Chapter 6
it was morning, and Gigi was struggling to wake up.
Her bed was soft—the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in—but she didn’t feel rested, not today, not any of the sixty-two days she had been here.
Instead, she felt as if a heavy weight was sitting on her chest, daring her to move, keeping her submerged just beneath the surface of wakefulness.
She didn’t know what time she had gone to sleep, after all the whisky and dancing and the hours in her bedroom staring at the ceiling and then the headboard and finally the window that looked out through the trees.
She turned to the window now and guessed that it was almost eleven, the hour of morning when the birds slowed their singing and sought shade from the coming noontime sun.
There were no clocks at Nam Koo, just the watch Auntie wore on a chain around her neck.
Auntie was the one who made sure the girls ate, slept, bathed, and exercised. She had only slapped Gigi once when, just before her very first evening, she had refused to clean herself.
“The soldiers expect hygiene. Clean your dirty Chinese ass.”
Gigi thought back to her first day at Nam Koo, after she was dragged through the doors and into the main foyer and made to stand upright.
Auntie was walking down the stairs, one heavily ringed hand gliding over the banister, a closed-mouth smile on her face.
When she reached Gigi, she grazed a fingernail over her cheek, sharper than a caress but not quite a scratch.
“Pretty,” she had said. “You don’t need to talk right now.
I will learn your name and everything else I need to know in short order.
For now, I will take you to your room, and you will bathe and change.
And then we will talk.” Gigi opened her mouth to scream or cry or accuse, but Auntie covered her mouth swiftly with her capable white-skinned hand.
“Once when I was a young girl myself, a friend of mine dared to talk back to the woman who was in charge of us, and that woman forced her to kiss a red-hot iron until all the skin on her lips burned away. I could smell it. Do you know how burning flesh smells?” And then Gigi had said nothing at all.
Gigi was never told what Auntie’s real name was or where she had come from, but she could hear from her accent that she didn’t speak Cantonese like a native and she wasn’t Japanese either, like the soldiers.
She spoke too far up in her throat, as if trying to sing her words.
Her vocabulary and grammar were flawless, however, so if she wasn’t Chinese, she was doing her best to fake it.
Gigi didn’t hate her as much as some of the other girls did, but she was afraid of her strident voice, the menacing weight of her hand on her shoulder, the way she swung her ring of keys in her hand so they could hear her coming before they even saw her.
Her eyes, lined in black and narrow, always seemed to be assessing Gigi, as if she was adding to her mental inventory of what made Gigi sad or afraid or nervous.
Gigi shivered in her warm bed and pulled the covers over her face. Auntie would be downstairs, waiting.
Xuan, the girl whose room was next to hers, called through the door.
“Come on, Gigi. I know you must be awake. You’ll have to come down to eat before the boss lady ties you to a chair and force-feeds you.
” Gigi knew Xuan was right and so she sat up, grabbing the housedress hanging on a hook by the window.
It would never do to be too skinny, they were always told.
Men didn’t like to touch bony little sticks.
When Gigi opened the door, Xuan was standing in the hall, hands on her hips. “Finally,” she said, before taking one of Gigi’s hands in hers and pulling her toward the stairs.
“Why is Auntie so grouchy?” Gigi whispered. “She’s such a miserable cunt.”
“One of the others told me last night that Auntie was a comfort woman, too, years and years ago, from a different war. There were other girls from back then too,” Xuan said.
“But they all died, maybe killed, or maybe they killed themselves. Auntie stayed with the regiment, told them she could be of service in other ways. And look at her now. She’s the old bitch in charge. ”
Gigi cocked her head as they sat down at the dining table, a large mirror the width of the entire room on the wall behind them.
This morning, there was congee, eggs, and sliced mangoes from the kitchen garden out back that the girls were expected to maintain.
Old Yan walked in, carrying a plate of baos, the little buns that he knew the girls liked best. He didn’t speak to them, only set down the plate with a nod before disappearing to the kitchen again; Gigi could smell he was simmering pork bones for soup and preparing the brine for pickled mustard greens.
She knew he lived in the servants’ quarters, accessible through a stairwell behind the pantry.
What he did there, or whom he spoke to, or how he slept, knowing what was happening in the stately bedrooms, she didn’t know.
Through the open door to the kitchen, Gigi could see Auntie. Her hair was set in glossy, fearsomely stiff rolls and her red lipstick was bright, sharply drawn on the edges of her mouth.
“She doesn’t look that old. She only has those little wrinkles around her mouth from smoking those smelly skinny cigars.”
Xuan sighed, rolling her eyes. “Whenever she tells those boring war stories, she makes it seem like she’s five hundred years old. You know, ‘Back in my day, girls did as they were told or else.’ Yes, we know, Auntie, the soldiers can kill us. They’re soldiers .”
Gigi laughed and the sound surprised her, a trill that lifted through the room with its heavy chandelier and dark wooden chairs before fading and dying out. “She tells us those things as a warning, I guess. Like how the nuns used to warn me about this place. I should have listened to them.”
what happened was that the girls were raped, every single evening.
On Gigi’s first evening, it was one soldier for hours and hours.
Three weeks later, it was a series, a new one every forty-five minutes.
Sometimes, it was two or three at a time.
It was whatever the soldiers wanted. No one, not Auntie and certainly not the soldiers, ever asked Gigi what would be acceptable or enjoyable.
Not that the soldiers spoke Cantonese well enough to ask.
And Gigi doubted she would know the right answer anyway.
Every morning, just before dawn, she pulled off her limp dress and squatted over a chamber pot, rinsing between her legs with warm soapy water, wincing when she touched the abrasions, the tears, the bruise that kept reblooming in the same spot.
She wrung out her washcloth and the water turned pink.
Then she crawled into bed, a needle in her hand, and repaired a tear along the zipper of her dress.
She could still hear the rip of the fabric as the soldier had yanked at the bodice, hands scrabbling at satin and then her flesh.
The girls learned a few phrases in Japanese, taught to them by a shouting Auntie during the day while they polished the mirrors or beat the dust out of the long curtains that covered every window.
“How are you today, sir?” Auntie bellowed, and the girls repeated after her. “You are very handsome. I am at your service. I like you very much.”
Gigi had never been a girl who thought much about her body, about how it felt to move around with these legs, to touch her mother’s face with these hands.
But here, in Nam Koo, she was acutely aware of how she sat when a soldier entered her room, her ankles crossed as she leaned back on the chaise.
She fussed over which shoulder her hair should cascade over.
She stared at her face every evening, applying layers and layers of makeup.
To the sides of her nose, spaces where makeup would never sit smoothly.
Under her right eye, to cover a cyst that would not pop, no matter how many hot cloths she pressed onto it.
Beside her mouth, to a sore that she was sure was passed to her by the soldier named Daisuke, the one who had insisted on ejaculating directly onto her face before slapping her five times.
She didn’t ask him why. It didn’t matter anyway.
When had her body ever been wholly hers?
When had she ever made decisions for her own comfort or rest or joy?
When it was quiet, usually in the late afternoon, Gigi wandered through the halls of Nam Koo as much as she dared, looking for a door Auntie had forgotten to lock, a window with a broken latch that she could climb through, but there were none.
Then, instead, she began trying to find all the secrets of this house she had dreamed of her whole life.
There were rooms that were completely empty, others filled with remnants of a beautiful life.
The music room with a grand piano and a standing harp.
The ballroom with mirrors framed into the walls and six crystal chandeliers.
The library with shelves and shelves of books that Gigi took down and opened, but then closed again when she realized they were about law or natural science or wuxia stories.
Not the romances she missed, not even a regular novel.
The furniture, she thought, must have been left behind by the wealthy merchant who had built this place.
It was worn down in spots, the velvet and damask growing bald patches, the fibres showing beneath the sheen and pattern.