Nora Keller - Comfort Woman

During the after-school tryouts, as I waited for my turn to sing next to the vice principal playing the piano, I watched the kids ahead of me turn shy and quiet, their squeaky voices breaking under the weight of the accompaniment. I vowed my voice would be strong enough to fill the entire cafetorium and rich enough to eat for dessert.

When my name was called, I marched down the aisle, a long gauntlet of chewed sunflower seeds spit at my feet by the Toots Entourage. My slippers kicked up the littered shells so that they flecked the backs of my calves. I kept my eyes on the stage, on the piano, and on Vice Principal “Piano Man” Pili, who alternately smiled encouragement to each struggling singer and glared into the audience in an attempt to stifle whistles and hoots and shouts of “Gong.” But as I walked past their seats, I heard Toots and Tiffi Sugimoto hiss, “Look dah fancy-pants! ‘I stay blinded by dah light!’”

1 tossed my hair and glided onto the stage. Clearing my throat, I nodded to Vice P Pili, smiled and waved to the crowd—right at Toots—and tapped my foot: one and a two and a three!

To this day, I am not sure what happened, or how it happened. I had practiced—in the bathtub, walking to school—until I knew I was good, until I made myself cry. But that day, some devil-thing with the voice of a big, old-age frog took possession of my throat, and “Hawai’i Pono’i” lurched unreliably around the cafetorium : “Hawai’i Pono’iiiii, Nana i Kou mo‘i… uh… la la la Lani e Kamehameha e… mmm hmm hmm… Hawai’iiiii Po-oh-no ‘iiiii! Aaaah-meh-nehhhh!”

At least I was loud.

As I slunk off the stage, I heard Toots and her Entourage laughing and howling like dogs. “Guh-guh-guh-gong!” they barked.

They followed me out of the building and pinned me against the wall. “You suck,” said Toots.

“Yeah,” said Tiffi, a Toots wannabe. “You suck.”

“You gotta be the worst singer in the school,” Toots said. “We don’t want you in our chorus.”

“We don’t even want you in our school, you weirdo,” said another Toots follower.

“You’re the weirdo,” I snapped back. “Just so happens I got the talent of my mother, who was a famous singer in Korea.” After I said this, I realized some things were better left unsaid.

“Yeah, right,” said Toots.

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said, then added, compelled to defend myself, “They just have different singing over there.”

“Hanyang anyang hasei-pasei-ooooh,” Toots screeched. “Yobos must have bad ears!”

The girls laughed and stepped closer, the half-moon made by their bodies tightening around me. “You’re nothing but stink Yobo- shit,” said Toots. “Nothing but one big-fat-shit liar. ‘Oh, my mommy’s a famous singer.’ ‘Oh, my daddy was rich, with a house on the Mainland, and I had one puppy.’ ‘Oh, next year my daddy going come get us and move us back.’ Yeah, right.”

Toots pushed my shoulder. “This is what’s true: You so poor that every day you gotta wear the same lame clothes and the same out-of-fashion, stink-smelling shoes until they get holes and still you wear em. You so poor you save your school lunch for one after-school snack—no lie, cause we seen you wrap em up in your napkin.”

By this time Toots was so close I could smell a mixture of seeds and the kakimochi she always ate in class on her breath. I gave her stink-eye, but she kept pushing me.

“You talk like you better than everybody else, but you not. We all know you live in The Shacks, and you prob‘ly sleep with dirty feet in the same bed as your crazy old lady.”

“Not!” At the one thing I could call a lie—that I went to bed with dirty feet—I called Toots a liar and punched her in her soft, newly forming chest. When she fell back into her friends, I ran away and didn’t look back, not even to see if they were chasing me.

I don’t think I ran home and asked my mother to verify her singing story right away. I probably went to my secret place, a spot under the Ala Wai Bridge, where runoff from the rains and the city drained into the canal. Underneath, I had flattened out a nest among the tall grass that stretched along the bank. Sheltered by the underbelly of that small pedestrian bridge, I would practice my singing. I liked to hear my voice bounce off the concrete that surrounded me.

I probably went there right after Toots and her Entourage told me I sucked. I know I would have wanted to hear the truth for myself.

Eventually, though it might not have been that night, I must have asked my mother to repeat the story of how she met my father. Because I have the distinct memory of another story.

We were at the kitchen table, sorting coins from the Wishing Bowl and packing them into paper sleeves, when, trying to sound casual, I asked her for the story of my parents’ first meeting. “Mom,” I told her, “tell me again that story, you know, that one about you and Dad meeting.”

Without looking up from counting out a pile of dimes, she sighed. “Once was a hard time,” she said, “but a happy time. I was helping to take care of all the orphans during the war—you know, so many children lost their mommies, lost their daddies at that time. Your father was one of the missionaries that gave us food and clothing. When he saw how good I was with the children, he fell in love with me, because he knew I would make a good mother.”

She slipped the dimes into a roll, then began on the quarters. “When the war moved into my village, he helped us all, everyone, even the old mamasans, escape. We walked and walked, trying to escape from the communists. We hid in cemeteries and walked over the mountains of Korea until we were free to build a new home. In America.”

My mother finished one stack of quarters, then looked up at me. She touched my cheek. “You remember anything about your father?” When I shook my head, she said, “Everything was nice and happy.”

I don’t recall if I challenged this new story or her old one. Sometimes I think I must have said, “Wait! That’s not what you told me before! What’s the truth?” because even then I must have recognized her story as an adaptation of The Sound of Music. Every year we’d watch that movie, after preparing a big bowl of boiled peanuts and a plate of dried squid as snacks. My mother liked the songs and would always cry at the ending.

Other times I think I must have said nothing, swallowing her new story without accusation or confrontation, even if I didn’t believe her. When she spoke to me, calling me by name, I never wanted to do anything to spoil the moment. I feared my own words might break the spell of normalcy.

I grew cautious of my mother’s stories, never knowing what to count on or what to discount. They sounded good—most of the stories she told me included the phrase: “It was a hard time but a happy time.” In fact, I repeated several of her stories, telling teachers and other students versions of them that I supplemented with my own favorite movies: West Side Story, where Maria, my mother, was left pregnant with her love child, who was, of course, myself; The Little Princess and The Poor Little Rich Girl, where I, the brave and suffering orphan, am reclaimed in the end by a rich and loving father, who was alive.

But I knew they were just stories told to people who didn’t really matter, those who couldn’t see into our Goodwill-furnished apartment in the row of dilapidated tri-story housing units nicknamed The Shacks. Those who couldn’t see into the past when my father was alive and drunk and yelling about God. Those who couldn’t see into my dreams of drowning and sinking and struggling for breath while unseen hands wrapped around my legs and pulled.