Chinese Comfort Women by Peipei Qiu, Su Zhiliang, Chen Lifei

daughters. They were very poor and didn’t have the money to send me to school. Unable to support us three girls, my parents sent my two sisters and me to other families, one after the other, to be child-daughters-in-law. My family fell apart and I never saw my sisters again. I married Wang Guodong, a chauffeur, at the age of fifteen. We were not rich, but we loved each other and lived a comfortable life.
    However, our peaceful life didn’t last very long. In June 1938, the year after we were married, the Japanese armies launched attacks on Wuhan City. My husband was at work in the faraway area controlled by Chinese forces. I had no place to escape to and stayed home. Not long after my husband left, my mother-in-law began to treat me like an outcast. She thought I was an extra burden on the family and, since her son might never be able to return, she forced me to leave the family and remarry. I felt very humiliated, yet I had no choice but to marry a man named Liu Wanghai. The following year I gave birth to a girl named Rongxian. She was the only child I birthed. [Yuan Zhulin didn’t want to talk about her only daughter at the interview. Later the interviewers found out that the child had died of neglect while Yuan was held as a comfort woman.] Liu Wanghai didn’t have a stable job; in order to help support the family, I worked as a maid, although frequently I could not find a job in the turmoil and economic depression during the Japanese invasion.
    In the spring of 1940, a local woman named Zhang Xiuying came to recruit workers. She said that cleaning women were wanted at hotels in the other cities in Hubei Province. I had never met Zhang before, but since it was very difficult to find a job at the time, several other young girls and I signed up. I was eighteen years old then and good-looking, so I stood out among the other girls.
    I didn’t know until much later that Zhang Xiuying was a despicable woman. Her Japanese husband could speak some Chinese; following orders issued by the Japanese army, he was rounding up Chinese women to set up a comfort station. I still remember how he looked; he was a man of medium height who often wore Western-style suits rather than a military uniform. He had dark skin and bug-eyes, and people called him “Goldfish Eyes.” He was about forty years old.
    I left my second husband, Liu Wanghai, and my daughter behind and travelled aboard a ship down the Yangtze River. In the beginning I was quite happy to have found a job, and I thought it could bring me a better future after the initial hardship. The ship arrived at Ezhou in about a day. As soon as we went ashore, we were taken to a temple by Japanese soldiers. As amatter of fact, the Japanese army had already turned the temple into a comfort station. A Japanese soldier was standing guard at the entrance. I was frightened by the devilish-looking soldiers and didn’t want to enter. By now the girls and I realized that something was not right, so we all wanted to go home. I cried “This is not a hotel. I want to go home.” But the Japanese soldiers forced us inside with their bayonets.
    As soon as we entered the station the proprietor ordered us to take off all our clothes for an examination. We refused, but Zhang Xiuying’s husband had his men beat us with leather whips. Zhang Xiuying yelled at me maliciously: “You are the wife of a guerrilla! You’d better follow the instructions!” [Zhang was likely referring to Yuan Zhulin’s first husband, who worked in the area under the control of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), which led the fighting against Japanese forces.] The physical examination was over very quickly since none of us was a prostitute and no one had a venereal disease. After the examination, the proprietor gave each girl a Japanese name. I was named Masako. Each of us was assigned a room of about seven or eight square metres that had only a bed and a spittoon.
    The following morning I saw a wooden sign hung on the