"I Want to Throw Flowers" (5)
The Memory of the First Time I Was Raped
By Neoul
Published: May 17, 2012
Translated by Marilyn Hook
Editor’s Note: “I Want to Throw Flowers”, a record of survivors of sexual violence, appears here serially.
In my second year of elementary school, when my family came up to Seoul, we couldn’t afford even a one-room house, and were forced to try to sleep at night on the chairs in the diner that my mother managed.
In the midst of poverty in which I had to try to sleep on stuck-together chairs in a service center’s diner, from after school to the evening I would do homework, sleep, or play, in the cars that were waiting to be repaired in the motor service center.
With that kind of daily life, one thing I liked to do was go to the park in front of the diner and look at the river. When the man, a regular customer at the diner, asked me to take him to the park, I was led by the thought that I would be able to see the fresh April river. Maybe because it was a weekday afternoon, Ttukseom Park looked peaceful only on that day.
While my nine-year-old self was sitting and watching the river, the man came and sat by me. He suggested that we play a fun game. He said it was a game that improved your mood.
The man pulled me towards him and began to lick my chest, which didn’t yet have anything that could be called breasts. He asked me how I felt. I think I said not good. He put his tongue in my mouth and started to lick again. I still didn’t feel good. I didn’t know what it was, but discomfort started to wash over me. I tried to push the man away, but I wasn’t strong enough. He asked me a question.
“What part makes you feel better, your chest or your tongue?”
A vivid memory. What part could make me feel better? In that situation, which place could make me feel better?
“Both of them aren’t good.”
The man told me to choose. Choose what part made me feel better, and also that I must answer an adult’s question well. The choice given to me was one of two. No other choice was given to me. I said that on my chest was better.
I didn’t know what to do in this kind of situation. Though, yes, I had learned to obey an adult’s words, I had never learned that I could say I didn’t want to, that I wouldn’t. At that time there was no sexual violence prevention education, and I didn’t know how to say “no.”
Even if I had said “no,” would the situation have turned out differently? If a mere nine-year-old like me had said “no,” would that person have stopped what he was doing and apologized? Couldn’t telling children to say “no” be putting them in greater danger? Because we can’t go back to the past, I can’t say “no” at that time, and I can’t know now what result that choice would have brought.
Without regard to my feelings or answer, in an instant he laid me down and his hand went inside my skirt. I felt a great pain and I screamed, but the man soon stopped even that with his tongue. As nausea rose, the man’s large genitals entered my nauseated mouth.
I felt tear-inducing pain for some time, and it hurt like I would die. A while later, I opened my eyes and no one was there, and I thought I had had a scary dream. But the all-too-sharp pain and the vomit let me know that it hadn’t been a bad dream.
For a good while it hurt so that I couldn’t walk, so I crawled to a bench by which people often passed and sat for a long time. I was too young to know what had happened to me; I was just filled with the thought that the man had hurt me. When it became evening, I went back to the diner, but I didn’t say anything to my mother, who still had bruises from being beaten by my father.
I was so young that I didn’t even know what to call what had happened to me, but what I felt certain about was that it must stay a secret. I was afraid that if the incident was discovered, I would be criticized or branded a dirty person, and above all, there was no one who I could trust, no adult who would protect me.
*Original article: http://www.ildaro.com/sub_read.html?uid=6050§ion=sc1