“In case of pregnancy, women are given abortion or instructed to give children to

an orphanage.”(excerpt from True stories of the Korean Comfort Women, by Chung

1995)

In the Japanese colonization period, being pulled-out of the mother’s womb or

forced to be put in an orphanage is the fate of a child which is the product of a barbaric
lust.

The author and her twin sister were born to school teacher parents in Cagayan
de Oro, Misamis Oriental. Her family spent the World War II years in the jungles of
Mindanao where her mother passed away when she was four years old.

Her experience of the war was the inspiration on writing the poems. Her
published books (The River Singing Stone and Almost Home), which is a collection of
poems, are considered as to be World War II poems. In one of her poem “The Raftsman
Never Looked Back”:

In Asia in an earlier war

in still another surge of evacuees

I was that child, bundle on head,

asking if we could stop.

These poems are the stories of struggles and hardships, manifesting the
helplessness of being a child in midst of war.

Myrna Peña Reyes, in her poem “Children of War” clearly implies that children
born in time of war is inevitable - produced either by natural order or by coercion.

These poor innocent souls are the living testimonies of war.

In the first stanza of the poem, the author emphasized babies as the aftermath of
wars. She even stressed it by using a deep rich description i.e. indelicate and insidious.

The following stanzas tell how these infants originated. The second stanza
mentions the longing of a soldier, his desire for all of his craving to be fulfilled before he
commence into battle, uncertain if he will live or die. He sues pleasure either to his
consort or to the harlotry. It was like a person on a death sentence, he will be given all
the food that he wants before he sits on his seat of death. The third stanza, it states the
restlessness of refugees, couples and lovers seeks comfort to each other even though
there is a feeling of annoyance that there might be someone is watching them, or
maybe the enemy is near. Doing that conjugal act makes them temporarily at ease; not
knowing that later will give them a token - a remembrance of that tragic incident. The
last stanza connotes the savage attitude of invaders, ransacking and burning houses,
killing innocent lives and raping the local women. These women were forced into sexual
slavery and will later on give birth to an infant that makes them remember that awful
nightmare of their lives; it was like “adding salt to injury”.

From the documentary, True Stories of Filipina Comfort Women:

“War serves no purpose, makes animals out of men, and afterward there is no
erasing the scars, and those that survive were haunted by the ghosts.”

Wars bestow humans a deep wound that will take a very long time to heal, but
afterwards, will leave a scar that can never be erased. That memory of yesterday’s
dreadful incident can never be relinquished. The sorrow and the agony of the victims
still echoes through these times.

The discrimination suffered by the native parent and child in the postwar period
did not take into account widespread rapes by occupying forces, or the relationships
women had to form in order to survive the war years.( excerpt from War Children,
Wikipedia)

The mother and child (Japanese offspring) were discriminated and secluded by
the society. They were tagged as a “Makapili”; their children were even mobbed and
bullied by other kids.

Often children never understood the reason they were isolated or mistreated.
(excerpt from War Children, Wikipedia). Their early life has been miserable.

The author plunged into her writings, with the aid of her war memoirs, and using
figurative language; she gave us a glimpse of that unforgettable era.