I was young, when they stole me away.

I was still at home when it happened.

I did not expect them.

Nor did I. But it is funny how little the world cares about what we do and do not expect. It runs its course, like so many rivers, and we simply follow.

I look back and wonder, what life would have been like had I grown up speaking the language of my people? If I had worn the hanbok and stayed planting rice with my mother and father. If I had married the boy who lived just three doors down and always snuck me an extra egg when their chicken laid more than expected. If I had never seen Tokyo.

It was when he took me away from Tokyo that I realized that it did not matter where I was in Japan, what I imagined could never be my home. I could never go back. I was a ghost in the world where no one wanted me.

I would never have a home.

I did not have to leave home for my world to change. Perhaps that made it worse. When so much else stayed the same, I changed so utterly and completely.

To watch the world mutate and burn before your eyes. To be the victim caught in the crossfire of other men's wars. To suffer between the powers that fight for a 'greater good' you will never see and, in the end, no one will ever achieve.

But no one wants to listen to an old woman. A woman old before her time. Old and weary from the ways of the world before wrinkles can even etch on her face. Worn to the bone before her bones crack and break with age.

What people we are, those silent sisters in the lives of men. The ones who suffer and endure and turn to paper before our very eyes. To watch our cultures torn from our grasp, our language desecrated and denied us. To see what made us a part of a whole ripped so violently from us that all we have left is the gaping hole the loss left behind.

And nothing to fill it with.

For how do you fill the hole left in you by the snatching away of who you are? Or, when they are through with you, how do you explain what you endured? No one will take you back then.

They forget about you. They pretend you were never theirs. They have wives and children and families they owe their allegiance. They fill your head with lies and promises and pretty words in their foreign tongue until you are stupid enough to believe them. And even when they do not, you hold to the false promise as your only hope in the dark of the night. For what else can you live for?

Nothing else awaits you. Nothing but pain and suffering. For you are a stranger to your people. To your family. And, if you seen them again, they will not see you.

You are a stranger to them. A ghost wearing the skin of someone they almost knew. A pretender in your borrowed clothes and with your stretch-marked skin.

So many of us gave up everything. Our homes burned to the ground, our families butchered and murdered, our land destroyed by greed and the false premise of a better future. One given us by those who did not listen to what we wanted. Did not care. And only told us that they knew better before they abandoned us when they could no longer fight.

My children, those born before and after, would bear the faces of their fathers. The eyes like mine, the skin like mine, and the language like mine. But him, the one born during, his eyes were not quite sharp enough. Too round, too big, too foreign.

He looked like his father. That is why they took him from me. He was not supposed to happen. But nature finds a way and all other desires be damned. My desires be damned.

There I was, cast out and forgotten because I fell victim to nature. Or, more accurately, victim to him. But that was not all I would be. Even if it was what I was to everyone else.

We proved ourselves greater than that. Greater than their false gods or their idols of war. Greater than their scorn and the hurt we endured.

I never raised my son. Only saw his face when he was too young to remember mine. But I prayed for him. To gods that might not have heard one, such as I was. I prayed all the same and I told myself that, someday, I could meet him again.

In this life or the next.

My son played alongside my other children. They refused to notice his differences. And the fathers who adopted him only playfully called him what he was. But his true father, the one who was no father, he will never know.

Perhaps never suspect what he left as the parting gift I did not want but will love until the end of my life.

For we are the forgotten.

We are the used.

We are the abandoned.

We are the abused.

Wartime was our prison.

And no home our refuge.

We made ourselves better.

We lived in solitude.

For all the questions and the pity.

For all the scorn and abuse.

For all that have forgotten us.

For all we have been through.

We are the women who survived it.

We are those who made it through.

The victims and the victors.

Those who you refused.