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

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Jing-Jing Lee’s first novel, How We Disappeared (OneWorld UK / Hanover US, 2019; reviewed this issue), begins in 2000 and flashes back to episodes in this terrible time for her birthplace (which is also mine). She earned a master's degree in creative writing from Oxford in 2011 and has since seen her poetry and short stories published in various journals and anthologies.

My great-grandfather suffered a stab wound and the cries of his youngest child were the last sounds he heard before he passed out. I do think a bit too much of the narrative focused on Kevin - not to the detriment of Wang Di's narrative, as I felt that her sections were properly fleshed out - it's more that Kevin himself added very little as a character. Wang Di is captured by the Japanese and forced to serve the soldiers and officers as a “comfort woman”, a euphemism for prostitute, but prostitute is also a misleading description for these women because they are never actually payed.At the heart of Lee’s historical tale lies the murky secret of the abduction of 17-year-old Wang Di from rural Kampong by Japanese troops and her subsequent imprisonment in a military brothel where she is forced to serve as a ‘comfort woman’ under the name, Fujiko, for three years till the cessation of hostilities.

The way he looked – she should have known; was trying not to think it while she combed his hair, telling herself how little he had changed.Non è un libro che sconsiglio, perché di sicuro non è brutto né fatto male; ma per quanto mi riguarda è un libro nella media. A lot of the details of the families trying to survive during the occupation was sad and horrific, but the second, present day timeline seemed unnecessary to the story and just didn’t appeal to me in the end. Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. And then one day you open a drawer and out come all the secrets that have just been sitting quietly, waiting to be found, even though you never thought about them, never suspected they existed in the first place. She wanted to focus attention on the " comfort women" taken to work as slaves in Japanese military brothels, unlike other fiction about the occupation of Singapore which focused on resistance violence and male prisoners of war.