Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  From the apartment window, Annuo could see Japanese troops marching in lockstep to their garrison. She would freeze in terror, afraid that they might come to her building and find her family. Annuo sometimes believed she could hear their heavy boots, the thought of each harsh thud sending a chill through her body. To her, it was the sound of evil approaching. If she wasn’t careful, the boots would find her.

  * * *

  —

  ONE NIGHT, ANNUO WAS jolted awake by those dreaded footsteps on their quiet boulevard. Not even the leafy trees could muffle the unmistakable sound of the soldiers terrorizing the neighborhood with their random searches. Annuo’s worst nightmare was coming true: The Japanese soldiers were making their way up her building. On the first landing, they banged on the door, waking the White Russians and demanding to see their identification papers. Soon an angry fist banged on the door of Annuo’s family’s home. “Open up! Open up, and show your identity papers!” a gruff voice shouted.

  Muma sent Amah Zhongying to the door, asking her to stall the soldiers so she could get dressed. Awake, Annuo and Charley huddled together and peeked into the main room. Their mother emerged looking neat and calm, as if she were going on a sales call with doctors, not to meet the angry soldiers.

  “We have nothing of interest to you,” she said to the officer in an even, unflinching voice.

  As the brown-suited officer stormed into the small apartment, he drew his sword and raised the gleaming blade toward Annuo’s mother.

  “Show me your ID!” he barked.

  She calmly gave them her documents. “No need to get excited, please. You’ll frighten the children.”

  He looked over the papers as the other soldiers glanced around. “Where is your husband? What is his name?”

  Muma gave them the phony name and the answer she had rehearsed. “He’s not here. He’s with his mistress tonight,” she said.

  The officer snorted. As he moved closer to Annuo’s beautiful mother, she stepped back and said firmly, “That will be all then.” Another soldier pointed his bayonet at her, but the officer only grunted and signaled to his men to leave. They stormed out and stomped up the stairs to the next door.

  Zhongying quickly shut and locked the door, while their mother put Annuo and Charley back to bed. “It’s all right. They’re gone,” she said softly.

  Annuo squeezed her mother so tight that Muma smiled and said, “Don’t be afraid. These Japanese invaders have no right to be in China. Your father and his brave soldiers will drive them out. Then he’ll come home, and we’ll be together again.”

  * * *

  —

  NOT LONG AFTER, ANNUO’S father did reappear. Three years had gone by since Yongchio’s family had last seen him. That had been in 1939, when he had left without saying goodbye to his children. Now it was 1942, and he showed up at the Avenue Pétain apartment one night, surprising them all. At first, Annuo didn’t recognize him. With only the ragged clothes on his back, he looked as disheveled as the beggars who lined the streets. The clothes weren’t even his. He’d had to ditch his Nationalist uniform to get past the enemy. His commanding officer had promoted him to be legal director of the Nationalist resistance in Jiangsu Province, which, like Shanghai and the entire Chinese coast, was under enemy occupation. His unit had come under attack, forcing him and other survivors to disperse like leaves in the wind. Somehow the Nationalist underground had led him to his family. He had no choice but to hide out with them in Shanghai until he could regroup with his unit in Jiangsu.

  For days, Annuo’s garrulous father filled their apartment with stories of his dramatic escape from the enemy. The children were spellbound. After his Nationalist command center in Jiangsu was attacked, he and other Chinese had been captured. The Japanese soldiers had intended to execute their prisoners alongside a ditch. To save bullets, instead of shooting them, they lunged at and twisted their bayonets into the Chinese soldiers, one by one, kicking the twitching bodies into the ditch. When her father was next in line to be killed, his would-be executioner noticed the gleaming watch on his wrist, a memento of his more prosperous years as a Shanghai lawyer. The Japanese soldier dropped his rifle to grab the watch. Annuo’s quick-thinking father was ready: He tossed the watch past the guard and escaped as his captor scrambled for the booty.

  To reach Shanghai, her father had to evade both enemy patrols and Chinese informants. He shunned the cities, towns, and major roads, but also had to be wary of possible Communists. Though the Nationalists and Communists were supposed to be fighting the Japanese enemy together, neither faction trusted the other, and the two often clashed. He told the family how he’d waded through muddy rice paddies, hiding among the water buffalo, hitching a ride in the bottom of a sampan along a route on the Grand Canal that coursed from Beijing to Hangzhou, and somehow managing to sneak past Japanese outposts. It was impossible for the Imperial Japanese Army to watch over every village, field, and waterway of the vast territory they occupied. People in some remote villages were unaware that China was at war. Her father had to barter his way along, offering up his Parker fountain pen, his leather shoes, his reading glasses. By the time he reached Shanghai, he had nothing left but the threadbare clothes he was wearing.

  Her father sat in Muma’s chair as he captivated the three children with his thrilling tales. Annuo sat cross-legged on the floor, her head propped up on her hands. While her father spoke, little sister Li-Ning climbed onto his lap, beaming. Annuo felt envious as her father squeezed Li-Ning with a warm smile. He’s never looked at me like that, she thought, but then she could never cozy up to him either. Charley seemed eager for their father’s attention too, rushing to bring him a cup of tea before being asked. Annuo just couldn’t do this sort of thing. What was wrong with her? she fretted.

  Luckily Annuo didn’t have much time to brood, for her father was staying only long enough to get outfitted. Then he planned to leave and rejoin the resistance fighters. To avoid suspicion, Annuo’s mother continued her usual routine. On her way home from work, Muma shopped for the clothes, eyeglasses, shoes, and other provisions that Annuo’s father needed. Annuo noticed that her father seemed less than pleased with her mother’s employment and her independence. He frowned when her job was mentioned but said nothing, for he depended on his wife’s financial support as much as their children did.

  In spite of the dangers, her father couldn’t resist going out on the streets of Shanghai—the underground resistance fighter in the midst of enemy secret agents and Chinese traitors. He was always at risk of being recognized by an old friend from his days as a bon vivant in Shanghai’s clubs. Though the city’s population was by then more than five million, with an ever-growing number of refugees, the area of the foreign concessions was compact, not even ten square miles. As a disguise, her father donned a long Chinese men’s gown instead of the Western-style suits that he preferred. He pulled a fedora down past his eyes, wearing the common mix of foreign and Chinese styles. Once, he took Li-Ning out with him, holding the toddler in front of his face as a shield. Muma chastised him for drawing more attention to himself that way.

  One day, he said, China would be rid of the Japanese enemy and all foreign control. China would eliminate the Communist menace too, to keep the Red Bandits from wrecking China the way the Soviets had destroyed Russia. As he spoke, he lowered his voice so that no one, not even their amah, would overhear. But Zhongying was no threat—she was a loyal servant who had sized up their situation long ago.

  After a few weeks, Annuo’s father disappeared into the night once more. His family didn’t know when—or if—he would return. Annuo didn’t mind. To her, it was as though he had never been back.

  SHANGHAI, AUTUMN 1942

  The leaves of the plane trees lining his route to school had begun to fall as Benny started the first of his three years at St. John’s Middle School. But he could hardly sit still as his teacher droned on about the s
imilarities between Chinese characters and the Japanese kanji. Nobody was paying attention. Students across Shanghai refused to study Japanese, to protest the occupation’s order that they all learn the language. Benny didn’t share their anger since he had met decent Japanese people through his father. But the teacher, a Chinese who had been ordered to teach the enemy’s language under the occasional supervision of a Japanese proctor, seemed as unenthusiastic as his students. Everyone was eager for the class to end.

  Benny’s eyes were glued to the large athletic field beyond his classroom window. He thought he spotted some of his teammates from the school track team readying to compete against another Shanghai private school. Though he enjoyed the camaraderie of the team, he had joined only to please his father, who wished him to be more athletic. Benny could run a decent sprint, but he knew he’d never be the champion athlete his father had been. Benny preferred badminton to martial arts, his father’s favorite sport. His father spurned the Englishman’s game, but its popularity had swept Shanghai, and Benny hoped to join the school’s team.

  Just beyond the playing fields was the busy Suzhou Creek. Hundreds of sampans and barges chugged by each day on their way to the Huangpu River. As Benny and his classmates looked on, a barge came around the bend in the creek, its coolies straining to push the heavily laden boat with their long poles. When the barge drew near, its contents became obvious: looted goods—a piano, carpets, furniture, and other valuables, even metal radiators to be melted into bullets, all stripped from the homes of the well-to-do, perhaps from relatives of St. John’s students. Much of the booty would be diverted to the Shanghai residences of the Japanese occupiers and their puppets.

  Someone sitting behind Benny muttered “thieves” and “vultures.” Benny didn’t turn around.

  The barbs weren’t aimed at Benny, but his face reddened anyway. His father’s name was often in the news as the police commissioner under the Japanese-approved Wang Jingwei government. Sometimes Benny heard angry whispers from other students, but no one said anything to his face. That would be unseemly at a school like St. John’s, where the official policy was to stay neutral on political matters. The two dozen or so private schools in the city were supposed to shelter children from politics and war, emulating the civility and decorum that presumably existed at English and American boarding schools.

  Benny’s mother had enrolled him as a boarding student when he was eleven, to stay at St. John’s Junior Middle School, believing the fenced and gated St. John’s University campus, shared with the middle and junior middle schools, would be safe, away from the hostilities. A guardhouse with watchmen monitored the school’s main gate across from Jessfield Park. Students who rode their bicycles to the campus had to leave them at the park entrance and pay a small fee to walk through to the St. John’s gate. But not even the well-trimmed park was safe: One of Benny’s schoolmates, Frank Kwok, was attacked there by a vicious Japanese military dog that was trained to kill. Enemy patrols now roamed freely throughout Shanghai, and no one was immune from their arbitrary violence. Though he had dog bites on his arms and legs, Frank’s backside was spared by the wallet in his pants pocket. St. John’s guards had to rush him to the hospital for treatment and the painful regimen against rabies.

  Benny never encountered the military dogs because he returned to school in a chauffeured car on Sunday evenings. In that haven of dignified gray brick buildings, mature trees, green campus fields, and fences topped with barbed wire, for the most part, Benny could be just another student. Except for the occasional whispers, no one made a fuss if a boy’s parents were Nationalists or Communists, gangsters or collaborators. Many but not all families of St. John’s students were rich. Others came from middle-class families; some received scholarships, while children of the school’s teachers attended tuition-free. Overseas Chinese who had migrated to such distant places as Hawaii, Southeast Asia, and the Americas also sent their children to boarding school in Shanghai. There were even a small number of Europeans attending, including Jewish refugees. Whatever their backgrounds, at school the students considered themselves to be “Johanneans” first.

  From Monday through Friday, Benny stayed in a plain dormitory, leading a life of puritan simplicity. At 6:45 A.M., he awoke to campus bells, followed by a bugler calling the students to morning exercise on the broad lawns. Morning service at the chapel for Christian students, optional for non-Christians, was followed by breakfast in the dining hall. Bells chimed again at eight for the start of school. Classes ended by four, giving students time for the many clubs and sports programs at St. John’s gymnasium and pool, inside the first modern college athletic center in China. Dinner in the dining hall was followed by evening prayers and study in the dim light of their dormitory rooms or at the library. Dorm lights were out by ten, with roll call taken each night.

  Benny thrived there and eagerly returned to school after each weekend. His favorite times were spent outdoors on the protected campus, climbing the hundred-year-old camphor tree or crossing the Suzhou Creek on the school’s wooden bridge. Benny didn’t miss living at home, which, as for most other boarders, was only minutes away. He was glad to be free of the constant monitoring by his amah, the bodyguards, other servants, and his parents’ sharp eyes.

  Moreover, his good friends were at school, including his closest pals, Dennis Yu and George Cheng. The three boys organized their own school club: the BDG Club—for Benny, Dennis, and George. They studied and played sports together and rode their bikes in and around the campus. When they tired of the dining hall, they went together for hawker fare at the portable food stalls that congregated just outside the school gates. The BDG Club always had ready cash for off-campus treats—Hazelwood ice cream, Bakerite biscuits, or Tip Top toffee. Even better, Dennis and George had motorcycles, so the boys could ride through the streets of Shanghai, stopping for a sandwich at Bianca’s or at Kiesling’s for chestnut cream cake. On Shanghai’s hot, humid days, they made their way to the fancy Sun Ya Cantonese Restaurant, which featured the miracle of air conditioning.

  The boys had much in common. Dennis’s and George’s parents were wealthy industrialists who had managed to forge an advantageous coexistence with the Japanese and their collaborators. The fathers of the two boys weren’t as connected to the Japanese or the puppet government as Benny’s, but their businesses were booming under the occupation. The fact that their families were able to keep their cars running with gasoline—and not the coal-burning contraptions that some inventive people rigged to their vehicles—was a clear measure of their wealth and special status.

  Benny did his best to be the model of Western civility that St. John’s expected of its students. Proper etiquette was a priority at the school, its handbook advising: “Good manners mark the conduct of a gentleman,” and “Politeness is the oil that lubricates the wheels of social intercourse.” In comportment class, students learned which utensils to use at a Western-style meal. They took dance lessons to learn the fox-trot and waltz, which they happily practiced at parties with girls from St. Mary’s, McTyeire, and other private girls’ schools.

  In spite of the careful grooming, Benny occasionally fell short of the behavior expected of him as the son of the police commissioner. Some St. John’s students had their own cars. Benny didn’t—but he had access to a few. When Benny was fifteen, he took his father’s black Buick and drove it to school—and promptly crashed into some bushes. The damage was negligible, but his father was so furious that his neck bulged out of his police collar like an overstuffed sausage.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Benny mumbled, looking down. “I won’t do it again.”

  “I will make sure that you never do it again,” his father declared in his most fearsome tone. “I forbid you to drive the cars.” But later that day, Big Pan bragged to his cohorts that his son had his spunk. “That’s my boy, just like his old man!” Not long after, Pan Da brought home a German-made police motorcycle, ostens
ibly for use by his bodyguards. It wasn’t a forbidden car, and soon Benny was zooming around with his pals, three privileged boys on motorcycles with the enemy-occupied city as their playground.

  * * *

  —

  FOR ALL OF ST. JOHN’S campus egalitarianism, at the end of each week, when most students went home, their dissimilarity became abundantly clear. Some students headed to cars driven by chauffeurs in white livery who opened the doors of gleaming limousines. Faculty children, attending on reduced tuition, walked to their nearby university housing, while others on scholarship or of lesser means hopped on bicycles or walked to the public tram.

  When it came time for Benny to head home, he looked for the Ford Willys GP with the canvas top and his father’s husky bodyguard, standing at attention with his revolver strapped to his side. Then it was back to the English Tudor–style estate at 40 Jessfield Road, where life seemed even more dazzling than the weekend before. His mother had redecorated the big house with new artwork, carpets, chandeliers, English dinner settings, and other items “requisitioned” from Nationalist homes. Whatever she tired of, she replaced with another extravagance.