How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  ‘Now, don’t you all look nice. Just one last thing before you go back into your rooms.’ Here, she proceeded to give us our new names. Japanese names, which she said made things easier for the staff. Huay, I noted, was Kiko and mine was Fujiko. I said the words under my breath. Fujiko, the edges of it round and barbed at once, a strange fruit in my mouth.

  Mrs Sato hummed a tune under her breath as she came for each of us. When it was my turn and she spun me around gently to go back up the corridor, I saw, for the first time, an armed soldier standing at the start of the entryway, watching as I was led back to the room I’d slept in. The kerosene lamp was lit and in the warm light of the single flame, it was easier to tell myself that it was going to be okay. Perhaps it wasn’t what I thought it was, this place. Perhaps we were there to mend uniforms, or take care of the wounded, or prepare food in the army kitchen. It’s going to be okay, I told myself, and looked around the room – the light from the flame illuminating a ‘v’ of brown damp spreading down from the ceiling, and, at eye-level, little dots and splashes on the walls. I went close, squinting, and saw that they were bloodstains, turned dark. Then I saw the words scratched into a corner of the plywood wall. Three characters. A name, perhaps. The name of the girl who had been in this room before. Maybe she was home now, I told myself. Maybe she had done a good job and was now home with her family.

  Less than an hour later, I heard the rumble of engines as several vehicles rolled in beyond the gate and settled into the driveway, as the stamp of boots came close, closer. Then quick and unrestrained laughter, the sudden pelt of it making me start. I told myself not to panic. Reminded myself that they needed women, surely, to be nurses and cooks and cleaners.

  I made myself think this until the first man came into the room that morning.

  There was no mistaking it then, when the door opened and he came in. I scrambled for the exit but he only had to reach out to catch hold of my shoulder, spinning me around as the door slammed behind him. I could not help but look at him – his wide-set eyes. The shiny, wet corners of his mouth as he said something in Japanese and put his arms around me. As if we were playing a game. I kept fighting to get out of his clasp and after a moment, he stopped smiling and gave an impatient sigh before reeling back and hitting me with his open palm. I fell to the mat and he kicked me in my side, the sharp jab of it a warning more than anything else, to make sure I stayed down before he undid his trousers. Then he knelt, pushed my dress up above my waist, and put one hand around my neck as he straddled me. He kept a grip on my neck the entire time so that I couldn’t move my head away from the rasp of his stubble on my cheek, his oily breath. The wet on my skin where he drooled or perspired. The sound of him as he rutted on top of me. The only thing I could do was to close my eyes and wait and wait for it to be over.

  When he left, Mrs Sato rapped on the door and called through, reminding me to clean up with disinfectant. In the haze of what had just happened, her instructions were almost a comfort, a clear line of thought I could follow. Even the solidity of the bottle was comfort. It was real. My body was not. Compared to the objects in front of me, the rag, the bottle, the liquid sloshing within, I felt hollow and strangely weightless, as if I didn’t exist. I wiped myself and looked down to see that the cloth had come away bloodied. The thick smear of it like something alive. It was all I could do to breathe when I thought about my mother and the way she had taught me to trim away squares of cheap cotton when I got my period for the first time. ‘You’re a woman now,’ she had said, her voice sombre. She had not looked at me – not once – as she explained how I should replace and wash the cloths several times the first three days, fewer after. ‘And keep them away from your father’s things when you’re doing the laundry,’ she’d added at the end. I knew why without asking. We were bad luck – our things, our blood.

  Then the next soldier appeared. Young and smiling. He bowed and started to take off his boots. No, no, I said out loud, I think. One, I could have lived with. Maybe. But another. I told myself to try harder, fight harder so I sat up and put my hands out when he tried to descend upon me, shoving as hard as I could. For a moment, he looked dispirited and I thought he would leave. Then he reached into his pocket and brandished a gun.

  ‘You’re a woman now,’ my mother had declared. A verdict. I had said nothing, just stared at the fissures around her fingernails, shiny red, as she showed me how to fold the cloth into rectangles. How strange I had felt when I sat down to dinner with my brothers and my father a few hours later. Yang had looked at me in a way that made wonder if he sensed something had shifted in the air around us, something irreversible.

  Like this. I would not be able to go back. I would not be able to look my mother or father in the eyes again.

  That is what I was thinking about when the third soldier came in, the fourth and fifth. I made myself stop counting after that and kept my eyes closed all the way through each of them, their oil and dirt and rumbling, until they eased their weight off me and left the room. Until the clip of boots outside the door grew faint, and died away. A woman came in to turn down the kerosene lamp in the room. Then all was dark.

  I tried to curl up into myself, on my side, but when I moved, the space between my legs felt as if it had been lit on fire so I lay still on my back and closed my eyes. That night, I heard someone crying on the other side of the wall. I was about to tap on the partition between us when someone yelled out in Japanese. The crying stopped for a second before it continued, muffled this time, as if the person had clamped her hands over her face. Even when I fell asleep, the sound of her weeping seeped into my dreams, crowding out everything else. It seemed like too soon, a minute or so, before I opened my eyes and there was light again under the door – it was dawn.

  ‌Part Two

  Kevin

  It was the seventh night after Ah Ma’s death and my mother was busy covering the living-room floor with talcum powder. She went from left to right and right to left, walking backwards like a sower scattering seeds. I stood watching from my doorway, and imagined Ah Ma coming in through the door with plastic bags full of groceries from the wet market and making tsk-tsk noises when she saw the silky white mess.

  ‘Are we supposed to find her footprints in the morning? Is that a bad thing? Or a good thing?’

  My mother shrugged. ‘If there are footprints, it just means she came back for a visit. If they’re not there in the morning, it means she didn’t. Nothing good or bad about it.’

  ‘But what will she do? If she comes back?’

  ‘Look around, I guess. Check in on you,’ she said, turning away so I couldn’t tell if she was joking. She stopped for a moment at the doorway of her bedroom to say goodnight and for a moment, I saw the glow of my parents’ thirteen-inch television set and my father’s toes pointing straight up underneath the blanket. I hadn’t told him. Hadn’t had the chance, or the guts to do so. Both. I blamed him. For taking his breakfast with him in the car. For disappearing the moment he came home from work. For not sitting still long enough on the sofa in the evenings. For getting up from the dinner table the minute I had the words in my mouth and was ready to spit them out. For lying down all weekend in the bedroom with his head turned away, towards the window so I couldn’t see if he was asleep. Or awake and crying.

  Your mother is not… Ah Ma is not.

  Dinner time was the only time I got to see him now. Dinner time was always a good time to announce important news. But it was as if he suspected that something was coming and wanted to make sure that I didn’t get the chance to speak. He started eating the moment he sat down, not waiting for my mother, who had a habit of cleaning up right after cooking, soaking the dirty pans and wok and wiping down the counter. Normally, he would sit and wait, tapping the table with his chopsticks and yelling, ‘Chi le!’ to my mother every ten seconds, until she appeared, drying her hands on her apron. Now he just put his head down, swallowing whole mouthfuls of rice so big I couldn’t help but watch them slide down his thro
at, thinking he might choke, he might choke and I would have to thump it out of him quick. When he was done, he didn’t linger to pick at the remnants of the fish’s head or to talk about the news, the way he usually did. Now he ate and left the table so quickly the chair jumped and squawked when he stood up to go.

  Your mother told me…

  She is actually…

  I thought about sending him a letter. Or copying the transcript of the audio recording onto a piece of paper and mailing it to him. Or sliding the tape into the car’s cassette deck so it would play the moment he started it up in the morning. But I could see him throwing all of these things away without giving them another look. I could see him stopping the van and flinging the tape out of the window, not recognizing his mother’s own voice because it wasn’t that recognizable, actually, not after she got ill. It sounded only a little like her, like someone was trying to imitate her, close but not quite. It would just be like my father. To throw something away and not think any more of it. And besides, ambushing him like that didn’t seem right or honest or brave. Or I could wait until we were all in the car, on the way to the grocery store and play it then. I wondered what would have happened, if I started playing the tape from Ah Ma’s old cassette player while the van was in motion so that both of them would have to listen to it. No one could leave. No one could make it stop. I would press ‘start’ and just let the sound of her voice fill the little space, the tight, creaking silence, until there was no need for me to say anything. But of course, I couldn’t do it.

  Your mother said she…

  You’re actually…

  You might still have…

  I wanted to tell my mother that my father had gone again. Disappeared like the last time he went to his Dark Place. Except this time, the going away was literal, because instead of having to sit at home two-finger typing out his résumé and making phone calls and circling ads in the newspaper, he had a reason to be out. It was work. Even though sometimes he came home smelling of beer and sweat, as if he had dipped himself in a vat of Tiger and walked home. I thought it would be safer to ask my mother first. Just in case I went to him and the whole thing went KA-BOOM. My last attempt had gone like this:

  ‘Ma, don’t you think Pa is behaving strangely?’

  ‘What do you mean.’ A statement. Not a question.

  ‘He’s like…you know…’

  She made a rolling gesture with her hands that meant keep going, keep going, which I hated.

  ‘I mean he’s not talking much. And he’s not home. And he smells of Tiger beer when he comes back.’

  ‘Aiya, xiao hai zi,’ she said. Little child. ‘Your father is just spending a bit more time at work. Anyway, these are adult issues. Don’t bother yourself with them.’

  ‘Is it about Ah Ma?’ I asked, even though I knew it was, of course it was. ‘Because if it is I can help. Is it about Ah Ma? And do you think I should ask him –’

  ‘Don’t ask so many questions.’ She frowned at me and went back to her files and papers, all spread out on the kitchen table like a collage.

  So that was that. I tried to go to sleep but the smell of talcum powder, heavy and floral, stayed in my nostrils; I couldn’t help but think that any moment now, Ah Ma would walk through the living room, tracking powder into the kitchen. She would make herself a snack. A smear of margarine on white bread. A cup of hot Milo. Just a bit to eat, she always said, pinching the air with her thumb and forefinger to show just how much. Tam po tam po, just a little, she whispered under her breath. I imagined her sitting in her chair, facing away from the dining table as if she wanted to be able to get up and run at any moment. She had important things to do and places to go.

  I had important things to do. And maybe places to go. I got out of bed and found an unused notebook in my desk drawer. Then I put the words I had transcribed onto the first page. When I was done, I looked at what I’d written and underlined the ones I thought important.

  I found you. Please don’t blame me. I found you and took you away. They were dead. Or nowhere to be found. I didn’t know. Everyone else was gone and I was only trying to help. I wanted to save you. You were just a baby, so little. I wanted to look for them after the war, I did, but one month became two, and then it became a year, two years. And after that I just couldn’t. I couldn’t. Do you forgive me? I tried to look for them. I really did. I don’t want you to blame me when you find out. Please forgive me.

  I double underlined the word ‘or’ in the second line, then triple underlined it. On the facing page, I wrote down the questions I needed answers to:

  1. Where did she find him? Where was my father left when he was a baby?

  2. Who are my father’s real parents? Are they still alive? Where are they?

  3. Ah Ma thinks or knows my father will find out. How does she think this will happen?

  These were the first questions I needed answers to. I shut my notebook and watched the curtains shift in the breeze until I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, it was to the sound of fingers scrabbling on wood. The room was still dark, the light scanty through the drapes but it was her I saw and she was herself again; mouth un-crooked, hair off her face and wound into a bun at the back of her head. The drawers in her dresser were all yanked open, and she was kneeling in front of it surrounded by pools of fabric. She said something under her breath, like a little curse, and reached her right arm, good and mobile again, all the way into one drawer, extracting it to throw a plastic bag, then a crumpled tissue onto the floor. I rubbed my eyes and asked what she was looking for, if she wanted some help. She didn’t reply, just looked in my direction and sighed as if I ought to know, as if I were foolish not to. I called out again and she told me to hush, to go back to sleep. Then she reached her other arm into the drawer, then her head. Soon she was in all the way to her torso, her waist. I blinked and she was gone. For a second, I saw the bottoms of her powdered white feet, her heels, cracked and pale, and the tips of her toes pointed out like a swimmer fighting forward. And then she was gone. Like Alice, fallen down a rabbit hole. She left nothing behind, just a sound in my head like a smothered shout.

  I woke at half past seven to the sound of my parents’ alarm clock. I listened to their bedroom door open and close, and drifted off again until I heard them in the kitchen; my mother pouring fresh water into plastic bottles for them to take to work and my father clinking a teaspoon in his mug. Sitting up, my body felt leaden – as if I had been running circles during the night. Even my fingers ached when I curled them, like I had been digging into stamped-down dirt. That’s when I remembered: my grandmother, her reaching arms and cracked heels; a tunnel, and me following after. I rolled over until my legs dangled above the floor. Then I sat facing my grandmother’s bed while I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. I stared at her pulled-straight floral sheets and her chest of drawers (all shut up, with its contents safely tucked away inside) and wondered what I might find in it. A birth certificate with a stranger’s name where my grandmother’s should be. Or a picture with someone else holding my father, still a child. When they leave, I thought, that’s when I’ll look.

  My parents were sitting at the table with half-finished coffees next to them when I walked into the kitchen. My father was pretending to read the front page of the paper, but was in fact picking up breadcrumbs on the table with his thumb and index finger, then dropping them onto his plate.

  ‘Did you sleep okay? You were making all sorts of noises, like you were fighting someone.’ She was busying herself with the breakfast things, opening the jar of strawberry jam and peeling back the metal foil that she insisted on leaving in the margarine tub even when you were scraping the plastic bottom with the butter knife. She nudged the loaf of sliced bread in my direction.

  ‘What? No? I slept okay.’ I sat down and spread a good layer of margarine on a slice of bread, then dipped it into my milky coffee. ‘No dreams or anything.’

  ‘Lunch is in the fridge. Just put it in the microwave when you get hungry. Don
’t use the stove. If you want eggs, I’ll make you eggs tonight. And make sure to do your school work – at least two hours. If you have any questions just ask us tonight. And don’t open the door to anyone, please.’

  ‘Ma…’

  ‘…burglaries in the neighbourhood, you know? Or go to Auntie Goh’s. You can do your schoolwork with Albert. Help each other.’

  I kept chewing and pictured it – Albert snatching the flag erasers out of my pencil case after he had finished copying answers from my maths worksheets, kicking me under the table as his mother handed out afternoon snacks.

  ‘Remember, you can call me or your father if there’s anything.’

  ‘Kim, it’s seven-thirty in the morning!’ My father stomped out of the kitchen.

  My mother and I said nothing for a few seconds. Then she flapped her hand after him. ‘Aiya, he didn’t sleep well last night.’

  I stirred a spoon in my coffee, round and round, trying not to touch the sides of the cup.

  ‘Do you think he would be happier if Ah Ma hadn’t died? Or if Ah Gong were still around?’

  My mother’s own father had died when I was little, too little to remember anything of him. The words ‘Ah Gong’ tasted strange in my mouth, like a foreign word, and I worked my jaw a few times to dispel the uneasiness off my tongue.

  ‘What? What are you talking about? I have to go and get dressed,’ my mother snapped. She got up to rinse the cups and plates at the sink and reminded me to wipe the surface of the table after I had my breakfast. She was just about to leave the kitchen when I remembered to ask.

  ‘Wait… Did you find footprints?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the talcum powder. Last night. Was there anything?’

  Did she come back, was what I really wanted to ask.

  ‘Oh,’ she laughed. ‘No, la.’

  I thought about the way my grandmother had looked at me last night, how she had put a finger to her lips and told me to go back to sleep, shushing me as if I were five again and resisting my afternoon nap. ‘Do you think this is real, all this?’