How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  ‘You can go; I don’t have time to deal with this now –’

  ‘But, you can’t –’

  She turned and looked at me. The set of her face, combined with her magnified eyes made me want to laugh with fright. Then she turned back to her marking, slashing red all over someone’s Chinese essay. I stood there for a few seconds, hoping she might change her mind. I didn’t know what else to look at so I stared at the piece of paper she was holding. The essay started the way everyone had been taught to start a story. Good weather, bad weather. ‘A piece of blue sky,’ it read, ‘with no cloud to be seen for miles.’ When I went out into the corridor, I saw that it had started to drizzle. It began to drizzle inside my chest as well, my heart making little pitter-patters as I thought about how my mother would react when she got Lao Shi’s phone call, how my father might react when she handed over the letters. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. I needed to have a rewind button just like on the tape recorder so I could un-happen this and stop myself before I got the bright idea to ask Lao Shi for help. Now I had lost the letters. All of them, except the first two.

  ‘Useless, useless,’ I said to myself. The drizzle was turning into a downpour but I didn’t run. The only other people around were two girls from the year above. They stared as I arrived at the bus shelter and I suddenly become aware of my washed-thin uniform, my muddied shoes. I didn’t know what to do with my hands and put them in my pockets. Only then did I remember the loose change that I had brought with me, the money I had taken from Ah Ma’s dresser. I counted out the coins in my hand. It was enough. Enough for the bus rides to Chinatown, and then back home.

  Wang Di

  ‘Eh, I didn’t know we would have neighbours like that. People like her still exist?’

  ‘Don’t be fooled. No one goes hungry in this country. She’s just one of those… You know… Not quite right, la.

  ‘And did you hear her?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Talking to herself!’

  And here Wang Di imagined them exchanging looks, circling a finger next to their foreheads.

  They were there nearly every day now. Chatting in the corridor. Using stage whispers whenever they talked about her. In response, Wang Di took to keeping her door wide open. I don’t care, she wanted to shout but never did. When Wang Di wasn’t outside collecting cardboard and tin cans, she folded her laundry and made her meals, sometimes humming ‘Rose, Rose’ as she did so she wouldn’t have to hear them. Her voice rusty with disuse. Until one afternoon when ‘Rose, Rose’ veered into a different tune. She stopped at once when she realized what she’d been humming. The words echoing in her head. The warble of Jeomsun’s off-key voice drowning out everyone else’s.

  Oni na rawa

  Kagaya ku mi yo no

  Yama sakura

  Cini sati ni o-o

  Kuni no hana

  ‘Aikoku No Hana,’ Jeomsun had explained, scoffing, as she taught the lyrics to the rest of them that first time. ‘About women who honour their country.’

  How the soldiers had clapped afterwards. The flowers, pink, white and orange, that they threw onto the stage. Tiny rocks that she discovered to be pieces of candy, their wrappers glittering in the sunlight. The shock of their low cheers – the unlikeliest sounds given where they were, what they had been doing for the past few months – goading them into picking everything up, crouching like children. Mrs Sato watching on like a proud mother. And then, in the days following, how she had turned her head to one side and stared at the flowers as the men moved and gasped on top of her. The blooms had lasted for days even out of water.

  After that, the song kept sneaking up on her when she was least prepared for it. To drown it out, Wang Di started using the radio instead. Only sometimes. As if wearing the batteries out for only one set of ears was a waste. On weekends though, she put it on loud enough to drown out the neighbours’ visiting grandchildren, their chatter over long Sunday lunches. But even that had its dangers.

  The Small Reception came on one afternoon. She recognized it as the string instruments started up and clicked the radio off before it could properly begin. Then, just as quickly, she put it back on again.

  If anyone asked her now, she would not be able to say what it was that made her return early the day Soon Wei blacked out at home. There were still hours to go before she was usually done with her rounds and she could have gone on, there was still space on her cart and her legs and joints were giving her no trouble. It was just past eleven in the morning and the sky was clear when she turned around and headed back. As she walked along the corridor, music from The Small Reception – her husband’s favourite opera – reached her ears; the crash of cymbals, a high-pitched voice. She’d thought, what good luck that the Old One had it on just then, they seldom played it on the radio.

  She had called out as she entered their flat, was putting away the cart when she saw the lower half of one leg stretched out from beyond the kitchen table.

  When he woke up in hospital, she was ready for him. Cup and straw in hand, a napkin for any spills. He took a sip and said, ‘How long was I asleep? Have you been here all day?’ His words were garbled, thick with stupor.

  ‘Not too long.’

  A family – three generations of them – came in, clacking their heels and chatting among themselves a little too politely. The Old One looked up and at Wang Di, his eyes bright with the shine of a recalled memory.

  ‘I remember when you were in hospital. You slept for hours and hours after the operation. I had to stop myself from shaking you, just to see if you would wake up. What was it? More than fifty years ago?’

  She tried to imagine him sitting next to her and waiting, badgering the nurses with his questions whenever they stopped by, and felt a bittersweet sting in her chest as she smiled. She remembered little of her hospital stay, the operation. Only the years of pain and discomfort before it, and the dull, empty ache after, most of which went away in a short time. The emptiness didn’t.

  Back when it first began, she had tried going to the doctor, a Chinese sinseh in another kampong so there would be less of a chance that she might run into a neighbour. It was a few months after the end of the war and she went alone, without her mother, lied and said she was going to the market, not because she knew what it was she had but where it had come from. To her growing dismay, none of the herbal concoctions she got from the Chinese doctors helped. She put off seeing a Western doctor until she couldn’t anymore. By then, she was bleeding relentlessly. The physician had been an old man who didn’t blink at all when he asked about her medical history. She told him about the pregnancy and nothing else. The way the physician had looked at her then, eyes sharp as a crow’s, disbelieving. The shame that crept all over her body. It was almost as bad as being back there, in that little room.

  ‘It looks like pelvic inflammatory disease,’ he had declared. ‘I will give you antibiotics now but you’ll need to go to the hospital for more tests.’ He had given her a referral, which she crumpled up and threw away as soon as she left the clinic. She remembered how her face had burned, as if she were standing too close to a fire, how the nurse had taken her time with the antibiotics, dropping one pill at a time into the bottle. The infection went away but the pain lingered, a pain that began deep in her belly and stayed there, or shot down her spine and into her legs so she could barely stand. It came back from time to time but she said nothing about it to anyone, nothing about it to her husband after she got married. The Old One found her one evening, curled up on the bathroom floor. He’d carried her out into the living room and cradled her head while he phoned for the ambulance, wordlessly praying (to his ancestors, to any one of the many gods or spirits who might listen) as they waited.

  At the hospital, the doctor quickly decided that she would have to have a hysterectomy. It took her some time before she absorbed the news, and then she had cried, refusing to look at the Old One even as he held her hands and squeezed them. After the operation, she had come to, h
azy but still herself, and spoken to him through a cloud of anaesthesia. A string of apologies. ‘I’m so sorry I never gave you children. That I’ll never give you children. Can you forgive me?’ She said this again and again. He had stroked her hair and hushed gently until she was swept into deeper, restorative sleep. For weeks after the operation, she had the sensation of being lighter and heavier at the same time. Whenever she was alone, she rubbed circles over her stomach, around the raised, horizontal scar, thinking about what it once held, what it would never hold again.

  That was the first and last time they spoke about it. A decade passed. They moved into a flat of their own, and Wang Di thought she had come to terms with it until Leng asked her if she wanted children. Leng had two of her own, a boy and a girl. Wang Di wasn’t surprised by the question. They had known each other for nearly a year and the topic was bound to come up. Still, she struggled to respond.

  ‘Maybe you can adopt. Nothing wrong with that, you know. So many people do it. There are some families with too many kids and some who want just one but cannot…’ She stopped there. It was difficult to know what the problem was if the woman didn’t talk.

  Wang Di considered telling her everything. About her hysterectomy. About why she had needed the operation in the first place. About the child as well. The one whom she still saw from time to time – tucked into a passing pram, sitting in the lap of a woman on the bus. For years he had stayed a baby, no more than a few months old. Then, one day she looked up from her meal at the hawker centre and saw a boy who could have been a mix of her and Soon Wei and felt she must know him. That it was him. Her mind latched on to the idea of the child, fully grown, and she continued to spot him on occasion. Less frequently as the years passed. Shen jing bing! Madness. She wondered how Leng might react to this ghost child of hers, tried to picture the expression on her face, her usual kindness and concern wrestling with a growing alarm.

  ‘If it’s because of the money, you shouldn’t worry. The further the war’s behind us, the better things will get. You’ll see. And besides, children don’t need very much. Look at mine, growing like weeds.’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I am worried about that. There’s no room for a child in this flat, not really.’ She knew this sounded weak at best but there was no way to explain this to Leng without giving everything away: how if she wanted to adopt, she would have to go to her husband and explain what had led to this. What had happened to her. So she changed the subject. Continued changing it each time until Leng got the message.

  If not for what had happened to her, they might have had a child in his fifties now. Instead, it had just been the two of them. They had been happy. It was more than she thought she deserved.

  Fifty-four years, she realized, watching him now. We’ve been married for fifty-four years, she wanted to say. ‘The doctors said you can go home in a few days,’ she told him. She ignored how poorly he looked – his hollow cheeks, the blueness of his lips, and wanted to reach out and rub the pale cast, like a fine dusting of flour, from his face.

  He turned to gaze out of the window. It was raining and large drops of water were tapping on the glass, the green, metallic smell of rain filling the room. There were storms almost every day during this time of year. The kind that felled trees, stranded cars in the middle of roads, with water rising so quickly past the tops of canals and spreading into the ground floor of homes and shops and schools it seemed it would never stop. She tried to remember if she had shut the windows before leaving home. There would be a good splash of rainwater on the floor of course – the panes were old and the one highest up kept getting stuck in a permanent yawn. She wondered how she would feel if their place got flooded. If she went home to their things drowned and washed away.

  The Old One turned back to look at her. ‘We don’t have much time left.’

  ‘I’m not going home yet. The nurses aren’t so strict with the visiting hours,’ she said, even though she knew just what he meant.

  ‘I just want to make sure that you are all right’ – and here he paused to look for words that would cause her the least anguish – ‘when I’m gone. You can’t just keep it all inside you like you’ve been doing all these years. I know it’s difficult. But.’

  The Old One never pushed her. He seemed to know, almost from the beginning, how difficult any talk of the war was for her and had skirted the subject for years until the day at Changi beach, a few years into their marriage. She was digging her toes into the wet sand as he walked along the shoreline, bent over, collecting shells in the palm of his hand. Then he found something and straightened up. She thought it was a large mollusc or the top half of a crab until the sand and seawater fell away and revealed ivory. Human bone, a lower jaw. It was clean, and several teeth – green with algae and chipped – were still attached. Soon Wei seemed to weigh it in his hand before he pitched it into the sea. They watched as it sailed into the air and disappeared into the water with a light splash. And then it was as if it had never happened. They were just watching the light flicker and dance on the waves.

  The Old One was quiet on the journey home. Over dinner, his uneasiness grew until he couldn’t hold it in anymore. ‘I could have brought it to the police,’ he said.

  Wang Di was imagining the scene, a group of blindfolded men kneeling, waist-high in the waves, while a line of Japanese soldiers got ready to fire. They had washed up over the years on beaches used as execution sites. Skulls, femurs, a hip bone.

  She had wanted to tell him that it was okay, that it didn’t matter, part of a jaw. But knew how wrong it sounded, how clearly untrue. That night, she dreamed about men being strung up and pushed into the rising tide. When she woke and found Soon Wei sitting at the kitchen, staring out of the window, she saw that he was thinking about it as well. She knew that it would come soon, the stories, the questions, and tried to brace herself for them.

  A few days later, he turned to her while they were watching the evening soap. ‘You know…’ he started, ‘you know I had a wife before you.’

  She nodded. ‘The matchmaker told me.’

  ‘I’ve never told anyone how she died. How my family died during the war. It happened a few days after the invasion, before the Japanese took over. There was no warning. I don’t think anyone had an idea of what was going to happen when we saw them driving into the village in their trucks –’

  It was at this point that Wang Di pushed herself away from him, holding one hand to her stomach, as if stabbed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pushing herself up from the edge of the mattress and running to the bathroom. Soon Wei followed her and waited outside, at the kitchen table just in case.

  That night, he woke her from a nightmare, trying to hush her and explain that she had been thrashing and kicking. Then she felt it – a warm dampness spreading under her. Wang Di had got up and ran to the bathroom. While she was in there, he stripped the sheets, made the bed, and lay down again. When she returned, it was as if nothing had happened. All night, she kept her back turned to him, the heat of her shame keeping her awake, making her breath come quick and shallow.

  He had waited for her to confide in him all that time. Fifty years. She remembered how she had fidgeted as she got ready to speak, digging her nails into her hands so that she wore the crescent scars of it in her skin for weeks after. How the words had come out that day at the hospital: ‘There’s something else. Something that happened in the black-and-white house.’ She had almost told him everything but stopped, believing that there was still time.

  The way he had assured her after she was done talking that day. She was exhausted but her eyes were still darting, as if she were a child awaiting punishment.

  ‘You shouldn’t take it with you. In the end,’ he said, forgetting about himself as he’d always done.

  And she had let him. Only thought about it when it was too late.

  It was close to two that afternoon when Wang Di made her decision. She tucked her purse into her trouser pocket and picked up the Old One’
s walking stick, dusting off the smooth top of it before walking out of the apartment.

  November 1944 – August 1945

  Late in the year, I was woken before dawn by the first bombings since the Japanese claimed the island. The sound was distant and ghostly; it reminded me how far removed I was from my old life, how little it had to do with me now. Mrs Sato gave nothing away when she arrived that afternoon. There was no information, only hushed gossip for days about what the explosions might mean. ‘Was it an air raid?’ ‘Maybe it was just a factory accident?’

  Two weeks after the new year, there was another spate of bombings. This time, we were wide awake, gathered in the bathroom for our morning ritual – the deep boom of it was unmistakable, as was the sound of planes overhead.

  ‘Do you know what that means?’ Jeomsun’s eyes were lit up, the high points in her face white and arched like the wing bones of a bird.

  I shrugged. The end of the occupation, I thought, or the end of things. I was fine with either.

  ‘Maybe when the British come, they will bring food with them. And supplies. ‘I’ve had to use the same sanitary cloths for months now.’ She filled her bucket with water, threw in her menstrual cloths and started scouring the strips with both hands. ‘Do you have any clean ones to spare? Mine are so tattered they’re almost useless.’

  My stomach lurched. I knew where mine where – tucked in a corner of my room, untouched for weeks. My voice was barely audible when I said, ‘I haven’t bled in more than a month.’

  Jeomsun froze. ‘When were you supposed to?’

  ‘I can’t even keep track of the days anymore. How can I know –’

  ‘Don’t panic. Maybe… Maybe it’s just because you’re so thin,’ she circled her damp fingers around my wrist to emphasize her point. ‘It happened to a lot of girls when we were in China, when we were close to starving.’ But she didn’t sound sure; Jeomsun, who said anything she pleased and nothing at all when she didn’t want to.