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

dragging, and the bloody blisters on her body became infected and didn’t heal for a long time. That was in the winter of the Thirty Third Year of the Republic of China [1944], when the Eleventh Lunar Month was already over. I didn’t dare to stay at home so I hid in my relative’s house and only went back home occasionally. Luckily, the Japanese soldiers didn’t capture me; since I didn’t stay at home I didn’t know if they had come to look for me or not. I couldn’t return home until all the Japanese troops left my hometown after Japan’s surrender.
    I was married twice. My first husband was named Gao Fengsheng, and I had a son with him when I was twenty years old. My son was named Gao Qiaoliang; he died in 1998 of an illness. After my first husband died I married Tan Guifu in 1965 in Yiyang and moved to Mulun Village, Xinkang District, Wangcheng County, Changsha City. My second husband was one year younger than I; he died in 1978 at the age of fifty-two. Tan Guifu’s ex-wife was also named Chunxiu, so he wanted me to change my name from Yao Chunxiu to Tan Yuhua, using his family name.
    Even today I often have nightmares in which I relive the torture of the Japanese troops and wake up crying. In the nightmares I remain extremely frightened, seeing the Japanese soldiers marching towards me as I run desperately in fear, crying. Looking back, after that experience, I hate theJapanese troops! I feel so helpless in my old age. If I had the resources I would sue them and demand that they restore my dignity. I hate the Japanese troops so much that I don’t know what I might do if I saw them in front of me.
    The Research Center for Chinese “Comfort Women” invited Tan Yuhua to come to Shanghai in July 2008 to talk about her wartime experience to history teachers from Canada and the United States. Her health has been rapidly declining in recent years .
(Interviewed by Su Zhiliang in 2001 and by Chen Lifei in 2008, with the assistance of Yin Chuming)
    Yin Yulin
    The Japanese army entered Shanxi Province in northern China in September 1937 soon after the beginning of full-fledged warfare and occupied the provincial capital Taiyuan on 9 November . 12 From 1937 to 1944, the Imperial Japanese Army operated a series of “mop-up” campaigns to wipe out the resistance activities led by the Chinese Communist Party in Shanxi and the nearby provinces. Japanese soldiers’ sexual violence escalated during these operations; they frequently killed women who dared to resist rape and kidnapped a large number of local women, taking them to randomly placed comfort facilities . 13 A 1938 newspaper article reported that, after the Japanese army left the Yuanqu County Seat, the resistance forces found the blood-soaked clothing of over sixty Chinese women in the Japanese-occupied county hall . 14 In August 1940, the communist forces launched a large-scale campaign called the Hundred Regiments Offensive, which significantly damaged Japan’s strategic position in the area . 15 The Japanese military retaliated with genocidal operations against the resistance forces and local civilians . 16 Yu County, lying at the border between the Japanese-occupied area and the resistance bases, was within the region of fierce fighting. Yin Yuling was one of the women abducted by the Japanese troops stationed near her village in Yu County during this period .

    Figure 14 Yin Yulin, in 2001, praying in her cave dwelling.
    I grew up in Wuer-zhuang Village, Xiyan Town, Yu County. My parents were poor peasants and I had an older brother and two older sisters. I was born in the Year of the Snake. At fifteen I was married to a man named Yang Yudong of Hou-Hedong Village. Yang Yudong was sixteen years older than I and had been married before. He was an ugly-looking man, but his family was quite rich. Life was comfortable in the family. I gave birth to a boy when I was nineteen, but the boy became ill and died at one year of age.
    In the Tenth Lunar Month of that