It took three hours in all. Three hours for the fire to consume everything, for the remaining fragments to be pulverized and laid out on a metal tray. When Ah Ma’s ashes were finally ready, my father started weeping afresh as each of us sifted through the remains of her body, picked out nuggets of cooled, smoke-white bone and dropped them into the urn. His tears made black, domed spots in the ash. My mother and I pretended not to see.
It was only after they put the urn away in the cool darkness of the columbarium, in a numbered spot assigned just for her, that my father stopped. A bunch of joss sticks materialized and were lit. While we offered them up, I saw her photo again, pasted just off-centre on the front of her urn. Above it, her name, Lim Li San, in Chinese characters. I looked at the other passport photo faces around us. They looked like uncles and aunties, and bus drivers and drink sellers, and teachers. There were women’s faces frozen in beauty shots; one looked like my mother’s favourite actress, a lock of hair making a sharp-tipped curlicue on her cheek. I finished bowing and stuck the joss sticks in a tin. My hands felt gritty grey. On the way out, I put my hands behind my back while my father walked next to me, red-eyed, his trouser pockets fat with damp, balled-up tissues.
During the ride home, I inspected my hands. I couldn’t see it but it was there. A layer of fine dust, straight from the fire. If it wasn’t my grandmother, it was someone else’s specks lingering between my fingers, hidden within my riverlike palm lines, getting under my fingernails. If it wasn’t my father’s mother, I thought, wasn’t it possible that the real one was still alive?
Wang Di
‘I’ve been looking for your chess partners. I tried walking past every block, past each chess table until it got late. You know, la. Six-thirty, seven, and everyone’s gone home for dinner. I’m going to look for them again tomorrow because…’ Because who else is left? What else can I do? ‘…because even though we’ve only spoken once, you’ve told me so much about them that I feel I almost know them. They must know something about you.’
For the next fifteen minutes, as she made her evening meal, Wang Di talked about the new neighbourhood. About the mall and how, instead of the smell of fish and water and earth, the market now smelled of plastic. ‘But the floors are clean and dry, which is good, I suppose. Remember the time I fell near the fish stalls and my ankle went the size of a mango?’ She turned and looked at his picture. ‘Things have changed.’
The Old One had said those exact words as they lay in bed waiting for sleep one night. It had been on the news, the anniversary of the end of the Japanese Occupation. Wang Di found she could not sit still long enough to watch the uniformed men smile and talk about what they did during the war. Even lying down in the dark afterwards, her hands danced, fingers twisting around each other even as it sent sharp pains around her bones, up into her arms. He had put his hand over hers, a gesture so rare that it made her look over at him.
‘I don’t understand… No one wants to hear about the occupation anymore,’ she’d said. ‘They didn’t back then, so why would they want to now, more than fifty years later? Besides, most of the people are dead.’
‘You’re not doing this for other people. You’re doing this for yourself.’
She knew he was thinking about that day. When he tried to tell her about his family, what had happened during the war. How she had reacted, all the air going out of her, as if she had been punched. After that evening, he had tried a few times, but as soon as he brought up anything to do with the war, she had to leave the room. He gave up after a while. And it was only when he stopped that Wang Di realized she had wanted him to keep trying, to wear her down until she was prepared to listen. But it was much, much later before he made any mention of the war again. He had simply announced one morning, over breakfast, that he was leaving to go into the city, something about an archive, about putting away what had happened during the occupation. She had been too scared to ask him what he meant by it. Instead, she reminded him to take his walking stick along – he was in his seventies and was starting to need one on his walks. He had nodded and accompanied her to their corner – pushing the cart loaded with its folding table, the sewing machine, and bags of cloth and things. Set up shop in their usual alleyway, and left. All day, Wang Di had sat at their roadside stall, taking in the bits of sewing she could do and telling the ones who needed measuring out to return later.
‘When?’ they’d asked, and she had to shake her head. She feared he would never return. But he did, in the early afternoon. Went straight to work at his sewing machine, chatting with her as they waited for customers. He would do this once a week for a month, always returning in the afternoon, always sidestepping the question of what he had been doing and where. One month, that was all it took. After that, for the rest of their years together, he seldom left her alone for a few hours at a time.
‘People are different now – they talk about things that we never would. You don’t know until you try.’ Then his voice wound lower. ‘Promise me you will try. Even after.’
She wanted to chide him for saying ‘after’, tell him that he was crazy. He wasn’t going anywhere, that she wouldn’t allow it. She wanted to say she was old too, that she might go before him. That anything could happen. She wanted to say all this and everything else, things she should have said decades ago when they were younger. But she didn’t. She barely heard herself as she told him yes, she would.
It was with this thought that she went out each morning and evening, making her collection round and filling her pushcart, all the while keeping an eye out for stone tables on the ground floor of each building, and the people sitting around them. During the day, it was mostly women; housewives and women her age waiting for their grandchildren to arrive home from school. The men came out in the evening, one by one, laying out their wooden chess pieces, waiting for someone to sit across from them and start.
She took to going up to them and asking if they had seen the brothers but they (always men, never younger than fifty) seemed to have little patience for anything else outside the square of their chessboard and would keep their eyes on their pieces as she described them: thin, average height, in their sixties, two brothers who looked like brothers.
No one knew who she was referring to.
It was only on the fourth day that someone sat up, nodded. ‘Yes, yes. I think I know who you’re talking about. I used to play them. They’re really good, especially the –’
‘Do you think they’ll be here today?’ Finally, Wang Di thought, finally.
‘Oh, I haven’t seen them for some time. A few weeks, at least.’ He tilted his chin at his opponent. ‘Don’t they live in one of those buildings? The ones that are getting demolished?’
The opponent shrugged and hunched over the board, tapping his foot to tell Wang Di that it was time for her to go. But she stayed where she was, watching until the first man looked up again.
‘Sorry ah, I really don’t know. Maybe they moved.’
Wang Di nodded, thanked him. She felt light. As if what had been keeping her whole was being hollowed out of her. She had a sense of the familiar, and knew at once, what this was. This was what it was like to lose hope, little by little.
August 1942
‘Good morning, time to get up!’ I woke to see a middle-aged woman standing in the doorway, smiling. She was fine-boned, tall and it looked like someone had wrapped a length of broad cloth around her to make a dress, a sober dark blue dotted with fine white squares, the thread of which shimmered silver and gold as she moved. ‘Come, follow me.’ Her speech was hushed but firm, and there was a lilt in her Mandarin that I couldn’t place. The skirt of her dress rustled against the doorway as she turned, and I got up to follow her down a narrow corridor and into a kitchen with a charcoal burner on a table in front of the window, a wok and two large pots next to it. There was a screen in the middle of the room and I could see someone’s shadow behind it, moving calmly. Four other girls joined me in the kitchen, none of whom I’d seen before
, then Huay. The woman counted heads, then smiled. ‘Good morning, everyone. My name is Mrs Sato. We are your guardians now.’ She turned and pointed at another woman, slightly older, in her fifties, standing next to the far wall. All of us turned to look at her but she didn’t move or introduce herself. ‘Now, we will need all of you to take off your clothes and shoes. Everything.’
There was a wave of movement, a gasp and shift backwards on our feet. One of the girls started weeping but the woman made a clucking sound with her tongue. ‘It’s just for the doctor. He’s here to give everyone a quick check-up and make sure you are clean and healthy,’ she said, keeping her hands close to her body while she spoke. ‘Go on. The quicker you do it, the quicker you will finish.’ She flashed a buoyant, maternal smile. Finish? I thought. The way she said it made me think of the market, putting what little I had left away in my basket and heading home. Maybe that’s what she meant, that we could go home afterwards. And I started wondering how long it would take for me to walk back to the village, and if my family would still be there, alive, by the time I got back. Finish. I fixed my eyes on the cracks running through the cement floor and took my clothes off. My trousers in a heap on the ground. My blouse. Done, I gathered them up in a ball, in both my hands and held it against my body.
‘Your underwear as well. Go on.’
I hesitated, frowning hard in an effort not to cry, and took them off, trying to shut out the sound of the girls. There was a noise in my head. A chattering. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of my teeth clattering together in my mouth. I tried to clench my jaws together but it just made the clattering louder, more violent.
I looked up to see Mrs Sato leading Huay past the screen. After five minutes, they came back and she picked out another girl and led her away.
Then it was my turn. I watched as she came closer, soundless as she walked over to me in her open-toed sandals. With one hand under my elbow, she guided me past the screen, towards a man standing next to a long wooden table.
‘Could you get onto the table and lie down?’ Except it wasn’t a question the way she said it, had moved close, impatient to have this over with. I lifted myself up, unthinking, and slid myself back on the warm wood.
‘Feet on the table, legs apart.’
It was this that made me almost spring up but Mrs Sato was close to me now. Watching. So I lay on the table, gripping the sides of it with my hands, hoping that I’d misheard. She waited for a second, then she sighed and placed her hands on my knees, forcing them wide. She stayed holding on to me and I remember thinking that her skin smelled of soap, the kind that we used to wash with before rationing was put into place. It was only when the doctor leaned forward and touched me that my eyes filled and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out.
She started to shush me. A mother, all of a sudden, calming her own child. ‘Stop crying. Nothing has happened yet.’
It was the word ‘yet’ that kept ringing in my ears as the doctor pushed two fingers inside me. I yelped and tried to get up but Mrs Sato’s grip was stronger than her hands suggested and she held me down without much effort. With any escape made impossible, the doctor’s hands were the only things I was aware of for several seconds – his skin and flesh and bone: cold, certain. The way he reached in and then paused, as if waiting, then withdrew, nodding in satisfaction at Mrs Sato before going to the sink in the corner to rinse his hands.
‘Good girl. You can put your clothes back on.’
They turned away from me to confer with each other. As I felt for the floor with my feet, Mrs Sato laughed, a coquettish laugh that sounded practised, businesslike.
I don’t recall walking out but I must have because the next thing I remember was being in the room I had waited in earlier with the rest of the girls. When everyone had been seen by the doctor, Mrs Sato shepherded us into the bathroom at the end of the corridor. We all had to wash between seven and eight every morning, she said, adding that there was to be no loitering, and no chit-chat – the caretaker would be close by to make sure of that. The space had a single barred window above a row of sinks and taps, showing a bit of sky, all cloud, no blue. Next to the sinks were two cubicles, both with a toilet in the floor and an earthen jar that came up to my hip. It was filled with water and there was a bucket floating on top, and in it, a bar of soap, half used. The doors had been taken off their hinges, leaving them gaping open so that the scent of soap and water wafted out freely.
Three women were standing at the sinks, finishing up. I couldn’t tell where they were from but there was something different about the way they looked that went beyond place of birth or language – the way held their faces and moved and breathed. The way they stood. I watched as one of them dried her legs, letting the front of her robe fall open as she bent over. It reminded me of a puppet show I watched once at the market, the absolute blankness of their faces. Mrs Sato gave a dismissive wave with her hand and all three of them walked out. As they passed, the first of them looked up and gave me a little nod. This, I soon found out, was Jeomsun. She told me later on that she wanted to take our hands and lie to us, tell us that it was going to be okay. We had reminded her of herself on the first day, years ago, back at a camp in Formosa. How lost we had looked.
The older woman came in with an armful of folded cotton and handed them over to Mrs Sato. ‘These are the clothes you will wear from now on,’ she said, passing one to each of us.
The dress I got was blue and looked used. The weave was soft, as if it had been laundered many times over and put out to dry in the breeze. I folded mine over my arm and smoothed the worn fabric, calming myself.
It was only much later that I would admit to Huay that the dress had made me hopeful. ‘I thought it could be a uniform. Hoped it was a good sign,’ I told her. ‘I thought we were there to be dancers, to cheer up the soldiers. Or cooks. Or servants.’ Underneath this shallow assumption was a torrid wave of fear. I had an idea about why we were there, a whisper that I was trying to shut out. Listening to the whisper would have pulled me under, like an invisible current, and swept me out to sea. For now, I clung on to anything I could. Even a glint of hope as faint as this.
‘But what’s going to happen? When can we go home?’ Huay asked. Her voice was soft, clear as a spring.
Mrs Sato’s eyes flashed. It was like watching a small, silver fish dart to the surface and flicker away again into the depths. ‘You’re here to help serve the Japanese troops. Make them feel welcome.’
‘What do you mean? What do we have to do?’ someone else said.
‘You’ll get rewarded for good behaviour. Didn’t they tell you? You can help your families by making money. I heard that everyone’s hungry, aren’t they? Money will help.’
All around me, there was a nervous fidgeting. A wishful twisting of shirt ends. Money, I understood. I knew Huay did as well. She nodded once, her chin dipping almost imperceptibly. Even though the house, the soldiers, the knot of apprehension in my stomach told me to think otherwise, I wanted to believe it as well and nodded along with the rest of them.
‘Good, good. Now everyone needs to wash. It’s going to be a long day.’
I didn’t think about what she said then but the words came back to me right after, in the dark. A long day, she had said. Mentioning nothing about what we had to do.
As Mrs Sato left the bathroom, she called out in Japanese. The older woman hurried towards us and stopped just outside the door. She had a bamboo cane in her hand and leaned on it as she kept silent watch. Huay was the first to move. All of us turned away as she undressed. I felt their gaze on me as I went into the other cubicle and skimmed the surface of the water in the earthen jar. Cold. I stripped down, draping my clothes over the wall of the cubicle because there was nowhere else to put them. The patch of dried blood on my trousers had turned dark, and I found myself thinking about my father, my family, wondering if they were back inside, taking stock of what the soldiers had taken and what else they had lost. How we had spent
an entire afternoon sweeping up broken glass and putting the cupboard doors back on their hinges the last time the soldiers passed through. The flash of realization – that there was nothing my parents could do now – made me start to shake, so I poured a bucketful of water over my head, washed the dirt off my feet, hands and face, and listened to the sound of water cracking as it met the floor. As I scrubbed, I focused my attention on the barred window showing a bit of sky, the sinks and taps, a convenience I wasn’t used to.
This can’t be too bad. It couldn’t be, I told myself; a wish more than anything else.
Afterwards, I put on the dress. It was different to the ones that Mrs Sato and her assistants wore – the sleeves were short and there were two buttons on the bodice, easily fastened and undone. The fit was loose, and the skirt wide instead of slim-fitting, as was the fashion then. My things, when I looked around for them, were gone. So were my undergarments, which I had tucked within my clothes. I felt naked and started shaking again from another wave of panic. Maybe our things have been taken away to be laundered, maybe it’s just the way they do things here, I told myself, pushing away the sound of Mrs Sato’s voice in my head, the thin cheeriness of it when she mentioned the soldiers. We would never see our clothes again. Shoes, those who still had them, would be taken away as well. I would go barefoot for the next thirty-six months. The first shoes I got after the war were wooden clogs and I wore them until they broke, got them mended, then taped up the straps when I was too ashamed to bring them to the cobbler’s anymore. But that would be years later.
How We Disappeared Page 13