When I was thirteen,
I had my first f***.
Sex has this positive connotation
Of being greatly enjoyable by both participants
The guy’s feeling fly, girl’s feeling high
And for this feeling,
Hundreds and thousands and millions
Of girls
no older than sixteen were
Dragged away by their hair, thrown into trucks
Duped into thinking that they were going to factories
Stripped from innocence, here are their stories.
World war 2,
Besides Hitler, there was more to it, who knew?
Let’s go behind the scenes
Behind all the men and their guns and glory
We’ll address the battle on the homefront
Of women fighting, so hold on to your gut
Dig deeper and it gets gory
This forgotten page in history
My name is Korea
I am fifteen years old
I am a spirit girl, or that’s what I’ve been told
Taken to a comfort station
Ha, to which member of any nation
Can comfort be seen in this abomination
They said I’d be making socks
Apparently being raped by 20 different men a day means making socks in Japanese
My name is Philippines
I am sixteen years old
I took the place of my twelve year old baby sister
Hoping that in my sacrifice, she wouldn’t have to pay the price
But they took us both
My name is China
I will never forget the day you struck the girl
Who would not bow to you
The blood dripping off your sword
Dripping down her thighs from the cuts in her sides
Forever burned into my memory
My name is Vietnam
My name is Malaysia
My name is Macau, my name is Burma
New Guinea Singapore Thailand Hong Kong Indonesia
My name is 200,000 women
Spending 10 years in 3 by 4 foot cubicles of wood and terror
I will never forget the way you looked at me
Nothing but a piece of meat
I remember you
I remember your face
Your eyes
Your words
Your deeds
5 decades later you call me a prostitute
a fourteen year old, know nothing of the world
you don’t even look at me, you’d rather I didn’t exist?
We are still here I am still alive
youth forever lost
you say I willingly shared my body with hundreds of men just for the sake of some military yen?
Time does not erase my memories
Time cannot heal all wounds
especially if you think that $1.08 cents is enough to compensate
for my childhood, innocence, and future unbloomed
But I don’t hate, I can’t hate
For something like that, it’s far too late
Money and official language won’t do at this rate, ‘cause I got a date with fate
My bones are weak my mind is weary
Now don’t get teary, deary
My time is quickly coming to an end
The end of our era is waving from right around the bend
So remember me, just remember my story.
Don’t let me be a page left blank, in His story.

“His Story.” Power Poetry, 24 May 2013, www.powerpoetry.org/poems/history-5.

For this genre, I chose slam poetry. Although in English, this poem describes a story of many young Korean girls in the 20th century. This poem is about the Comfort Women, 80,000 to 200,000 young women and girls taken from their homes during World War 2 by the Japanese Imperial Army to live in comfort stations for the use of the Japanese army. Girls who were taken ranged anywhere from 10 to early 20s. They were promised jobs in factories or as nurses, but instead, they were forced into prostitution. After Japan lost its power over all of Asia, many of the young women and girls never got to return home, instead, they were left to die in foreign lands. If they managed to return home, they were shunned and called prostitutes, being told that this was their fault. It wasn’t until decades later that South Korea has tried to honor the few remaining comfort women, but Japan still hasn’t formally apologized for what its military has done in the past.

What happened to the comfort women, and what happened to all Koreans during World War 2 when Japan occupied its country and forced its citizens to throw away their identity and take on Japanese identities is the basis of Han. Han is the sorrow and hatred that has stemmed from occupation, colonization, and being forced by foreign countries to forget their own identity. The comfort women hoped they could reunite with their home countries, but so many of them never got that reunion as many of them died from disease and illness. So today, the remaining survivors and the Korean people are coming together to mourn the women that never came home and were forgotten by the government.