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

by Jing-Jing Lee

Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize

Longlisted for the HWA Debut Crown

Shortlisted for the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize

'A heartbreaking but hopeful story about memory, trauma and ultimately love.' New York Times

A beautiful story of endurance, identity, and memory in WWII Singapore, for fans of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko and Nguyen Phan Que Mai's The Mountains Sing

Singapore, 1942. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked. Only three survivors remain, one of them a tiny child.

In a neighbouring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is bundled into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military rape camp. In the year 2000, her mind is still haunted by her experiences there, but she has long been silent about her memories of that time. It takes twelve-year-old Kevin, and the mumbled confession he overhears from his ailing grandmother, to set in motion a journey into the unknown to discover the truth.

Weaving together two timelines and two life-changing secrets, How We Disappeared is an evocative, profoundly moving and utterly dazzling novel heralding the arrival of a new literary star.

• ISBN10: 1786074125
• ISBN13: 9781786074126
• Publish Date: 2 May 2019 (first published 4 April 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 31 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Oneworld Publications
• Edition: Hardback
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[Bianca]

It was her scream which kept me up. The sound of it spoke of everything no one dared to talk about: what the soldiers were doing; young and afraid and separated from their families. It spoke of the things everyone was to keep silent about all through the three and a half years we belonged to the Japanese, and of the decades after.

A historical fiction set around the Japanese occupation, depicting the horrors women forced into sexual slavery had to go through. It’s cruel enough what they endured during the war, but to suffer from scars and discrimination after is even more heartbreaking.