How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  It was to this quiet that Wang Di returned that afternoon. This same quiet and lack of questioning that she now regretted.

  She could recall the first time her husband had told her he wasn’t going to work that morning – was leaving home that day to take care of something. They were still strangers, muddling through their first week of marriage, of knowing each other. She had felt watched as he waited for her to ask where he was going. ‘Okay, of course,’ she’d replied instead.

  He did the same thing the following year on the same day, 12 February, and every year after that. After he left his boss’s shop to set up his own tailoring stall, he would ask Wang Di for permission to leave, just for a few hours, as if she were in charge. She had the idea that he was doing something shameful – the way she was doing something shameful, going to the sinseh for herbs that turned out not to work – so she didn’t ask.

  The yearly ritual only stopped when his leg became so bad that even a walking stick was of little help. The first time 12 February came and passed without his half day away, Wang Di almost wanted to ask if he had forgotten but let it rest. It was much too late to talk about this, she decided, it would only bring up the question of why she hadn’t wanted to know all these years.

  ‘I should have asked,’ Wang Di said, as she looked at his photo on the altar. Then she did the only thing she could to feel at home again: she went to bed. Even though it was thirty degrees outside and her flat was lit with the afternoon sun. Even though Baker Teo’s words were still buzzing between her ears. The look on his face when she started asking him about the Old One, a look that said, ‘Why talk about what happened during the war?’ and ‘Why now?’ She lifted the thin blanket over her head and closed her eyes. As she lay on her mattress, she tried to weigh her two fears against each other. Her fear of his past and her own, swathes of it still untold, and her fear of the future – one that was absent of her husband. The only other time she had lain in bed like this was the day after she began telling the Old One about what had happened to her when she was young, just on the cusp of adulthood. How it had felt, all that history like a large, wriggling fish she was trying to wrestle to shore, how she had to fight not to get pulled under. She remembered how she had told him all she could until a familiar dread stoppered her throat. That night, the nightmares returned (her first in years) and he had to hold her hand while she slept, as if trying to prevent her from being swept away by a swift current.

  She thought about the way people stayed on afterwards in the very places they had died, wondered if the Old One would be able to find her new place or if he would linger in the building, even as construction workers took it apart and grew something new in its place. If he were still here, she told herself, she would ask him instead. None of this creeping-around-and-asking-the-baker business, as if she were doing something she was not supposed to do. She would ask him and hope that he would forget about all the times she made him hold his tongue, hope that it wasn’t too late.

  ‘Is it true? Have I run out of time, Old One?’ The answer, when she sat up and looked around her, was clear. It echoed in the things she had accumulated over the years, brought over from the old flat (much to the chagrin of the movers) to fill this chalk-white, new apartment. The cardboard boxes bricking a half-wall that led from the entryway into the living room. The plastic bags hanging from doorknobs or left gaping on the floor, all of them filled with inconsequential objects – rubber bands, jam-jar lids, disposable plates and bowls. The kitchen table covered with piles of junk mail and letters that she couldn’t read, that she’d left unopened since the Old One died. His things, lifted out of the box and put back in their respective places: his clothes, in his side of the thin plywood wardrobe, clean and folded. His sewing kit on top of the TV, expectant, like a plant waiting to blossom. It echoed in her ears – too late, too late.

  December 1941 – March 1942

  When we emerged from the ground on the morning of 8 December, we were almost surprised to find everything still there. For much of the night we’d crouched in the bomb shelter, breathing in the smell of mud and fear, listening to the thunder of planes overhead; I expected to see evidence of the night’s terror as my father pulled me out of the bomb shelter, but nothing in our village, nothing on the surface at least, had changed. When we were back home, my mother set about making coffee and laying out the breakfast things while my father told my brothers to get ready for school; a stoicism that they had picked up from having spent their youths living from one disaster, economic or natural, to another. My brothers and I were shaky from lack of sleep but instead of snatching a few moments of quiet indoors, Yang and Meng stood outside watching thick plumes of smoke rise from the city centre and waft over like dark clouds.

  Later that day, a few of the neighbours came with news that the island’s airfields had been destroyed, that people in the city centre had lost their homes, but my father insisted that this was hearsay. ‘Rumours. Nothing but rumours. We have the British on our side. More likely that the sky will fall.’

  A lull seemed to confirm this. Then a second air raid occurred, and a third.

  After that, for the next six weeks, we knew little else but the sound of air-raid warnings and planes and bombs. My father led the short dash to the shelter each time, a few hundred yards beyond the attap huts, all the while looking overhead as if we would have been able to outrun a plane or a bomb if one had been heading towards us. I was in charge of keeping Yang and Meng close while my mother carried two wooden buckets, one from which we would sip during the night and one in which we took turns to relieve ourselves – there was no knowing how long we had to wait.

  Throughout the six weeks, even as we felt the tremor of bombs sinking into the ground just over a mile away, my father held on to the belief that the war would be over soon. It was this stern optimism and the fact that our village had, so far, escaped the air raids, that allowed Yan Ling and me to continue going to the market every day. As we walked, she relayed bits of news that she had overheard on the radio at work.

  ‘The newscasters keep talking about how hard the soldiers are fighting the Japs and how they won’t give up. No one’s worried. Not my boss. Not my parents. Especially not my parents. All they talk about is the wedding.’ It was early February and her sister was set to be married in little more than a week. ‘My mother was so upset when they announced the curfew last week. All day she complained, “What about the wedding dinner?” Yan Ling imitated her mother, her eyebrows going up and down in dismay. “The restaurant has already been paid” – she’s praying for the war to be over so that they can have the wedding party.’

  ‘But the ceremony will go on? The dinner’s not that important.’

  ‘Not to my mother. She wants to show everyone how well my sister married – the meat, the fish, the mountains of noodles and sweets.’

  ‘What does she think about it?’ Yue Qing was only sixteen, my age, and I could not imagine leaving my family to live with someone else – a man, a stranger – that I had met just once for a half an hour.

  ‘I heard her telling her friends that she can’t wait to leave home. I don’t blame her. I want to leave as well.’ We reached the market just then and she waved goodbye before weaving her way through the morning crowd.

  Even with the bombings, the market lost none of its colour. Business went on, punctuated now and again by air-raid sirens, which everyone seemed determined to ignore. Behind the noise and bustle were gradual signs that things were changing: the constant buzz from the neighbours’ radios; the curfew, which meant that we had to sit in the dark for most of the night, listening to my father tell ghost stories until my brothers and I fell into fitful sleep.

  As the Japanese troops swept through Malaya, more and more people fled south. I didn’t realize the full extent of the exodus to Singapore until I accompanied my mother to Chinatown one weekend. There, under the arch of the five-foot-way where the letter writer usually set up his table, were whole families sitting on the floor.
Mothers nursing infants, grandfathers perched on discarded wooden crates. Outside, on the street, I saw lone figures separated from spouses or parents or siblings. There was one boy about Meng’s age – not older than ten at most – begging for coins from passers-by, and scraps from a whole line of food hawkers – only to be shooed away each time. As he got closer, I saw that he had a layer of dirt on his face and neck, save for the clear track lines his tears or sweat had made along the side of his face. He seemed abandoned, had the skittish manner of a kicked puppy. As he neared, I looked down, hoping he wouldn’t come to me. When I raised my eyes again, he was gone.

  There were also soldiers, mostly Indians, and ang moh from Britain and Australia, sitting on kerbs. Their bandages mottled scarlet as they smoked their cigarettes down to the nub. All of them – both the soldiers and the homeless – seemed to be waiting for something. Food or help or a hospital bed, and I never found out if they got any of those things. Or if they would disappear in the air raids, with no one to claim them.

  ‘Have you noticed people in town? The new people, I mean?’ I asked my father at dinner one day.

  ‘What? Oh, you mean the refugees. Terrible. But don’t worry. Once the war is over, the police will take care of things again. It will all go back to normal, you’ll see.’

  It was days away from mid-February when Yan Ling’s mother sent her on a trip to Chinatown, a monthly errand – part duty, part treat – that I accompanied her on, usually to procure things we couldn’t get from our neighbourhood market: herbs from the medicine hall or scrap cloth from a tailor they were friendly with. This time, her orders were all for the wedding. While she bought a packet of fragrant Oolong for the tea ceremony, then a box of rouge for her sister from the beauty store, I wandered the narrow aisles, picking up one glass bottle then another and looking through the amber bottles to try and see how the world might look like with different eyes. We were leaving the store when Yan Ling showed me the two coins in her palm. ‘My mother said I could keep the change.’ Two cents could buy us a bag of iced gems that could last us a few days or two shaved ices that would last minutes.

  ‘First, I have to sell these,’ I said, lifting my basket to show her how heavy it was with produce.

  It was while we were in Trengganu Street, pushing through the sweaty market crowd that the sirens wound up, wailing higher and louder than I had ever heard them. All around us, stall owners packed up and their customers abandoned their half-finished meals to get to their feet. Mothers picked up their children while housekeepers with bunned and netted hair scattered into the alleyways. Neither Yan Ling nor I were familiar enough with Chinatown to know where to go – not in a snap; so we stood, watching to see who went where. As we did, a plane crossed overhead and I looked up. It was flying so low that the pilot’s face was starkly visible. He was a young Japanese man, little older than I was, and his face was so serene he could have been someone, anyone, driving his new car down a freshly laid road. I was thinking this, face tilted skyward, when Yan Ling took my arm and shook me, making me drop my basket. Five eggs rolled out and cracked on the tarmac, spilling their yellow insides.

  ‘What are you doing? Run!’

  Yan Ling pulled me along, through a crush of people coming our way, trying to avoid rickshaws and cars recklessly tearing down the street. We saw a crowd surging towards the entrance of a shelter, barred by the linked arms of two white men, their pin-striped shirts drenched through, ties askew.

  A voice rang out, high-pitched, despairing. ‘They’re not letting us in!’

  ‘It’s only for the ang moh,’ someone else cried. ‘It’s no use.’

  The next air-raid shelter was full, the way leading down into it choking with civilians and the stench of sweat. So was the next. The streets were starting to empty. As we retreated into the five-foot-way pressing close to the shuttered shops, I heard someone singing, ‘the bombs are coming, the bombs are coming.’ The singer, mad or drunk, zigzagged into view before wandering ahead, his voice sailing up, cracking through the scream of the siren.

  ‘Should we turn back and run home?’ I asked. But Yan Ling only held on to my wrist, squeezing it tight, then tighter still.

  ‘Here, in here!’ There was a woman waving at us from halfway behind a shutter, just a few shops down. I thanked her as we squeezed past, into pitch black and quiet, and settled down onto the concrete floor. Someone struck a match and lit candles, passing the light from hand to hand until all four corners of the room were lit. There were tables all around, and chairs pushed back from them. Underneath the table tops crouched men, women, and children. I counted about fifty. After some minutes, we heard a long, ghostly whistle, then the thunder of something like God striking ground close by. The building shuddered. Pots and pans clattered onto the kitchen floor in the back and the jars of chopsticks on each table crashed to the floor, dispensing all of their contents. Throughout all of this, no one made a sound, not even the infants nestled in the crooks of arms.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Yan Ling whispered. I looked at her for the first time since we stopped running and noticed that there was a bloodied gash across her forearm.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ I said.

  Without a word, an elderly man closest to the kitchen slipped away and came out again, tiptoeing between groups of people to hand her a dampened tea towel. ‘Here, you should clean it. We don’t have any iodine in here or I would have given it to you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, wincing as she applied the towel to the cut.

  All around us, people were starting to whisper.

  ‘I should have left the island when I got the chance.’

  ‘And go where? It’s not safe off the island. The British care about what happens to Singapore. We’re not some far-flung little kampong up in the north, we’re actually important. I heard they’re going to deploy more ships. And not just the English, the Australians –’

  ‘You should all wake up. They’re losing. We are losing.’ Everyone turned to stare at a man sitting in the middle of the room. His face was thin, pale and he had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses tucked into his shirt pocket. ‘Why would they bother protecting this island anyway? They have their own country to defend. Most of them, the ang moh who used to live here, have gone back. They started leaving the minute the Japanese landed in Malaya.’ His face reddened as he finished speaking, as if he had not meant to; was astonished at the sound of his voice in the enclosed space. He looked down, took his glasses out of his pocket and started polishing the lenses with a handkerchief.

  The people in the room murmured, some nodding, some turning away to whisper sharply to their neighbours. More planes overhead. Then another round of bombing, this time further away.

  By the time it felt safe to leave, it was late in the afternoon. It was only when I stepped out that I saw the caved-in building to the left of us, just a street away. There was still smoke rising from within the rubble and as we approached, I saw people sitting among the piles of rock, like wildlife caught in traps. An ambulance waited, the red cross on it shiny, as if painted on minutes ago, while three first-aid workers pointed at different spots in the debris and argued about where to begin digging. Close to them, a row of civilians looked on with white handkerchiefs pressed over their mouths and noses, and I wondered if this was their home, if it used to belong to them, the stone and soot of it, spilling out into the road. We passed a few more shophouses that had been hit, all of their insides exposed, bricks spat out like poison.

  A little further up, on Temple Street, rickshaws had been scattered, as if swept around by a giant hand. There was a sound like a constant wail, a smaller siren that had continued sounding its alarm. Then I saw it, a woman my mother’s age, squatting in the middle of the road. Her mouth was open in a howl and she had her arms extended towards a doll. I blinked. Not a doll; it was a boy of about five, on the ground. He was wearing a short sarong around his waist, had his arms spread out as if in sleep. There was nothing, no sign of injury except around his mout
h, a splash of blood like a dark strawberry birthmark. His hair was swept back off his face, as if combed and set lovingly by an adult hand. I waited and waited for him to stir and crawl to his feet but he didn’t.

  ‘Don’t look,’ Yan Ling said, pulling me away, turning my head with her hands. ‘Don’t look.’

  Against all common sense, our neighbours went ahead with the wedding despite the daily air raids. Only a small cluster of people gathered outside Yan Ling’s home to watch Yue Qing leave her childhood home. She was dressed entirely in red; her veil was so heavily embroidered that she stumbled a couple of times even with Auntie Tin’s help. I held my breath until she was seated inside the waiting rickshaw. As she was led away, Meng turned to me. ‘Jie-jie,’ sister, he said. ‘Are you going to get married like this one day?’ I laughed and nudged him towards the direction of home.

  The wedding dinner had to be cancelled because of the curfew. The day after the ceremony, Mrs Yap went from house to house, distributing cuts of meat and noodles that the restaurant had divided into takeaway boxes. It was the best meal that we’d had in years and would be the best meal that I was to have for years to come.

  That day, as Mrs Yap gushed about the ceremony to my mother, I went outside to join Yang, who was leaning against the wall of the hut. He was watching the sky for planes, something that he’d started doing ever since the first air raid. We stood side by side for a few minutes in silence until he said, ‘I haven’t seen any of the ang moh’s planes for days. Only the Japanese ones.’

  I shook my head, uncomprehending.

  He made an impatient click with his tongue. ‘Ever since the war started, I’ve seen mainly Allied planes flying overhead; Brewsters – barrel-shaped with short wings – and Hurricanes, fighter planes that look sleeker. But lately my friends and I have only spotted Japanese planes. You can pick them out easily, not that you have much time to – you’d be in trouble if you stayed still instead of running – but they have red circles under their wings and on the sides of their bodies, the same red circle that’s on the Japanese flag.’ He looked up again. ‘I’ve only seen their planes in the past few days. No others.’