Daughters of the Dragon: A Comfort Woman's Story by Andrews William

Author:Andrews, William [Andrews, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: MADhouse Press LLC
Published: 2014-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

When I pushed my way out of the apartment to go to work, my stomach churned. I moved to the street in case I had to vomit again. I had to wait a full minute to let my stomach settle.

I had decided not to tell Jin-mo about my morning sickness or that my breasts were swollen and sore. I didn’t want to burden his troubled mind with the fact that I was pregnant. Over the past few months, we had made love sporadically, and after each time, Jin-mo berated himself and called himself weak. It frightened me to watch him slip deeper and deeper into his depression. When my morning sickness began, I did my best to hide it. Jin-mo was missing a lot of work. He slept during the day, and at night, he read his books or filled sheets of paper with notes. He rarely ate and had turned pale and weak. I worried about him.

That morning, the March wind was sharp. I wrapped my scarf tight, dropped my shoulder to the wind and headed to work. I dreaded going to work. My manager in the translation department, Mr. Chee, had disappeared months earlier. Some said government officials took him away because he had lived in England and might have had capitalist’s ideas. Others said he had escaped to the south. After he left, the documents and contracts I worked on became increasingly absurd. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted to be home with Jin-mo. But with the way things were in Pyongyang, I went to work every day and kept my feelings to myself.

As I rounded a corner onto the boulevard leading to the government building, a convoy of gray-green army trucks belching black smoke in the air rumbled south. In the back of the trucks, young soldiers clutched rifles and looked out at the pedestrians with fatalistic eyes.

Outside the government building, a group of workers clung to scaffolding around a newly installed granite base on the boulevard. Next to it was a tall crane. A government official dressed in a black wool coat and fur hat stood next to the scaffolding. The pedestrians bowed to him as they walked by. From behind the scaffolding, the crane lifted a huge iron statue of a man. Its back was to me and its arms stretched out to the street below. As it rose to the pedestal, it slowly turned toward me and I saw they were erecting another statue of Kim Il-sung. The massive figure smiled down at me benevolently.

I went inside the building and climbed the stairs to the second floor. In the bullpen area, a man whom I had never seen before was sitting in my chair. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a black military coat with a major’s insignia. Standing next to him was a soldier in a green uniform. The pistol on his belt made me swallow hard.

I wanted to run but went to my desk as my coworkers glanced at me nervously.

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