How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  Wang Di took a deep breath and let it out. ‘I can’t imagine what it must have been like for them. Both of them.’

  ‘I think she wanted to return him. But –’ Kim stopped there, trying to come up with the right words.

  ‘It can be difficult to give things up,’ said Kevin. Everyone turned to look at him but he was too busy pressing buttons on the gadget in his hands to notice.

  That night, Wang Di lay in bed for a long time, staring into the dark of her eyelids. Finally, she grew tired of waiting for sleep and got out of bed.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about what the boy had said. How it was difficult to give things up. She thought about her decades-old habit of bringing things home, things that meant nothing and had no place in her flat. She thought about how it had begun. How it had grown from squirrelling away things just to have the pretence of control over her life in that little room, to this accumulated mayhem taking over her apartment now, more than fifty years later.

  The next day, Wang Di began undoing her habit the only way she knew how.

  She started right where she was, in Red Hill where, years ago, her mother had said Huay’s family had moved. She went to each coffee shop and headed straight for the drinks seller – always the one with all the news, all the gossip – and asked if they knew of a family who had lived in the kampong, a family named Seetoh. Then she talked to everyone around who looked above the age of seventy, sipping their morning coffee, dipping bread into a saucer of soft-boiled eggs. It helped that the name was so rare, a bright songbird in a sea of Tans and Lees. Still, she felt like giving up after fielding hours of shrugs and ‘don’t knows’ trudging from one coffee shop to the other. Some people wanted to help, most people had something to say. Sometimes it was just, ‘Sorry, auntie, I don’t know anyone by that name,’ or ‘Ah-mhm, were they Cantonese?’ ‘No,’ she would answer. ‘Hokkien. Seetoh and Hokkien, she thought, even rarer. And they would say no, no. They didn’t think they were thinking about the same family at all.

  ‘Please be lucky, please,’ she said as she got within sight of the eighth coffee shop, crowded with lunch-goers.

  The drinks man was pouring freshly brewed coffee into a coffee sock from high up, above his head. ‘Hello, kopi?’

  It would be her fifth of the day and her change purse was getting lighter so she went straight to the point. ‘Young man, do you know anyone called Seetoh? They lived around here years ago, after the war.’

  ‘Seetoh, Seetoh, Seetoh…’ He left to go into the back kitchen. ‘MA! DO YOU KNOW ANYONE CALLED SEETOH?’

  When he came back, it was with a woman around her age, a little younger. She came out from behind the counter and Wang Di tried to stand up straight as she got closer. ‘Are you looking for Seetoh?’ the woman asked.

  Wang Di nodded.

  ‘Follow me.’

  They exchanged pleasantries as they walked. ‘The weather, so hot.’ ‘Everything is becoming more and more expensive.’ ‘All my children want to leave, go to Australia.’ Until they were standing in front of a shop.

  ‘Seetoh Minimart,’ the woman said, pointing to the sign.

  Wang Di started to thank the woman but she had already turned away, was weaving through the midday shopping crowd back to her stall. It might not be them. Even if it is them they might not want to talk. Don’t be disappointed, she told herself.

  A chime went ding-dong as she entered the shop. The old lady felt a little like she was entering home. The store was little, the size of her flat, and squashed tight with four narrow aisles. Boxes and boxes up the walls, along the floor. Every inch of space.

  ‘Hello? Anyone?’

  There was a shuffling, the sound of a cardboard box tumbling to the ground. ‘Ow.’

  ‘HELLO?’

  ‘WAIT AH, WAIT.’ The person who came out from behind the aisles was smaller than the old lady. Huay? Wang Di thought. She wanted to squint and rub her eyes. The woman was still frowning. ‘Do you need help looking for something?’

  When they finally sat down, squeezing their way past the boxes, into the back room, Wang Di told her that she used to live in Hougang, and stuttered a little before asking if she was part of the family who lived behind a little convenience store. The woman replied yes and shifted in her seat, as if she knew what was coming.

  ‘I knew your sister. Huay. I’m here because I promised her, decades ago, that I would look for her family. We lived together for over two years. During the war.’ Then she told the woman about the black-and-white house, said how sorry she was to have waited for so long. ‘She told me all about you. She said you were her favourite, the baby in the family.’

  The baby, now sixty-five, took a few deep breaths as she wiped her face with her sleeve. ‘I thought she had left us. That’s what they told me. She left us to get married to a Japanese officer.’

  Wang Di said nothing.

  ‘I never believed it. All those things people were saying. She would have written, at the very least.’

  ‘Of course she would have.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  Though she had predicted the question would come, had practised answering it over and over again the night before, sitting in front of Huay’s sister made her want to change her mind. Would it be kinder, she wondered, if she told her that Huay had not suffered and left it at that?

  ‘She fell ill. She was so sick that she got confused and tried to escape. So they killed her.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She was shot.’

  There was a long silence. Wang Di listened as the woman ground her teeth.

  ‘At least it was quick.’ She sighed – half relief, half sorrow. ‘You know, I was so sure that she would come back to find us gone that I wrote a letter. Left it in the kitchen.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I remember her being taken away. I remember even though everyone told me to forget. And I always hoped that she would come back. But at least now I know.’

  ‘She was always kind. She taught me to write my name.’

  The woman smiled. ‘Yes. She wanted to become a teacher.’

  A week after their first meeting, Yong Xiang drove Kevin and Wang Di to the national archives. It was raining and he drove slowly, knowing that Wang Di wasn’t used to the movements of the van, especially with it raining so hard that she couldn’t see past the windscreen, could only see red, mottled lights all around her. When she put a hand to her head, he told her to press her fingers into the insides of her wrist if she felt motion sick. It sometimes helped his wife, he said.

  The downpour became a drizzle as they got closer to the city. By the time they turned into the road that led to the national archives, the rain had stopped. The building was modest, just four storeys high. When they went in, Yong Xiang signed his name in a book as the receptionist chatted with someone over the phone. She smiled and nodded at him as if she’d been expecting him. Them. Wang Di said nothing, just followed them into a room filled with wide tables and low shelves stacked with files and books. It smelled of old paper and wood and must. Smells she knew and was familiar with. Kevin took the old lady by the elbow, led her to one of the computers lined up against the wall and guided her into a chair, steadying the wheels with one foot as she lowered herself into the seat.

  Wang Di let them take care of everything. Yong Xiang tapping and clicking away on the computer while Kevin clamped the headset over her head. They had listened to the reel a few days ago, sat at this very table, leaned in over their elbows, and listened. Yong Xiang had gone over the recordings, all six of them, twice over.

  ‘Okay?’ he asked, giving her the thumbs up.

  She said yes and held on to the headset. It was heavier than she thought it would be and she swayed her head back and forth, trying to make sure that it wouldn’t fall off.

  He pressed a button and a low buzz flooded her ears. Someone cleared his throat. There was a crackle of paper, then a billow of exhaled air, straight into her ear.

  ‘Pleas
e state your name.’ A man’s voice, a stranger.

  Another throat rattle, then, ‘My name is Chia Soon Wei.’

  ‘I was fifteen when I got my first job, considered quite late for the boys in my neighbourhood,’ the Old One said. ‘But my father made me stay in school. Said that he would beat me to within an inch of my life if I ever set foot in a farm, or a factory. He wanted me to do something else, learn an easier trade, or even better, become a man of letters. I could read and write, I could, but I never liked books very much. They seemed so removed from the rest of the world – the world that I knew anyway. I forget why but I decided to become an apprentice for a tailor, a friend of a relative. All I did for the first few months was measure out lengths of fabric that people came to buy but I thought this seemed practical. Everyone needs clothes and I could eventually have a store of my own, if I did well enough. That’s what I longed for. To have a place of my own.

  ‘I was still working at Mr Tan’s shop when Japan invaded China. I remember volunteers coming around to collect money, donations for the resistance army in China, and Mr Tan saying that we had to do all we could for our people back home. I donated a little money. I didn’t tell him this but I didn’t think of China as home anymore. My parents had long stopped writing to the family that was left in our village. I think a lot of people came to Singapore thinking to go back once they made enough money… There was always talk about going back but as the years went by, Singapore became home. Myself, I never thought about leaving. I was only two when we left so I remember nothing about Chaozhou. Home is where you build your own family. In 1939, I was newly married to a girl from the same kampong. We had always known each other and our parents got along and approved. She moved in with me and my parents the way people did in those days. This was home. We were just starting to build a life for ourselves.

  ‘We were just beginning. I was just beginning, in a way. About a year later, we had a child, a boy. Suddenly, there was someone else to take care of. It made me feel different, less of a person, and more. Because there was a part of me in that little boy, you see? But I was more because I had real responsibilities now. I’d helped create a human being. I felt so helpless when things started to go wrong. My son was about a year old when my employer let me go because business was being affected by the war in China.

  ‘We never thought that the Japanese would come to Singapore. That even if they did, the British forces would see them off. Then in December, they bombed the naval base, which was in the north of the island, and the city centre. From that day on, I began stockpiling food. I think a lot of people did. We couldn’t imagine it before, but after that day, people started getting scared. I mean, I was still optimistic but every day, I returned home after work with a few cans of powdered milk, pickled vegetables, sometimes a slice of salted fish wrapped in newspaper. I didn’t say this to my wife but I felt that something was going to happen. When she stumbled upon the cupboard full of tins – she was bound to because she was the one managing the kitchen – she just looked at me, as if she knew.’

  The interviewer said, ‘So it was only after that first bombing in December that you realized that Singapore was going to be implicated in the war?’

  ‘Yes. Everyone seemed so confident. We all thought there was no way… Even after that attack, I thought – we thought – that it would pass. That the Japanese would move on. I don’t know. Maybe because we were a small island. I thought, why would they want a little island like ours?

  ‘The rest of December 1941 was relatively quiet. There were several false alarms, with the sirens going off for no reason. After a while, people started to ignore them. Life went on, as it does. People went to work and school, bought and sold things at the market. Then at the end of the month, the air raids started again. This time, we could hear the planes roaring over our heads. It continued every night for a week. Each night it woke my little boy and he would scream as my wife and I brought him to the shelter, just a little way from our home. All of us, my parents, our neighbours, about fifteen to twenty of us, would cram into that shelter. It was little more than a dugout reinforced around the sides with wooden planks and sandbags. It had a zinc roof so that when it rained, there would be such a racket, the tap-tap-tap of raindrops close to our heads. My parents would be the last to arrive because my mother had arthritic knees. She would lean on my father and he would support her even though his own legs were bad. They would be the last to arrive. Each time I saw that, I thought, that was love.

  ‘It got worse in January. That’s when they began to attack us during the day. We tried to go on with life as usual. I went to work whenever I could, doing odd jobs as a labourer. Sometimes the sirens rang all day so I couldn’t even leave the house. My wife occupied herself by preparing for the Lunar New Year celebrations. She wanted to go to the market to buy a hen, she said, there was still time to fatten one up before reunion dinner on New Year’s Eve. I said yes but we never got around to it… One day, I saw the planes as I ran from a construction site I was working on to the public shelter. I only saw them for a moment but they were majestic things – sleek and gleaming in the sunlight. At first I couldn’t figure out whose planes they were. When I realized that they belonged to the Japanese, I felt foolish. I thought – many of us had thought – that their planes couldn’t possibly match up to the ones flown by the British army. And yet there they were, flying over us, day after day, dropping bombs, and the British army didn’t – couldn’t – do anything about it…

  ‘It went on for the rest of the month, and into February. I heard that many people were killed during these raids, mostly because of flying shrapnel. Our kampong didn’t suffer a hit but I’ll always remember this cloud of thick, black smoke rising far away, blocking out the sun. During the next couple of weeks, we spent so much time in the shelter that my wife sometimes brought bread and kaya along, dealing out slices whenever someone got hungry. We would take turns holding our toddler. Often he would sleep right through until we got the all clear to go back into our homes.’

  The interviewer said, ‘When did you realize the Japanese were gaining the upper hand?’

  ‘I didn’t know. The British were so optimistic on the radio. Churchill sounded strong, confident. I didn’t think the island was going to fall but there were whispers about the Japanese invading part of the island; villages in the north. But I didn’t pay much attention to it. Just rumours. Even if it were true, we lived close to the south of the island and I had hoped that the resistance fighters and the armies would stop them before they got any closer. A few of our neighbours packed up and left, we saw them making their way with cloth bags filled with a few supplies. I don’t know where they were headed. But we stayed.

  ‘And anyway, I couldn’t think about anything else but what was in front of me – taking care of my family, putting food on the table, my job. Between running to the shelter and waiting for the shelling and bombing to come to an end, I didn’t have the time or energy to think about much else. My mother and wife were also busy preparing for the Lunar New Year. It’s strange to think of it now but we were excited about it – as if it were any other year. I remember my neighbours had bought fireworks. Their children couldn’t wait and set off a string of them a week before; it gave the people living close to them the fright of their lives – they thought it was gunfire or bombs or something. My wife. She was so cheerful when I returned home after work one evening and I asked why. She said she was lucky, she got the last bit of duck from the hawker. She had saved up for months for it. That was the day before…before it happened. Up until then, I felt that things would be okay if we just made it past the new year, somehow.’

  The Old One sighed. There was the sound of a chair being scraped across the floor.‘It started early in the day. The sound of guns, of gunfire. I found out that the British and a local resistance army were fighting the Japs, but I only heard it through the news and word of mouth much later. That day, all we knew was that it sounded close, the fighting, so we staye
d in the air-raid shelter until it stopped. I remember my boy playing with a rattan ball that a neighbour had given him for his first birthday. He had just started to walk on his own and the whole time we were in that shelter, he was stumbling around, picking the ball up and then throwing it again. He had got used to the noise the way some people got used to living near the railway and having trains roar past their homes every day.

  ‘There was a lull in the sound of gunfire, and for no reason at all I thought “we have to leave”. Just like that. Then I told my family, said we should go back into the house to pack up. Neither my parents nor my wife protested. While my wife packed clothing for all of us, I went into the kitchen to retrieve some of the food that I had put away. It was then that I heard the sound of heavy vehicles nearby. Nothing else. Just the sound of engines. I thought it might be the British troops passing through so I carried on packing. We were almost ready to leave when I heard the crunch of tyres on sand and then footsteps coming our way.

  ‘Someone yelled in Hokkien and Mandarin, telling us to step out of our homes. I remember walking out of the house, holding my hand out behind me to tell my family to stay put. There were soldiers, some of them carrying rifles, others with swords fastened to their belts. They looked tired and dishevelled, as if they’d all been dragged through the forest all morning. Some of them had stains on their uniforms the colour of dark mud. Blood, I later realized. These were Japanese soldiers.

  ‘There was one man. I remember him. He was the one who told us to come out. He was standing next to another man who kept turning to him, speaking in Japanese. He yelled again, his face so distorted by his wide-open mouth that I felt a wild urge to laugh. Until he punctuated his words by firing a pistol into the air at the end of his speech. Soon, everyone was standing outside their houses, in the sun. I felt my wife clutch the back of my shirt, heard my son cry. He sounded so far away but I turned and he was right there, in her arms.