By Monica Macansantos
We didn’t know about them until the early 1990s, just as I was entering school. “Comfort Women,” as soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army once called them, were women abducted from their homes in countries occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War, held against their will, and turned into the army’s sex slaves. Those who survived held their silence years after the war was over, many choosing not to tell even their closest friends and kin what they went through. When testimonies of former comfort women in Korea began appearing in the international press, Rosa Henson, a Filipina, came forward to speak of her ordeal at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Her story opened a floodgate, and other former comfort women in the Philippines emerged to tell a part of our nation’s history that had been silenced for decades.
Despite the flurry of media attention surrounding these women, many of whom were in their 80s and 90s, the topic remained taboo for many Filipinos, especially for our elders, who thought it was inappropriate for polite conversation. Since the media constantly milked the subject, and we children were bombarded with TV reports, the adults knew that we knew what comfort women were, and felt they didn’t have to discuss them any further. My classmates in elementary school would snicker whenever the words “comfort woman” were mentioned in class. A boy would chase a girl and yell, “I’ll turn you into a comfort woman!” at recess, that time of day when chaos ruled the classrooms and corridors of our school. Even some of our teachers treated the subject good-humoredly. “What if you were turned into a comfort woman?” they asked us, smirking, and we’d all giggle in our seats.
I entered high school in 1999, more than half a century after the war ended. By that time, World War II was just another story in our dilapidated history textbooks, a series of dead paragraphs on the page. We had heard from our grandparents how scarce food was during the war, but these stories belonged to a distant era. We’d be amused to watch our grandparents eat every single grain of rice on their plates, and then we’d feel unjustly treated if they scolded us for carelessly dropping rice on the floor. We had enough rice to waste. Our parents had taken care of that.
The problems we dealt with were much more trivial than the struggles they went through during the war, yet for us, our problems were painfully important. We worried about having friends in school, being popular, and being noticed by members of the opposite sex. The girls wore makeup and cologne, the boys tried to make it onto the school basketball team, most of us begged our parents to buy us the latest mobile phone models, and the select few had lunch at expensive restaurants downtown, just to brag about this to those who could only afford to eat at the school canteen.
I entered high school painfully shy, making few friends and spending much of my free time reading Henry James novels. Apparently I was calling attention to myself, for the most popular girl in school, a tall, mannish, brown-haired, rich girl named Roanne noticed me and singled me out. She pointed out to her elite circle of friends, who in turn pointed out to our classmates, the strange way I supposedly walked, talked, and groomed myself. People started avoiding me, even the few friends I had made, as though uncoolness were a disease they could contract by association.
Our history teacher was a middle-aged woman who had thick, unruly hair and large teeth. She would teach history the usual way: we’d read a passage from our history book, memorize all the important names and dates, and identify them in quizzes she’d give after her lectures. I was an honor student in primary school and was usually good at remembering facts, but by the time I entered high school I had gotten tired of remembering names and dates that failed to bear any significance in my life. Sometimes our teacher would come to class, ask us to read a chapter in the book, disappear, and show up just when her period was about to end, to give us a quiz. Instead of reading the assigned chapter, my classmates would go to a section the teacher had taught previously that day and return to our classroom with a list of answers they’d share with their friends. I was not one of their friends, and in high school I never made it to the honor roll.
When we reached the chapter on World War II in the Philippines, our class was divided into several groups, and each group was asked to present a skit dealing with some aspect of the war. As I approached the circle of students I was assigned to, they exchanged glances and rolled their eyes.
Romina, a tall, heavyset girl, promptly called herself the leader of the group and proceeded to write down our names in her notebook. I had seen her chatting with Roanne during recess, and she seemed to get along well with the popular students in our school. She told us she’d write a skit that night, and allow us to choose the roles we wanted the next day. The boys nodded indifferently. The girls asked her what the skit would be about. “I don’t know. Maybe it will have Japanese soldiers and comfort women in it,” she said.
“I’m not playing a comfort woman,” one of the girls chirped.
“Me neither,” another girl said.
The girls exchanged knowing glances, giggling. A guy winced and turned away. I was the only girl in the group who hadn’t spoken up.
Romina approached me at lunchtime the next day. I sat at my desk, forcing myself to finish the cold rice-and-meat meal packed in a gray lunch box by my father. When I looked up, she wore a worried, pathetic look on her face.
“Monica, they’ve all chosen their parts. No one wants to play the comfort woman. You’re going to be our comfort woman.”
I froze as she said the last line, feeling the handles of my fork and spoon slice into the flesh of my clenched fists.
“Why do I have to be the comfort woman?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“Monica, you don’t have any other choice. Nobody else wants to do it.”
“Well, I can’t do it.”
Romina sighed, and I wasn’t sure whether she felt sorry for me or was tired of reasoning with me. “We have no choice. No one else wants to play the comfort woman. You have to do it.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You have to do it. No one else will. It’s part of the skit.” When I didn’t answer her, she said, “It’s going to be quick. I promise.”
I joined her and the other members of our group who had gathered at the far end of the corridor to rehearse before lunchtime ended and classes resumed. She handed out copies of the skit and explained our parts. The girls giggled and glanced at me with derision as she explained my part. “You’re going to lie on the teacher’s table and pretend you’re a comfort woman. The guys will play soldiers who will line up in front of you. We’ll just cover you with a sheet and you’ll pretend you’re being raped,” Romina said.
The girls snorted and laughed. The boys scowled, disgusted by what they were being made to listen to. A big guy with a deep voice and watery eyes said, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna enjoy this, am I right, Monica?” This cheered up the other boys, who chuckled and smirked.
Later that afternoon, people whispered and giggled whenever I passed their seats on my way to the lockers or the restroom. The news had spread, and it was becoming the joke of the day. My thoughts drifted away from the sound of their laughter. I wanted to leave the cold, stifling walls of our classroom and soar above my school, into nothingness.
History was our final class in the afternoon. When our teacher finally entered the classroom, we were asked to push our desks back to make space for an improvised stage. We sat with our group mates, waiting for our turns to come. “Remember your part, ha,” Romina told me, as the first group performed their skit.
“Romina, I really need to go to the bathroom. Just a sec, ha?” I said.
“Okay, but come back,” she slowly said, seeming to have read my mind.
The cold afternoon air curled around my neck as I stepped out of the room. I left the honors class building, a small, two-story structure at the foot of a hill, and walked up the covered stairway that connected us to the main grounds. The day was ending, and jeepneys sped towards the main gate where students from the regular sections waited for a ride home. When I reached the top of the hill, I gazed down at the classroom I had just left, and felt a sense of release, as though school and its pressures had been lowered into a hole in the ground and buried below me.
I spent the next twenty minutes strolling across the main grounds, passing the tall, pillared main building where all the offices were. The principal’s car was parked near the entrance. On Mondays she’d deliver long-winded, bombastic speeches at the steps of the main building after we sang the Philippine National Anthem and school hymn. None of us listened to her, since we were too absorbed in trying to impress our classmates with stories about our weekend to listen to the praises she heaped on her school. I entered the damp, unpainted hallways of the regular sections, thinking of a guy in another section whom I had a terrible crush on, dreaming of winning the Nobel Prize for my poetry, imagining the house I’d build, the trees I’d plant in my garden.
I descended the covered stairway on my way back to my classroom, consoled by my brief taste of freedom. I entered the classroom and was greeted by loud jeers and booing. Our history teacher was at her desk, flipping through her books, a calm, indifferent eye in the middle of a brewing storm.
I returned to my desk, where I sat and gazed into my lap. Romina glared at me from her desk. “You’ll pay for this,” she muttered, in contrast to the worried, pitiful tone she’d used with me earlier that day. I smiled to myself, relishing my small victory.
Monica Macansantos earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. A graduate of the University of the Philippines, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Masters Review, Five Quarterly, TAYO Literary Magazine, and Impact: An Anthology of Short Memoirs, among other places. Her story, “Stopover,” earned an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and was featured in the University of Pittsburgh Writing Program’s Longform Fiction.
