I woke on my fourth day in hospital to find my mother watching me. Another dream, I thought, like the dreams I kept having of my baby, and reached out. Except when I touched her arm, I felt warm skin. Dry and sun-scored, but alive.
She was smiling a terrible, painful smile when she said, ‘Nu er.’ Daughter. Compounding my disorientation. Nu er. How many times had she called me that? Never, I was sure. I wanted to tell her, this woman, that she had the wrong person. That I was sorry, I wasn’t who she thought I was.
‘Don’t cry, don’t cry,’ she said, ‘or you’ll make your ma cry again.’ She touched my face with her hand, and it was this that finally woke me. Her hands, I knew. The hands I knew from her slaps and pinches, the yanks they dealt when she thought I was being too slow. I felt the familiar strength of them, the grip of her bones, her work-ready muscles, as she helped me up to sitting.
‘Ma,’ I said.
For several minutes, all we could do was stare at each other. She looked as if she had aged a decade, and as she got closer, more. The skin over her cheeks was drawn down, caved in where her molars used to be. On both sides of her mouth, deep grooves stretched and deepened as she spoke, reminding me of the wooden puppets I once saw as a child, their jaws falling open and snapping shut at the twitch of a string. I wondered if she could see what had been done to me. What I had done. And it was this last thought that made me regret not having washed that day. I would have spent the morning scrubbing myself if only I’d known. Instead, I pulled back from her and hid my hands under the sheets so she wouldn’t touch them.
Twice she started speaking – ‘I thought you were…’ – ‘Never imagined I would…’ – only to choke and swallow her words each time. Eventually she managed to say, ‘It’s been so long.’
I nodded, wondering if I could speak again, trying to remember the things I used to say in my past life as a daughter, someone’s child, but I wasn’t sure there was enough of me left. For a few moments I was almost frantic, afraid that the person I was before – their unplanned-for daughter, their Wang Di – had disappeared entirely. The way a body burns and leaves nothing recognizable in its wake. Just a few shards of bone, ash. Handfuls that slip away in the wind.
I took to parroting her or giving monosyllabic answers but she did the bulk of the talking, asking few questions, making observations. ‘You’re so thin.’ ‘So are you.’ ‘Your father couldn’t make the trip.’ All the things I wanted to say filled my throat, stopped right in the middle so that I could only swallow and stare. It was all I could do not to choke on everything that I couldn’t put into words.
‘I brought you something – in case they aren’t feeding you well here,’ she said, getting out a tiffin tin filled with rice porridge, and on top, sweet-potato leaves stir-fried with chilli paste. The sharpness of the flavours made my eyes prick with tears. After a few hurried gulps, I felt the burn of the food in my stomach and made myself slow down. I knew I would be sick later but I couldn’t stop. As I ate, my mother told me about my brothers: how Meng had stopped going to school ages ago, how Yang was away – the Japanese had sent him off the island to work. She didn’t know where. The last she had heard of him was in 1943.
‘Work? What do you mean, work? How long has he been gone?’
‘For a while now. Years. After they took you –’ Here she shook her head, as if to deny the memory of what had happened. ‘We waited and waited for you to come back. And when you didn’t… He got the idea to go to the Japanese police to try and find out where you had been taken. This was a few months afterwards…in 1943. He went with a neighbour, one of the Tan boys – he was the one who told us that the police had taken Yang, arrested him for no reason. We thought he was in prison but got a letter from him towards the end of the year – just a few lines saying that he was in Thailand. Nothing after that.’
He’s dead, I thought, and looked down so I wouldn’t have to see the fervid hope on my mother’s face.
‘Don’t look so worried. I’ve been praying to Guan Yin for you and your brother. And see? It worked! I’m going to keep looking for Yang. When everything has settled down, he’s going to turn up. Just like you did – I knew when I saw Nurse Noor that it was good news.’ I pictured the nurse getting off the bus, walking the long way into the kampong while people stared from windows and doorways. I should thank her, I thought. ‘Your father will be so happy to see you. He stopped working for the Japanese last November and has been looking for a job ever since. Things are so bad that it can only get better. Oh, he will be so happy to see you. You don’t know how worried we all were. Three whole years.’
Two days later, my mother helped me into the trishaw that was to take us home. The journey took us through busy streets, past cars and buses and lorries, carrying people and goods meant for somewhere else; things happening that did not involve soldiers, trucks or planes. There were hawkers tending their food stalls and people bent over bowls of noodles at wooden tables, women bargaining for their groceries, people selling bundles of vegetables and sweets from a tray strapped to their necks. All of this bathed in a morning light so sharp it made my eyes water. Things had gone on. I felt my stomach churn with this realization. Once in a while though, I spotted figures, stock-still amidst all the movement and noise: an old man, mere skin over bones, squatting by a wall. Another, talking to himself. No one else seemed to see them or mind their presence, passing them as if they were walking past a tree or mailbox or a lamp.
Then I saw her. Lying in a gutter, her face half hidden behind matted hair. It looked as if she had been there for a day or two; flies were beginning to settle on her face but she made no movement to brush them away. Huay? I thought, leaning out, causing my mother to exclaim and clutch at me as if she thought I was about to leap out of the moving trishaw. But the woman’s face was too sharp, and I could tell that she was older and much too tall even from where I was. Shen jing bing, I told myself, insane. Huay was dead. This was just another woman. Just another. I wondered where she had come from, if her family was still alive and looking for her or if they preferred her gone, like this. I thought about Jeomsun, hoping that she had left the island, gone back to her family and mountains in Korea.
My muscles tightened as we entered the village and I had to open and close my fists to get my hands to relax. There was young fruit in the trees, light green against the dark of the leaves. Stray cats on the dusty ground, showing their bellies to the sun. Home – I wouldn’t have thought this possible a month ago. We passed a few houses which looked empty and others with familiar faces looking out, gawking. I wanted to disappear but Jeomsun’s voice was in my ear all of a sudden, telling me to wave and ask what they were staring at. I ignored it best I could, pushed away her small, elfin anger, but wondered how my neighbours would react to my return and how much they knew.
‘We’re home,’ my mother announced.
Home. I was just over the threshold when I froze and took a step backwards, fighting to keep acid from rising up out of my throat. I’d forgotten what it smelled like – home, a thing that used to be a bitter but steady comfort. Because underneath the scent of the kitchen, with its oils and heady sambal spices, was the smell of sun-browned skin, of male bodies and their sweat and dark, sweet breaths, all of it sharpened by the heat. It’s just Ba and your brothers – no, brother, I corrected myself, act normal. Still I stayed by the door, watching my mother wait, her smile slightly fading. My father, sitting in his usual chair in the living room, had risen up, was extending his arms in welcome and walking towards me.
My body felt light. I could run, I thought. I could run now and never have to explain myself, or be around my father, my brother, both of whom I suddenly, unreasonably dreaded. It might have been this – my face, contemplating flight – that made my father stop. He dropped his hands to his side.
‘You’re back,’ he said. Then, as if suddenly reminded of where I’d been for all these months, these three years, he looked at the floor and returned to his chair, holding on to th
e armrests as he sat himself down.
‘Ba.’
He nodded. ‘You’re home now.’
I turned away, adjusting my eyes to the dim indoors and saw that my brother was crouching by the bedroom door, watching me. He was thirteen now, I realized, and a long way from when I’d last seen him. There were lines around his eyes. and below them, a darkness, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.
‘Meng?’
‘Jie,’ he replied, more out of reflex, it seemed, than anything else for even as he said it, he was getting up. I thought for a second that he was coming towards me, but he turned midway and left the house.
‘Must be going out to play,’ my mother said, bustling in the kitchen, not looking at me.
I went into the deserted bedroom. Everything was as it was. The spare rattan mat, which Yang used to unfurl on the floor at bedtime. That one pillow, which I always relinquished to Meng. I found my clothes stuffed deep into the bottom of the dresser, moth-eaten and much too big, and changed into them, hoping to feel like myself again. When I came out from the room, everyone was gone.
My mother went back to work that morning, hurrying in the hope that the water wouldn’t be cut off before she had finished washing her basket of laundry. I offered to accompany her but she shook her head. ‘You’re as thin as a bamboo stick. You’ll be no help.’
To make myself useful, I scooped out the sweet-potato porridge my mother had prepared before she left into bowls, filled a small dish with sambal. When everyone came back at noon to find the table laid out, there was an awkward shuffling before they sat down to eat, much too politely.
‘Oh, you really didn’t have to…’ She made herself smile, shifting the bowls around.
‘I wanted to be useful. And you, Meng, have you been going to school? Helping out?’ I’d wanted to tease but the words came out shrill – sounding like a reproach.
Meng didn’t look up. Instead, my mother replied for him, ‘He went to school only when they were giving out milk. When they stopped doing that a year ago, he just stayed home. Helped out with the garden now and then. Isn’t that right?’ She moved her elbow to prod Meng into answering but stopped shy of touching him.
‘Meng has grown but you look thin, both of you,’ I said. Nothing. My parents darted their eyes up, then down. I realized then that I’d said something untoward and embarrassed everyone. I must have forgotten how to be myself, I thought, my old self. In the black-and white-house we’d talked about food, aches and pains, our various bodily functions. Said little else that wasn’t about our bodies, survival. Three years.
My mother cleared her throat. ‘We’re okay. But only because we have the garden.’
They bolted their food. My brother and father got up to leave within five minutes of sitting down. Then it was my mother, murmuring about collecting the laundry. I sat there for almost half an hour, savouring every spoonful of sweet-potato porridge, looking at the damp rings their bowls had made in the wood. Wondering at the carved emptiness in my stomach even though I couldn’t eat another bite. A feeling like homesickness. And I realized that it was gone: home. My idea of it. My place in it.
As I dried the bowls, I could see and smell the smoke from my father’s roll-ups, hear his faint sigh as he stamped the last of it into the ground just outside the door, where he remained for most of the afternoon.
That night, the same thing happened though I said nothing. All three of them left the table within minutes of sitting down, my mother turning her back to me in order to wash the dishes at the sink, clanking and splashing as much she could to discourage me from talking.
I could be a ghost, I thought. One of those lingering souls that people just live with and skirt around, as long as it doesn’t do them any harm.
At the end of my first week back, I had learned to talk about the weather, about how salty or good or bad the food was, about the neighbours. Nothing else.
Things were shifting back into place after the Japanese surrender. Schools were still shut, and my brother, left to his own devices, stayed outdoors most of the day except for lunchtime. It was a small house with little place to hide. Still, he managed to avoid almost all contact with me. When he returned, he said nothing, did not even acknowledge that I was in the same room or look up when I called out to him. I told myself to give him time, that he must still be getting used to me after not seeing me for three years. He was just a child, after all.
Dinners remained uncomfortable affairs. Afterwards, instead of sewing or doing homework and sitting by candlelight as we used to do, my parents retreated into the bedroom. Meng rolled out the mat in the sitting room and flipped through an old comic book until it got too dark.
I could hear him scuffling against the floor in his sleep as I lay awake in the bed we’d shared together when he was a child. Each time I fell asleep, I would startle awake again and reach for the baby, thinking I was in the black-and-white house. With sleep though, came dreams; I would see Huay and Jeomsun most nights, and if I was lucky, Cheng Xun as well. Then I would wake, my face damp, remembering how I’d left them like that. The relief of being back with my family and the guilt of it spilling over into each other so that I almost wished I hadn’t survived. Almost.
Things will go back to normal, I told myself each day, almost believing it as I watched my family over dinner. Waiting for one of them to raise their eyes and look at me. I had been home for a week and they were still looking straight through me, half listening whenever I spoke. Meng, especially. He just needs time to get used to me again, I thought, pushing away thoughts of my baby, refusing to acknowledge that I saw him as a replacement of sorts. I told myself to be patient until I couldn’t anymore. My mother had left for the public tap one day and my father was outside, smoking, when I went to my brother.
‘Meng, why don’t we go to the market? We can get you iced gems from the corner shop.’
His eyes flickered, tempted for a moment before he said, ‘I don’t want anything from you.’
‘Don’t be silly, you love iced gems. Come on. It’s me, your –’
Leave me alone,’ he spat, his voice lower, no longer a child’s. ‘Why did you come back?’
I was still staring, wondering the same thing when he continued, ‘We thought you were dead. But they said you were living with the Japanese, those riben guizi. Do you know what that meant for us? For me? I lost all my friends. People talk about us. They gossip.’
It took me several beats to recover myself, before I said the first helpless thing I could think of. ‘Who? What do they say?’
‘Everyone. My classmates. They told me what you are. They called me a traitor, just because you’re my sister.’
Before I found my tongue again, he was getting up. ‘You should have just stayed with the riben guizi. You should have just stayed dead.’
The next morning, I followed my mother when she left for work in the morning, persisting even though she kept telling me to go back home. In the end, she let me carry the bucket and washboard as she knocked on the neighbours’ doors and retrieved bags of dirty laundry from different women. No one paid me any mind. She was beginning to look more at ease when we ran into Yan Ling’s mother.
‘Eh! Wang Di, isn’t it? Where have you been hiding her all this time? Wah…so skinny.’ She reached forward to circle her fingers around my wrist.
I pulled away and put my hands behind my back.
My mother laughed. An empty, out-of-tune laugh. ‘She was staying with family, up north in Malaya.’
Her eyes flickered. ‘Oh, of course, of course… I don’t know if you heard but my Yan Ling got married a few months ago. Moved to live with her husband’s family.’ She smiled and pointed vaguely east.
I wanted to ask her how Yan Ling was but my mother was pulling me away.
‘Nice to have you back.’
People began to talk. It started quietly, with questions about where I had been, about what I had been doing during the war. My mother just smiled and murmured about having sent
me to live with a relative in Malaya but it was a bald lie and her manner was too transparent. People started to sidestep us in the streets, tried not to meet our eyes even as the morning crowd at the market made it impossible for them to turn and walk in another direction. Customers stopped opening their doors when my mother came around and she lost precious work. Neighbours whom we had lived close to all our lives, whom I had known ever since I was a child, whispered among themselves whenever they saw me. Often, when they gossiped at the public outhouse, their voices carried in with the breeze, loud enough so that we caught snatches of conversation. They neither referred to me by name, nor called me ‘Mrs Ng’s daughter,’ which they used to do. After several days I caught on. I wasn’t Wang Di anymore, not to the neighbours anyway; what they called me instead was this: wei an fu, comfort woman.
I told myself that it could have been worse. That there were worse things to bear than this gulf between my family and me. Worse things than having to keep silent about Cheng Xun, about Huay and Jeomsun. Years later, I heard about a girl who made her way home, only to have her parents proclaim that they had never seen her, never known her, or spoken her name in their lives. She waited outside the hut where she grew up until a storm started. Just as quickly as she had returned, she disappeared again, as if washed away by the rain and wind. And then there are those who didn’t make their way home from the comfort houses; those who didn’t board the ships that were meant to bring home prisoners of war and female captives from the neighbouring islands, believing – rightly or wrongly – that their families would never open their doors to them. So they stayed away. Then there are those who never got to choose, who didn’t make it that far, not even close. Even Jeomsun, the most dauntless of us, had been rendered helpless in the face of this particular hope. Not of surviving, but of seeing her family again; it was the only thing that cracked her pragmatic facade – her manner becoming childlike when she talked about going home after the war, and then, a day later, almost collapsing inwards as she told me she would never be able to face her family again. I wondered if she had decided to return to Busan after all. If she’d made her way to the docks so that she could join the hordes of people clambering onto the ships sailing to Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines.
How We Disappeared Page 26