How We Disappeared

by Jing-Jing Lee

  When I woke up, I was in hospital. The child was next to me. The first thing I said to the nurse was a lie: ‘The child isn’t mine. I found him.’ The words came so easily, they must have been right. ‘He belongs to someone else,’ I added. I remember her face, kind, distant, unreadable. She took him away and I fell asleep again, this time for days.

  That is one story.

  Or, I sat for a long time in the clearing waiting for him to open his eyes, touching his face, holding my ear above his nose to try and hear him breathe. I sat there as the sun crept from east to west, as a light rain fell in the late afternoon. The crickets were starting up when I accepted that he wouldn’t, that his quiet was permanent, there would be no waking him. And there I was, surrounded by different trees, choosing which one to bury him under. I chose a young angsana and broke into the ground with my fingers. The damp soil came away in my hands quite easily. I made a deep hollow in the earth, smoothed the cloth around him again to cover his face, and put him in. It took everything I had to push the soil over him, patting it firm when that was done. I sat for a long time touching my hand to his resting place. I told myself he was safe, that there was nothing he would have to fear anymore. When I woke, I was somewhere else.

  Or, I called out in the clearing and an old woman, so small and bent that the grass had hidden her completely, stepped out from within the field. She had been foraging, had a little basket filled with leaves and tapioca in the crook of her arm. She asked if I was okay and if I needed help. Her hut was just ten minutes’ walk away, she said. It was a tiny village – no more than eight families – and as we approached, people came out to look or stared from their doorways. She said not to mind them, and led me in. It was just her and her husband, no one else, and she made me a meal from the things she’d found. Yam and rice, the porridge tinged orange from the sweet root. While I ate, she fed the child for me, spooning the gruel into his mouth. There were a few goats in the village, she said, and if she asked she might be able to get some milk. There was a softness in her voice, and I thought about asking where the rest of her family was but I didn’t, afraid of the answer. Before it got dark, her husband went out and returned with a rattan mat. They made a bed for me in the sitting room, gathered as many blankets as they could find to make it comfortable, and told me I could stay for as long as I needed to. I thanked them and waited for them to fall asleep. Before I left, I made sure the baby was warm and nestled in the middle of the blankets. The last words I said to him were: ‘I told you I would find you a home.’ I stumbled for half an hour in the twilight until I became too exhausted to continue and ended up back in the clearing, under a tree. I slept until I was found again.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘but which one is true?’

  I said all of them were. All of them. Every one of the things I told him, with my thousands and thousands of words and sounds, every one of them was true.

  ‘But…’ he repeated. The furrows between his eyebrows getting deeper, pinched in.

  So I asked him, ‘Which one do you think is true?’

  He took his time, and when he looked up, he was sure.

  ‌Acknowledgements

  A great number of books and articles and documentaries about comfort women and the Asia-Pacific War have aided and propelled the writing of this novel, especially The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang; Omdat Wij Mooi Waren (Because We Were Beautiful), a documentary by Frank van Osch.

  Thank you, Nelle Andrew, for your bold guiding hand. Thank you, Marilia Savvides and the rest of the team at Peters, Fraser + Dunlop.

  Thank you, Juliet Mabey, for your electric wisdom. Thanks to all at Oneworld for their support and warmth, especially Kate Bland, Anne Bihan, Alyson Coombes and Paul Nash, all of whom helped put the book together, piece by piece.

  Thank you, Peter Joseph, John Glynn and Natalie Hallak at Hanover Square Press for making a safe home for Wang Di in the US.

  Thanks to my parents, who generously allowed me to use our family history in this novel. (And who are still looking, sometimes, for that lost child.)

  Thanks to my fellow writers, Bette Adriaanse, Erik Boman and Genevieve Hudson, for your eyes. Thanks to Cheryl Goh, for your safe pair of hands.

  Thank you, Marco.

  A Oneworld Book

  First published in Great Britain, North America and

  Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2019

  This ebook edition published 2019

  Copyright © Jing-Jing Lee, 2019

  The moral right of Jing-Jing Lee to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78607-412-6 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-78607-596-3 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-78607-413-3 (eBook)

  Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpt from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 2000 by O. W. Toad, Ltd. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Li-Young Lee, excerpt from ‘Furious Versions’ from The City In Which I Love You. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

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