Jing-Jing Lee
1. BIOGRAPHY
2. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
3. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
4. SELECTED PROSE
an excerpt from How We Disappeared
SELECTED PROSE
an excerpt from How We Disappeared
Home – I wouldn’t have thought this possible a month ago. We passed a few houses which looked empty and others with familiar faces looking out, gawking. I wanted to disappear but Jeomsun’s voice was in my ear all of a sudden, telling me to wave and ask what they were staring at. I ignored it best I could, pushed away her small, elfin anger, but wondered how my neighbours would react to my return and how much they knew.
‘We’re home,’ my mother announced.
Home. I was just over the threshold when I froze and took a step backward, fighting to keep acid from rising up out of my throat. I’d forgotten what it smelled like – home, a thing that used to be a bitter but steady comfort. Because underneath the scent of the kitchen, with its oils and heady sambal spices, was the smell of sun-browned skin, of male bodies and their sweat and dark, sweet breaths, all of it sharpened by the heat. It’s just Ba and your brothers – no, brother, I corrected myself, act normal. Still I stayed by the door, watching my mother wait, her smile slightly fading. My father, sitting in his usual chair in the living room, had risen up, was extending his arms in welcome and walking towards me.
My body felt light. I could run, I thought. I could run now and never have to explain myself, or be around my father, my brother, both of whom I suddenly, unreasonably dreaded. It might have been this – my face, contemplating flight – that made my father stop. He dropped his hands to his side.
‘You’re back,’ he said. Then, as if suddenly reminded of where I’d been for all these months, these three years, he looked at the floor and returned to his chair, holding onto the armrests as he sat himself down.
‘Ba.’
He nodded. ‘You’re home now.’
I turned away, adjusting my eyes to the dim indoors and saw that my brother was crouching by the bedroom door, watching me. He was thirteen now, I realized, and a long way from when I’d last seen him. There were lines around his eyes. and below them, a darkness, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.
‘Meng?’
‘Jie,’ he replied, more out of reflex, it seemed, than anything else for even as he said it, he was getting up. I thought for a second that he was coming towards me, but he turned midway and left the house.
‘Must be going out to play,’ my mother said, bustling in the kitchen, not looking at me.
I went into the deserted bedroom. Everything was as it was. The spare rattan mat, which Yang used to unfurl on the floor at bedtime. That one pillow, which I always relinquished to Meng. I found my clothes stuffed deep into the bottom of the dresser, moth-eaten and much too big, and changed into them, hoping to feel like myself again. When I came out from the room, everyone was gone.
