How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  For the next two years, she’d continued talking about her large extended family and the crumbling, grey-tiled building that they shared with a number of other households. The inner courtyard where they would gather to share a pot of tea on a clear day. Her pet geese. How she used to take dips in the river in the peak of summer. Her parents had betrothed her to my father as soon as she was born, and when she was fourteen (and he, eighteen), they got married. My mother moved out of her parents’ home and into my father’s ancestral home in the next village up, only to wave farewell to him a few days later. It was a full day’s journey before he got to the port of Guangzhou and almost two weeks in a junk before it docked in the promised land – Singapore. There, amidst the babel of languages (other Chinese dialects he could just about comprehend; plus Malay, Tamil and English, which he could not) and a quay teeming with bobbing sampans, he stopped, breathing in the hot air, smoky from the exhaust of idling trucks and the long pipes of foremen directing their labourers between boats and warehouses. Even then, through the lingering vestiges of seasickness, my father could smell opportunity in the air, a riotous mixture of rice and chilli and tobacco, and realized that he would never again see his family’s roaming tracts of barren farmland. Never again see his mother, though he had promised to return once he had made his fortune. Out of the depths of the ship’s hull and away from its sweating, sickly masses, this simple act of walking across land almost made him break down in regret and gratitude. By the time he arrived at the address he had been given – a Hokkien clan house – he was so euphoric from the bustle and colour and temple music coming from every lane and corner of Chinatown that he said yes to the first job he was offered. The next day, he bussed up north to a part of Singapore dense and dark with rubber trees. A different world, he marvelled, though he soon realized that he had exchanged the onerous farm work back home for similar work that paid him only a few cents more and required him to rise at two in the morning instead of five.

  By the end of his first day, his face and arms were mosquito-stung and his hands scored from multiple accidents with his tapping knife. His fellow workers quietly laughed as he stumbled over tree roots. Rubber tapping paid badly but it doesn’t break your back, they reminded him. In a few weeks, his skin had stopped reacting to insect bites and his eyes had grown used to the gloom and depth of the rubber grove. He sent money home every month. Along with the money, my father included a letter enquiring after his parents’ health, and then his young wife’s, in that order. They wrote back, his eldest brother’s slashing script seeping through the paper in spots, telling him that his parents’ health was good but for the usual aches that came and went with the rain; that his wife was readying herself for married life learning to sew and cook; that his six siblings were busy trying to coax something out of the leached soil.

  It took my father years of scoring veins into the trunks of trees and years of living in an eight-to-a-room dormitory before he could afford a house. A little wooden house in Hougang, a village notorious for the stench of its pig farms, but a house all the same. It was several months before he could send for his wife. By the time she set foot in her new country, they had been apart for four years. My mother was the one who recognized my father. Went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. For in the space between their first and second meeting, she had changed – child to woman – the milk fat on her cheeks had vanished, tapering down to a pointed chin. She was all but unrecognizable. To her blank and unwavering gaze, all my father could say was, ‘Lao Po, you have changed!’

  ‘Lao Po,’ my father now said. Wife, old woman. He only called her this during the height of an argument, or when he was trying to plead with her. ‘We already send money home every Lunar New Year. We can’t afford boat fares for anyone, much less the entire family. Look around us. Do you think we have anything to spare?’ I followed the sweep of his arm as he directed it around our attap hut, pointing at the one rattan chair that no one ever sat in because they were afraid to wear it out; at the one bedroom where all of us slept, my brothers and I sharing a single bed, sleeping head to foot to head; at me. I was standing at the dining table, chopping up kong sin vegetables and making sure there were no snails hidden among the deep green stalks when he nodded in my direction. ‘We can’t even afford to send her to school.’

  ‘Are you telling me you’re going to let them starve? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I’m saying we are barely making ends meet. I’m saying that the boys can’t read or do their homework after sunset because we’re rationing the candles, I’m saying we have nothing to give. Look, look.’ He turned out his empty pockets, flapped the hem of his shirt to show how thin the cotton had become from years of washing.

  ‘One of my brothers is thinking about coming over.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You think the boats are running? There are Japanese ships in their harbour. The whole of Guangdong province has been under Japanese rule for two years. What do you think they’re going to do if anyone goes to the port looking to leave? This is madness, this is –’

  ‘If no one is allowed to leave, how did this letter get to me? Maybe there is a way, if they travel inland.’

  ‘And what then? Even if they manage to cross the South China Sea without getting captured by the Japs. What then? Who’s going to give them jobs?’ My father was almost heaving. His back curled like a cat’s backed into a corner. The rubber industry had collapsed a few years ago. With it went the plantation and my father’s job. Now he did what work he could: poorly paid odd jobs for a furniture store in town, and manual labour in the pig farms in our village sometimes, only to make ends meet. ‘What, do you want to sell one of the children to pay for the upkeep of your family? Maybe the girl?’

  That was the moment Auntie Tin rapped on the door. I smelled her perfume before I saw her, a floral note amidst the deep musk of farm animals and earth around us.

  ‘Hello, hello, Mr Ng, Mrs Ng. I’m Mrs Tin,’ said the visitor, smiling.

  My parents, caught mid-quarrel, folded their arms across their chests.

  The visitor continued smiling and held out a paper bag with both hands. ‘Pastries. Tangerines.’

  My mother passed the paper bag to me and said, ‘Go. Finish making dinner out the back.’

  Out of sight, I tried to eavesdrop on their conversation but they were whispering, their voices drowned out by the cries of children playing outside and the chatter of our neighbours relaxing before their evening meal. The smell of tangerines filled the kitchen as I finished washing the vegetables and I was trying to start the fire underneath the wok when my mother called for me.

  ‘Wang Di! Bring us some tea.’ Her voice like a crack of a whip, making me wonder what I had done this time.

  When I brought them the tea, my parents were sitting on the kitchen stools and the woman was deep in our one good rattan chair, making the wicker stretch and creak as she looked me over from top to bottom and up again. The curls in her hair were freshly set and there was gold on her arms and on her earlobes, little yellow hoops that she rubbed every now and then between finger and thumb as if to make sure that they were still there.

  She nodded as I handed her a cup. ‘Good girl. Call me Auntie Tin.’ Then to Ma, ‘You have just one daughter, yes?’

  ‘Yes, just one.’

  ‘And did I hear you say “Wang Di”? Is that her official name?’

  My mother nodded and Auntie Tin turned to me, the perm wobbling on her head as she did so. ‘Girl, do you want to know what your name means? Would you like a husband? I have just the man for you in mind.’

  It was only then that I realized that I didn’t know what my name meant. The realization dropped like a stone down my throat, into my belly. Confused, I nodded, then shook my head. Yes. No.

  My father said nothing but started agitating the spoon in his cup, as if he were ringing a bell.

  ‘Wang, meaning “hope” or “to look forward to”. Di, “little brother”.’ She turned and g
estured outside with her hand, as if she knew that my brothers were out playing and might step through the doorway any moment. ‘Wise name. And good girl’– she nodded at me –‘for bringing your parents good luck. Two brothers, this is something I can tell potential suitors about.’

  My father dropped the spoon with a clatter. ‘She’s too young.’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t have to be today. I’ll just put her name down and you can let me know whenever you’re ready.’ She drew out a palm-sized notebook from her bosom, blood-red and pulsing with all the names and potential it held within its pages. ‘Ng. Wang. Di,’ she said as she wrote, the fortune mole above her lip leaping with anticipation. I had never heard my name spoken so many times in one day and I hadn’t seen it written before. I leaned forward to watch the characters appear on paper, admiring the way she did it, as easily as brushing crumbs off a table.

  伍 望 弟

  ‘You are, what, seventeen this year?’ she continued, pencil hovering above a line.

  ‘Sixteen,’ my mother corrected.

  ‘Ah, good. Just right.’

  ‘She’s too young.’

  ‘Lots of girls get married at this age.’

  ‘We’ll need time to talk about this.’ My mother turned towards my father, who looked away, out of the door, as if he were expecting someone else to arrive.

  ‘Of course, of course. But don’t take too long ah… People get nervous during times like these – they start to think about families, babies, making a home of their own. A lot of women back in China got married before the start of the occupation, you know, just to make sure that they don’t get taken away to be dancing girls, or worse…’

  I heard my father muttering below his breath in dialect. ‘Another one. Another woman who cannot let go.’

  ‘Mr Ng?’

  My father cleared his throat and switched to speak in Mandarin. ‘That has nothing to do with us. That war is all the way across the sea.’

  ‘You may think that but I’ve heard differently.’

  My mother was nearly in tears. The letter, I knew, was still tucked up into her sleeve. ‘What? What have you heard?’

  The woman now lowered her voice and leaned towards my mother. ‘Oh, that they’re getting close, spreading out. You know that they’re planning to attack Malaya, right? And once they have Malaya, they will come down south. And then it will only be a matter of weeks, if not days –’

  ‘Hu shuo ba dao,’ my father muttered. Nonsense. ‘The British are here. They have ships and planes and cannons protecting our island. A few Japanese soldiers aren’t going to defeat the British.

  ‘Then why do they keep sending soldiers here? Why do they tell us to dig air-raid shelters? To go to the hospitals and donate blood?’ Auntie Tin’s voice was low, her matchmaker’s charm put on hold for a moment.

  She had walked past the bomb shelters, of course. The one my father had dug one morning along with four other men as the village elder gave instructions from outside the trench, his hands behind his back. For a few hours, the air had been filled with the chink of metal hitting earth and dry rustles as earth landed back on the ground. When the village elder retreated into the shade, the men started to talk, laughing at a joke I couldn’t hear. My father was back before lunch, the shovel tipped carelessly over his shoulder. He didn’t know why they bothered at all since no one was going to use it – it was going to fill up with rainwater, he said as he took a drink of water. The bomb shelters didn’t look fortuitous. They looked like trenches. Like rectangles of carved-out ground, waiting for coffins to be lowered into them.

  Auntie Tin opened her mouth again, caught herself, and turned her unspoken words into a wide smile. I saw a silver tooth in the back of her mouth.

  ‘All I’m saying is, Mr and Mrs Ng, all the good matches might get snapped up if you wait too long.’ There was something in her eyes that hinted she was prepared for anything that might happen, almost; that it was this ease of adapting, her flexibility, that had given her all she had. Her jewellery, her cotton samfu with its silky knotted buttons. ‘So yes, discuss this among yourselves. I will visit again after the new year.’ Then she beamed, eyes crinkling, patient, like a snake that has just swallowed a fat brown hen. She had got what she had come for: tea, a friendly exchange, the beginnings of a guanxi – a connection – to another young woman in the village.

  ‘That woman didn’t know what she was talking about.’ My father had been bristling all day ever since the visit from the matchmaker, but my mother ignored him as she gave everyone except him a bit of the salty radish omelette. ‘We’re not going to get her’– he pointed his chopsticks at me – ‘married off just because of some silly rumour. Anyway, we need her at home.’

  He had said the same thing when I was ten and a teacher from the neighbourhood school came to ask if I was going to be enrolled that following term.

  ‘It’s brand new and only half an hour away. Ten minutes, if she has a bike,’ she had added, looking around to see if there was one. Her eyes went left and right, right and left, to the open door and the windows until she saw the one my father used for work, the front and back carriage rusted over and strewn with metal parts, a spare bicycle tyre. She cleared her throat and sipped the tea my mother had given her. Even the sounds she made drinking were delicate. Her hands were pale, almost white; small and as perfect as a doll’s. ‘Uncle, please think about it. Times are different. We might still live in the kampong but everyone sends their children to school now –’

  But my father had simply waved his hands in front of her. ‘She has two brothers; one is in the third year of primary school, the other will go when he’s older. That’s already two sets of uniforms. Plus the books. The shoes. We can’t afford to –’

  ‘Oh, please don’t worry about that. People donate things all the time, I can help you with –’

  ‘No. No help. We don’t accept charity.’

  ‘Nearly everyone receives an education nowadays, even the girls. She’s already a few years late but we can –’

  ‘She’s a girl. What can she gain from going to school that her mother can’t teach her? We need her at home.’ He pointed into the front yard, where the chickens were, and then into the wild, open back yard that extended into the trees. While my father cycled around the city doing odd jobs for a furniture store (deliveries, mostly, and bits of light carpentry) and my mother went around the village collecting laundry, I went to the market every morning with a basket of eggs and sweet potatoes. Once there, I would lay out sheets of newspapers and spread out what I had. Sometimes all the produce went in an hour, sometimes I had to take everything home again with me; and the weight of it slowed me down so that I arrived home later than normal. I would see my mother watching from the window, knowing that I had made no money that day but she would say nothing and I would say nothing. The feeling of it would pervade all throughout dinner so that my throat closed up and I would have to swallow again and again to keep my food from rising from my stomach.

  I nodded. When the woman looked at me, it was with a look that made me feel watched – the way an animal might feel watched. She was cautious with my father like that, as if he were a large dog, tame enough, but which could still pounce.

  ‘I don’t want to go to school,’ I said, even though no one had asked me. My father nodded as I hoisted Meng onto my hip. Look at this, I wanted to say, to shame her, to remind her that there were needful things – and then there were things that people wanted, that anyone could want, but could live without. Meat and fish for dinner more than just twice a year. New clothes. An education. I had stared back at her, unblinking, wanting to sound older than I was, wanting to be on the side of my family because they were the only thing I knew. ‘I don’t need it,’ I’d added, revelling in a sour satisfaction as the teacher got up to leave.

  My mother, still sore about my father’s refusal to send money to her family, refused to speak to him throughout dinner. Every now and then, as she moved to pick up morsels of food
to put into her bowl, I heard the crinkle of paper under her blouse. A few days later, I saw her wrap her jade pendant, a pale green stone that she had always worn on a loop of string around her neck, in cotton and slide it into an envelope. I imagine that the jade was still warm when she brought it to the post office. For the next few months, I would catch her in the middle of reaching for it, her hand going to the dip in her throat, and find nothing. My father never noticed.

  I imagine, too, that she was already thinking about sending her family the pendant that evening. The matchmaker’s warning about the war was ringing in my ears but the only thing I could think about then was my future husband – what he might look like, where we would live, whether he would be kind.

  Yan Ling came by the following day as I was feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs. I felt her watching me and knew what was on her mind before she’d said it.

  ‘Did she visit you as well? The matchmaker?’

  ‘Yes.’ I rolled one egg, still warm, in my hand. Who would collect them, I thought, if I weren’t around?

  ‘She wanted to talk to my sister, not me.’ Yan Ling bit her top lip, then released it so that her cleft reappeared, bruised and shining, like a fresh scar. ‘What did your parents say?’

  I shook my head and set the five eggs in my basket, nestling them in a circle, pointy ends up. When I turned back, she was chewing on the end of her plait, looking relieved.

  We set off for the market together, trading details about the matchmaker’s visit as we went down the lane. Yan Ling’s parents had taken one look at Auntie Tin, the precious metals adorning her neck and wrist, the gifts of fruit and biscuits and said yes. They had brought out her younger sister after pinching her cheeks red and pink, and forced her to smile for the audience of one. ‘Do this for us,’ they had told her. She was barely sixteen.

  ‘They made me sit in the bedroom, in the dark, until she was gone,’ Yan Ling said.

  I made useless, empathetic sounds as we went down the lane, past the other attap huts that were waking up, not knowing who to feel worse for: Yan Ling, because she had been passed over as if she weren’t there, or her sister, for having been bartered for some food and the possibility of a bride price. I kicked at the lalang, their white, feathery tails. My skin would itch that evening and I would have to prise the weeds’ sharp teeth from my cloth shoes and my trousers. Neither of us said anything until we were outside the boundaries of the kampong, far enough to have left behind the heavy stench of pig pens and chicken coops, far enough so I could breathe in the smell of green and dew.