on my grandmother, and the four years of her life in japanese occupied indonesia
she tells me of her years in the mountains the way people talk about their house getting robbed,
(like a home invasion, but not a murder,)
even though she and her friends spent the last years of their adolescence up in the mountains, she’ll still talk in amusement about her last years of school, and her japanese given name,
as if her high school diploma was a certificate she got from puncak for learning to be a woman overnight, printed in script she only half recognized
she says the soldiers would hurl a plethora of things at the curve of her bent back as she picked rice for the imperial army’s mouths and their wives, and their homes, who didn’t think much of their husbands stationed in the tropics,
crazed by the bite of mosquitos they would ravage women in the name of co-prosperity,
and she tells me that she thought she would die up there, paralyzed at night by footsteps on dormitory aisle, picking at nightgowns like fruit at a pasar stall,
swats at young face like fruit flies,
i only imagine that the bomb is the closest thing to heaven she had ever tasted,
and in the folds by her eyes she carries that bliss like a medal;
(she smiles a little when she thinks of the end of the war,)
white light at the epicenter of a mushroom cloud that heralds the beginning of her new life
as people disappear in a snap their souls travel back into her
and she finally gets to go home again.
i don’t think she knows what an atom bomb looks like, but i imagine that she cries the same as women whose children died of radiation sickness, sadako sasaki a thousand times over,
like popo’s first and forgotten child, who at twelve, died of cancer too,
some women become martyrs, some become dead women walking—
her favorite word for the japanese is sadis,
an indonesian word which loosely translates to sadistic,
but doesn’t have that spiced sting, like imperial whip on hakka smoothed skin,
on a trembling body that just wanted to disappear,
and i imagine she does her best not to think much about japan much anymore.
trauma is funny in that it chooses what you should remember, and for her,
she cannot see victim in eyes that look like those who whipped her, and used her, and dragged her weeping back into dormitory bed,
in her soft anger, she’d say that at the very least,
those women who died in the blast died immediately.