How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  ‘A tear mole,’ she said, when I touched it with the tip of my finger. She patted powder over it but it stood out, like a smudge someone had tried and failed to rub away.

  Tears, I thought, and bad luck. But I said nothing and sat as she combed my fringe into a smooth curve above my eyes.

  The photographer was a middle-aged man behind a large standing-up camera. ‘Oh,’ he said, seeing me for the first time. He pointed a finger to his own neck, as if flicking away his collar. ‘How…modern.’

  When the photos came out, my mother put them in an envelope and got my father to cycle over to Auntie Tin’s. He had said nothing about the incident but smiled at me now and again as if trying to cheer me up. ‘The hair makes you look young. Not bad for the matchmaker.’

  There wasn’t a choice this time. No one was asking me if I was ready. My father said that I would be better fed, that married couples received slightly bigger rations. ‘Reason enough to get married,’ he had said, trying to sound light.

  We heard nothing from the matchmaker, not after two months. ‘Don’t worry. It’s only because there are so many people looking to get married. The matchmaker has to work day and night. It might take a while but it will be no problem… No problem.’

  It was the first Saturday of August when it happened. Late afternoon. My mother and I were sorting the rice for dinner, sifting broken grains and weevils from the rest when both of us looked up to a distant drone, a low whirr of activity making its way to our village. I was standing at the kitchen and an ache settled into my stomach as my father came in from the backyard. He had been digging up tapioca, tending to the plants and there was a smear of dirt on his forehead, right above his eyes, and he stood still for a moment, listening before he went to the door and looked out to where my brothers were, squatting in a circle with three other boys. Fighting crickets, I guessed, or playing with marbles, I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Meng! Yang! Come into the house,’ he yelled.

  By the time my brothers arrived back, panting, we could see the trucks. Two of them, the sides muddied up, as if they had driven through ditches in the rain. There were eight to ten soldiers in the back of one truck. The other was carrying nothing, making space for what they were going to take from us.

  The soldiers we saw the last time had looked bedraggled and tired, as if they needed sleep and would have given anything for a shower and clean sheets. Now they peered around at us as they rolled up the lane, awake, alert, their faces peaked with something akin to hunger. Someone in the first vehicle called out and both of them sank to a stop a few houses away, close to the centre of the kampong. The ones sitting in the back of the truck jumped out, hitching their trousers up and talking among themselves.

  ‘Everyone, outside at once!’ It was the same interpreter. I recognized his voice, unadulterated as it was without a loudspeaker.

  ‘Don’t bother hiding the rice. They’ll find it anyway,’ my father said to my mother as she pushed herself up from her chair, eyes wide, as though he could read her mind. ‘Just let them take what they want.’

  In two minutes, everyone – young, old and poorly – was standing in the dust in front of their homes. Each step my mother took was an effort so my father stayed close to her, one hand hovering near the small of her back. I had Meng’s hand in mine and was looking at my feet, waiting for it to be over with when I felt him pulling away. I tugged at his fingers to get him to come closer but his chin was tilted up and he was taking little gulps of air. The men stood in a cluster by their trucks, as if waiting for a command. Then, out of the tight silence, my brother opened his mouth.

  ‘Konnichiwa.’

  Everyone froze. Meng was smiling, proud that he remembered the words, that he had got it right. The soldiers looked around and laughed with surprise. One of them came forward and reached into his pocket. His eyes were twinkling as he drew out a piece of candy wrapped in red and white paper and held it out in his upturned palm, in front of Meng’s face.

  My brother looked to my father, then my mother, for permission but their eyes were panicked. They didn’t speak. After a pause, Meng shook me off to reach for the offered sweet and I watched him pick it up between thumb and forefinger. Their hands touched for a fraction of a second and the moment stretched out impossibly before Meng withdrew his hand and put the wrapped sweet in his pocket for safekeeping.

  ‘Ari-ga-toh goz-aiii-mas,’ he said, with an even wider smile. His front tooth was missing and it made him look even younger than he was.

  The soldier ruffled Meng’s hair. He was young, and like the rest, appeared to be in his twenties. He was still smiling when his eyes fell on me. His face was small, foxlike, and he was fair, unlike his compatriots, who were mostly darkened by the sun. He crooked his finger at the soldiers, who came running and they spoke for a second before the interpreter looked at me and said in Mandarin, ‘Yoshida-san says he would like you to come with us.’

  I shook my head and took a step backwards, right into someone’s arms. Turned around to see my mother’s face, tight with fear. She pulled me to her, so close that I could hear her breathe.

  ‘You will get work, make some money for your family.’

  The soldier still had his hand on my brother’s head. There was a pause before he frowned and said something else. Then he lunged towards me and grabbed my wrist.

  I pulled back, trying to wrench myself free and felt my mother’s arms tighten around me. Then my father stepped around us, trying to put himself between us and the soldiers. His eyes were shining and his hands were stretched out in front of him. He opened his mouth wide. What came out was nothing, a croak. He spoke again and this time I heard him. ‘Wait!’

  ‘Wait, she’s just a child.’ He grabbed my other wrist, pulling me towards him.

  The soldier closed his fingers around me, tighter, and pulled again before realizing that my father wasn’t going to let go. He shouted, then flicked the blunt end of his rifle into my father’s face, making him fall backwards; the skin on his eyebrow split open and blood trickled into his eye, over his cheek. The soldier rammed his rifle into my father again, this time in his stomach, making him double over. My mother finally let go of me, loosened her arms from around my body to go to my father, as the soldier stood over him, waiting, daring him to get up, his rifle in the air. As he did this, the glint of metal on his bayonet caught my eye.

  Grab it, sink into it, I thought. But my limbs were stone. By the time I moved, I was too late.

  Someone had appeared next to me with a length of rope, making short work of binding my wrists. There was a wooden plank leading up to the truck bed and he jabbed the bayonet at me and walked me up. I smelled alcohol on his breath as he pulled at my bonds and trussed me to the side rail. I sat there, straining at the rope, and watched as the group marched past each house, pulling girls and women away from their families. What came to mind again was the image of wild dogs, the pack of them that had burrowed its way into our coop. The pack had continued their sack of the village’s coops, taking prey out of our neighbours’ gardens night after night. A few each week, until the pack moved on to another village. As if they knew they were running out of luck and out of prey.

  Each of the girls resisted. One of them flailed, hitting a soldier across the face. There was a wild roar and I saw her getting pushed to the ground and kicked by the men surrounding her, before being taken back into her own home by four soldiers, one at each limb. She screamed as they dragged her in. Like a pig being brought to slaughter. I heard her howls, the sound of them reaching high over the thatched roofs, cracking the languid stillness of the afternoon.

  While she cried, the other soldiers picked out five more women and girls, pulling them away from their families the way they had done with me. They were mostly my age, still in school, except for one. A young mother. The wife of a young man who lived a few doors away from us. High-school sweethearts – the couple had met while they were still children, my mother had told me. It was just last week that she ha
d come round with her baby in her arms, smiled and presented my mother with two eggs, painted red for good luck, to celebrate their son’s first full month. I heard a baby’s wail. Hers, I thought numbly. All the feeling had gone from my limbs and I watched as half of them were pushed in after me, and the rest into the other truck. The ones who didn’t move or couldn’t were hauled up, as I had been, in tears or shocked into stillness. I had to put my fingers to my face to see if I was crying. No.

  There was a loud, sharp pop, then another, and then another. The four men who had pulled the woman into her hut came out. The last of them, the one who looked the youngest, was tucking his shirt tails into his trousers, his face flushed red. He could have been anyone. A friend of Yang’s, sweat-soaked after a football game. Anyone. While the rest piled into the first truck, he climbed up the back and sat at the end of ours, resting the rifle across his knees.

  I looked over at my family, crouching in front of our home. My mother was sitting on the ground, cradling my father’s bloodied head. He wasn’t moving. From where I was, I couldn’t see his eyes, and I couldn’t tell if he was dead or simply unconscious. I felt an urge to jump and run to him and I stood, tried to. But the length of rope tethering me to the side rails was too short even for that. I sat back down, hard, making the truck quiver.

  ‘Ma,’ I said but my voice came out in a half-whisper.

  She heard it all the same. Her eyes were fixed on me, mouth open in a silent yelp. There was a rattle. I felt the truck shudder back to life, and then we were moving. Yang and several other people ran towards us, then stopped, as if held back by an invisible wall. I watched as our attap hut got smaller, watched as Meng scrambled to his feet and started running after me, while Yang tried and failed to grab him by the back of his shirt.

  ‘Jie-jie,’ he shouted.

  The truck sped up. Meng pumped his arms to propel himself forward and his tiny bird’s chest pushed out, filling and filling with air. He ran for a few hundred yards before tripping and falling forward in the sand. The driver took a bend in the road and I turned my head to watch as my brother pushed himself halfway up, his eyes shining, before I lost all sight of him.

  It took me a while to realize that they were driving us south but until then, I could hardly see or hear from the whirr of panic in my chest, a constant whoosh in my ears which I took for the wind but was just my breath, coming in quick and much too shallow. We passed kampongs, all a blur of green and earth-brown. The wild, cheerful voices of the driver and his passenger over the grind of the engine. Then, singing. Just minutes after one of them had thrown a woman on the ground, tied her up and pushed her onto a truck like cattle. Could someone like that sing? Laugh? I thought. I was sweating, and the back of my blouse stuck to my skin. Blood on my trouser knee. Not mine. My father’s. I looked up and blinked. Across from me sat the woman who had been taken away from her husband and child. She was tugging at the rope around her wrists. Don’t cry, I told myself. See? She’s not crying. Don’t cry and there will be nothing to cry about. Something my mother liked to say. Mothers. The woman was still trying to twist loose of her bonds and I was reminded of a sparrow that I had seen once caught in a tangle of kite string, frantic to break free. I watched her until I felt someone’s eyes on me and turned to my right. A girl. Familiar-looking. Her hair tied back into a plait. Round cheeks which dipped into a small, pointed chin, making her look elfin. Then a faint memory of my mother gushing about how pretty she was, how she would have her pick of husbands when the time came. I’d felt a stab of jealousy, fine as needle, whenever I saw her in the village after that. How foolish, I thought now, what nonsense.

  ‘You’re Auntie Ng’s daughter,’ she said, with a calm that made me stop and look at her full in the face. Her eyes were red, her collar ripped and flapping in the wind.

  ‘And you…you live on the west side of the kampong.’ My voice sounded odd – strained and out of place. The soldier sitting guard looked up at the sound of our voices, then turned his head to look out at the road behind the truck, unperturbed. It didn’t matter, he must think, just women, talking.

  Huay, I recalled. The girl’s name was Huay. Her parents owned a convenience store, a tiny shop that didn’t allow more than two people in it at the same time, and then their name: Seetoh, a name so unusual that they were the only Seetohs I knew of; the sound of this name conjuring up something hazily exotic each time I heard it. I had a memory of Huay’s face, lit red by a paper lantern, younger siblings around her legs, tugging at her hands and clothes; Huay trying to herd them through the mid-autumn festival crush. I forced myself to smile at her. I felt I had to, and she smiled back. As if we were out on a ride, a jaunt that somebody had arranged for us. It was all just a bit of fun; it would be over in a minute. Too nervous to speak any further, I looked away, past her and returned to staring at the road, the trees.

  After twenty minutes, the truck entered a wide street busy with traffic. It was lined on both sides with shops grander than the ones in Chinatown, and tall buildings with bold signs, spelling things out in English. This must be Orchard Road, I guessed. I’d passed this street a few times on the way to Chinatown. Never stopped. There was nothing for me here. It might as well have been another country. After a few minutes, the driver turned right, slipping into a residential street. More townhouses, taller, the white paint on them fresh. There were no sheltered walkways here but little gardens beyond gates, and paved walkways leading up to each front door. The truck ambled past a row of them, past a carefully made-up woman leaning out of a second-floor window, past a group of workmen hurrying boxes from the back of a van into an alley. I waited for one of the men to look up – I would wave, give a signal, I thought, and they would come to ask what was wrong and how could they help. I would arrive home that evening and tell my parents that it was alright, nothing happened, everything was okay after all. But no, the men kept their eyes on the ground. A couple of them turned their heads as if they’d smelled something rotten. Finally, the driver stopped in front of a townhouse with a signboard in front, red letters screaming something in Chinese or Japanese. All of us shrank away as the guards unlatched the tailgate, but they only chose two girls, untying the ropes from the side rails and dragging them off. My neighbour, the one with the infant, was taken off; I could see from the way she was standing, tall, her weight even on both feet, that she was readying herself to run or fight. The door opened and they were pushed in, one after the other. We drove off again.

  The truck was driving east. After what seemed like hours, a deep panic set it. I couldn’t understand how we could still be driving. I looked up at the sun. Wouldn’t be long until it set. I wondered if they would stop at dusk. Then at the thought of night, another shot of panic. I looked around me – nothing I could recognize. How little my world was. Maybe we’re never going to stop, not until we get to the edge of the island. I could already see us plunging straight into the sea, to an inevitable, watery death. Trapped and drowned the way they used to drown adulterers and fallen women. But no, no sight of water. Not a whiff of its salt and mud. Instead, more buildings and factories, all of them interspersed with swathes of grass and nothing else. Then another stop where two girls were taken off, until it was just Huay and me left.

  A different neighbourhood now. The sun was ahead of us. So we’re headed west, I decided, right before the truck turned left into a lane, then right again. And then we were surrounded by the thick green of tembusu trees with their low, pronged branches, like arms held wide open. The high-pitched whine of crickets. I saw a few houses far apart from each other – bungalows with black-and-white rolling curtains, and clusters of low buildings that looked like a large school or barracks. There were a few road signs in English – nothing I could make out, of course. I wanted to ask Huay but she was staring down at her knees, unseeing. If only I had gone to school, I thought. Then, another thought, bitter and fleeting: even if I could read, so what?

  The sun was shining a dark orange, the curve of it almost mel
ting into the tops of trees when the truck turned into a narrow, meandering lane. There, the canopy grew so thick that the trees blocked out much of the light and the truck snaked along in semi-darkness until it broke open into a clearing where a sentry was on duty behind the gate. He called out as he let us through and the young soldier sitting at the end of the truck called back and laughed as he untied my rope from around the side rail. Then he leaped off and jerked at the end of the rope he held in his hand until I jumped off after him, almost tipping to my knees. It was only then, standing on the warm tarmac that I realized that I was barefoot. Huay followed, hardly making a sound as she landed.

  My father had talked about houses like these, houses mostly owned by the wealthy expatriate or military families from Britain. He had delivered furniture to the private residences a few times, and each time he had come home, still wide-eyed from the experience. ‘You won’t believe how big they are. The gardens these ang moh have,’ he’d gushed. Standing there, I had a sudden image of him dismounting his bicycle, tilting his head back to stare at the two-storey bungalow, white except for the black wooden beams and window frames, and its pitched, terracotta roof. There was a perimeter of barbed wire all around it, newly raised and clean of leaf litter. Beyond that, a thick wooded area and a wall of cricket song, loud and insistent.

  The same soldier marched us around the house to the back, towards a separate, single-storey building a few yards away. It was constructed in the same style, just cheaper, smaller, though it was still twice the size of my home. Compared to the bungalow, though, it looked doll-sized, unreal. A guest house fallen into ruin. Servants’ quarters. The idea of the last filled me with hope, dangerous and sharp-edged. I held on to it even as another guard opened the door and I was pushed over the threshold, into the house. It smelled of rice and tea, and something bitter, medicinal. Huay stumbled in after me, scuffing her feet along the concrete floor. The front room was empty of furnishings, but for a long wooden bench lining the wall and a desk with papers and boxes on top. And then faces. Men. And a few women, dishevelled and oddly clothed, all a blur. I felt the heat of someone else’s body behind me, much too close, before I was pushed by a soldier past the counter into a narrow hallway, on and on past several doors until he halted, holding on to my arm to make me stop. The soldier opened the door, then walked around to look at me. As he did so, the tip of his rifle brushed against my kneecap, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. Then he removed a knife from his belt and walked around to stand behind me. I felt him tug at my bonds and begin to cut through them. He shoved me again, harder, until I fell forward, through the doorway, onto a rattan mat. The rope loosened itself from my wrists and slipped to the ground. There was no need for it anymore.