How We Disappeared

This book is a work of art. I loved absolutely everything about it. Set in Singapore during the Japanese occupation, it tells the story of a woman who lived in abhorrent circumstances and survived. It is lightly interwoven with the story of her husband and the horrors he too experienced at the hands of the Japanese.

It isn't an easy story to read but it is so worth it. By the end my heart was broken, but my mind and soul felt so enriched. An incredibly powerful story that will stay with me for a long time.

A heart-breaking story. It was fascinating to learn more about Singapore during the war and I loved the weaving together of two timelines - old and modern.This book will stay with me. Sensitive writing on a difficult subject.

This beautifully written story laments the damage done to relationships and individuals, by keeping secrets considered ‘shameful’ and not speaking out of what is buried deep inside us; how this affects future love, ‘self-growth’ and respect.

Wang Di and Soon Wei have been married for over 50 years. Each kept quiet about their respective catastrophic wartime experiences, each trying to ‘protect’ the other and one bearing a deep ‘shame’ which she was warned never to speak about by her own mother – particularly to her husband.  Wang Di is Soon Wei’s second wife – she never questions where he vanishes to every February and he never gives an explanation. When he dies, she has so many questions unanswered and secrets unvoiced.

Alongside their story is a modern one about Wei Han, or ‘Kevin’, a curious 12 year old who is losing his sight. He loves his Grandma dearly and inherits her tape recorder with which he hopes to prepare himself for the blindness which is expected in his future. On her deathbed she believes Wei Han is his father and is taped making a confusing confession to him .

Both our main characters, Wang Di and Wei Han are eager to discover the truth about their recently lost loved ones. The story is their journeys of discovery, their determination and how both become stronger people – the result is uplifting and life affirming. I love this book; how it’s written, its message, its philosophy.

Shocking, gritty in places (where required), the author does not shy away from horror and despair where it needs to be described. The title suggests not only how society made certain people ‘disappear’ – namely the ‘Comfort Women’, and those witness to atrocities in WWII but also how individuals try to make parts of their very being ‘disappear’ when it is too hurtful to remember or reveal to someone else – even their closest loved ones. A real gem of a book.

"Who's going to listen?" I repeated. [...] "Don't tell anyone. Not me or your father or any of the neighbours. Especially not your future husband."

An important book that is hard reading at times as we learn the story of one woman's life as a 'comfort woman' to the Japanese Army in Singapore during WW2. 

I have to say that I found this uneven in places: I loved the heart of the book, Wang Di's cathartic narrative as she finally allows herself to tell the story of her captivity and experiences. But I found it all wrapped up in far less entrancing tales: Wang Di as an old woman 'now', and Kevin who is searching for his antecedents. Not just do these stories take away from the prime wartime narrative, but I tend to dislike these kinds of full-circle 'happy' endings, reuniting the lost.

Still, what I consider the main story is wonderfully realised in all its horror and terror. What is so striking is not just what these women went through during the war, but the shame they experienced as if they had done something wrong rather than having wrong done to them. The cultural burden of silence imposed on them by their families who wanted to just look away is what tore me up the most. 

So I might not have necessarily agreed with the structural and narrative decisions that the author made but would recommend this book widely: it's painful reading but surely urgent and necessary - especially as women are still being trafficked into sexual slavery, and placed in 'rape camps' in wars around the world.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this but thought I would expand my reading and am so glad I did.  This book kept me gripped from the first page where Wang Di tells the reader two stories of how she may have been welcomed into the world.  
The book is told in two times frames and two perspectives both on the island of Singapore.  In 1942 we meet Wang Di a seventeen year old girl who is just waiting for the matchmaker to find her a husband, once her family agree, but then the Japanese invade.  In 2000 twelve year old Kevin is trying to get through the perils of being a child in today’s world and grief on the loss of his grandmother.  
It was like a thriller you knew what was going to happen to Wang Di but you dread it with every page and hope for a happy ending.  Knowing that the story is based in historical truths the  happy ending seems unlikely.  
I loved this book and how the story of Wang Di unravelled before becoming whole again.  I would highly recommend this book and enjoyed learning about the history of Singapore as I learned Wang Di’s.
Thanks to OneWorld publications and NetGalley for an ARC.
#NetGalley #HowWeDisappeared

‘He knew what the unsaid did to people.  Ate away at them from the inside.’

Singapore, 1942.  The Japanese troops sweep all before them as they move through Malaysia and into Singapore.  In one village, only two people and a tiny child survive.  In a nearby village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is taken from her village to a Japanese military brothel, where she is forced into sexual slavery.  Wang Di becomes one of becomes one of the ‘comfort women’.  

Later, Wang Di marries.  Her husband, affectionately known as ‘The Old One’ has also been traumatised by the war.  He was widowed and lost his family.  The two of them never speak to each other of their experiences.  
And then, years later after ‘The Old One’ dies, Wang Di tries to find out more about his past.

‘’Tell me a story.’  It was then she knew he had been waiting to say this.  Waiting for decades for the right moment.  And now he couldn’t wait anymore.’

Almost sixty years later, in 2000, twelve-year-old Kevin is with his grandmother as she is dying. She reveals to Kevin (unintentionally) a secret that she has kept for many years.  Kevin sets out to find out more about this secret.

The novel shifts between the young Wang Di and her experiences during the war, the elderly Wang Di and her search, and Kevin and his search.

I found parts of this novel difficult to read: the experiences of the ‘comfort women’ and their treatment are harrowing.  Ms Lee’s writing kept me reading, as did my desire to learn more about the secrets ‘The Old One’ and Wang Di had kept from each other. Each trying to protect the other from the horrors of the past.  

There is both horror and hope in this novel.  It is a novel I will reread.

‘Sometimes all you had to do to get someone to talk was to be silent.’

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Oneworld Publications for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Beautifully written, this book has stayed with me after reading it. Not many books do that with me these days, so that should be an indication of just how good it is. The very sensitive subject matter is handled well, and written in such a way that it gave me a true insight into other situations, and the hardships some people have had to endure. Don't miss this one.

As I started to read How We Disappeared, I felt that it was fortuitously connected to my last Asian novel, The Garden of Evening Mists. That post-war Malaysian story included passing references to the ianfu (comfort women) and How We Disappeared is a fictionalised, but well researched, account from one such woman, Wang Di. To be honest, this is a horrific story. Not the novel itself, of course. Lee's delicate yet powerful prose style is perfectly suited to the tale and I couldn't tear myself away from the pages. But imagining what those thousands of ianfu women endured firstly years of sexual abuse from the seemingly endless queues of Japanese soldiers and then, after the war ended, being shunned by their own families who frequently turned their backs on returning women because the shame was too much. A relation who has been mentally and physically almost destroyed by her wartime experience and she gets no help or 'comfort' herself because sex hurt her so everybody looks away and pretends she doesn't exist. It's heartbreaking.



If I haven't scared you off yet though, and you enjoy good literary fiction, then this is absolutely a novel to pick up and read. Wang Di speaks to us in vivid remembrances of the past, but also of her life as the crazy old woman she has become. We learn of the sixty years following the war, her marriage and the ways in which she learned to cope, strategies that seem bizarre to outsiders yet are completely plausible when their roots are known. I was reminded of Sylvie in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping where a misunderstood woman encounters similar reactions to her behaviour. Then the connection with young Kevin is a lovely storyline and I appreciated its thoroughly believable conclusion. How We Disappeared is an amazing read that I think will become a classic.