How We Disappeared
SynopsisPlot
When her husband dies in the year 2000, Wang Di is forced into the solitary life of a widow in modern Singapore. But this new silence brings with it a surge of memories, taking her back to the brutal events of the Japanese invasion which altered the course of her life forever. Twelve-year-old Kevin is preoccupied with his own family worries; his father is suffering from depression, Kevin is being bullied at school, and his beloved grandmother’s health is declining fast. And then, on her deathbed, she makes a surprising confession – one she never meant for Kevin to hear. Back in 1942, Wang Di is sixteen years old and forced into sexual slavery as a Comfort Woman. What she sees and experiences will haunt her present nearly sixty years later. Meanwhile, after his grandmother’s death, Kevin sets about finding out the truth – a truth that will lead him to Wang Di; to the events of that brutal war and to a reckoning no one is prepared for and which can no longer be suppressed.
Story
About this book
Set in Singapore across two timelines, How We Disappeared follows Wang Di, a woman whose husband's death in the year 2000 opens the door to decades of suppressed memory. As a sixteen-year-old during the Japanese occupation of 1942, Wang Di was taken from her village and forced into sexual slavery as a so-called comfort woman, a term used for women and girls coerced into service at military brothels. Nearly sixty years later, she lives alone with events she has never spoken about openly.
The novel's second strand centers on twelve-year-old Kevin, whose grandmother makes a confession on her deathbed that he was never meant to hear. Already dealing with his father's depression and bullying at school, Kevin begins searching for answers. His search eventually connects him to Wang Di and to the wartime history behind his grandmother's words.
Jing-Jing Lee drew in part on her own family's experiences to construct the novel. The two timelines move between occupied Singapore during the Second World War and the modern city-state at the turn of the millennium, tracing how silence around wartime atrocities can persist for generations and what happens when that silence finally breaks.
