Comfort Woman : a Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under ...

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Comfort Woman
child is not treated well.
I don’t think that my teacher was very talkative. But later on
other teachers began to know about me. And some of my classmates
began teasing me. “You are like wild grass,” one of them said. “You
just sprouted from the soil.”
My friends and classmates heard her. But I only laughed and
recited a stanza from a poem we had learned in school:
“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”
They all fell quiet. Maybe they were embarrassed. So I just went
on reciting, on the verge of tears:
“Each little fl ower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colors,
He made their tiny wings.”
Then the tears started fl owing down my cheeks. I cannot describe
what I felt. My classmates cried, too. “Rosa, we are very sorry to hurt
you,” one of them said. “You have a big heart...You are still our best
friend.”
I only sobbed, because I pitied myself. It was not my fault that
my mother bore me out of wedlock. But I thought it would have
been worse if my mother had aborted me. I was her only happiness.
Without me, she would have gone crazy, thinking that her life was
meaningless.
I tried to study harder still, so I could get higher grades. I was
the brightest pupil in my class. I got high marks in all my subjects. I
wanted to become a doctor someday.
One day as I passed a crowd of students, one of them said, “You
are not qualifi ed to study in this Catholic school because you are an