Review of How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee

*How We Disappeared* by Jing-Jing Lee (2019). Published by Hanover Square Press.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I’ve always and forever been a library girl from the bottom of my heart. When I was a child my mother would always take us to the library and I’d pick out a ridiculous amount of books, and I’ve continued that tradition when I moved home from New York City, after college, in order to keep picking my brain for new stories out there in the world.

I love stories, hence why I even became a writer. When I was unemployed during this period I found solace in books (and movies/television, too) because it fed into my own creativity and reminded me the options and world out there were limitless. The library is somewhere that is sacred to me, and I’ve been loving how my local system has been leaning hard into acquiring diverse titles.

Lately I’ve been able to go into my library branch and find books from all over the world, LBGTQ+ authors, and so much more, and I’ve been living it up. I find all of these new, wonderful books I had no idea existed before the day began, and it makes me so much more curious about the rest of the world out there.

I was wandering the depths of the fiction section when I landed in the “L” last names section and saw this spine sitting there in front of me. I’d actually been meaning to read this novel for quite a bit of time now, but because my TBR list is always so long, I never got to it. But while I was unemployed was the perfect time, so I grabbed it off the shelf and ended up reading it in the course of two days.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know this might bore a lot of people. We’re here for the book!

Across two timelines, we learn the impacts of what happened to a small Malaysian/Singaporean village and how it ripples across generations.

This is a novel that takes place across two different timelines, with chapters often alternating between them. We begin though in the present day of the novel, which is 2000. A boy named Kevin is 12-years-old at the start of the novel, and he’s struggling with the circumstances of his life. He’s being bullied at his school by his male classmates, and his grandmother is actively dying.

When he’s sitting next to his grandmother during her final hours on Earth, she admits something that rattles him. What she confessed on her deathbed will drive Kevin to try and figure out the mystery of what he heard from her that day, even if it means not telling his parents what exactly he’s up to.

It’s the discoveries that Kevin makes that unravel the mystery of the past. This is the section of the novel that takes place in the past, when Singapore is being occupied by the Japanese in the midst of World War II. The year is 1942, so there are several years before the country is going to be liberated by the end of the war.

Until then, the Japanese are committing acts of atrocities against the locals. For Wang Di, who is sixteen years old, she has to watch as the Japanese come into her village. When her brother starts speaking to the soldiers, not knowing the consequences of what’s to come, they decide to take her away and put her in the back of their car.

She is taken away from her family and forced to another part of the region. Now she is known as what we call a comfort woman, which is a form of sexual slavery (which the Japanese government still refuses to acknowledge and amend their wrongs about). These young girls and women were raped by the Japanese soldiers in rounds, and barely given anything to survive beyond another day of sex.

This part of the story is horrific, but Wang Di does survive. It’s her survival, then marriage, that connects the missing dots to Kevin’s story he’s trying to excavate in the modern day. Even when comfort women survived and came back to their homes, families, and villages, they were often cast away forever by the societies they lived in because they were now impure by societal standards.

Which is another tragedy layered onto what’s happened, but this involves deeper discussion. I recommend reading narratives of comfort women in Southeast Asia and Korea to understand the severity of the trauma these women faced—it’s truly awful.

Overall Thoughts

As someone who hasn’t read a ton of Singaporean literature, but dabbles in its history here and there, I found this book to be quite compelling. If you know nothing of the history going into this novel I suggest reading up the basics on Singapore from the 1930s onwards. You don’t have to go in-depth, but there’s a reason it’s a wealthy nation in SEA beyond World War II.

Anyways, this was pretty well written, and I could see the characters existing beyond the pages of this book. That said, the pacing was a bit slow at times, so if you weren’t invested in continuing it, I could see how someone else might get bored with the historical parts, no matter how tragic they could be at times. I couldn’t look away at what was happening personally.

If you’re interested in the book, or the history, I suggest picking this one up from your local indie bookstore or library branch. I think it was worth reading, even though I’m not sure if I am going to be picking it back up any time soon. Maybe if I was teaching a class on contemporary SEA and memory I’d definitely be teaching and picking this one back up again.

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