Shame, Silence and Survival: A Feminist-Trauma Study of How We Disappeared

Abstract

This article examines Jing-Jing Lee’s debut novel How We Disappeared (2019) to address the systemic erasure of Singaporean “comfort women” and challenge the redemptive conventions of traditional war fiction. It argues that the novel functions as a “feminist-trauma text” wherein literary strategies of fragmentation, delayed disclosure, and embodied narration serve as the formal correlates of complex psychological and social trauma mechanisms. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, and Sandra Bartky, the analysis explores how shame is weaponized as a patriarchal disciplinary technology to enforce silence, and how that silence functions simultaneously as a traumatic wound and a precarious strategy of resistance. Furthermore, the study theorizes the “body as archive,” demonstrating how somatic memory preserves historical atrocities that official language and state-sanitized historiographies withhold. By analyzing the dialogic interplay between the elderly survivor Wang Di and her young, non-professional listener Kevin, this article proposes a feminist historiography of silence—one that rejects redemptive narrative arcs in favor of an ethics of testimony that honors the fragmented, the idiosyncratic, and the irretrievable. Finally, it offers pathways for future scholarship to undertake comparative transnational analyses of comfort women narratives across East and Southeast Asia and to further theorize the somatic and acoustic registers of trauma.