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  • North & South

    INTERNATIONAL BOOKS / the best of the month

    May 12, 2019 5 minutes
    edited by VIRGINIA LARSON

    Fiction

    How We Disappeared

    Jing-Jing Lee (Bloomsbury, $33)

    “Comfort women” was a euphemism for sex slaves during World War II. In more than a dozen occupied countries, Japanese soldiers visited “homes” where women and teenage girls abducted from their families were raped and half-starved. This novel is about Wang Di, taken from her rural Singapore family aged 16. That story strand is intertwined with a plot set in 2000, when an elderly Wang Di finally breaks her silence. “All that history [felt] like a large, wriggling fish she was trying to wrestle to shore, how she had to fight not to get pulled under.” While it’s harrowing, there’s no gratuitous detail, and Jing-Jing Lee really brings to life the characters, and the streets and villages of Singapore. The celebrated Chinese author Xinran called this “a brilliant, heart-breaking story”. I agree.

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