Angels of Suwon

Enne Kim

When I finally arrived at the door of shattered silence, there was a child standing there, a child without gendered form. The child played with the tattered end of a rope leading into the room, tied around the hands of the grandmothers. How old was your grandmother when she first learned how to tie a thread, they asked. We filed into the room and examined our grandmothers. They were radiant. Light poured out from their wrinkled pores, seeping, unblinking. They said they had first learned to mother in this place. They were only seven, ten, fifteen years old, and the men were twenty, twenty-three, twenty-eight. The men cried in their arms. The crying took place after the brutalizing. As we stood in the room, our grandmothers became younger and younger, transformed by their blazing light. Soon, I encountered my own grandmother. She looked about eight years old. I held her and she told me how she had been orphaned just the year before. Her aunt and uncle had asked her to visit a U.S. military base in Suwon, once every Saturday. They would escort her to the premises and return at the end of the day. Every Saturday, she tied one thread for every man she comforted. She tied these threads around her tongue, hoping that it would shrivel with the force of the strings and she would no longer have to speak.

We put our heads together. I bowed, she received. She spoke about when she had asked a colonel why she had been chosen for this. He said she was very beautiful and pure. An angel of Korea, a blissful dream. The next Sunday morning, she baptized herself with the runoff water from her uncle’s roof. The water was the skim of rain—particles of dirt, grass, and unfiltered sky. Burying her purity. She held a short ceremony during which she praised her body, something an angel—a dream—does not have. An angel can fracture as easily as light can, but a body cannot. A body can run. A body can hide. At this point I could no longer hold her because the light became too strong. I did not have to speak. Words unable to live as strongly as the presence of light. My grandmother said, I am glad my tongue has not abandoned me. Where meaning has fled, I have you.

The child’s face darkened until it became wrinkled and darkly spotted, like an elderly woman. Our grandmothers extended their hands, and we found we had been weeping, but only because we found ourselves lost, again.

A footnote that is not really a footnote: To this day, the U.S. empire still has 73 military bases installed in the Republic of Korea (ROK). Its largest overseas military base and its most active Pacific airfield is located in the seaport city of Pyeongtaek, about 40 miles south of Seoul, about 233 miles south of the DMZ. The base is called “Camp Humphreys.” The ROK is not alone—there are still around 750 U.S. military bases in at least 80 countries. This is only an estimate. Japan was not the only empire to employ “comfort women.” The U.S. military’s exploitation of women, of Korea, remains unsettled as well.

Enne Kim (she/her) is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Creative Writing and International Relations. Her home is in Georgia, and sometimes Korea. At Penn, she is part of the Excelano Project and Signal Society.