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

Product Information

Reading guide and discussion questions to accompany the Big Jubilee Read title How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee. This was a traumatic story about a woman who was abducted during the Japanese occupation of Singapore in WWII for service as a “comfort woman”. Too much of the book is dedicated to following a secondary character, Kevin, whose connection to Wang Di is too insignificant to warrant dedicating half the book to his uninspired attempts to solve an emotionally detached mystery. My great-grandfather got away with a stab wound in his torso but lost all of his family (except for two daughters who had married shortly before the invasion and moved out), but he never talked about what happened during the war until he became demented. Because the only time her parents used her name was when someone important was at the door, someone life-changing, or rich.

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. He put the bundle on the table like a packet of biscuits and told his wife that she could keep her if she gave birth to a baby boy next year. Lee often glosses over or impassively summarizes the more horrific aspects of the life of a "comfort woman".This book follows the twelve-year-old Kevin's zealous journey to discern the truth about his grandmother Wang Di.

Also in 2000, a 12-year-old boy named Kevin has just lost his grandmother, with whom he was very close. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. From the outset, Lee captures something of the essence of Singapore; her sentences are as effortlessly freighted with historical fact, local lore, aromas, flavours and speech rhythms as they are with poetic grace. The narrative switches between Wang Di during the War , Wang-Di ‘s present life and Kevin and his quest for answers.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. How We Disappeared: A Novel is a 2019 historical fiction novel by Singaporean author Jing-Jing Lee, written in English. In a nearby village, Wang Di is captured and sent to a Japanese military brothel where she is a “comfort woman. We also meet Kevin, a sensitive twelve year old child grieving for his recently deceased grandmother , his Ah Ma ,who on her deathbed revealed a family secret that she had kept buried for decades , the roots of which might shed a light on his own father’s true parentage.

While most historical fiction set in the WW2 era are narrated from European or American perspectives, Jing Lee’s How We Disappeared sheds a light on the impact of WW2 and the atrocities faced by women in a different corner of the world – a chapter in history that is important and needs to be shared . She was walking away from the altar when she turned back and lit up three more, planting them in among the fallen ash. This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The woman my father saw, I realised, might have been my grandmother’s youngest sister, whom his family had long presumed dead. 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.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. He’d brought it up one day at home, was beginning to tell Wang Di what happened during the invasion but stopped when he saw that she was drawing back from him as he spoke, as if she were an animal, netted in the wild; and her face, how wide her eyes had become, how very still. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft.