Description
About the Author

Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2020 (English, Fiction)
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020

When her husband dies in the year 2000, Wang Di is forced into the solitary life of a widow in modern Singapore. But this new silence brings with it a surge of memories, taking her back to the brutal events of the Japanese invasion which altered the course of her life forever.

Twelve-year-old Kevin is preoccupied with his own family worries; his father is suffering from depression, Kevin is being bullied at school, and his beloved grandmother's health is declining fast. And then, on her deathbed, she makes a surprising confession – one she never meant for Kevin to hear.

Back in 1942, Wang Di is sixteen years old and forced into sexual slavery as a Comfort Woman. What she sees and experiences will haunt her present nearly sixty years later. Meanwhile, after his grandmother's death, Kevin sets about finding out the truth – a truth that will lead him to Wang Di; to the events of that brutal war and to a reckoning no one is prepared for and which can no longer be suppressed.

They say the truth will set you free – but what if its horrors have been the very chains you have longed to escape from your whole life?
Jing-Jing Lee was born and raised in Singapore and graduated from Oxford’s Creative Writing Masters in 2011. Her poetry and short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies. Her novella If I Could Tell You was published by Marshall Cavendish and her debut poetry collection And Other Rivers was published by Math Paper Press. Lee’s work comes from a wish for lesser-heard voices to be included in the mainstream narrative. She now lives in Amsterdam with her husband.

Authors

If I Could Tell You

How We Disappeared