Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  There had never been a reason for Benny to question his family’s continued good fortune. So many of his wealthy classmates also seemed to live in luxury despite the war. And after all, his father was the admired and feared police commissioner Pan Da. In his refined enclave, Benny remained blissfully unaware of the growing criticisms of his father for failing to curb the rampant vice in the Badlands throughout his time as police commissioner. The gambling, prostitution, and other debauchery in the Western District were so out of control that even Japanese politicians in the National Diet in Tokyo were appalled. Wang Jingwei’s presidency was dubbed the “Monte Carlo government” because of its flagrant dependence on kickbacks and bribery. Wang actually owned a casino in the French Concession. But Pan Da couldn’t reduce the ubiquitous vice of the Badlands. Not when he was busy extracting revenues for himself as well.

  Benny had been unaware that, in late 1941, his father had been demoted to another position at 76 and given the reduced title of “major general of the Special Police.” After almost two years as police commissioner, Pan Da could no longer outmaneuver the many rivals for his lucrative position. C. C. Pan was replaced by another member of the Chinese puppet police force. However, because of his vast network of friends in high places, he wasn’t banished to another city as some of his colleagues had been. And there was no discernible impact on the Pan family’s lifestyle. The Sunday dinners, chauffeured cars, armed bodyguards, and extravagant habits of Benny’s mother all continued without pause, as did Benny’s excursions with the BDG Club, the parties, and after-school visits to eateries. The Pans’ good times continued to roll.

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  —

  YET BENNY COULD NOT have failed to notice how Shanghai had changed after December 8, 1941. Overnight, the once-protected foreign concessions had become fair game to the Japanese occupiers who had been tyrannizing the Chinese jurisdictions of Shanghai for the past four years.

  On Benny’s American missionary campus, the numbers of American teachers had dropped sharply as several headed back to the States, if they were lucky enough to find passage. Any teachers who were Allied nationals choosing to stay in Shanghai were required to wear red armbands marked with the letter A, B, D, or X for American, British, Dutch, or other. Unsurprisingly, few foreign teachers remained, although some had chosen to stay and tough it out.

  To replace St. John’s president F. L. Hawks Pott after the seventy-seven-year-old American had been among those evacuated, the university appointed its first Chinese to head the school: Dean William Zu Liang Sung, a leading advocate of sports and physical education in China. President Sung’s first priority was to keep the American school open and to prevent the Japanese from taking over the campus. The Japanese military had already seized other schools, such as Jiao Tong University on Avenue Haig. With St. John’s strategic location on the Suzhou Creek near the Shanghai West Railway Station, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself was said to have asked Sung to keep the school open and out of the hands of the Japanese. President Sung called Benny’s father for advice on how to deal with the occupation officials. “Do as they request; don’t provoke them,” Pan Da recommended. In addition to the mandatory language classes, there were Japanese observers stationed around the campus to monitor the school. Sung also added some noted Japanese Christians to the faculty. His actions alarmed some at the campus, but the school remained open.

  As Japan’s strength grew, the Allied positions in Shanghai became more tenuous by the day. At the very start of 1943, the United States and Britain signed treaties with the Nationalist government to restore China’s sovereignty in Shanghai: The century of those countries’ extraterritorial privileges that had so humiliated and angered China was over. The United Kingdom and United States needed to keep China in the Allied fold by countering the pro-Japan propaganda of puppet president Wang Jingwei and his denunciations of Western imperialism. However, these moves provoked great consternation among the foreign Shanghailanders, whose privileged status depended on their exemption from China’s legal authority.

  Not to be outdone, Vichy France, a partner in the Hitler-Hirohito-Mussolini Axis, soon followed with a similar recognition of Chinese sovereignty. The century-old treaty-port era of the International Settlement and French Concession had ended. With the waning of Anglo-American influence, Japan-friendly officials like Major General Pan Da seemed more deeply entrenched than ever.

  By the summer of 1943, all the American and British teachers and their families had vanished from St. John’s. Many had been rounded up and imprisoned in internment camps around Shanghai. The only foreign teachers remaining were from Vichy France or Axis or nonaligned countries, stateless Jewish teachers who’d escaped from the Nazis. At St. Mary’s, one of the music instructors was a Jewish opera singer from Munich. But Chinese nationals were now in leadership positions at St. John’s and other foreign schools for the first time since the missionaries had come to China in the mid-1800s. President Sung and other staff paid regular visits to their interned colleagues, as did students, passing some of their own limited food and clothing through the prison fences to the internees.

  Benny hadn’t joined any of those visits. He was too busy taking the daily boxing lessons that his father had arranged, insisting that the teenager build up his physique. When school ended each day, his father’s White Russian bodyguard picked him up and chauffeured him to the boxing gym on Bubbling Well Road by the Lido Theater, where Benny pounded a punching bag, dancing and dodging with his trainer. His father was pleased when he began to change from a gangly teenager to a muscle-bound youth.

  Benny proudly shows off the muscles he developed in the course of his daily boxing regimen insisted on by his father.

  Occasionally, Major General Pan Da asked his son to accompany him to official ceremonies, and sometimes Benny went alone to represent his father. He’d stand in his neatly pressed suit and tie with his chin up and back straight, trying to look older than fifteen or sixteen. Though his father never told him so, Benny sensed that he was being groomed in Pan Da’s image. It was a role that he cherished.

  SHANGHAI, 1942

  Once Britain and the United States declared war against Japan, life for Shanghailanders—the foreigners—swiftly changed. Immediately after December 8, 1941, all Allied nationals aged fourteen and above had to report to the Hamilton House near the Bund to register with Japanese gendarmes and receive ID numbers, as well as the red armbands they would have to wear at all times when in public.

  Worse yet, Japan froze all bank accounts belonging to its enemy nationals. They were allowed to withdraw only two thousand yuan each month—a paltry amount for foreigners accustomed to pampered Shanghai lifestyles, effectively reducing them to the same income level as their Chinese servants. Each day, the Japanese military issued new edicts that further restricted where foreign Allied nationals could go, what they were allowed to do, how they conducted their lives.

  Faced with bitter austerity, the Allied nationals were in a bind. Many expatriates worked for American telephone, gas, and electric utilities or the British waterworks, police, port, and customs. Now these entities were controlled by Japan, aiding its war effort. If Allied Shanghailanders quit their enemy-supervised jobs, they’d be stuck in China, destitute. Plenty of British bobbies, former coworkers of Pan Da, stayed on as members of the Shanghai Municipal Police—enforcing the will of Japan to crush all resistance. When their fellow Americans and Britons back home learned of their work for the enemy, they angrily denounced them, accusing them of collaboration, even treason.

  The glamorous Elder Sister, here with her husband, Kristian, is completely at ease in the company of Shanghailanders—the city’s many foreign residents.

  At the start of the war in Europe in 1939, after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Denmark had been a neutral country. As a Dane in Shanghai, Kristian Jarldane had expected his Danish passport to shield his famil
y from trouble. Before Pearl Harbor, his household in the French Concession had carried on as if things were normal, in spite of the war outside their home. Bing and Ma watched baby Ole while Elder Sister socialized. Kristian still had his engineering job with the Shanghai Water Conservancy, which paid him in foreign currency—better than gold in the inflationary wartime economy. He joined other Shanghailanders in maintaining the three-hour lunchtime “tiffins,” as well as afternoon high tea. Kristian would return to the apartment promptly at four o’clock for some strong English tea and thick slabs of dark bread from his favorite Russian-Jewish boulangerie, to be served with eel, fish, or some other meat fried in pork fat and onions.

  But the expanding world war began to disrupt everything. The first shock hit Elder Sister and her husband on April 9, 1940, when Germany invaded Denmark. The Copenhagen government immediately surrendered to the Third Reich, becoming part of the Axis with Germany, Japan, and Italy. The couple wondered if that would be a plus in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

  As a Dane, Kristian wasn’t required to wear an armband, nor was he subject to the mortifying financial restrictions confronting other Shanghailanders. He had plenty of company, for the nationals of other Axis-occupied countries were also exempt, as were the stateless White Russians, Ashkenazi Jews, and Indian Sikhs. But then, one week after all Allied nationals had to register, Kristian received orders from the Danish consular staff. He was required to provide them with the names and contact information of all Danish members of his household. Everyone in occupied Shanghai was to be accounted for.

  Elder Sister’s usual optimism was wearing thin. “What’s next? The Jews coming from Europe say this was their port of last resort,” she said. “If Shanghai is the last port, where can we go?” Her husband would shrug in reply. He and Elder Sister were friendly with some Jews living nearby who had fled the Nazis and been turned away from the United States, Canada, Britain, and other countries. Altogether about twenty thousand Ashkenazi Jews had arrived in Shanghai, the only major port in the world willing to accept them. Bing had learned of their ordeal on her daily walks with Ma, who pointed out the foreign men with long beards, some wearing yarmulkes.

  To keep up with the rapidly changing situation, Kristian and Elder Sister pored over newspapers and magazines each day, some of them borrowed and traded among his friends. He would try to sift news about the war from propaganda in The Shanghai Times, one of the few English-language papers permitted to continue publication—under Japanese supervision. Elder Sister would sit opposite him, reading the Shen Bao, one of the major Chinese dailies. Or she would thumb through copies of Life magazine and Shanghai tabloids. As they discussed the news in English, Bing would listen with interest, trying hard to understand and pick up new words.

  Ma would scan the Shen Bao headlines after Elder Sister finished reading, later discussing it all with her friends. Thirteen-year-old Bing would perk up when they dissected the latest gossip about the movie stars featured in the Chinese newspapers. Her favorite magazine was Life. While she couldn’t read most of it, the photographs introduced her to people around the world. Bing’s vocabulary in both Chinese and English was growing. Though her formal schooling had stopped, she was determined to keep learning.

  “The Germans are bombing the civilians in London day and night, the same bombing strategy the Japanese have used here,” Kristian announced one day, looking up from his paper. “The casualties will be worse than in the Great War.”

  In early 1943, the Japanese issued the order that Shanghailanders had dreaded: All citizens of Allied countries were to be imprisoned. Kristian and Elder Sister watched helplessly as friends and neighbors were loaded onto trucks and shipped to one of the eight crowded and squalid internment camps on the outskirts of the city. Most of them were British and American men, women, and children. Some were forced to walk for miles and carry their own baggage, like coolies. Because the prominent Sassoons, Hardoons, and Kadoories—wealthy Baghdadi Jewish families who had lived in Shanghai for many years—were British citizens, they, too, were subject to internment. About seventy-six hundred Americans, British, Dutch, and other civilians were imprisoned between January and July 1943 to “prevent fifth-column activities and guarantee stabilized livelihood for the enemy nationals,” according to the pro-Japan Shanghai Times. Ironically, this same rationale was being used by the U.S. government to incarcerate 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in 1942—and duly noted by Japanese propagandists to label critics as hypocrites.

  Bing had never seen the supremely confident Elder Sister so worried. She was unnerved at the prospect that men like her Danish husband might be sent away too. Though he wasn’t interned, he had recently been fired from his job. The Japanese occupation authorities intended to replace foreign employees with Japanese civilians or pro-Japan Chinese. Now the family had no income—and Elder Sister was pregnant with their second child. Another boy, Peter, was born before the year was out.

  At first, Kristian stayed home, smoking his pipe and reading the paper all day while Bing watched over the two boys. He soon tired of spending the day in the apartment and instead visited his Danish and other non-Allied friends. They passed the time at nearby parks or at Viennese cafés opened by Jewish refugees, sipping one cup of tea for hours. The cafés were full of aimless and apprehensive foreigners, since jobs for those who remained in Japanese-occupied Shanghai were now scarce.

  With their money running low and no prospects of the war ending, Elder Sister sprang into action. Her workable English and smattering of other languages landed her a job as a typist in a trading company. She worked there for a few months—just long enough to observe how commodities were bought and sold. Then she struck out on her own.

  First, she chose an English name. She liked the actress Betty Grable and took on her first name, becoming Betty Jarldane. Then she reached out to all the men she knew: anyone she might have danced or flirted with, especially any Japanese. Elder Sister knew her assets—her looks, her smarts, and her ability to talk a man into anything. And men, after all, had the money. Did they need any goods? Did they know of anyone looking for an apartment or a godown? One of her former Japanese acquaintances had a shipment of khaki cloth to sell—Elder Sister offered to find buyers. She was out on the pavement, talking to wholesalers and retailers, finding out what they needed and what they wanted to unload. With every deal, she earned a commission.

  Elder Sister’s unselfconscious ease with foreigners and their languages gave her an advantage in brokering apartments vacated by internees and others who had left the city. With each rental, she claimed the key money, a special Shanghai fee that was far more than the commission, which of course she claimed as well.

  Bing watched with awe as Elder Sister transformed herself, wheeling and dealing with strangers to support the entire household. She also instigated drastic measures to cut their expenses. She convinced Kristian to rent out one of the two bedrooms in their apartment, reorganizing the space so that their household occupied two rooms instead of three. With Bing moving in to help with the boys, there would be five crowded into the smaller space—Elder Sister, Kristian, the two boys, and Bing. Ma stayed in a small inexpensive apartment two blocks away.

  A renter was quickly found. He was a Chinese businessman from Fujian Province who had graduated from Keio University, one of Japan’s leading schools, and now worked for a Japanese company in Shanghai. His girlfriend moved in too. Neither Elder Sister nor Kristian seemed to mind that he worked for the Japanese—it was becoming harder to find work in occupied Shanghai that did not have some association with their occupiers. To Bing, the tenants seemed nice enough, and they kept to themselves. Now that seven people lived in the apartment, Bing did her best to stay out of everyone’s way.

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  IN 1943, THERE WAS an additional twist in Bing’s life: Elder Sister brought another adopted girl into the crowded household. Ah Mei was thirteen, jus
t like Bing, and had also been abandoned. Bing had never known a girl like herself before, though abandoned girls were everywhere in China. Ah Mei wasn’t embarrassed at all to share that her parents had given her away when she was too young to remember. All she knew was that she had been born in Shanghai. A relative of Ma’s had adopted her but had fallen on hard times. Ma had suggested that Ah Mei move in with Elder Sister, who could use more help.

  Once again, Elder Sister rearranged the apartment. In wartime every household made room for extra people. Ah Mei and Bing were to sleep on the floor of a small area off the kitchen, and once that was settled, no one gave the new girl another thought. Except Bing. She was thrilled.

  From their first meeting, the two girls hit it off. Ah Mei was taller and rounder in places, whereas Bing still looked like a child. She was outgoing and confident, while Bing was quiet and shy, imprinted with the soft manners of Suzhou. Ah Mei would say things that Bing wouldn’t dare, freely expressing her likes and dislikes. She sometimes mimicked Ma’s rants behind her back, forcing Bing to choke back her laughter or risk Ma’s wrath.

  Bing had never had a friend before. Now she had someone to confide in, to whisper about silly things and giggle into the night with. Bing shared her frustrations about Ma and school, her shame and sadness at being abandoned twice, her dream of finding her beloved father one day. She felt lighter after telling Ah Mei the painful secrets she had held in for so long. Even Ma’s scoldings felt less oppressive now.

  And finally Bing had someone to pal around with. When Ma took her afternoon nap with the boys, Bing and Ah Mei walked arm in arm along busy Avenue Joffre to see posters of the latest movies playing at the Cathay and Paris movie theaters and to admire the goods in the windows of fancy stores, chocolate shops, and the Russian cafés selling pastries and bright red borscht.