Vanessa Chan

A spellbinding, sweeping novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family. Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth. A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an “Asia for Asians.” Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction—and she will do anything to save them. Spanning years of pain and triumph, told from the perspectives of four unforgettable characters, The Storm We Made is a dazzling saga about the horrors of war; the fraught relationships between the colonized and their oppressors, and the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake.

A Novel

The Storm We Made

Lindsay

The truth of it, she thought, was that men lose interest when the veil falls off and they learn the normalcy of a woman. That she urinates, and bleeds, and cries, and snores like everyone else. But women grow fonder when a man feels within reach. Women do not worship gods, they yearn for broken toys that they can mold and imprint on. It was so stupid, and she hated herself for it. Yet perhaps, this is what a woman's idealism is. Not the reach for a utopia, everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach. But the need to transform one thing into something better.

Though all love was humiliation, in a way, Cecily supposed. All love was someone breaking their soul into smaller pieces and offering the broken pieces of themselves as a puzzle to someone else. "Help me put myself back together."

Jujube wondered about the ways in which girls and women performed for men. By always knowing what it was men wanted and how it was they wished to be comforted. Always engaged in the ongoing calculus of figuring out what sides of themselves they should show to a man, and which parts of their grief were to unbearable to him.

Celine

She'd asked her mother what to do if one day he were to take her into the back of the teahouse, throw her onto the pile of wet garbage, and hold a knife to her neck. Her mother's advice had been simple: "Stay still."   

Or the doctor who had injected his young comfort-women patients with harmless viruses that gave them a rash, so they would become undesirable enough not to have to go back to servicing the soldiers.  

Then he was standing up, chair pushed back, voice raised. “You cannot survive this and live a dead life."  

"I will not lose another child," her mother had cried, grabbing a pair of scissors and chopping off all of Jasmin's fine black hair. Jasmin, brave and old beyond her years, had blinked back tears in silence and held Jujube's hand. From that day, Jasmin wore Abel's old clothes- grimy pants and large white shirts and was not al- lowed to leave the house.

Abigail F

 Though all love was humiliation, in a way, Cecily supposed. All love was someone breaking their soul into smaller pieces and offering the broken pieces of themselves as a puzzle to someone else help me put myself back together. 

"That's love, isn't it?" she said. "To know badness lives in some one but to love anyway… Maybe I love him more for his badness."

Perhaps it was earlier in the Occupation and people had not yet been cauterized to accept pain as part of existence.

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