Atrocity

There are all too few novels written in English on the ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese occupation in Singapore from 1942-1945, so I seized on this one and read it avidly. It certainly tells a very important story, though how well it does the telling is to be discussed.

There are several parallel story lines in this novel – the first is a 17-year old called Ng Wang Di. Wang Di means ‘waiting for a brother’, which is what her disappointed parents named their firstborn girl child. Wang Di is just a village girl, illiterate, who has spent her life living with her parents and two younger brothers, taking eggs and vegetables they have grown to the market, looking after her family. This story itself is split into 2 storylines, one in the present, and one in the past. The present one finds Wang Di an old woman, whose beloved 93 year old husband has just passed away, and who is coming to terms with her grief by trying to find out more about his life since she silenced him whenever he tried to tell her. There recounting of the interactions between the couple are quite nicely done; their very restraint and undemonstrativeness juxtaposing their tenderness and deep affection.

The storyline set in the past (1940s) sees Wang Di taken away by the Japanese forces and imprisoned in a ‘comfort house’ along with a half dozen or so other girls, including one 20 year old Korean, Jeomsun.

Jeomsun told me about how she had survived the week-long transport from her hometown in Busan to Formosa, where she’d been moved from camp to camp and the women around her succumbed, one after another, to dysentery and typhoid fever. Then she had been taken away and put on a boat to Singapore. It was luck, she said, that she was in here. ‘Conditions here are better. You even have running water. The places we were in before…’
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All things are relative, and it is poignant this kidnapped girl can think she is in a better place, when she is a prisoner who for years is daily beaten up and raped by several dozen Japanese soldiers, in 20-30 minute sessions (though officers have no time limit), starved and ill-treated, and on weekends and ‘busy days’, raped by up to 40 or 50 soldiers in a day. Girls as young as twelve are used by the Japanese invaders as ‘comfort women’ and not just in Singapore of course, but in many of the countries they occupied – China, Korea, the Phillippines, etc. Girls who fall ill are shot and replaced. The girls are promised their compliance helps their families as the Japanese will pay their families, which will help keep them alive in times of country-wide starvation, but this is of course just a lie, the girls and their families are never paid.

Perhaps the saddest part of the atrocity (that is a wholly insufficient word to describe this situation), is that the girls themselves know they cannot go home, most of them, that their families will not take them back after this has been done to them, and also because some will suspect the girls of treachery, of prostituting themselves to the enemy to get food. Wang Di is one of those who is luckier — her parents let her come home when she is freed after the Japanese are defeated, after 3 long years. Although she survived, her father and brother will not interact with her, and they marry her off as soon as they can, so they do not have to have her in the family home.

Another parallel storyline is that of young Kevin, not even a teenager yet, an unpopular kid navigating modern life in Singapore. His paternal grandmother is dying as the novel commences, and on her deathbed, she confides in Kevin that his father, her son, is not her biological son, but a baby she took and kept, in the chaos of war and death. Kevin spends his time thereafter tracking down her history and story, and at first he thinks Wang Di is his grandmother, but it turns out she is not. When he finds Wang Di however, he leads his parents to her and she is able to answer some of their questions because her recently-deceased husband is Kevin’s biological grandfather. Then there is a fourth parallel story line, or a sub-parallel storyline in Kevin’s, denoted by a series of letters by Anonymous to Wang Di’s husband, written over a series of years, never sent.

The storylines, alas, do not in the end dovetail. It is slightly confusing to the first-time reader who has to understand there are actually 2 young women’s stories in the 1940s, not a single young woman’s. In her attempt to build suspense by releasing information in a careful trickle, the author may have released not quite enough, leaving the reader just slightly puzzled for most of the novel. Not puzzled enough to detract from the novel being a most interesting read, however.

That said, despite the very compelling portrait it sketches of the terrible sufferings during the Japanese occupation in Singapore in the 1940s, the novel struggles with its many story lines because the first narrator’s voices do not change significantly, each sounds like the other. The dialogue is not noticeably local or Singlish or dialect, the child Kevin’s supposed first person narrative is told like an adult may write, not like a local boy born and bred in Singapore would think:

You find things you are not ready to see when you go looking
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I unfolded the letter and saw that it had a single handwritten line on the page
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These sentence constructions would be extremely unlikely for a Chinese Singaporean child; and also, this writing voice is not much different from the voices of the other narrators, though supposedly from such different backgrounds and ages. However, the novel should not be accused of being inauthentic – there are many notes struck which would resonate with Singaporeans, images, scenes, sights, beliefs, practises, attitudes, all extremely authentically related actually. The author’s observations are clearly much more her strong point; much more so than her ability to present character voices which successfully translate their peculiarly Singaporean experiences into English. But this last, this process of translating experiences of a completely different culture into English, is one even extremely skilled writers have struggled with, and not everyone can be expected to be an Arundhati Roy, after all.

So do not let this criticism of the writing voice – mild criticism only! – stop anyone from picking up this novel – it is an important contribution to the genre, to the history, and to the identity reconstruction of Singapore and Singaporeans. And on my part, I shall certainly be receiving Jing-Jing Lee’s next novel with welcome and warmth.