Someday, dear, there will be nothing left in the world but hair and Clorox bottles

July 28, 2007

Behind my back, the television is murmuring Pedro Penduko's show over at ABS-CBN. The scene has one of the protagonists asking why her professor is so mad at one of her students, Watashi, who happens to have a Japanese dad. The professor (played by Anna Capri, one of my favorite actresses) emotionally explained how her grandmother was a comfort woman during the last war. This explanation was liberally sprinkled by screams of 'wag po' in the background, presumably by her lola, in sepia. And then some giant monkey guy enters the classroom to attack the professor. She faints in terror.

 

This post is not about this giant monkey guy though, it's about comfort women.

 

Freshman year, History I. We had some visitors for class that day. Some old ladies tottered in and sat down in front of the class, and not until our professor introduced them to us did we realize who they were. You'd think they'd be anxious and twittery people, traumatized by their experience of abuse and terror. But no, they had a placid composure about them; nobody would have guessed. As the ladies were telling us about their experience though, this composure melted away. The most heartbreaking was when one of them cried as she explained how fifteen to thirty Japanese men would come everyday and beat her up before raping her. If I remember correctly, she was no more than fourteen at that time.

 
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