How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  She shook her head. ‘I only did it because it’s what you’re supposed to do.’

  I looked at her, wanting her to go on but she simply shook her head again, then swept a patch of the tiled floor with her feet. She lifted them, first her right foot then her left, and dusted the faintest cloud of white off them.

  Wang Di

  It was a week before she found them. Sitting at a table two blocks away from her new home. Leong was busy at a game with someone she didn’t recognize, Ah Ren sitting next to his brother, so fixated on the chessboard that he didn’t look up, not once. So she waited. She didn’t play, but saw, from the number of pieces Leong had collected next to him that it wasn’t going to take much longer.

  Eventually Leong said ‘Jiang’, ending the game and beaming before he spotted Wang Di. ‘Ah-mhm!’ he called out. ‘Grandma Chia.’

  Wang Di waved. There you are, she wanted to shout, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Instead, she sat down on the just-vacated seat and tried not to shake. Her mouth was dry and she had to swallow once before she continued. ‘How nice to see you,’ she said, wondering how to go on. How to unearth what they might know about the Old One. How to begin. ‘Listen, I have something to ask you.’

  She had rehearsed the words each night as she lay in bed, waiting for sleep. It came out now, stuttering and choked. As if it hurt her to say the words. While she talked, the brothers listened.

  ‘Ah-mhm, I’m not sure I can help,’ Leong said. The sun was setting but pinpricks of sweat were starting to collect on his lined forehead.

  ‘Anything will do. Baker Teo told me that he used to work in town, at a shop. Maybe he told you where it was?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’ Leong looked at his brother, who had stayed silent as Wang Di spoke, simply sat on and gazed past her, to a spot just above her ear. ‘Ah Ren?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ah-mhm. But I’m not sure we’re the right people to ask. We saw him often, but mostly we talked about chess… The only thing I can recall is that we talked about where we once lived. Which kampong, how everyone used to play outside…things like that.’ He looked at his brother again before continuing. ‘Our parents died during the war. Pa was working at the docks on the night of the air raid. Ma passed away a few years after that. I told him this and he said that he’d lost people too.’ The man stopped here and reached into his pocket. Wang Di watched as he brought out a packet of tobacco leaves and began rolling a cigarette. ‘But I don’t think he said who or how. This was a long time ago, maybe a decade.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was the only thing Wang Di could manage. She was about to say thank you when Ah Ren leaned forward. He had been so quiet that she had almost forgotten that he was there at all. When he spoke, it was with a voice deeper than she imagined it would be, steadier.

  ‘His family,’ he said. ‘He told us that they died during the war.’

  ‘Do you – do you remember how? And when?’

  ‘He didn’t say. But he did tell us that they’re buried in Kopi Sua cemetery. That he visits every February on their death anniversary. I remember thinking that it must mean they all died on the same day.’

  ‘Ah Ren, don’t say things you’re not sure about.’ To Wang Di he said, ‘I’m sorry. Sometimes my brother is a little blunt.’

  ‘I’m not making things up. I remember it well. He said February.’

  The twelfth of February. This is something, at least, Wang Di thought. She was about to leave when Leong spoke up again.

  ‘He used to talk about you. All the time. He used to tell us how good you were with the customers, how you remembered all their names and what they liked. Told us you became the breadwinner after he had to stop working on account of his age. He talked about you all the time.’

  Wang Di did not notice the ache in her knees as she walked home, or the heat, still lingering even as the sky streaked red and purple. There was a quickness to her step, made buoyant by what the brothers had told her. ‘Twelfth of February,’ she chanted. ‘Twelfth of February. Kopi Sua.’

  It was only when she got home that she sank back down to earth.

  If Leng had been around, she would have gone over to her apartment. Leng, who used to come over on Saturday afternoons and lean against the grill gate to chat for half an hour, an hour. She would know what to do. She had been there when the Chias moved in. She had been the one who walked her to the market that first week, who had, a few years later, helped boil the herbal concoctions from the sinseh when Wang Di was ill. The last time she saw Leng was late last year, in a care facility. The care worker had shrugged at Wang Di when she’d asked for Lim Poon Leng, and Wang Di had to walk the length of one floor, passing by rooms full of yelling. She had given up and was looking for the exit when she spotted Leng slumped in a wheelchair in front of a blank TV screen. At first Wang Di had tried talking, telling her about the weather, how everyone had been given notice to move out of their building, but Leng had just sat, jabbering wordlessly, making a series of noises that sounded like a toddler learning to speak. ‘Hum mummm mummm mummm.’ She did that for an hour. When Wang Di got back home, she told the Old One that Leng wasn’t Leng anymore, and had never gone back to visit.

  Now, in the new flat, she thought about her. Pictured the two of them walking through the cemetery together, Wang Di helping brace the older woman as she peered at the words on each gravestone. She hadn’t been to the cemetery in years but she remembered how large it was. How it was more woodland than cemetery in parts. It always took her half an hour, twenty-five minutes if she was lucky, to arrive at her parents’ graves. Much of the trek would be across uneven ground, would involve ducking past the aerial roots of banyan trees and trying to avoid treading on food offerings laid out on the ground. She had stopped visiting ever since the Old One started to need a walking stick – he would have insisted on accompanying her each time, stubborn as ever. He had never asked why she’d stopped, grateful, maybe, for the small mercy of this avoided conversation and what it implied – how old he was getting, how near the inevitable seemed. She hoped that Meng was still visiting each year. Still trimming away the grass that grew out over their parents. Still painting in their names on the dark stone.

  It would be impossible, she told herself. First, there was the matter of finding out the names of Soon Wei’s family members, the name of his first wife. Then there would be the graves. She had asked the brothers if they could help her look for a register, a list of people who were buried in Kopi Sua. Both of them had been apologetic when they told her that they were illiterate, that they’d left school when their father died. Wang Di had wanted to say that she understood but the brothers had gotten up then, murmuring something about returning home.

  And so what, if I find them? Then what? she thought. The dead can’t talk.

  August 1942 – May 1943

  Two days passed before I ate anything or spoke to anyone. Two full days of lying on the damp mat, being bent and held down into submission. Thumbs pushed into the sides of my mouth so I couldn’t bite down. There was little reprieve, especially in the first week. One soldier would be done, would be withdrawing from me when the next man barged in, making impatient gestures while undressing himself. All of them merged to form one faceless, nameless beast – all body and inhuman noise. It was a year later, with a recent young captive amongst us that I realized that this was what they did with the new girls, that word spread so the men would queue up, the line snaking out of the door, to visit this new face and break her in like a pair of shoes. Several times during the first hours I had to put my hands up to fend off blows from several soldiers affronted by a look or any resistance on my part. One man slapped me so hard I spat out part of a tooth. I learned to play dead after that, closing my eyes and lying so still that I felt myself sinking into the floor. At night, I would see my mother before me, turning her head away in shame as I tried to sleep. Or else my own clear-eyed face looming and hissing at how pliant and easy I was. You could hav
e killed yourself when you got the chance, or jumped from the truck, I thought; the bottle of antiseptic – there – might end things quick.

  All of this until I fell into a numbing, dreamless slumber. I cannot recall getting up to wash or going to the bathroom although I must have – I remember gnashing my teeth as I squatted, the dull soreness turning so sharp it almost split me. Someone must have come for me. It was the way things went in the black-and-white house. You adhered to the schedule or they, Mrs Sato or the caretaker, dragged you along with them. At some point during the first day I noticed a bowl of rice on the floor. Left it to grow cold until it became too late. Only after insects began to swarm around it did I start to feel hungry. When it became clear that the caretaker wasn’t going to give me a fresh meal before I’d finished this one, I scattered the black ants that had lined up from the wall to the bowl and scraped handfuls of rice into my mouth with my fingers. Two mouthfuls and it was gone. When the caretaker returned to pick up my empty dish in the evening, she sneered at me and I understood then that I was theirs, that I belonged to them.

  ‘Come on, come on. Get up, lazy ones.’

  The voice was close enough to wake me up from my second night of fitful sleep. A nightmare, I thought, opening my eyes. Then the door opened for someone to slide a half bowl of rice across the floor. Mrs Sato’s head appeared in the gap. ‘Eat. Then it’s off to the bathroom with you.’ Then she went on calling out instructions down the hallway. ‘Make sure that all of them wear a sakku. If they don’t have one, call out for me’, and, ‘don’t forget to collect the tickets from each soldier!’

  No, not a nightmare. I pushed myself up and was at once distracted by a jolt of pain, both sharp and dull at once, spreading from my pelvis down to my legs. I did the only thing I could. Ate. Then got up to go to the bathroom.

  There were a few women in there but it was the one who’d nodded at me my first morning who came up to me then. I was washing when she came and leaned against the wall, waiting. I glanced at the exit, nervous about the caretaker but there was only her wooden cane, leaning against the doorframe. ‘Don’t worry,’ the woman said. The trick, she told me, was to grow eyes in the back of your head. ‘The caretaker has bad legs and likes to sit in the kitchen. She’s supposed to watch us to make sure we don’t chat in the bathroom but she gets tired. See?’ She pointed at the empty doorway. ‘I sometimes count up to two hundred and give up because I lose track.’ She paused as if to let me take it in. ‘What’s your name?’

  I wanted to tell her to leave me alone but I stayed silent, blinking water from my eyes. She asked again, thinking I hadn’t heard and my voice cracked when I replied, ‘Wang Di.’

  ‘Jeomsun. My name is Jeomsun. You’re new, aren’t you? From around here?’

  Without further preamble, Jeomsun told me about how she had survived the week-long transport from her hometown in Busan to Formosa, where she’d been moved from camp to camp and the women around her succumbed, one after the other, to dysentery and typhoid fever. Then she had been taken away and put on a boat to Singapore. It was luck, she said, that she was in here. ‘Conditions here are better. You even have running water. The places we were in before…’ There was a pause. When she spoke next her voice had lost much of its energy. ‘I feel so much older now than when I started. Older than my twenty years. But you. You can’t be more than sixteen, surely.’

  I had to think for a moment before I replied. ‘Seventeen.’ I had just turned seventeen. My parents had forgotten my birthday because of the war and their frantic efforts to find me a husband. For a moment I pictured my photograph pressed between the pages of Auntie Tin’s red notebook and wondered if she was still showing it to potential suitors and their parents.

  Jeomsun shook her head and gave me a pitying look. ‘Still… You aren’t the youngest. There was a girl…before you arrived. She was twelve.’

  ‘Where is she now? The girl?’

  ‘She tried to run away.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘The soldiers caught her. They brought her back here and – the things they did to her…’ She stopped there.

  I wanted to ask her to go on but a change had come over her, turning her inward, her eyes hard. She looked older than her twenty years but her eyes were quick, birdlike. Her face was wide and pale, without a touch of blemish except for a faint, circular scar on her right cheek. Whenever she felt nervous or hungry, she would smooth it with the tip of a finger, as if trying to rub it away. A cigarette burn, I discovered, given to her by a soldier.

  The other girls were finishing up, silent in the shells that they were already beginning to form around themselves. No one spoke. No one talked about what had happened the previous nights. As Huay passed me I saw an imprint of a hand around her upper arm but I kept my eyes on the stone floor as I went into the cubicle and flinched when I saw my reflection in the water – a bruise on my neck, my upper lip red and split with a cut. As I picked at the dried blood, I wondered what Yan Ling was doing; if she was at home in the kampong or on her way to work. If, for the first time, she felt relieved, grateful for that single deformity, the deformity her mother frequently cursed her for being born with.

  In the days following, Jeomsun and I often met in the bathroom. As I washed, she would keep an eye out for the caretaker and talk, keeping her voice low so it wouldn’t carry. She obsessively compared our breakfast rations, asking how many mouthfuls of rice I’d had, how many pickles; or else she complained while she washed out used condoms – as we were meant to do every morning – in the sink. She would talk about Busan sometimes; as she did her face would change, lifting and unclouding itself as if she were being warmed by the sun. She told me about the mountains and the sprawling farmland she had grown up on, and how much she missed it. Never about her parents. All this, she communicated with a child’s rudimentary Chinese, picked up during her time in Formosa, and filled in the rest with hand gestures. Whenever she was tired, she would start off in Chinese before trailing off in Korean and I leaned in to listen to her even though I understood nothing. The sound of the vowels cushioned the air around me and rolled around in my head even after we split up to go back into our rooms.

  Jeomsun explained that there were two types of soldiers: officers – the ones who got as much time with us as they liked, and all the rest, who were allotted twenty minutes each, no longer. She advised me to try to please the former as much as we could, and I nodded even though I didn’t know what that entailed.

  ‘And make sure the soldiers wear a sakku before they do anything with you or you might get pregnant. And eat. Eat as much as you can. You never know when they will start cutting back on rations. The doctor comes every Monday to perform a health inspection so pinch your cheeks pink before you go in to see him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You need to look healthy. Otherwise they might take you away.’

  ‘But if we look unhealthy, they might not want us, right? And if we fall sick, they might put us in hospital, won’t they? They might let us go…’

  ‘Huh. You think they’ll send you to hospital to get treated? And waste good supplies?’ Jeomsun scoffed. Then she turned to face me fully, straightening herself. ‘You know what happens to girls who fall sick here? Or who get pregnant?’ She jerked her thumb towards the back of the house, where the rubbish bins were. Into the heap, she meant. Gone.

  As much as I could that first week, I tried to avoid Huay, ignoring that pinch in my chest whenever I saw her. Her presence provided a bittersweet reminder of home – the trees, the whitewashed wood on our house, its palm-thatched roof – a familiarity that felt dangerous, untoward. I decided that I didn’t want her around me – didn’t want her bearing witness to everything that was happening in the house. It would not do, I thought, to have another witness to my shame. If we were ever let go, she would go back and tell everyone what had happened and I couldn’t bear it. The thought of everyone knowing or suspecting anything close to this. And even if she kept quiet, I
would see the regretful knowing of it in her eyes and I wanted it – all this – swept away afterwards, as if it had never happened. Except that wouldn’t be possible with Huay around. If I went home and she did as well, she would be a constant reminder of what had happened, what was never supposed to happen. If not, I would be able to tell my family that I had spent the entire time working in a factory. I would lie to myself first, then to everyone else after.

  It was Monday morning, after our second inspection, after the doctor nodded at Mrs Sato and she turned to nod at me as if to say good, well done. I remember being relieved even though I didn’t know what there was to be relieved about. A little later, in the bathroom, I asked Jeomsun if we would get a visit from the doctor every week.

  ‘No. Only for the newcomers, and then every month for the rest.’

  For the rest? I thought. Jeomsun saw the look on my face. She stopped cleaning her teeth with the corner of her face cloth, took me by the shoulders and did not blink, not once, as she spoke. ‘Listen. Do what helps you. If hoping helps you survive from day to day, then keep hoping that they’re going to release you. The truth is, I’ve never seen them let anyone go. But if it helps you. I’ve done this for five years. Since I was fifteen. What helps me is getting through one day at a time. I don’t think about what’s going to happen tomorrow. I focus on being clean. Eating. Talking. If I couldn’t do these things I would have died a long time ago.’

  Five years. I felt myself sway on my feet.

  Before I could reply, Jeomsun nodded to show that the conversation was over with and walked into the cubicle. I never found out if it was the way she had learned Mandarin, communicating as clearly as she could using the limited words that were available to her, or if this was how she was. Clear as a bell. Unmistakable. Perhaps she was exactly the same when she spoke in Korean.