Chapter 15 #2
But then, nothing in her life had been reasonable , not her fatherlessness, not her mother’s daily despair, not the war, not these violent, unspeakable five years.
Maybe she—once a schoolgirl, once a comfort woman, now an abandoned madwoman—was just catching up to the irrational, violent chaos she had lived through, one ghostly encounter at a time.
there were many mirrors in Nam Koo: full-length mirrors framed in gold leaf, bathroom mirrors that opened to shelves of dusty perfume bottles and jars of face cream, vanity mirrors spotted with black. Gigi had seen herself in all of them by now.
But it had been months since she had looked, truly looked, at her body, at how the growing baby was changing her day by day, pound by pound, inch by inch.
Near the end of the war, when the soldiers were growing more resigned (although some only grew angrier), she had draped an old shawl over the standing mirror in her room and pushed it into the darkest corner, beside the door.
Auntie had stopped checking in on them, stopped snipping stray threads off their hems, or sniffing their hair to make sure their personal musk was well hidden by talcum powder.
If Auntie didn’t care to look, then Gigi didn’t either.
She dressed without knowing if her outfit was ironed or neat, and this had felt like a necessary rebellion.
Today, though, she unbuttoned her dress—the only one that still fit—and unhooked her bra.
Her underwear could not be pulled over her belly anymore.
Unrolling it down her legs felt like a relief, an exhale that she had been impatiently waiting for.
Then she walked barefoot to the mirror and pulled off the shawl.
Her nipples were dark, the colour of black coffee. Gigi pressed on them with her hands, and pain shot through her breasts and deep into her chest. Her skin was smooth to the touch, stretched over round bumps and swells, no dimples, no senseless rolls.
Her belly though. Like nothing she had felt before, simultaneously soft and hard, full though she knew there was more to grow.
If she placed her hand on the left side and closed her eyes, she swore she could feel a pulse, maybe a heartbeat, maybe a hiccup, maybe the baby swishing their hand back and forth, watching the ripples in the warm fluid.
There, she felt it, a sharp jab, an elbow or a knee, the baby testing what was possible, what movement could feel like, what the boundaries were between their body and hers.
Gigi sat down on the floor naked, cross-legged with her belly resting in the space between her thighs.
She couldn’t remember if she had ever wanted anything from her life, if her past schoolgirl self ever dreamed of a job or a husband or anything other than Nam Koo.
She wanted to give this baby everything she herself had ever wanted, but in this room, in this house she had loved and hated, she realized the younger Gigi had never imagined any future for herself.
Had she lived a normal girlhood, dreams would have come to her.
She would have discovered what she was good at, what she loved, how she could carry both with her into an adult life that could have been happy. Or at least not this.
The unfairness of it all.
Do you know that feeling when rage first begins to bubble, when the first flashes of heat begin in your gut before spreading everywhere?
Do you know what it feels like to chart its speed, the impact it makes when it slams into your neck and face, where it burns hottest, so much so that when you touch your hot cheek with your hot fingers, you think you might be throwing off sparks, the kind that fly through the air and could ignite rage in another person, if another person was there?
Have you ever stood up to cool the rage only for the fire to burn even more, the added length of your body like dry kindling thrown into an already monstrous bonfire?
Gigi strode over to her discarded clothes and pulled them back on her body, her red-hot, raging body.
She yanked open a drawer in her vanity and found a notebook and a pen and sat down heavily.
She had been wasting time for months. She had to make a plan to get herself and this baby out of this cursed house.
coming up with the plan didn’t take long, Gigi’s anger propelling her forward.
She and Old Yan sat beside each other at one end of the long dining table, Gigi talking and talking for hours every day while Old Yan mostly nodded, until she had written a list of tasks, a structure for the rest of her life.
She would stay and have the baby at Nam Koo.
There was nowhere else for them to live; neither of them had any money, and here no one would ask them any questions, ask Gigi where her husband was, whether Old Yan was the father.
She knew that birthing her baby alone was risky, but Old Yan promised to get her to the hospital if even the smallest thing went wrong.
“You can trust me,” he said, unsmiling. “I have been here all this time, after all.” And it was true.
He had always been there, even if he didn’t speak, even if he walked through the house so silently that Gigi never knew where he was going or where he had been.
Even if he had never done anything to try to save the girls.
His kindnesses were small, but she could be grateful for them.
Old Yan would make sure Gigi had the right foods for her postpartum confinement: black vinegar soup with pig’s trotters and eggs, gingery chicken rice, papaya, and fish soup.
Then when she and the baby were robust and strong, he would take them to his daughter’s apartment in Kowloon, where they could stay until Gigi found a job.
“Will it be all right for us to impose on her like that?” Gigi wondered if his daughter knew where Old Yan worked, if she would refuse to have a woman like Gigi living with her and her children.
“Of course, of course. You will be with me. You will be treated like family.” Old Yan nodded, as if agreeing with himself.
When she was close to the end of her pregnancy, when she was so sore and heavy that she could barely walk down the curved staircase, she sat by one of the windows in the ballroom and tried to think of the jobs she could do.
No, not secretary. She had never learned to type or enter numbers in a ledger or even make coffee.
Nurse? She would need schooling for that, and she had never finished high school.
The idea of being a teacher made her laugh.
She had never cooked a meal, never changed a diaper, never walked a dog.
She had only been here. This was all she had ever been.
Gigi thought of the costumes she had made for her school plays and then it came to her: she could be a seamstress.
She could tailor clothes, maybe even design them one day.
Ballgowns. Tuxedoes. Skirt suits that a woman could wear to feel invincible, powerful, like someone who was exactly what she was supposed to be.
She would start by getting a job in a clothing factory or a tailor’s shop.
Then she would buy her own sewing machine. Atelier Gigi , she thought. Perfection.
Slowly she stood and walked back up the stairs, careful to place one foot solidly on each step before moving again. She sat down at her vanity and pulled out her notebook, the pages filled with plans and memories, a hodgepodge of things she wanted and things she felt an obligation to remember.
A list of things to be gathered and packed.
What Daisuke had done to her and how much it hurt.
Names for the baby her mother would have liked.
How she imagined her brother had died.
A map of the trees in Nam Koo’s garden.
Gigi turned to a new page and wrote in tall letters at the top: The Plan for the Rest of My Life.
in the end, old Yan spread out towels on the tiled floor of the kitchen and propped Gigi’s labouring body up with pillows.
He did not tell her what to do, but wiped the sweat off her face and gave her boiled water to drink when she gasped for air.
When Gigi was pushing, Old Yan said gently, “The head. I can see the head.” And she pushed one more time before he held the head in his hands and guided the baby outward.
“A girl,” he said. “Of course.”
Nam Koo was a house that begat girls. The faceless girl. The ghosts, so many ghosts. The girls who were teenagers and became comfort women. Xuan and Mina and Gigi. And now this baby.
Despite the list of names she’d scribbled in her notebook, Gigi didn’t know what to name her.
She needed someone to teach her which names were auspicious and which ones were not.
Then she thought back to the Hollywood movie posters she used to see glued to the brick walls along the streets of Kowloon.
“Bette,” she said to Old Yan. “How about that?”
“Good enough,” he replied, before gathering up the bloody towels and walking to the back door. “Easy to say.”
neither gigi nor old Yan could remember how long a woman and her newborn baby were supposed to stay confined, recuperating with hot tea and boiled eggs, saving their energy to make up for all the heat and sweat and blood lost during labour and delivery.
Was it supposed to be thirty days? Sixty days?
One hundred? Gigi lay on her back in her bed and gingerly touched her inner thighs with her fingertips.
There, a small tear that felt like a serrated knife had been sawed into her vagina.
It couldn’t have been longer than a half inch, but the pain was shooting up and down from deep inside her body, and she couldn’t even catch her breath.
Bette was a good baby, barely crying, always hungry. She was greedy as a piglet, latching onto Gigi’s nipple with so much ease and strength that Gigi wondered at how gnawing her daughter’s hunger must be, if the only thing she could think of was milk and a full tummy and then milk again.