How We Disappeared: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020

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Weaving together two time lines and two very big secrets, this stunning debut opens a window on a little-known period of history, revealing the strength and bravery shown by numerous women in the face of terrible cruelty.

If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. This was perhaps a little slow at times, but overall it was compelling as I waited to see how Kevin and Wand Di’s paths would cross.Fast forward sixty years , recently widowed Wang Di earns a meagre living recycling cardboard (referred to as ‘cardboard lady’ by her neighbors) . He smiled while she rubbed a damp cloth over his face, his neck, his hands, cracking his joints as she wiped from palm to nail. Just as poisonous is the shame that was heaped upon Wang Di as a “comfort woman” at the war’s end, and ensured her silence for nearly 60 years. Evocative and heart rending, it tells of one woman's survival in occupied Singapore, and the quest of a child to solve a family mystery.

It is this cassette player that he uses to record a cryptic confession that his grandmother makes on her deathbed. Jing-Jing Lee has a lot of empathy for her characters, she does not indulge in flashy descriptions of violence or in kitsch, and she taught me quite a bit about Singapore. Jing-Jing Lee's How We Disappeared is a captivating and heart-wrenching novel about identity, displacement, and resilience in the face of war.This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. Was it the sufferings she had to face in the military camp or the words said by her mother and her family? Raises poignant questions regarding multi-generational trauma, accelerated modernization, and changing identity. Not only did Wang Di face the threat of death should she not comply while enslaved by the Japanese military, but she faced censure from the rest of society after the war ended. Weaving together two timelines and two very big secrets, this debut opens a window on a little-known period of history.

It took hours, and it was only after muddying up swathes of moth-eaten sheets the neighbours had given in the last few weeks of her mother’s pregnancy that she emerged.Auntie Tin had appeared at the door one Sunday and snaked inside past her mother before she had been invited to. The only explanation I can give is that my father must have told me about this part of my family’s history when I was too little to understand the significance of it, and subconsciously filed it away in my mind, only to have it resurface much later, when I was writing the book. For me Wang Di and this part of the narrative is the strength of the book, and I believe it would have been a better book if Kevin had been left out of the narrative all together. The Allied forces were twice the strength of the Japanese, but a badly organised and badly commanded defence condemned the people of Singapore to three and a half years of brutal occupation. Her hand fluttered to the faint scar on her neck, right where her pulse lay, then went down to the line on her lower stomach, the raised welt of it smooth beneath her fingers.

How We Disappeared is a remarkable, original novel that uncovers the long-silenced atrocities that the 'comfort women' in Singapore suffered at the hands of the Japanese during WWII. In a neighboring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is strapped into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced into sexual slavery as a "comfort woman. She named the main character Chiow Tee after her own mother; the name means "care for a brother" ( 照 弟 zhàodì). If you're going to read one book about sexual slavery off the Women's Prize longlist, make it this one instead of Girl.This book highlights on comfort women, as in what they went through, how they felt, how the things they experienced affected them and how it slowly changed them and drew out their once innocent and upbeat spirit. But not even this meticulous foregrounding prepares the reader for the visceral power and heartbreak of this exquisitely rendered debut novel. It seems a failed opportunity on Lee's part not to provide a first-person narrative of a second (or even a third) comfort woman who's experiences are a more authentic portrayal of the abuse, rape, trauma, starvation, disease and death suffered by comfort women. And then, after the horror during what was supposed to be her best years, how her mother’s words, the shame foisted on her by herself, her family and everyone around her, had dictated the silence that shadowed her every move after the war. Then, just as war arrives in her village, her tale is interrupted by the arrival of 12-year-old Kevin in a third narrative strand.