‘No one is going to make me move,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m staying right here, where my home is. Elderly people living with other useless elderly people, what a foolish idea. At least where we live now, the next-door neighbours would come and help if we were in trouble, if one of us fell down. What if something happened to us in that Old People’s Housing Estate? Who would come and help? No one would hear us. And if we were lucky, someone with arthritic knees.’
Eventually, the housing officer got him to sign by hinting at the possibility of a court case. ‘It will be very inconvenient for everyone involved,’ the man had added, flapping the end of his tie and looking at the tips of his too-shiny leather shoes. When he left, Soon Wei had sunk into himself, as if someone had let all the air out of him.
To cheer him up, Wang Di had gone to the market that afternoon for chicken wings, coconut milk, and freshly ground curry paste for his favourite meal. She arrived home to see him seated at the kitchen table with his sewing box in front of him, lid off, spools of white, blue and grey thread rolling away from him.
‘Look,’ he said, happy as a child in a sandpit. ‘Look what I found.’
The table was spread with photos, ID cards, letters and newspaper clippings that she couldn’t read. There was more underneath the bric-a-brac, but he took one photo from the pile and handed it to her. ‘See who it is.’
The paper was thin, its four corners bent soft. A young woman, dressed and made up in clothes and make-up that clearly belonged to someone else. She was perched on the edge of a wooden chair, looking just off-camera, in a way that suggested that she was about to ask if it was done and could she move or get up now. Her mother had spent the entire morning coaxing the tapered ends of her hair on both sides of her face so that they curled around her jawline. Her fringe, normally pinned back from her face, had been combed forward, as if to assure the looker that she had plenty of hair, really. Wang Di hadn’t seen the photo in more than half a century but she remembered why her hair had been cropped. Two decades later, in the sixties, the length would be fashionable, but that day it had taken the photographer more than a moment to recover from his shock at seeing her.
‘How old were you?’
‘Seventeen. My mother had to save up for weeks to be able to afford it.’
What she did not say: that Auntie Tin had given out copies the year the picture was taken and not had much luck. That she had reused the same photo, which Wang Di’s mother had kept in her dresser drawer for almost four years, when Wang Di was twenty. A little old, in those days. It was something her mother had worried about until Auntie Tin told them that she had found the perfect man. Thirty-eight years old. Recently widowed. Not Hokkien. Teochew. But still heaven-sent.
‘This was taken a few months after the occupation.’
‘You weren’t the only one. I remember my neighbours were hurrying to get husbands for their daughters. People getting married after curfew, in the dark. Strange times.’
‘You were still married then, weren’t you?’
He nodded, a faraway sadness settling around his shoulders. ‘And then years later, I met you.’
‘Years later.’
‘Almost a lifetime.’
March – August 1942
After what happened at the market, my father decided that my mother and I had to stay within the kampong for our own safety. I still had my makeshift stall, though it was now confined to the heart of the village, close to a little huddle of shops. Sales were slow and whatever I sold went at a cutthroat rate in the afternoon, when the villagers knew I was close to packing up and going home; unlike the city dwellers, they had the space to grow their own vegetables and the knack for foraging in the fields. Vegetables were easy enough to get. What we all lacked was eggs, meat, fresh fish and staples, like rice and flour and salt, which my mother knew would remain scarce until after the war. It was with this intuition that she cleared out a plot of earth in the back between the trees and got me to help plant the cuttings of cassava, potato and tapioca plants. When rice rationing was at its worst, forcing entire households to live on a single bowl of rice a day, it would be these cuttings that kept my family alive through the next four years.
While I busied myself with the stall and the kitchen garden, Yan Ling continued going into the city. Instead of walking with her, I waved from the garden as she passed the house. Sometimes she stopped to chat but more and more I only caught brief glimpses of her as she left for work, braiding her hair as she ran up the lane. I had finished doing my chores one evening when I decided to visit her. Instead of Yan Ling, it was her mother who answered the door.
‘Are you looking for Yan Ling? She’s still at the eating house.’
‘Oh, I thought she would be home by now. What time will she be back?’
‘I don’t know. Late, I think. The eating house is even busier now with the Japanese soldiers. They’ve had to put in more tables.’ She paused and looked me up and down as if seeing me for the first time. ‘Listen, do you want to make some money? Yan Ling said that they are looking for more waitresses. I heard there was even an advertisement in the Syonan Times. They want girls aged seventeen to twenty-eight. You’re seventeen, right? I would get Yan Ling to do it if she could, but you know…’ She tutted, brushing a finger over her top lip. ‘They only want her working in the back of the house.’
The possibility of bringing in money interested me almost as much as the chance of seeing my friend again. ‘I’ll ask my parents.’
‘I heard they pay well. You get tips.’
‘Tips?’
‘If they like you.’
My next word would have been, ‘Who?’ but I heard my mother calling out for me and had to go. ‘I’ll ask my parents,’ I repeated.
I did it over dinner. The rations weren’t enough, as my mother had predicted but she made do with what we did have, spreading the essentials thinly across the weeks so that we wouldn’t run out before the end of the month. To achieve this, she supplemented our meals with the root vegetables that we had planted – adding them to every dish – and used pickled vegetables and anchovies and chilli to impart flavour in place of salt. That night, we had watered down congee, bulked up and tinged purple with tapioca, and topped with pickled radish.
‘Ba, Ma, they’re looking for new waitresses where Yan Ling works. At the eating house.’
‘When did you see her?’ my father asked.
‘I didn’t. Her mother told me. They need more people to help out…and you get tips.’
‘Tips?’ my father spat. ‘You know who gets tips? Tell that woman to keep her suggestions to herself. She can get her daughters to do whatever she wants but I don’t want to hear –’
‘No need to get angry, la. She was only trying to help,’ my mother said. She shot a warning look in my direction.
‘Help? There’s enough for you to do at home. Once it calms down, you can go to the market again with your mother. Maybe we can make some money selling sweet potato plants.’
There was a moment’s silence before my mother spoke again, her voice strained, a little too high. ‘Children, your father found a job today. Did you know?’
‘Ba, you found a job?’ said Yang, looking up.
‘Just for a while. Carrying stones at the construction site. The shophouses and shipyards need to be rebuilt.’ I knew what this meant – taking away rubble from caved-in shophouses, back-breaking work that only xin ke – fresh immigrants – were willing to take on, work that he was lucky to get now. I knew, too, how much my father hated it.
My brother flinched. ‘You mean… You mean you work for the Japanese now?’
‘Yang, finish your food.’
In April, Yang and Meng went back to school to find that most of their teachers had been replaced. All the Chinese instructors were gone; some of them, the husbands of women in our neighbourhood, had never made it back from the reporting stations. They simply vanished, as if they’d never existed. No one asked questions; the wives they left behi
nd adjusted by taking on odd jobs in the city, all the while hoping that their husbands might return home one day.
‘I don’t want to go anymore,’ Yang said after his first day back. ‘All they do is play the Japanese broadcasts and make us learn their national anthem.’
There were no more Chinese language classes, he informed us. Instead, there were new teachers at school. Students spent most of their time learning Japanese. ‘Even mathematics is taught in Japanese now,’ Yang went on. It was his favourite subject and I remembered how he said he wanted to teach it one day, perhaps at the same school, perhaps in the city, he didn’t yet know.
‘I don’t want to go anymore,’ he repeated over dinner. It was then that I looked up and realized that his face had changed in the last few months. He used to look like my mother, with the same softness in his cheeks and mouth. Now, when I looked at him, all I could see was my father. The swarthiness of his skin, the angles in his jaw.
Both Yang and Meng grumbled for a few weeks but they got used to it, the way children their age got used to things. Before long, they were coming home from school with dirt on their shoes from playing football in the bare field as if nothing had changed. Meng, in particular, took to practising his Japanese around the house. ‘Konnichiwa, good afternoon. Ohayou gozaimasu, good morning. Arigatou gozaimasu, thank you,’ he would chant, repeating his vocabulary list until Yang shouted at him to stop.
Nothing had changed except everything had.
The island was small, smaller than my parents’ ancestral town in China, and news spread the old way, with people whispering to each other as they went about their work and grocery shopping. Each Sunday a neighbour would drop by our hut and sit down for a half hour of gossip over coffee; they would tell the boys to go outside if they weren’t already playing in the fields. I was usually in the back, quiet and forgotten. This was what I heard: a whole kampong set ablaze because the families, all of them Chinese, were among those who sent money back to the old country so they could buy weapons to defend themselves against the Japanese. The way the occupiers simply took what they saw and wanted, bales of expensive silk from the tailors, bicycles from people on the street, pushing them off and riding away, laughing. From the travelling noodle hawker, we heard stories about women and girls as young as ten being assaulted in their own homes by bands of soldiers, their children and husbands bayoneted if the soldiers met any resistance.
I listened to these stories, always the same stories in a slightly different form, gorging myself on each little detail. At night, I turned them over and over in my head as I went to sleep in an effort to guard myself against similar horrors. As if by thinking about them, dreaming about them, and keeping them close, they would be kept away from us in real, waking life.
It was around this time that the women in our kampong began turning into boys overnight. Oversized shirts and trousers replaced floral blouses. Some wore caps to shield their faces and bound their chests to hide their curves. A few went a little further and shed their braids and ponytails to take on short crops – dark, jagged ends cut close to their necks. The rest got married. Month after month, I watched as rickshaws rode up to our neighbours’ houses. There were no fireworks, no music at any of the weddings, little else but the sound of light chatter as the bride got into the rickshaw, and the others followed. One of these women was a cousin of Yan Ling’s. For the occasion, Yan Ling had been coiffed and made-up. Normally she would have enjoyed it but now she looked uncomfortable and her eyes were far away. It was the first time in months that I had seen her and I tried to wave from where I was standing, within a crowd a little away from her family, but she did not look. Not once.
‘Lucky girl, she’ll be safe from the Japanese,’ said my mother to a neighbour.
‘Oh, it’s no guarantee. Those people, they don’t care…’ The neighbour lowered her voice, her words drowned out by the sound of more clapping.
When Auntie Tin came by a few weeks after that, she received tea and a bit of kueh that my mother had made from the previous bit of flour and sugar we had. This time, my parents were the ones who wanted something out of the visit.
‘It might take a while. So many girls want to find a husband.’
‘I know, I know. It’s the way things are. But please, her father wants it to happen as soon as possible.’
‘I’ll try my best. I always do. Wang Di will need to get a photo taken. And tell her to smile, she looks so nice when she smiles.’ The matchmaker looked naked and lost without her earrings, her bracelets. All that remained was one jade bangle around her left wrist. The bangle slid down her arm as she waved goodbye and I wondered what she had sold the rest for and if it was enough to keep her family from starving.
‘I wouldn’t ask you to come with me if your mother wasn’t ill,’ my father said. I wanted to say of course she was ill, she ate scraps so that Meng and Yang would have enough, but I shut up and listened as he handed me one of his shirts and told me to rub coal dust onto my face.
We had to get rice, flour and noodles, each from a different distribution centre. Throughout the journey, he reminded me time and again to lower my head and keep my eyes to the ground. The queue at the distribution centre went all the way down the street and it inched along for an hour until a fight broke out.
‘What’s going on, Ba?’
‘Ah, the usual. Somebody’s trying to cut in. A young couple.’
I stepped out of the line for a better look, just in time to see an open-top vehicle pull up. Two uniformed men jumped out, shouting in Japanese. One of them started waving his rifle around and the line shifted, moving away from the men in a wave. A sharp scream, and then, ‘No, please. She’s my wife!’
There was a dull whack of wood against flesh. Then another scream. I moved my face into a gap above my father’s shoulder just in time to see the woman being hauled out of the line and dragged into the vehicle. Her screams didn’t stop but simply faded away as the car started up again and drove off.
The line murmured and surged, spitting the man out. He got up and stumbled in the direction the car had taken.
‘Oh, poor thing,’ someone behind us tutted.
‘Stupid. Making trouble and attracting attention. He shouldn’t have done it. Cutting in like that.’ My father turned away. Even with his arms folded, I could see that his hands were trembling. It took half an hour before we got to the front of the line.
The sky broke on our way back and only stopped when we were in our kampong. It was three in the afternoon and by the time we reached home, we were both soaked. My father put his bags on the kitchen table and hurried towards the door. ‘I’m going to get the salt. You can stay home.’
‘Oh, you’re going to fall ill like that,’ my mother said when I went in, dripping. She was thin, paler than I ever saw her and looking fifty instead of her thirty-odd years. ‘Come here, there’s fresh water in the bucket.’ She made me follow her into the backyard, told me to squat and tip my head forward as she poured warm water over my head. The rationed soap was black and bit into my skin but I kept quiet. Later, whenever anyone mentioned my mother, I would remember this. The smell of wartime soap, the rasp of her fingernails along my scalp.
My hair had grown waist-length from neglect, and I was at the window, combing out the tangled ends and trying to catch the warm breeze in an effort to dry it when my father returned.
He flung the door open and when I swung to look at him, his eyes were wide with alarm, as if he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to.
‘What are you doing by the window? I could see you all the way from up the lane.’
I couldn’t think of an answer, simply let my hands drop to my sides and stared at him.
He disappeared into the bedroom and came back out again after a minute. I only saw a flash of the blade but I knew he had my mother’s sewing scissors in his hand.
I started to run but he grabbed first my arm, then a fistful of hair. ‘Stand still. I don’t want to hurt you.’
&
nbsp; My mother, who had been at the kitchen table all the while, started screaming. ‘Have you gone mad? What are you doing?’
The shock of cold steel against my neck made me flinch. Then I heard the familiar, flinty clip right next to my ear, saw the first clump of hair floating to the floor before my vision blurred, everything obscured by the fog of my tears. He took care not to nick my skin and worked in silence for minutes until thick sheets of black hair lay at our feet. It looked like a dead animal, run over on the street.
What a pity, I thought. We could have sold it if he cut it all off in one straight line. My mother continued screaming. The sound of it stayed with me the entire night. Long after my father had put away the scissors. Long after he said, ‘It’s for your own good, you should know that.’ Then, he walked away and returned the scissors to my mother’s sewing basket. It was her scream which kept me up. The sound of it spoke of everything no one dared to talk about: what the soldiers were doing; young and afraid and separated from their families. It spoke of the things everyone was to keep silent about all through the three and a half years we belonged to the Japanese, and of the decades after.
The sight of my roughly cut hair unnerved my mother. She fussed with it, sitting me down at the kitchen table as soon as it was light, and trimming the back with a smaller pair of scissors to even out the ends.
After a month, she sighed and said that it was getting too late.
‘We can’t wait any longer. Auntie Tin needs a photo of you. We’ll just make do. It looks quite nice, like this.’
At the photographer’s studio, my mother and I were shown to a corner with a mirror. There was rouge paper and powder on a table next to it; she showed me how to put my lips over the paper to press the red onto my mouth while she dusted pink onto my cheeks. I couldn’t stop looking into the mirror even though I didn’t want to. I was used to hiding behind my hair and the loss of it revealed the unevenness of my eyes, the blunt slope of my nose, the mole beneath my left eye.
How We Disappeared Page 10