Jing-Jing Lee

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by W. Michelle Wang
Dated 30 Jun 2021

Novelist and poet Lee Jing-jing is best known for her works of fiction, If I Could Tell You (Marshall Cavendish, 2013) and How We Disappeared (Oneworld, 2019), as well as a poetry collection entitled And Other Rivers (Math Paper Press, 2015). Her short stories also include “To the Sea” (Lumina, vol. 10, published by Sarah Lawrence College, 2011), “Eclipse” (A Time of Waiting: Stories From Around the World, published by Oxford University Press, 2012), and “When We Get There” (Balik Kampung 3B, published by Math Paper Press, 2016). The borders between Lee’s writerly worlds remain fluid in her recurrent preoccupations with silence and the difficulties of articulation; death and bereavement; ageing and illness; children who struggle with (feelings of) abandonment; and characters who are marginalized or discriminated against on the basis of ability/disability, age, gender, sexuality, and/or socioeconomic status. 

Revelation, Silence, and the Challenges of Telling

The fulcrum of narrative action in Lee’s fiction typically hinges upon unexpected revelations and/or that which characters find difficulty articulating. For instance, “When We Get There” (2016) begins with the character narrator’s blunt confession, “It came to me, while I was waving from my seat in the bus, what I wanted to say: my mother murdered somebody and I was her willing accomplice” (39). The short story then unpacks the implications of this startling disclosure, as the unnamed protagonist recalls yet another bus ride taken with her mother when she was just six years old, on their way to confront the woman with whom her father was having an extramarital affair. Such candid disclosure is sharply contrasted with the challenges of telling that characterize Lee’s debut novel, If I Could Tell You (2013), wherein nine character narrators struggle with language, with untold truths of painful histories—all the while fearing where these revelations might eventually lead. The conditional clause (If) in the novel’s title highlights the difficulties of articulation, where the book can be read as characters’ poetic responses to such challenges in telling. As the blurb notes: “If I Could Tell You is about silence, the keeping and breaking of it, and what comes after.”

Readers of Lee’s debut novel follow the meandering stories told by inhabitants of the soon-to-be demolished Block 204, all of whom struggle to articulate their thoughts and/or feelings. Ah Tee on the tenth storey confides, “I tried to form words with my mouth to answer” (181), while “Cardboard Auntie” on the ninth storey “thought about all the things I wanted to say, the words nearly bursting out in my sleep,” only to find herself speechless before the church volunteers at her doorstep (“And it was all gone. All the words. Just like that.” [31]). While the married couple on the eighth storey, Kim and Yang, do not struggle with language in quite the same way as their neighbour “Auntie Wong” does, Kim finds herself “wanting to say I’m sorry and then not saying anything at all” (87), while Yang in turn falters with his gathered questions, which “slip out of my mouth dressed as completely mundane questions . . .. As if I’m missing the vocabulary for the questions I need to ask” (68). Unpacking the difficulties of articulation and what’s at stake in these acts of telling crucially drive the novel’s narrative progression.

It is perhaps Alex, who lives on the sixth storey with Cindy, who most clearly articulates the stakes of silence and speech. Initially described as “a skinny boy who’s always wearing shirts too big for him” (16), readers later learn that Alex is short for Alexandra, who leaves home after being shamed for their sexual orientation: “My mother had said . . . I was a disgrace to her. Auntie Sue had seen me in town with a girl, she said. Holding hands, kissing” (49). (Note: Alex’s preferred gender pronouns are never specified since the novel adopts shifting first-person narration.) In the face of such familial estrangement, Alex recounts a difficult conversation with their brother, Adrian:

All that day, I kept thinking about what I should have said. … If I said to him, I am still the same person, he would have kept silent; to him, it would sound like the most transparent of lies. There would be nothing left for us to do but stop calling, stop pretending to talk on the phone. I was left with the most tenuous of ties with my family through him and even that would be lost, perhaps for good, if I opened my mouth and spoke. (155)

The family’s inability to understand that Alex/Alexandra is “still the same person”—and that their gender and sexual identities deserve to be respected—prompts Alex’s silence and (self-censoring) speech. Fragile familial ties that depend on such silence further points to the broader reticence that surrounds issues of gender and sexuality in Singapore. 

The notion of a recognizable self that persists despite apparent change—whether wrought by Alex’s decision to defy parental/familial expectations in If I Could Tell You, or by Elise’s illness in “Eclipse” (2010)—also cuts across Lee’s oeuvre. Elise’s partner, Will, experiences a troubled sense of shame when he considers how her illness and subsequent chemotherapy appear to have transformed Elise into “a stranger”: “Has someone taken your place in the time I’ve been away? … Every time I go away and come back again, I feel I am entering someone else’s flat. This is not our home. … ‘Where’s Elise?’ I think” (“Eclipse” 66). However, unlike Alex’s estrangement from Adrian and the rest of the family, Will and Elise’s relationship endures because he eventually learns to recognize the beloved who persists despite her altered physical appearance: “[You] look straight into me with your dark eyes, I see you again. You’re right there. Hidden under that pale face. You’re in there” (66).

Structures, Style, and Writerly Ethos

Akin to Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011)—which hover between the form of a novel and a cycle of short stories, sufficient unto themselves yet considerably enriched when read together—Lee’s If I Could Tell You (2015) features sixteen chapters that are loosely anchored in an unexpected event that occurs shortly after the book begins. Readers encounter a Cubist fracturing of perspectives in characters’ meandering streams of consciousness, as the central incident that anchors the book (p. 15) is filtered through a prism of perspectives, including those of “Cardboard Auntie” (p. 41), Yang (p. 17), the unnamed boy (p. 23, p. 168), and Alex (p. 19). The same moment is retold again and again from different angles, a telling that mirrors characters’ fears of painful histories that repeat themselves such as Kim’s deep-seated anxieties that her mother’s fate will be her own (“I didn’t want you to think that perhaps it might be me in that bed, years down the line” [90]); and Yang’s escalating worries that Kim may share his own mother’s fate as he considers “how people say history always repeats itself and I always nodded, thinking that I knew exactly what they meant, only I didn’t. I do now. I never actually saw my mother cry either, but I heard her” (68).

An unusual stylistic choice that Lee adopts in If I Could Tell You—which does not appear in her other works of fiction—is dispensing with quotation marks, even as speech tags such as “I said” and “she asked” are retained (34). What results is a fluid melding of speech and thought that emphasizes the articulate insight that characters like “Cardboard Auntie” possess—a perceptive understanding of people and events that belies her difficulty with communicating in the English language:

helloauntiegoodmorning. That was all I got before it got tangled up into a long, continuous babble. … I had to shake my head, explain myself in Cantonese and then a bit of Chinese before she stopped ….

How long live here? she asked. [sic]

I put up four fingers and made a zero with my fist, and she widened her eyes and said, waaaaah. Drawing the sound out with her breath as if I were a child that she had to pat on the head, indulge with high-pitched coos.

Forty, I said out loud. Just to be sure. And if not for her broken Mandarin, if not for that tricky little smile that kept coming and going, I would have gone on to say:

forty years living in this flat, and this will be the last. They are moving me out, you know, into another neighborhood. They keep saying it will be a. What. An upgrade. The building will be for people like me — old ones who have nobody, no children, or children who don’t want them …. (32, 34)

Not only does the passage highlight the protagonist’s astute recognition of the church volunteer’s (albeit well-intentioned yet nonetheless) patronizing attitude, Lee subverts the conventional dynamics of communication breakdown between a younger, well-educated generation and the perceived inadequacy of an older generation deprived of similar opportunities, who struggle in modern-day Singapore with limited English language skills. Lee instead emphasizes the “broken Mandarin” of the young volunteer, whose formal bilingual education has failed her at this juncture, even as “Cardboard Auntie’s” adaptability in picking up fragments of English and Mandarin (in addition to her own fluency in Cantonese) are foregrounded. 

To draw on Belinda Kong’s work in a different context, Lee’s artistic decision to drop quotation marks that conventionally separate speech from thought, dialogue from narration, further “restore[s] interiority and eloquence” to characters like “Cardboard Auntie” and Ah Tee who struggle with language, bringing their voices into harmony with the narration (Kong 105). Not only does this stylistic choice point to a “more capaciously inclusive aesthetic” (105), it simultaneously signals the ethical impetus that underlies Lee’s shaping of her characters.

Sense of Home

In If I Could Tell You, the sense of familiarity that defines home for Lee’s characters is severely disrupted by urban housing redevelopment plans. The physical and psychological displacement that Block 204’s inhabitants experience is exacerbated by the book’s non-linear chronology; in fact, the end of the book loops back to the beginning, where the motif of shoes is aligned with a sense of home. If I Could Tell You opens with the lines: “He steps out of his shoes, the way he does each time he arrives home, the round tips of each meeting the wall. Home, he thinks, he’s home”—a motif that recurs across the book (9, cf. 11, 47, 98, 160–61). Involuntary violations of this everyday ritual cause characters to feel particularly ill at ease in the new flats they are supposed to be calling home. “Cardboard Auntie” recalls, “An agent brought me to see the new place last month. Better for you, the agent kept saying, not removing her shoes before stepping in, so that her high heels went click-clacking on the white tiles, leaving dirt on the floor” (34).

Narrating the memory of his first visit to the new flat in similar terms, Ah Tee observes:

I’ve lived here, in Block 204 for all my life. What is old and familiar and you — that’s home. I knew the moment we saw the new flat that it was not going to be okay. All white walls and hard floor smelling of stone. The woman bringing us around said that we could do what we wanted to the place. It was made like that. Raw, I think she said, so that we could do it up the way we wanted. Except we didn’t have any money to do it up with. It would have to remain like that for years and years. … I said nothing, walked into all the rooms with my shoes on. The floor was covered with pale sand and I left the shape of my shoes on the floor walking in and out. (176–77)

Not only does Ah Tee’s act of walking in the new flat with his shoes signal his deep sense of unease and estrangement in this new space (i.e., its essential unhomeliness), but the necessity of doing so—as a result of the raw concrete floor, without tiles or proper flooring—further points to the misaligned expectations between urban housing plans and the economic realities of people like Ah Tee and Cardboard Auntie, who simply do not have the financial means of renovating the house “the way [they] wanted.” 

The characters’ predicaments foreground the jarring disconnect between housing redevelopment and the socioeconomic displacement experienced by those who have been similarly uprooted from their homes, especially “the old, the poor, people who have had trouble finding a new home” (13). Lee’s work consistently spotlights characters like “Cardboard Auntie,” Uncle Wong, Alex, and Ah Tee, who epitomize segments of Singapore society that have been marginalized as a result of poverty and job displacement, of failing to assimilate to heteronormative expectations or conforming to “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer 96).

Death, Disappearing, and In/visibility

Death and bereavement are central themes across Lee’s work. Her poetry collection, And Other Rivers (2015), features three poems (“Sitting Up,” “Feast,” and “Thread” [pp. 38–40]) that evoke the experience of a grandfather’s passing, while the dying words of 12-year-old Kevin’s grandmother in How We Disappeared becomes the pivot for his quest to uncover the family’s history. The challenges of confronting mortality are likewise explored in If I Could Tell You, as “Cardboard Auntie” recalls the deaths of her husband and child (pp. 129–32, 135), while Yang and Ah Tee struggle to come to terms with their respective mother’s passing (p. 74, pp. 181–90). Uncle Wong ruminates on deaths that are reported (or neglected) on the evening news (p. 21), while Alex considers the paradox that it is one’s death which renders us visible:

It was then, with the life coming out of him, that I thought of him as a person. Someone who had been breathing, talking, living through each hour of his life just as I did. Strange how I only thought it when he was dead or dying. I only thought it when he was no longer there. . . . I knew the guy. I knew the guy and never really saw him until he was dead. (45–46)

Lee’s focus on individuals who have been marginalized by society makes this issue of visibility particularly important to her work. “Cardboard Auntie” recalls the unease she experienced in her earlier job of clearing tables at a food court: not only did the act of “pouring away all that [unfinished] food, putting perfectly edible things into trash bags,” make her nervous,

It made me disappear as well, so that I was just a pair of floating hands attached to a slop bucket. I wasn’t there in people’s eyes, not even when I was right in front of them, wiping down the table they were sitting at. They looked everywhere else but at me. (36–37)

The stakes of such “disappearing” are heightened in Lee’s second novel, How We Disappeared (2019), given its historical context of World War II and the Japanese occupation of Singapore—when an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 girls and women from Japanese-occupied territories of Korea, China, Philippines, Singapore, and more, were imprisoned and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers during the war years (Yang 57). Known as “comfort women” or “wei-an fu” (“慰安妇”)—a problematic euphemism that glosses over the atrocities suffered by girls and women referenced by this label—Lee’s readers learn toward the end of If I Could Tell You that “Cardboard Auntie” survived that horrific experience as a teenaged girl (p. 133). 

It is a part of her history that “Cardboard Auntie” never shared with her now-deceased husband of more than sixty years (known affectionately as “the Old One” [35]), a man whom she married after the war. Standing in her empty new flat after placing the Old One’s altar photo “on the only tall surface there is, the kitchen counter,” she finds

[t]he newness of everything makes me stand still for a moment and I think carefully before saying what I said next, because you don’t make promises to the dead and not keep them. I made up my mind and then I said, I have a story to tell you. Maybe tonight, or tomorrow night, I will tell you. A story. My story. From a long time ago. (137)

While her story ends on this note in If I Could Tell You (2013), this promise is picked up six years later in How We Disappeared (2019), where “Cardboard Auntie” is reconfigured as Ng Wang Di, who awakens to the hundredth day of her husband’s passing in this new flat and readers learn: “It was in the last few years living in their grey and broken down flat in Block 204 that Wang Di became Cardboard Auntie” (How We Disappeared 61). In this second novel, Lee develops the character more fully: for example, Wang Di’s “decades-old habit of bringing things home”—of “squirrelling away things just to have the pretence of control over her life”—is configured as a response to the traumatic abuse she endured in the “military comfort station” (319–21).

Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2020 in Fiction and longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, How We Disappeared vividly reimagines the untold stories of individuals who have vanished from the annals of (Singapore’s) history, positing how and why they tend to fade out of official archives—especially since only a small fraction of historical survivors stepped forward to deliver testimony after almost a half-century of silence (see Shim 265; Lee, interview with Alan Fisk). Lee’s novel examines the sociocultural pressures and gendered expectations about female chastity that likely led many survivors to stay silent. Wang Di recalls in How We Disappeared,

Years later, I heard about a girl who made her way home, only to have her parents proclaim that they had never seen her, never known her, or spoken her name in their lives. She waited outside the hut where she grew up until a storm started. Just as quickly as she had returned, she disappeared again, as if washed away by the rain and wind. And then there are those who didn’t make their way home from the comfort houses; those who didn’t board the ships that were meant to bring home prisoners of war and female captives from the neighbouring islands, believing – rightly or wrongly – that their families would never open their doors to them. So they stayed away. Then there are those who never got to choose, who didn’t make it that far, not even close. (275)

This “disappearing” is configured in physical and emotional terms, as the diminishing war rations take a toll on the imprisoned girls and women, “their colour and skin and flesh withering away into pale shadows, until they were little more than a collection of cuts and bones and bruises, badly healed. This, I thought, this is how we’re going to disappear” (200).

Reconfigured Worlds

The strength of Lee’s writing lies in her ability to vividly conjure her characters’ inner worlds. Their experiences persist incessantly in the author’s imagination, as unarticulated hauntings waiting to be exorcised onto the page. Lee explains in a 2017 interview that Wang Di’s voice pervaded her dreams: characters “become real for me – it goes on for months and months. I let myself be taken over by them” (Ho, “Incredible stories”). At times, the legacies of these characters reach across texts and are reworked, reimagined, and reconfigured: “Cardboard Auntie,” her husband (an older man widowed during the war, known simply as “the Old One”), her younger brother (“the only one of my siblings left”), and the matchmaker Auntie Tin from If I Could Tell You (p. 133), traverse Lee’s fictional worlds to arrive largely unchanged in How We Disappeared (pp. 189, 280, 267). While this second novel picks up shortly after the end of page 137 of If I Could Tell You, there is also a distinct sense that Lee is keen to reconfigure that earlier fictional world given her incessant repetition of character names. Kim, who lives on the sixth storey of Block 204 in If I Could Tell You, is reincarnated as Kevin’s mother in How We Disappeared. Readers learn in If I Could Tell You that Kim’s mother is afflicted with Alzheimer’s, causing her to mistake her daughter for her elder sister, Huay (p. 79); correspondingly, a character named Huay and her younger sister become an important part of Wang Di’s journey in coming to terms with her own past in How We Disappeared (pp. 163, 321).

The effect of such insistent recycling of character names is as much an expansion/extension of Lee’s fictional universe, as it is a simultaneous reconfiguration of her textual worlds—one that compounds and intensifies the debilitating impact of patriarchal structures latent in many ethnic Chinese families. Uncle Wong’s friend (Meng) and his neighbour (Yang) from If I Could Tell You are reshaped into Wang Di’s two younger brothers, Meng and Yang in How We Disappeared. Like many infant girls who are born to ethnic Chinese families hoping for a male heir, the protagonist learns that her name Wang means “hope” or “to look forward to,” while Di means “little brother” (How We Disappeared 25, 178). Wang Di’s name pleases the matchmaker Auntie Tin, who nods approvingly: “‘Wise name. And good girl … for bringing your parents good luck. Two brothers, this is something I can tell potential suitors about’” (25). Similarly, the name of Ah Tee’s elder sister in If I Could Tell You—a character whom readers never meet, since we learn that she was given away by the family as a child—meant “to bring in a brother” (If I Could Tell You 187).

Learning the genesis of her name profoundly shapes Wang Di’s self-regard, especially as she endures repeated sexual, physical, and emotional abuse from the Japanese soldiers. She wonders how her life might have turned out differently had she been born as the son her father had hoped for: “A boy instead of who I was. What I was now. But perhaps this was all for them [her brothers Meng and Yang] – as my name suggested. My life for two of theirs” (How We Disappeared 178). Lee thus situates Wang Di’s heart-breaking experience of repeated wartime rape within the broader context of sociocultural norms that devalue women—such as patronymic conventions that led to the dominant valuing of sons over daughters in many ethnic Chinese families during the mid-twentieth century. 

Women who are deprived of educational opportunities—especially daughters who remain afterthoughts to sons—are subjects of crucial significance in Lee’s work. Wang Di is secretly envious of her neighbour’s adopted daughter who has the opportunity to receive formal education, while her own father insists that Wang Di is needed at home for chores and decides only her younger brothers should attend school since they “can’t afford” to send all three children (How We Disappeared 34, 29). Adopted children and unwanted daughters are recurrent themes that haunt Lee’s oeuvre, as villagers in Lee’s poem “Huang He” feed “incense, live cattle, / their daughters” to the river; while the poem “Dragnet” yields fish, mud eels, bycatch, water beetles, “and fragments of girls”—mostly devoured by aquatic wildlife after being drowned in the river, by families who believe that a daughter “is nothing / but a waste of milkwater” (And Other Rivers 34, 10). Another poem in the collection “Split Twins” explores the disparate fates of a pair of twin sisters, one of whom is given away (30–33).

The words “second girl” tumbled out of an album, 

. . .

I wondered if they kept her for themselves 
or gave her away to strangers

. . .

Nothing else but one less mouth to feed. (33)

Ah Tee’s elder sister in If I Could Tell You suffers a similar fate, when her parents give her away because they can no longer afford their younger son’s medical bills (187), while Kim’s throwaway comment earlier in the book tellingly illustrates this casual sexism that persists in everyday life, as she explains to her husband: people “don’t sell boys, silly, only girls” (71).

Coda

In all of Lee’s characters, readers are likely to find tender traces of people we know: of a woman who sobs quietly into a cupboard of patterned casserole dishes too precious to use, lest her daughter hears her (“When We Get There” 43); of the bewildered realization that a loved one has passed while one was engaged in the busy mundanity of daily living (How We Disappeared 11); of the “heavy kindness” of strangers who offer us more than we believe we deserve (If I Could Tell You 144). Lee reveals such tenderness with minimal sentimentalism and few embellishments, filtering the everyday through these glimmers of poetic portraits that render seemingly unremarkable individuals and invisible rituals manifest. 

Notes

Given that “Cardboard Auntie” (whose name is never given in If I Could Tell You) is specifically used to title the subsections that constitute her narrative (p. 31, p. 127), I retain the reference in quotation marks since the term is typically intended as a disparaging appellation and use the name Wang Di only in relation to How We Disappeared. Terms such as “comfort woman” and “military comfort station” are intentionally used within quotation marks throughout the critical introduction to signal how these problematic euphemisms gloss over the historical atrocities suffered by girls and women referenced by this label.

Works Cited

“Fiction Shortlist.” Singapore Literature Prize 2020, Singapore Book Council, https://bookcouncil.sg/singapore-literature-prize/shortlists/category/fiction-english. Accessed 27 Aug. 2020.

Ho, Olivia. “Incredible stories about women.” The Straits Times, 8 Aug. 2017, https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/incredible-stories-about-women. Accessed 16 Oct. 2019.

Jing-Jing Lee. http://www.jingjinglee.com/. Accessed 29 Jul. 2020.

Kong, Belinda. “When Ghosts Dream: Immigrant Desire in Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger.” Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead. Eds. Lisa K. Perdigao and Mark Pizzato. Ashgate, 2010, pp. 99–112.

Lee Jing-jing. And Other Rivers. Math Paper Press, 2015.

—. “Eclipse.” 2010. A Time of Waiting: Stories from Around the World. Retold by Clare West. Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 59–67.

—. How We Disappeared. Oneworld, 2019. 

—. If I Could Tell You. Marshall Cavendish, 2013.

—. Interview with Alan Fisk. Historical Novels Review, no. 89, Aug. 2019, historicalnovelsociety.org/how-we-disappeared-an-interview-with-jing-jing-lee/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020.

—. “When We Get There.” Balik Kampung 3B: Some East, More West. Ed. Verena Tay. Math Paper Press, 2016, pp. 37–51.

McRuer, Robert. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. Modern Language Association of America, 2002, pp. 88–99.

Nanda, Akshita. “Heartland Loss.” The Straits Times, 27 Jan. 2013. 

Shim, Young-hee. “Metamorphosis of the Korean ‘comfort women’: How did han恨 turn into cosmopolitan morality?” Development and Society, vol. 46, no. 2, 2017, pp. 251–78.

“The 2020 longlist is announced.” The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, 9 Mar. 2020, https://www.walterscottprize.co.uk/the-2020-longlist-is-announced/. Accessed 15 May 2021.

Yang, Hyunah. “Revisiting the issue of Korean ‘military comfort women’: The question of truth and positionality.” positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 5, no. 1, 1997, pp. 51–71.

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