How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  Wang Di couldn’t fathom the possibility that the Old One was dead, couldn’t even begin to think about it so she started apologizing to the nurse instead. ‘I’m sorry. You called? I’m sorry I was out.’ She had been picking up cardboard and newspapers, getting her collection weighed at the recycling truck when the Old One had died. $9.10. That was how much she had been paid that morning. She tried to recall how it had come to this, how quickly it had happened – in little more than a month. First a cold. Then this. How could a cold kill you? she thought, reaching forward to put a hand on the bed. The sheets on it were cool, fresh from a cupboard. It was then, while the nurse was giving her the pale, sanitized version of what had happened, telling her that his death had something to do with his age and an infection and his heart – that the words ‘I should have asked him, I should have asked him,’ thrummed in her head. So that when the nurse asked if there was anyone they could call for her, perhaps a child or another family member, all Wang Di could say was, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about my husband.’

  Afterwards, she had sat in a white-walled room as they brought her papers to sign. When she told them she couldn’t write (or read), someone ran out for an ink pad and helped her press her thumb into it, as if she hadn’t done it before, couldn’t manage it herself. And the way they kept saying his name. ‘Chia Soon Wei,’ over and over again, she forgot why, could only think about the fact that she had never called him Soon Wei. Not once. It was a week after the wedding ceremony before she could look him full in the face. A whole month before she started to call him Old One, a joke (another first with her new husband) because he was eighteen years her senior.

  At his wake, the guests – mostly neighbours – kept saying the same thing to her: ‘Uncle Chia had a long life.’ Each time, she had nodded and replied, ‘Ninety-three,’ as if to reassure them and herself that they were right, that ninety-three was good enough. It made her wonder how long she might last after him. Later on, lying alone in the dark after his cremation, she had decided that ninety-three was nothing at all. He had promised more.

  A month after that, she had moved from Block 204 to this apartment. As was planned before the Old One’s death. Everything went on the way things did after someone died. The housing officer came by to give her three sets of keys. The volunteers at the community centre packed everything up and installed her in the new place. While all this was happening, Wang Di spoke and walked and slept with a Soon Wei-sized absence right next to her. The illogicality of it. Both of them were supposed to move to the new place. Just as both of them had looked at the buildings offered by the housing board and picked out the one closest to the home they’d lived in for forty years. The housing agent had rolled out a map of Singapore – a shape that always reminded Wang Di of the meat of an oyster – and drew dots to show them where the buildings were. ‘Here,’ he’d said, ‘here’s where you live now.’ He drew a red dot. ‘And there, there, there – those are the buildings that are available.’ Three more red dots. They chose the one closest by, a thumb’s length away on the map. It turned out to be thirty minutes away on foot. It might as well have been another country, another continent.

  Moving had meant losing him again. Losing everything: the neighbours with whom he would play chess for two hours every evening before coming back up to help with dinner. The stall from which he would buy a single packet of chicken rice every Sunday afternoon, him taking most of the gizzard, her taking most of the tender, white meat. The medicine hall’s musty waiting room where she’d sat, staring at illustrated charts pointing to body parts both inside and out, while the sinseh took his pulse and stuck needles into him. Each of these things, person, each place, holding a part of her husband like an old shirt that still retained the smell of his skin.

  After the movers left, she had busied herself unpacking, opening box after box until she tore open the one filled with Soon Wei’s belongings. She had disposed of nothing, given nothing away even at the volunteers’ quiet urging. There they were: his walking cane, four shirts, three pairs of trousers, and two pairs of shoes. His sewing kit. A plain wooden box containing his Chinese chess pieces, the words on top worn smooth from touch. A biscuit tin packed with newspaper clippings and letters. She had sat down then, on top of the box, and wept.

  The box was now next to the bed. The surface of it clean, bare except for an alarm clock. Once a week, Wang Di peeled back one cardboard flap so she could inhale the scent of his clothes and papers, then shut it again, as if the memory of him could waft away if she left it open for too long. She looked at it now, her fingers furling and unfurling. No, too soon, she decided, then got up to open the front door. This was what she used to do – leave the front door open to let the neighbours know she was home – the gesture like a smile or a wave. But it seemed they spoke a different tongue here. Her new neighbours didn’t even leave their shoes outside because they thought they might get stolen. Two months living here and she had only exchanged a hello and goodbye with someone’s live-in domestic. Now and again she heard voices, soft and companionable, passing her door. The shuffle of well-worn soles. But they were gone before she could unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth quickly enough to call out a greeting. She wondered if she might be able to do it again, hold a proper conversation. All she said nowadays was ‘Good morning, how much does this cost?’ ‘Too much!’ ‘Too little!’ ‘Thank you.’ Maybe she would be found one day wandering the streets, able to say little else. To make sure she wouldn’t end up like that, she sometimes repeated the news as she heard it on the radio, saying the words aloud, aware that the Old One might have said these words to her had he been alive; he liked to read the thick Sunday paper to her while they sat on a tree-shaded bench.

  As she listened to the news radio that morning, she recited:

  ‘Household income. Grim view of bottom earners. Top percentile richer.’

  ‘Schoolboys arrested for throwing water bombs.’

  ‘National University of Singapore revamping its courses to produce more leaders for the country.’

  ‘And now we have the hourly traffic updates. Major incident on the A.Y.E.’

  A quarter of an hour later she had said all she was going to say for the rest of that day. She made coffee. Halved a mangosteen – his favourite fruit – and placed both halves in a bowl, white flesh facing up. A hundred days. At the altar, she stuck three joss sticks in the tin can and cleared her throat. The thought that she’d had months ago, at the hospital, blooming to the surface. I never let you talk. I should have let you. Here she paused, picturing how she had stopped him each time he brought up the war. How she froze, or left the room, or cried. How his need to talk about what happened during the war had given way to her fear of it, so that she was left now with the half history of a man she had known for most of her life. ‘I’m going to fix it. I am,’ she said, a little below her breath. She wasn’t sure how. Not yet. But she would find out, had to find out, all that she could about what happened to him during those lost years. ‘I’m going to fix it,’ she repeated. Here her voice gave, and she had to force herself to smile and change the subject. ‘I might need your help but you don’t mind, do you? Staying around?’

  Because aside from Soon Wei’s photo on the altar, there was a stark absence of anything else that might hint at a wider family. An absence as real as a wall, so solid you would have to be blind to miss it. No cluster of toys for visiting grandchildren, no extra chairs around the kitchen table for large weekend dinners. Nothing on the walls except for the pages cut out of Zao Bao, the Chinese morning paper, and the English paper (which the Old One couldn’t read but had clipped out anyway for their accompanying photos). He had collected them for years, and the collection had grown over time into a patchwork of paper tacked up on the wall of their home. On the day of the move, she had made sure to remove the articles herself. One of the things she did that first evening in the new apartment was to put them up on the wall along the kitchen table, a fine approximation of
where they had been before. There was one picture of Senior Minister Lee Kwan Yew shaking hands with the Japanese prime minister, a short column of words right underneath it. Another was a photo of two women in traditional Korean dress; one of them held a handkerchief to her face, the other stared straight into the camera, lower jaw hard, daring the viewer to blink.

  The Old One had watched her face as she looked at the two Korean women. His voice was soft, cautious when he said, ‘People are still talking about it… People who remember what happened during the war.’ And he had read the column aloud, which he did when there was something in the paper that he thought might interest her. She had listened and not said a word. The quiet afterwards was so thick she felt that someone had wrapped a bale of wool around her head. Later that evening, when the Old One was taking a shower, she got up to peer at the woman whose face was half obscured. That could be her – Jeomsun, she thought. Wang Di remembered how, decades ago, they had talked about her going to visit one day. Jeomsun had laughed and promised to take her on a long walk into the mountains; it was one of her favourite things to do. Wang Di had told her it would be her first time then, seeing a mountain, climbing one. There were no real mountains in Singapore, she’d told her, only hills. Jeomsun had said, ‘You know, it sounds strange but I feel the absence of it. Like I’ve lost a limb, or an ear, almost. You live in a strange country, little sister, the wet heat, the land all flat and small.’ It was then that Wang Di realized how little her world was, how strange and cloistered everyone else must think of her place of birth – all the soldiers and tradesmen, the captives brought over by ship. A cramped little prison island.

  The memory had landed like a hot slap across her face. She couldn’t stop hearing their voices – not just Jeomsun’s, Huay’s as well. After decades of muffling their voices in her head. Of trying not to see them when she closed her eyes at night.

  Later that evening, she had asked, ‘Those women that you read about, who are protesting… Do they live in Korea?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But there are others too. In China, Indonesia, the Philippines…’ He had stopped there, nodding slowly. Eyes on her the entire time.

  He had given her that same weighted nod earlier this year as he waited for her to speak. The week before he caught a cold. The cold that made him ill for close to a month before he toppled over with a heart attack. But even before all that, before the visits to the Western doctor who dispensed antibiotics like giving candy to children, before Wang Di’s long wait for the ambulance which seemed to take the entire afternoon to arrive, before all that, he seemed to know it was coming. The approaching, ultimate silence. And he had behaved accordingly, Wang Di realized afterwards, and insisted on having a Lunar New Year meal. A proper reunion dinner, not sitting in bed in front of the TV but at the table. She had returned home from collecting cardboard one afternoon to the smell of roast duck procured from Lai Chee Roast Chicken and Duck at the market. There was soup stock bubbling away in an electric steamboat on the table. And fishcake, raw stuffed okra, silky tofu and straw mushrooms, all plated on the side, ready to be plunged into the boiling soup. Sweet tang yuan to round off the meal. Cutlery already in place. She had smiled and combed her hair while he scooped rice into two bowls. It had been years since they had shared a reunion dinner like that and they started off much too polite, sitting straight up in their chairs as if they were meeting for the first time. It took them a while to stop watching each other over the tops of their bowls and begin talking about their day. The sweet dumplings they ate to the sound of the eight o’clock news on the radio, settling back into their easy silence.

  Later, she went to bed and found him sitting up with his eyes shut. Wang Di had to resist the urge to wake him – she had never liked watching him as he slept. His face was meant to be lively. He had dark, bristling eyebrows meant for wiggling above his eyes, a sturdy nose that he wrinkled as he worked. A mouth full of square teeth that he ate and grinned and tore off threads with. At rest now, it was as if he were only a fraction of himself. Wang Di could see what he might look like if he were never to move again.

  So she put her hand on the top of his shoulder and shook. ‘Old One, are you awake?’

  He flared his nostrils wide but said nothing, nor did he slide down into his usual sleeping position, flat on his back with one arm above his head. She sank into the mattress, close to his feet, trying to find the firmest spot in their sat-upon, laid-upon, age-old bed, and waited for him to speak.

  ‘Tell me a story.’

  It was then that she knew he had been waiting to say this. Waiting decades for the right moment. And now he couldn’t wait anymore. ‘What – what story?’

  ‘Any story.’

  She stayed silent for a while until he put his hand on hers; she had been tapping her nails on the bed frame without meaning to.

  ‘Just talk about something from your childhood, where you went with your mother on market day, for example, what you saw there.’

  The clock ticked its thin, plastic tick. Minutes passed. The first thing that came to her was this: ‘There used to be a man who sold his songs near the city.’

  She stopped to look at him and he nodded slowly, telling her to go on. ‘He would be outside one of the coffee shops whenever it was not raining, sitting on a bamboo stool, a well-worn walking stick gripped in his left hand. His face looked like it was made of ragged sackcloth and he hardly moved while he waited for the right moment to begin. Then he sang. And the sound of feet around him hushed for their owners to hear better. The market with its stalls selling vegetables and home-grown poultry, the noodle stall with its sweaty cook pouring pork-based soup into bowls. The chatter of the market never stopped, but the sound of his voice, his songs about home, about missing the old country, about love and its ills, lulled everything around him into a different rhythm. Even the noodle man, with a cloth wrung around his neck to catch drops of sweat, could be seen using the same cloth to dab at his eyes whenever he thought no one was looking. People clustered around the old man, going close, listening with hands behind their backs or clasped at their chests and at the end of it, some of the people who had gathered around to listen threw coins into a tin mug.

  ‘I always stood at the edge of the crowd, out of sight, peeping now and then to look at the expression on his face. It pained me that I had nothing to give him and I made myself walk away before the end so that he wouldn’t see me – never with a coin but always there, long after my vegetables and eggs were sold, listening.’

  When she stopped, she could hear the last of her words clinging to the warm air in the room. He opened his eyes and nodded once more. Go on. She took a deep breath as if she were about to plunge her head into water, ignoring her mother’s voice in her head. What she had said to Wang Di the night before her wedding: ‘Remember. Don’t tell anyone what happened. No one. Especially not your husband.’

  When Wang Di spoke again, it was about home. About the year it all began – her almost-marriage to someone else, her too-short childhood, the war. For a week, they sat like this in the night, in the dark, the Old One leaning towards the sound of her voice. This was how she started.

  October – December 1941

  If Auntie Tin had arrived at our door an hour earlier, I might have found myself married off right before the turn of the year. As it was, her rickshaw driver was new to the island and kept taking one wrong turn after the other.

  ‘Honestly, they should know where they’re going, don’t you think?’ she whispered as she dabbed her temples with a handkerchief, trying to explain her fluster. I didn’t yet know who she was, or what she was there for, but I was already on her side. Anyone who had to meet my father’s steely silence that day deserved to be pitied. I wanted to tell her that it was not her fault, that she had simply come at the wrong time.

  My parents had been having the same fight every few months for over a year now. This evening, it had begun as it always did, with my mother brandishing a letter.

  I heard my fath
er curse under his breath, promising that he would take her earnings away to stop her from bringing any more letters to the letter reader in town. My mother was the only woman in our village who kept the money she made, hiding coins under floorboards and within the hems of her clothes. My father closed one eye to it, and to the fact that the other men in the village mocked him for being soft.

  ‘They’re starving,’ she cried, ‘the people in my old town. My home.’

  It was only when the Japanese captured Shantou that my mother started calling it ‘home’. Until then, she only mentioned her birthplace occasionally, each time with a voice steeped in relief and guilt. Relief at having escaped the oppressive poverty and the natural disasters that swept through much too often. Guilt, of course, at having left her family behind, and how easily she had done it. When news came through about the Japanese navy’s arrival on the Southern Chinese coast via motorboats, then of the city’s quick capitulation in mid-1939, my mother wept openly and called out for her da ge and er ge, her nainai – her two older brothers and her grandmother. I could only stand by and watch, my stomach heavy, churning. Later that day, I went to the outhouse and almost tipped into the hole at the sight of fresh, red blood in my underwear. When I told my mother that I just had my first bleed, her face lifted in a half-smile and cracked again into sobs. For many nights after that, I dreamed about ships and blood. All of it silent, backdropped by the sound of my mother’s weeping. I was fourteen.