Review | How We Disappeared: Jing-Jing Lee’s powerful tale of wartime Singapore and the shame of silence
The haunting narrative follows one of the Lion City’s unseen citizens, a widow and ‘cardboard auntie’, as she confronts the horrors she experienced during the Japanese occupation
How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee One World 4.5/5 stars
In inscribing this novel with a phrase from Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker-Prize-winning work, The Blind Assassin, “the best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one,” Singaporean author Jing-Jing Lee signals vital clues to How We Disappeared. Clues not only to its thematic essence but to its three-stranded, slightly ungainly yet mysterious structure. But not even this meticulous foregrounding prepares the reader for the visceral power and heartbreak of this exquisitely rendered debut novel.
Lee, an accomplished poet, has dedicated her narrative to “the grandmas (halmonies, Lolas and amas) who told their stories, so that I could tell this one”. So it is fitting that it begins with an elderly woman’s early morning musings about the circumstances of her birth, her too-short childhood and the significance of her name, Wang Di, which means “to hope for a brother”. Before rising to the quotidian chores of her solitary existence in the year 2000, in her new Red Hill studio flat – the closest offered by the Singaporean housing board to the apartment she and her husband had shared for 40 years – she wonders how different her life would have been had she gone to live with her aunt. Or had she been approached by a matchmaker at another time and war hadn’t torn through the island.
From the outset, Lee captures something of the essence of Singapore; her sentences are as effortlessly freighted with historical fact, local lore, aromas, flavours and speech rhythms as they are with poetic grace. By the time Wang Di shuffles the 11 steps to the home altar and lights joss sticks to her husband – who she affectionately called the Old One, because he was 18 years her senior – we have learned of her parents, who thought poorly of girls, her lack of education and the local water spinach called kong sin, empty heart.
Wang Di talks to the dead out loud, especially to the Old One, who died 100 days earlier, aged 93. Memories of her childhood in an attap house in a kampong have been flooding back, and she is acutely conscious that she is mixing up past and present. But she is not mistaking the regret she feels at not having allowed the Old One to tell her of his wartime experiences. It had worried him that she always recoiled from discussing the war. “He knew what the unsaid did to people,” writes Lee, “ate away at them from inside.”
So it is that the war’s dark secrets enter the pages of this gently unfolding novel like a shadowy, haunting presence – a veritable ghost in the orderly, modern Singapore to which Wang Di awakes.