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If you are interested in books about WWII or books about Asian history, I think you will probably enjoy this more than I did. But unless you're really interested in these subjects, I don't think the novel has enough substance to really stand on its own and appeal to people who are strangers to the historical fiction genre and are looking for something light and titillating to read. HOW WE DISAPPEARED isn't a bad book by any means. I found it flawed, but there were parts of it I enjoyed. It doesn't shy away from the atrocities of war, and the casualties of the war in the form of women who were taken against their will and ill-used by soldiers who saw them as objects ripe for play or abuse. I also liked how language played a somewhat central role, and how the meanings of certain characters and words were mentioned. I'm currently learning Chinese right now, and it was really exciting to recognize certain romanticized words, like di, and even some of the characters. This imbued the novel with a relevance for me that went far deeper than the surface storyline. As with most Singaporeans, I learned what civilians went through during the Japanese Occupation as I was growing up, some of it from stories that my relatives told in hushed, yet bitter voices, some of it from programmes, fictional and otherwise, on TV. The “accepted narrative” is openly discussed in textbooks and in the national newspaper. Every year, there is a day of remembrance for people who died during the occupation, especially for those who were captured and tortured for being part of the resistance. These were heroes and victims of a sort that people recognised and could contend with. Yet it remains largely unspoken that the Japanese raped local women and abducted them during the occupation – this has to do with the dreadful stigma attached to sexual violence in most of Asia, even today. The fact that Singapore is a tiny country only magnifies this. Everyone on the island is connected in one way or another, with one or two degrees of separation. In the 40s and 50s, to let anyone know that you’re a rape victim was to expose yourself to shame and condemnation for the rest of your life. For research, I trawled through hours of audio interviews; whenever rape or abduction was mentioned, the interviewee always made a point to emphasise that it happened to someone else, someone outside of the immediate family – a neighbour, the friend of a sister-in-law, a stranger. An elderly woman is haunted by her past as a "comfort woman," while many people would prefer to cover up their family member’s tragic history.
I asked Lee whether she thought that the issue of “comfort women” is being more openly discussed in Singapore now, as it is in Korea and China, for instance. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.
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Era un’adolescente quando fu strappata alla sua famiglia per diventare una “comfort woman”, una delle tante donne che soddisfacevano i bisogni dei militari giapponesi.
Readers will immediately notice the beautiful cover of this Historical Fiction novel that looks at WWII from a different vantage point - the Japanese occupation of Singapore between 1942 and 1945. 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. The narrative switches between Wang Di during the War , Wang-Di ‘s present life and Kevin and his quest for answers. The story continues in the present day when Kevin and Wang Di’s worlds converge and the revelations that are unearthed unravel a connection long thought to be lost which enable Wang Di and Kevin’s family to reconcile with their past and present traumas. On 15 February 1942, the island of Singapore in Southeast Asia surrendered to a Japanese invasion force. 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.Banerjee, Argha Krishna (28 August 2020). "Secret horrors from 1940's Singapore". Telegraph India . Retrieved 7 May 2022. In the creative hands of Jing-Jing Lee, the rawness and the brutality of the war years in Singapore become a reality for all of us. Once occupied by the British, Singapore became a land seemingly passed from hand to hand always waiting for the boots of strangers to fill the room with echoes of uncertainty. The book's pacing is ineffective, and the framework lends itself to redundancy. Finally, the first and last chapters allude to the unreliability of memory but feel like a cheap riff off of Life of Pi You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Parallelamente alla sua storia, c’è il racconto del piccolo Kevin un ragazzino singaporiano bullizzato a scuola che, alla morte della nonna, scopre un grande segreto celato alla famiglia per anni.
The author brings across the horror of Wang Di’s wartime plight without having to resort to gratuitous description and the passages are all the stronger for that. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. More than 50 years later, a 12-year-old boy records a confession by his grandmother on her death bed. He begins a journey that will unravel the secrets of his family’s past. Overall, while I had some issues with this book, it is an evocative read about survival, female endurance and the long road to healing. Lee first won praise for her portrayal of the rich inner lives of Singapore’s social outcasts in her 2013 novella, If I Could Tell You, but with How We Disappeared, she has created that rare novel that speaks to hope as much as to grief; to resilience as much as to erasure. The notion of erasure is a potent undercurrent in How We Disappeared, where Singapore itself – an island whose shape Lee likens to “the meat of an oyster” – is another character in the story. And it is a character so vividly evoked that the novel serves not only as a powerful homage to the women who were shamed into silence, but also to the spirit of this island; a hymn to its lost lanes, kampongs, markets and disappeared lives.
In the year 2000, twelve-year-old Kevin is determined to find out the truth – wherever it might lead – after his grandmother makes a surprising confession on her deathbed, one she never meant Kevin to hear, setting in motion a chain of events he could never have foreseen. Bullied, nerdish Singaporean Chinese schoolboy Kevin starts a personal research project to try to make sense of the mutterings of his dying grandmother. His chain of discoveries leads him to revelations that he would never have imagined, and to facts about his family that even his parents did not know. In a parallel narrative, starting in 1942, a teenaged girl called Wang Di is carried off by Japanese soldiers from her home village and put to work as a “comfort woman” in an official military brothel.
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