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By Root 1423 0

to leap from the window, the Emperor tried to cheer her up with a paddle boat shaped like a swan. Then he bought her a mechanical horse that circled a pole on a metal track. When she tried to throw herself on the ocean’s jagged reef, a shark rose. Endure, the shark said. I must dive each day to the bottom of the sea for my dinner—surely you can find a way to survive. When she placed her neck in the gears of the mechanical horse, a finch landed and implored her to keep living. I must fly around the world to find my little seeds—certainly you can last another day. In her room, as she waited for the arrival of the Emperor, she stared at the wall. Gazing at the mortar binding the wall’s stones, she thought, I can hold fast a little longer. The Dear Leader turned her story into a screenplay for me, so I know what my grandmother felt. I have tasted her words and stood waiting by her side for the Japanese dictator’s inevitable arrival.”

Sun Moon motioned for the Rower to stand, and she washed the girl’s entire body, like a giant child, skin glistening above the gray-skeined water in which she stood. “And the choices my own mother had to make are things about which I can’t even speak. If I am alone in this world, stripped of my siblings, it is because of the decisions she had to make.”

There were freckles along the Girl Rower’s arms and down her back. Sun Moon had never seen freckles before. Even just a month before, she would have viewed them as flaws marring otherwise even skin. But now the freckles suggested there were other kinds of beauty in the world than simply striving to be made from Pyongyang porcelain. “Perhaps adversity has skipped my generation,” Sun Moon told her. “Maybe it’s true that I don’t know real suffering, that I haven’t stuck my head in mechanical gears or rowed around the world in the dark. Maybe I am untouched by loneliness and sorrow.”

They were silent as Sun Moon helped the Rower step from the tub, and they didn’t speak as she toweled the American’s body. The choson-ot, utterly golden, was exquisite. Sun Moon pinched the fabric here and there until the dress fell perfectly. Finally, Sun Moon began weaving the Rower’s hair into a single braid. “I do know that my turn at suffering will come,” she said. “Everyone’s does. Mine might be just around the corner. I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you’re given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?”

Here, Sun Moon realized she had gripped the Girl Rower’s wrists, and her questions had become demands, leveled into the Rower’s wide eyes. “How does a society without a fatherly leader work?” Sun Moon implored. “How can a citizen know what is best without a benevolent hand to shepherd her? Isn’t that endurance, learning how to navigate such a realm alone—isn’t that survival?”

The Girl Rower took her hands back and gestured toward some unknown distance. Sun Moon had a feeling this woman was asking about the end of the story, of what became of the Emperor’s comfort woman, his private kisaeng. “She waited until she was older, my grandmother,” Sun Moon said. “She waited until she was back in her village and all her children had been grown and married away, and that’s when she unsheathed her long-hidden knife and took her honor back.”

Whatever was going through the Girl Rower’s mind, the strength of Sun Moon’s words moved her to act. The Rower, too, began speaking with some force, trying to get Sun Moon to understand something vital. The American went to a small