Episode 69
"What can you even do in fifteen minutes? Hurry up and start already."
Miako muttered under her breath.
"You hate waiting the most, and yet here you are, showing up early and making us wait!'" Sakura laughed as she set the pizza boxes down on the table.
"I even brought two bottles of cola today."
Hina pulled a two-liter bottle out of a convenience store bag.
"Ohh! Hina, you’ve got taste!"
Yui ran into the kitchen to fetch the cups.
Miako folded her arms and glared at the screen.
00:12:47
She grumbled, but there was no denying the way her heart was already thudding.
Ever since she’d watched the first episode, it hadn’t left her mind for a single day that whole week.
The family parting at the train station.
Anna’s tears.
The bird that had begun singing again.
And the Korean appraiser who had found Singing Bird.
Looking at him more closely, he might even be handsome.
She had followed him on Byeolstagram and looked up every interview and every trace of his past she could find.
Appraiser Kim Si-woo had exposed his superior’s corruption and become a whistleblower.
Where on earth did a person get that kind of courage?
He had quit the company and started a second life as an artifact appraiser.
And after that came one astonishing achievement after another, enough to inspire not just admiration but real respect.
She resolved to watch every documentary about Kim Si-woo that came out in the future.
By then, Yui had returned with four cups in her hands.
"All set!"
The four of them sat down side by side on the sofa.
The pizza boxes were opened.
Cola was poured into the cups.
00:03:12
"I feel like my heart’s going to burst."
Hina pressed a hand to her chest.
"Do you think it’ll finally show what happened to Anna?" Sakura asked carefully.
"Of course it will. She’s the protagonist," Yui said with a nod.
Miako said nothing.
Instead, she quietly pulled the box of tissues on her lap a little closer.
00:00:10
The four of them held their breath at the same time.
Dum-dum-
Nutflix’s familiar low chime filled the living room.
Singing Bird: Episode 2 - Anna and Maria
At first, Anna’s family photo zoomed in on the screen.
With a solemn swell of strings, the photo lying on the table scattered in the wind and naturally turned to reveal its back.
There, in faded ink, the words "Anna & Josef & Maria, 1939 Wien" were visible.
It showed Anna and Maria leaving the homeland where they had lived, boarding a ship and sailing away.
Anna had been gripping Maria’s hand tightly.
* * *
The image changed.
Color seeped over black-and-white footage.
An old passenger ship was docked at the harbor.
People were stepping off in a line.
In April 1939, Anna and Maria arrived in Shanghai.
At the time, Shanghai was the only city in the world where you could enter without a visa. That was because the control of the harbor had loosened amid the Second Sino-Japanese War. About twenty thousand Jewish refugees fled there, and Anna and Maria were among them.
Narrow alleys.
A ghetto packed wall to wall with Jewish refugees.
A reenactment showed Maria walking with Anna, holding her hand.
Maria earned a living working as a nurse under a doctor. Life in a strange land was exhausting, but her faith in the husband who had gone to make a home for them in New York kept her going.
Maria tucked a blanket around Anna in the cramped room and said,
"Your father will send a letter soon. Let’s just wait a little longer."
Anna looked down at the bird box she held in her arms.
"I miss Daddy."
"Me too. But your father is a man who keeps his promises. You know that, don’t you?"
Anna nodded.
But no letter came.
A world map appeared on the screen.
Red X marks were stamped one by one along the sea routes connecting Europe and Asia.
In September 1939, the Second World War broke out in full across Europe. Civilian mail routes were severed or censored by military operations and naval blockades.
Joseph’s letters from New York had to cross the Atlantic and travel through Europe. But Nazi-occupied Europe was no longer a safe place to relay them. The letters were seized by censors, discarded, or vanished from postal hubs destroyed by the war.
Maria’s letters from Shanghai met the same fate. Even the Pacific routes had become unstable under the Japanese Empire’s military expansion, and the letters of the two were never able to reach one another.
The husband did not know whether his wife and daughter were alive, and the wife could not confirm whether her husband had arrived safely. War severed the last thread between the family.
A brief silence fell.
In the meantime, Shanghai itself was changing rapidly.
In 1941, as Japanese military influence spread across Shanghai, the treatment of Jewish refugees began to worsen. Through the Jewish network she had come to know in Shanghai, Maria decided to move to Hong Kong.
At the time, Hong Kong was a British colony, and the Jewish tycoon families such as the Sassoons and the Kadoories controlled its economic base. They were providing housing and work for Jewish refugees arriving from Shanghai, and for Maria, with her nursing experience, it was the better choice.
The screen shifted to Hong Kong Harbor.
The view opened onto the Kowloon Peninsula.
Maria and Anna settled in an old communal villa in the Tokawan district of Kowloon. Maria kept working as a nurse there too, raising Anna while she did.
A small room.
Maria was writing a letter, staring out the window.
Anna came up beside her.
"Mom, are you writing another letter?"
"Yes. To your father."
"Do you think it'll reach him this time?"
"......"
Instead of answering, Maria gave her a warm smile.
Maria continued sending letters in Hong Kong as well. But as the shadow of the Pacific War deepened, the chances of those letters arriving grew ever slimmer.
And then came December 1941. The day of fate was approaching.
The screen darkened.
Subtitles appeared.
December 25, 1941. Black Christmas.
On December 8, 1941, the Japanese army invaded Hong Kong.
Gunfire.
Footage of fighter planes filling the sky.
People running through the streets and screaming.
The British forces held out for eighteen days, but in the end they were overwhelmed. On December 25, 1941, Christmas Day, the British surrendered.
History would come to call that day Black Christmas.
In the early days of the occupation, Japanese soldiers swept through civilian homes and shops in the city, committing indiscriminate looting, arson, and rape.
Several documentary segments passed by.
A professor from the University of Hong Kong appeared and explained.
"An incident known as the St. Stephen's College massacre occurred when Japanese troops stormed a field hospital, stabbed wounded soldiers with bayonets, and gang-raped and killed the nurses afterward. It is regarded as one of the darkest scenes in Hong Kong’s history."
That was not all.
"During the Li U Nei massacre, when the eastern defense line on Hong Kong Island was broken, dozens of surrendered prisoners and wounded soldiers were executed on the spot. According to official records and testimony, thousands of women were harmed by Japanese troops in the first month of the occupation alone. It was common for people to be beaten or summarily executed on the street for failing to salute Japanese soldiers properly."
The professor’s face was heavy with grief.
The four of them, including Miako, could say nothing about the atrocities committed by the Japanese army.
It was too cruel.
So many testimonies and so many records were proving that none of it was a lie.
As they watched the brutality unfold, Miako clapped a hand over her mouth.
History class had never taught her anything like this properly.
Yui was the first to speak.
"...We never learned about this at school, did we?"
No one could answer.
Hina lowered her head.
"We learned that there was a Pacific War, but..."
Sakura set a slice of pizza down on the table.
None of it could go down anymore.
The testimonies of survivors coming from the screen.
The trembling voice of an old woman.
The ruined streets in black-and-white photographs.
The fact that all of it had been done by Japan.
It all pressed down heavily on the chest.
Miako’s hand clenched into a fist without her even noticing.
A long silence followed.
After pausing the video for a moment, Yui quietly lifted the remote and said,
"...Let’s keep watching."
No one objected.
As if none of them wanted to look away.
All four stared straight at the screen.
* * *
The communal villa in Tokawan.
In the early dawn.
Gunshots rang out in the distance.
Maria held Anna, who had awakened from sleep.
"Mom, what was that sound?"
"Anna. Listen to me carefully."
Then Maria’s eyes swept quickly across the room.
The bird box hidden under the bed flashed through her mind.
"Anna. We need to hide this first."
Maria acted at once.
She ran into the kitchen.
She tore up the board beneath the sink.
Maria packed the bird box with wax and sealed it inside. She covered it completely with tar and all manner of substances, disguising it so thoroughly that it looked like some grotesque, unrecognizable lump. That was the very shape Kim Si-woo would find eighty years later on Hong Kong’s Cat Street.
Miako sucked in a breath.
So that’s why it was so black and unrecognizable.
The scorched object Kim Si-woo had picked up from the bottom of the street stall in Episode 1.
At last, she understood why it had ended up like that.
The scene on-screen continued.
Bang, bang, bang!
The front door was pounded on roughly.
Japanese soldiers with bayonets burst in.
Their passports were shown, but one side of the passport bore a large letter stamped in red ink.
J
A Jewish identification stamp.
The officer’s expression turned vicious.
"A Jew."
"We are German citizens. How can you treat the nationals of an ally country like this-"
"Shut up!"
The soldier shoved Maria.
Another soldier immediately grabbed Anna by the arm and yanked her away.
"No!"
Maria threw herself forward to shield Anna.
Thwack-!
The butt of a rifle struck Maria hard in the side.
She collapsed to the floor.
"Mom!"
Anna screamed.
Maria lay on the floor, grinding her teeth.
Then she lifted her head and looked at Anna.
"It’s all right, Anna. Mom’s okay."
Blood trickled through her lips.
But Maria worried about Anna first.
Anna and Maria were arrested that day and, after some time had passed, were transferred to Stanley Internment Camp at the southern end of Hong Kong.
Black-and-white archival photographs filled the screen.
Camp buildings seen beyond barbed wire.
Emaciated faces of the internees.
About 2,800 civilians were held in Stanley Internment Camp. Most were British, but civilians of various nationalities, including Jews, were imprisoned there together.
Food was desperately scarce, and medicine was almost nonexistent. Disease swept through the camp.
A shabby infirmary inside the camp.
Maria was placing a damp cloth on a patient’s forehead.
Maria volunteered as a nurse in the camp. Even while starving herself, she never stopped caring for the sick.
Years seemed to pass in an instant, and Anna lay beside Maria.
"Mom, do you think Dad is looking for us?"
"Of course. He absolutely is."
Maria’s gaunt face came into view.
She brushed back Anna’s hair.
"Your father promised, didn’t he? He said he’d come find us no matter what it took."
"Tch... but no letters are coming."
"That’s because of the war. It’s not that your father isn’t sending them."
Even speaking seemed to cost Maria dearly.
"Right this very moment, your father is looking for us. He has to be."
Anna burrowed into Maria’s arms. Maria held her tight.
Maria was not wrong. At the same time, Joseph in New York was searching for news of his family through the Red Cross and Jewish relief organizations. But the wall created by war was far too high.
The screen slowly darkened.
Subtitles appeared.
3 years and 7 months. The time Maria and Anna spent in Stanley Internment Camp.
July 1945. One month before the end of the war.
An infirmary bed.
Maria was lying there.
The same bed where she had once cared for patients now held Maria herself.
Malnutrition and pneumonia.
The price of caring for the sick even while starving was that she had neglected her own body.
Anna sat beside the bed, holding Maria’s hand.
"Mom..."
Maria gave a faint smile.
"Anna."
"Yeah."
"You have to find your father."
"No. We’ll look for him together. You come too, Mom!"
Anna cried out, voice breaking.
Maria shook her head.
"Anna. Instead of Mom... you have to meet your father and be happy, all right?..."
The strength drained from Maria’s hand.
"Mom? Mom!"
Anna’s sobs echoed through the infirmary.
The four people in front of the TV could not say a word. Miako was already nearly through an entire box of tissues.
Maria Weiss. Died in Stanley Internment Camp in July 1945, just one month before the end of the war.
She was buried in the Stanley Military Cemetery in Hong Kong.
A photograph of the gravestone appeared on screen.
Marie Vaiss
In the camp records, her name had been written incorrectly. Not Maria, but Marie. Not Weiss, but Vaiss. That single small error became one of the reasons Joseph’s search for his family grew even more difficult afterward.
Silence.
And then the screen changed.
Appraiser Kim Si-woo and the Nutflix production team immersed themselves in Anna’s story, digging through countless records.
Then, with Si-woo’s astonishing deduction after coming from Korea, they dug into the information from every angle and finally managed to find Anna.
It was enough to give viewers a deep, satisfying release.
After painstaking effort, they learned the story contained within Singing Bird.
The era itself had been captured vividly on camera.
And then.
After pushing through the brush to the cemetery of Stanley Internment Camp...
they finally found Maria’s gravestone.
The gravestone with Maria’s misspelled name.
The grass around it had grown up to a person’s waist because it had gone untended for so long.
Everyone in the production team held their breath and watched.
On the screen, Kim Si-woo appeared with a grave expression, standing in silent tribute.
* * *
The one who had cared for Anna after she was left alone was Margaret Harrison, a British woman who had been in the camp with her.
The British woman wrapped an arm around Anna’s shoulders.
"Anna, I’ll be here for you. It’s all right."
Pale-faced Anna did not answer.
In 1946, Margaret took on the role of Anna’s guardian and they were transferred together to London, England.
Anna suffered severe memory loss as a result of her mother’s death and the trauma of camp life. She could no longer remember her father’s face, his name, or even where she had hidden the bird box.
Anna’s life as an old woman flowed by on the screen in chronological sequence.
From girlhood to adulthood.
And then into middle age.
Time passed, and she became old.
Anna lived her entire life carrying one burden of guilt.
A voice was heard.
The voice of an old woman.
It was Anna.
- I lost the bird my father gave me. So... that’s why my father couldn’t find me.
With that, New York from long ago appeared on screen again.
Inside one house, someone was writing a letter.
It was Joseph.
At the same time, the image faded to black as the credits rolled.
A sorrowful string melody played.
The four of them, Miako included, said nothing, their eyes wet with tears.
The tissues they had brought were already gone.
The credits disappeared.
And then words appeared.
Nutflix series Singing Bird additional release tomorrow
Unexpected text appeared.
"Tomorrow?"
"Then we don’t have to wait a whole week?"
All of them stared at one another with widened eyes.
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