A Sample of My Writing

     We walked into the auditorium and a young Chinese volunteer, acting as an usher, handed us a set of headphones. “It’s for the translation,” she said in English and waved us down the aisle. We found a seat near the front, so we could see, and looked around. Not too many women had come to this workshop, it seemed. The program had already started and a woman in a sari stood at the podium, talking. “What’s this all about?” I whispered to Kelly. “It’s called a tribunal,” she said back. As it turned out we didn’t need the headphones; the woman spoke in English, heavily accented, some of it broken, but all of it perfectly understandable.

       “We come from different parts of the world to testify on how different forms of direct violence, from war and religious fundamentalism to female infanticide and circumcision, have ruined our lives,” she began. She told the story of her Indian friend, who entered into an arranged marriage at age sixteen. Her first child, a girl, brought great disappointment to her husband and his family. They wanted her to kill the child, but her parents convinced them that, because they were both young, they would have many sons.  So this girl child lived. The couple bore a second child, also a girl, and this time the woman succumbed to the mores of her society. She killed the baby with a poisonous leaf, a popular method of female infanticide. The woman, desperate for a son, began to pray.  The man, angry, began to drink and beat his wife. The couple’s third child came, another female. It, too, died by the poison leaf. Frantic, the woman prostrated herself upon needles and meditated for hours. The couple’s relationship deteriorated but the woman conceived again, her fourth girl. Unable to handle the tragedy, the woman sent her only child, now ten years old, to fetch the fatal leaf.

        A remarkable thing happened next. The girl did not retrieve the leaf. Instead, she ran for the help of a social service agency near her home. Social workers came and stopped the infanticide. The agency provided temporary shelter and support to the woman and her two daughters. The story does not have a happy ending. The man left his wife in search of one who would give him sons. The eldest daughter, now twelve, supports her mother and baby sister in a land that shuns divorced women and seldom educates girls. The hard work to stop female infanticide continues, and two more girls grace the streets of India.

        Another story began, and this time we needed the headphones. The seventy-year-old woman who stood before us spoke in even tones of Japan’s infamous comfort women, adolescent  Korean girls stolen in the night to administer sexual favors to Japanese servicemen during World War II. For years the Japanese government told its people, and wrote in its history books, that these young women had volunteered to comfort the soldiers in their hour of war and despair. Now, one stood before us, thin and wrinkled, in need of justice. She spoke of the morphine the soldiers shot into her arm so she could withstand rape after rape after rape, sometimes fifty a day. She became addicted and, after the war, was disgraced in her village. She wanted a formal apology from the government, she told her audience, and for the truth to be told. In solidarity a large group of Japanese women stood up in the now-still auditorium, holding signs: We demand our government tell the truth.

        Kelly and I looked at each other. Our stories of female inequality included corporate glass ceilings, unequal pay, some domestic violence, and the fight to keep Roe v. Wade on the books. The largest delegation of women to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women came from America, home to the world’s richest and most advantaged women, most of them white. But we, imposters all, had the least to say. Kelly and I listened all afternoon to the stories of the world’s women. It was a gift.