How We Disappeared Read online

  Jing-Jing Lee was born and raised in Singapore. She obtained a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford in 2011, and has since seen her poetry and short stories published in various journals and anthologies. How We Disappeared is her first novel. She currently lives in Amsterdam.

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  HOW WE DISAPPEARED

  ‘A beautifully controlled novel that tells an utterly compelling and important story. Jing-Jing Lee’s prose is crystal clear, the narrative scope is sweeping and devastating, and the story is as deeply felt and well observed as it is captivating.’

  Caoilinn Hughes, author of Orchid & the Wasp

  ‘Jing-Jing Lee writes like a poet… This was a hard story to tell, to hear and to read, but it is also an important story that demands to exist and Jing-Jing Lee has brought it to life… Congratulations. Every single hour I spent reading this was an hour that could not have been better spent.’

  Catherine Chanter, author of The Well

  ‘This is a brilliant, heartbreaking story with an unforgettable image of how women were silenced and disappeared by both war and culture.’

  Xinran, author of The Good Women of China

  ‘A heartbreaking story told with such humanity and grace. The details of How We Disappeared are so vivid they return to me in dreams.’

  Marti Leimbach, bestselling author of Daniel Isn’t Talking

  ‘A shattering, tender and absorbing novel… Meticulously researched, exquisitely written, with characters that will live and breathe in your hearts long after you finish the last page… I’m reeling from its power – what an absolute triumph.’

  Fiona Mitchell, author of The Maid’s Room

  ‘How We Disappeared is a masterpiece of storytelling. Evocative and heart-rending, it tells of one woman’s survival in occupied Singapore, and the quest of a child to solve a family mystery. It is beautifully written, exquisitely crafted, and utterly compelling.’

  Mary Chamberlain, author of

  The Dressmaker of Dachau and The Hidden

  ‘An exquisite mystery, an enthralling novel. Equally touching and intriguing, How We Disappeared is a soaring debut of surviving the unsurvivable [and] a searing and shocking reminder of a history many would like to forget, and of the endurance of the human spirit.’

  Eoin Dempsey, author of White Rose, Black Forest

  For the grandmas (halmonies, Lolas and amas)

  who told their stories, so that I could tell this one

  For Marco, always

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Acknowledgements

  ‘The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one.’

  Margaret Atwood

  The Blind Assassin

  ‘I’ll tell my human

  tale, tell it against

  the current of that vaster, that

  inhuman telling.’

  Li-Young Lee

  ‘Furious Versions’

  ‌Part One

  Wang Di

  She began in the first month of the lunar year. They said she was born at night, the worst time to arrive – used up all the oil in the lamp so that her father had to go next door for candles. It took hours, and it was only after muddying up swathes of moth-eaten sheets the neighbours had given in the last few weeks of her mother’s pregnancy that she emerged. As her first wails cracked through the hot air in the attap hut, he went into the bedroom to look at her, a worm of a thing freshly pulled out of the earth. When he saw the gap between the baby’s legs, the first-time father spat, then slumped in a chair at the kitchen table, eyeing his wife as she nursed, already thinking about the next child.

  That is one story.

  Or, she began when her mother found her in a rubbish skip. She was walking to the market with four eggs her hens laid that morning, was passing by the public bins when it started to whimper. The woman looked in and there it was – a child, scraps of leftover dinner on top of it. She took the baby home and brushed the dirt off her face. Waited for a week to see if anyone would come and claim her. They kept her when no one did.

  The third and last story, told to the child by her aunt, was that she was born and her father took her to the pond; the one where water spinach grew. Villagers went to collect it in armfuls when they could afford nothing else for dinner, and it was by this vegetable, completely hollow in the middle of their stems so as to warrant the name kong sin, empty heart, that her father put her. The aunt told this story each time she went to visit, and each time, as she got to this point in the story of her niece’s birth, she would stop, smack her lips and lean in close, adding that her father had tried to push her under with the tip of his sandalled foot. She explained that it wasn’t easy, what he was doing, because the water was shallow and the weeds were holding her up.

  ‘You were bobbing in and out of the water,’ she said, ‘and the whole business was almost finished with when you stopped crying from the feeling of damp on your body and simply looked at him. Your eyes opened up a crack and you just stared into his face.’

  The aunt couldn’t say why but it made the new father take the child back home again. He put the bundle on the table like a packet of biscuits and told his wife that she could keep her if she gave birth to a baby boy next year. They didn’t bother naming the girl for a few weeks, but when they did, they named her Wang Di – to hope for a brother.

  This morning, as with most mornings these days, Wang Di woke to the ghost of a voice, a voice not unlike her aunt’s, calling out her name. As she lay in bed she remembered how her aunt once asked if Wang Di wanted to live with her; she could adopt her and take her away since her parents thought so little of girl children. She wouldn’t be like them, she told her, casting an eye at Wang Di’s father, but would make sure she went to school, got two sets of uniforms and books. An education.

  ‘What do you think, Wang Di?’ She’d smiled, a hopeful, shuddering smile.

  Each time she remembered this, Wang Di wondered how her life would have been different had she said yes (in her mind her parents would have said go, good riddance), if she had gone to live with her aunt on the other end of Singapore, ten miles south in Chinatown, with its narrow alleys and smoky shophouses. Or if she had grown up and been approached by the matchmaker at the right time, and the war hadn’t torn through the island as it had: in the manner of an enraged sea, one wave after another sweeping everything away.

  What she remembered most though, what she liked best, was the way it felt to hear her name, softly spoken.

  Because the only time her parents used her name was when someone important was at the door, someone life-changing, or rich. The matchmaker was both. Auntie Tin had appeared at the door one Sunday and snaked inside past her mother before she had been invited to. A few months later, war would arrive on the island. Auntie Tin visited a second time during the occupation and then again – the third and last time – after the war, when Wang Di had little choice but to say yes. She had been the one to tell Wang Di what the words in her name meant and she had been the one who plucked her away from her anguished parents, away from the stolid silence of their home four years after they first met.

  When Wang Di sat up and opened her eyes, the faint hum of her name was still in her ears, a song she couldn’t stop hearing. Her hand fluttered to the faint scar on her neck, right where her pulse lay, then went down to the line on her lower stomach, the raised welt of it smooth beneath her fingers. Eyes closed, she already knew what kind of day this was going to be – dread was pooling in her chest but she put her legs over the side of the bed and stood. Shuffled the narrow path to the altar. Eleven steps and she was there lighting up joss sticks for everyone sh
e remembered, saying, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ as if they’d been the ones calling out for her: The Old One, of course; her parents, her aunt and her two friends, one who died earlier than everyone else, and the other, whom she hopes is still alive. She was walking away from the altar when she turned back and lit up three more, planting them in among the fallen ash. Then she clicked the radio on before the memory of a child’s face, a memory as clear and smooth as a polished stone, could wash over her.

  ‘Breakfast, Old One,’ she said. Out of habit. Muscle memory. Her mouth hanging open in the quiet after her words. She knew there was going to be no answer and why, instead of the brown damp of newspapers, she was now surrounded by the scent of clay. Brick. A new-house smell that made her feel sorry for having woken up. It was still dark out when she walked into her (new) kitchen and saw herself in the (new) windows: an old lady with a curved upper back that made her look more and more like a human question mark; grey-and-white hair cut mid-neck – a style the kindly neighbourhood hairdresser called a ‘bop’.

  As the water boiled, Wang Di ripped off yesterday’s date on the tearaway calendar in the kitchen.

  There it was: May 24. To make sure she wouldn’t forget, she had written ‘100’ above the date. One hundred, as in ‘It’s been one hundred days since my husband passed away’. One hundred days spent regretting the fact that she hadn’t said and done all she could for him. She touched the black square of cloth on her sleeve – the black badge that told everyone that she had just lost someone close; the black badge that she wore even in bed on the arm of her blouse – and unpinned it. She fixed her eyes on the calendar again, for so long that the print started to squirm. Like ants on the march. Weaving left and right. The way her mind did these days, moving from past to present, mixing everything up in the process. She could be watching the news or doing the wash when everything blurred in front of her eyes and she would be reminded of something that happened years ago.

  More and more, bits and pieces of her childhood came back to her, especially this: the many mornings she had watched as her mother stirred congee in a pot. Neither of them saying anything as she did what girl children were supposed to and laid out the cutlery. Five porcelain bowls. Five porcelain spoons. All chipped somewhere, the smooth glaze giving way to a roughness, like used sandpaper. Her mother would remind her to give the one perfect spoon to her youngest brother – Meng had a habit of biting down on cutlery as he ate from them. ‘He’s going to swallow a bit of china one day,’ her mother used to say.

  For the last hundred days, it was the Old One who came back to her. How she had left him that evening. The way he looked – she should have known; was trying not to think it while she combed his hair, telling herself how little he had changed. His hair was a little thinner, like a toothbrush that had lost some of its bristles. Thinner, and more white than black now, she thought as she combed it back. Lines around his eyes that stretched to his temples. She wanted to say it then, how he hadn’t changed much. Instead she said, ‘You look good today. Colour in your face,’ and wondered if he could tell she was lying, wondered if by saying it, she could will it into being. He smiled while she rubbed a damp cloth over his face, his neck, his hands, cracking his joints as she wiped from palm to nail. She saw how blue his fingertips were and knew it was a bad thing even though she didn’t know why.

  Chia Soon Wei had said nothing as his wife fed him his evening meal and cleaned him. Every single word drew much-needed breath out of him, made his heart flutter and race. His voice used to ring through people, through walls, like a gong being struck. Now, it flitted out of him like a dark moth, barely visible. He nodded to thank her as she sat down and held the sidebar on the bed, and wanted to start talking before she got up again to do something else, like pour another tumbler of water or tuck the sheet under his feet. Wanted to urge her to finish her story before it was too late, before both of them ran out of time. He knew what the unsaid did to people. Ate away at them from the inside. He had told Wang Di nothing. Not until a few years into their marriage, following a rare day at the beach. After that, all he wanted to do was talk about the war. What he had done. Not done. He’d brought it up one day at home, was beginning to tell Wang Di what happened during the invasion but stopped when he saw that she was drawing back from him as he spoke, as if she were an animal, netted in the wild; and her face, how wide her eyes had become, how very still. The point was made even clearer when she woke that night, kicking and thrashing, cracking the dark with her cries. He had watched her until the sun came up, in case she had another nightmare, afraid that he might fall asleep and have his own. His usual, recurring one. One that he woke quietly from in the morning and carried around with him. One he had been carrying around with him for more than fifty years.

  That day, at the hospital, he wanted to tell her that he understood, that it took time, gathering courage, finding the right words. But what a pity it was that they hadn’t started earlier. What came out instead was this: flutter flutter. A whisper that crumpled in the air half heard.

  ‘What did you say, Old One?’

  ‘I said you should finish your story. From yesterday.’

  She nodded to mean yes, yes I really should, but her hands were shaking. She had told him everything. Everything but.

  He beckoned to her. Closer. Come closer. Wang Di went to him, leaning towards his mouth.

  ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed about. You did nothing –’ he looked at her now, so fiercely that she had to force herself to hold his gaze ‘– nothing wrong.’

  ‘I know. I know.’ But she was shaking her head, her body betraying what she thought. What she wanted to say was: You might change your mind. You might change your mind after I tell you the rest of it. So she hemmed and hawed, then started talking about the various neighbours who had come over to say goodbye over the last few days, about the trash heaps that people were leaving behind, piled up along the corridor.

  One of the last things she said to her husband was, ‘You should see the state of the building! Rubbish everywhere – old textbooks, a mini fridge – as if it doesn’t matter anymore, now that the building is going to be demolished.’

  This was another thing she regretted. How she had rattled on instead of asking him if there was anything he wanted to tell her, to unburden himself of. And this one question in particular: where he had been every 12th of February (until his legs started to fail him) and who with. All questions that had looped over and over in her head the first time he had left and come back again at the end of the day. All questions that she’d practised saying out loud every year after that while he was gone. That she pushed away the moment he returned home. And all because of that little voice, not unlike her mother’s, which hissed at her, warning that he might want answers of his own, out of her.

  And then what would happen? Would she stay silent? Would she lie?

  This is how it became their part of their life. Wang Di turning away when he said he would be gone for the entire day. How she would say goodbye to him over her shoulder as if it meant nothing to her; how she laid out the dinner things in silence when he arrived home later that day smelling of smoke and dirt and sweat. All of this, they repeated. A play of sorts, an act, that they would repeat year after year for almost half a century.

  Even then, at the last, she let it lie. A sore point left untouched for so long that it would be too painful, too ludicrous to bring up at the eleventh hour.

  She skirted the topic. Started complaining about other people’s rubbish.

  At eight that evening the nurse came in, and in the quiet way of hers, signalled the end of visiting hours. A tap of her white orthopaedic shoes on the floor. A low cough. Wang Di stood. She and her husband had never hugged in public. Not once in fifty-four years. Instead she gripped his hands, then his feet on the way out. Cold. As if he were dying from the bottom up.

  The old lady batted away the thought by waving her hand. ‘Bye-bye, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Her words sounded strange, like an
off-key note in an orchestra but she kept smiling. Nodding. Squeezing his foot.

  He waved without lifting his elbow off the bed.

  Wang Di waved back, turned the corner and left.

  The next day, she had woken with the resolve to try harder, reminded herself not to hold back later on. She had made him his favourite soup: pork with pickled cabbage and peppercorns and she left it to warm in the slow cooker while she did the day’s collection. Returned home when it got too humid, the heat like a hot damp blanket around her body, and opened the front door to the salty perfume of bone broth. It was almost noon when she arrived at the hospital with the sense of something gone wrong. If she could she would have run. For a moment, when she got to his ward and found him gone, she half expected a nurse to come and touch her arm and say that he was just in the shower, he was strong enough now. Or that he had been wheeled away for an X-ray or scan. But no. She was there for a few minutes, the red thermos like a weight in her arm before anyone took notice of her.

  The bed had already been stripped. What they would never tell her was the way he had died. How his heart had stopped beating and the doctor on duty and two nurses had hurried in. How the young doctor had leaped on top of the bed, knees on either side of the patient, and started doing chest compressions. How, finally, the head nurse – the same one who went into the ward to tell Wang Di that her husband had passed away – had laid a hand on the doctor’s arm to get him to stop. He climbed off the bed, straightened his clothes and looked at his watch, noting the time of death. 10:18.

  ‘We called you at home but there was no answer.’ The image of the doctor and Mr Chia, dead or dying, bounding up from the mattress again and again from the force of each compression was still playing behind the nurse’s eyes. On and off and on, like a film projector on the blink. She pinched the top of her nose to make it go away. ‘He went peacefully…like falling asleep,’ she said, her voice cracking at the effort of the small, merciful lie, her cloying words. Like talking to a child. When in fact what happened was the man’s heart had failed. He had been lucky the first time. Not the second.