Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  At times when Benny sat in quiet meditation, he reflected on his life before his father’s fall. He could have become bitter against the world and Japan for the war that had compromised his father. He’d been angry at his father for aiding the enemy and sacrificing his fellow Chinese, bringing peril and unspeakable shame onto his family. He was angry at himself for being so ignorant, enjoying every luxury while oblivious to his father’s collaboration with the enemy and the source of his unlimited funds. With God’s help, Benny began to see it all in a new light. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “please forgive me for the easy life I partook in when my father was a hanjian at 76. Please, Lord, forgive my family for living off of other people’s suffering.”

  As Benny progressed through college, Grace Brady continued to guide him and cheer him on. On weekends, she often invited groups of students to her campus cottage for a simple supper. Benny was always welcome there. When the damp cold of the Shanghai winter approached, she found extra blankets and sundries for Benny, knowing that he had no family to help him. She urged him to keep going when he became discouraged. Through Miss Brady and the chapel, Benny had found a spiritual family and home. In 1947, Benny decided to be baptized as a Christian. He was learning to forgive himself. He could finally hold his head up again.

  * * *

  —

  EVEN BOLSTERED BY HIS new faith, Benny could not ignore his family’s harsh reality. As the eldest son, he was expected to visit his father at the prison and watch out for his sister Doreen at St. Mary’s. In the early days following his father’s arrest in September 1945, Benny had visited his father quite often, since no one knew when it might be his turn to face the firing squad. About eight months after he was jailed, the puppet president Chen Gongbo, who as Shanghai’s mayor had appointed C. C. Pan police commissioner, was tried for war crimes and executed.

  By now, three years after the war’s end, Benny’s attitude had changed. Before heading from his campus to the Tilanqiao Prison, Benny would stop first at his aunt’s flat in the Dasheng lilong on Avenue Haig. It was the same lilong complex he had lived in so happily before his father’s meteoric rise. This aunt was one of the only relatives who had stayed in touch with Benny, inviting him over for home-cooked meals. She always prepared some tins of food and articles of clothing for Benny to take to his father. From there, Benny would ride the trolley through the former French Concession, past the Bund into Hongkou to the north and the Tilanqiao neighborhood further east. After traveling nearly three miles to the edge of the former International Settlement, he would reach the largest prison in all of Asia, its massive gates and towering concrete walls taking up more than 750,000 square feet on seventeen acres—more than an entire city block.

  The infamous Ward Road Jail, as it was known in English, or Tilanqiao Prison, as it was known to the Chinese, had been built in stages beginning in 1901 when the British ran the International Settlement. The colossal stone dungeon, made up of eleven cellblocks, each four stories high, was a fearsome place, with thousands of inmates packed into some three thousand prison cells patrolled by armed Sikh guards. During the war, Police Commissioner Pan Da had sent countless unfortunates there—if they had managed to survive the interrogations at 76. How strange that Benny’s father was jailed in Tilanqiao alongside the Japanese war criminals he was supposed to have collaborated with, all of them awaiting trial together.

  Somehow Benny’s father had staved off the executioner. In the three years he had spent in prison, he had not only survived but didn’t appear to be suffering. He never looked haggard or unkempt like other prisoners. Benny didn’t dare ask his father how he managed to maintain himself in the cellblock, but he could guess. His father had a huge network of influential friends. Many were high in the Nationalist government and the Green Gang, the police and prison systems. Benny sometimes imagined his father would one day get out of prison unscathed. In fact, that wouldn’t have surprised Benny at all.

  Perhaps because his father seemed to be doing all right, Benny let more time slip by between visits, which consisted of little more than a few awkward moments together under the watchful eye of surly prison guards. He dared not ask the questions that gnawed at him: Had his father tortured and killed Chinese patriots and resisters to aid the Japanese enemy? Had he enriched himself during the war at the expense of his fellow Chinese? How could he have collaborated with the enemy against his own people? Against his own family?

  * * *

  —

  BENNY’S AUNT ON AVENUE Haig suggested that on this visit to the prison he pay close attention to the mood of the prison guards. With the instability of the Nationalist government and fears of its imminent collapse, she said there was no telling what changes were occurring at the prison. The Nationalists were making mass arrests of workers at the Shanghai Power Company and other workplaces, suspecting them of being underground Communists. Many, like the popular labor leader Wang Xiaohe, were also being jailed at Tilanqiao.

  “Your father is lucky that the Nationalists are too busy searching for Communists to think about him,” Benny’s aunt surmised. “With so many Nationalist officials packing up to leave Shanghai, maybe they’ll be releasing some prisoners too.”

  By the time Benny reached the Tilanqiao area, it was midmorning. He walked past a few blocks of squalid three- and four-story tenements known as Little Vienna, where the Japanese had ordered the thousands of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe to be confined in 1943, at the behest of the local Nazi authorities. Many had feared a Kristallnacht-style pogrom would follow, but it was said that the Japanese rejected Hitler’s “Final Solution” for Jews and darker races—like themselves. The Ashkenazi Jews in Tilanqiao were poor, unlike Shanghai’s wealthy and long-established Sephardic Jewish elite whose influential families had built some of Shanghai’s most famous institutions. Pan Da had known them all.

  Visiting his father, Benny had walked through Little Vienna and its busy sidewalk cafés many times, observing the similarities between these Jewish refugees and the White Russians of an earlier time; both had been displaced persons who had arrived with nothing in a strange land. If he fled to Hong Kong as many of his classmates were doing, Benny wondered if perhaps he’d be like these Jews, trying to re-create the life they once knew. Some had been hired as teachers at St. John’s, especially after the internment of many of the school’s foreign faculty. There were fewer Jews in Little Vienna now, with international relief efforts sending many of the stateless refugees to America, Australia, Brazil, and the brand-new state of Israel. As Benny walked by the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, he saw a wedding in progress there. Celebration and renewal taking place across from the fortress of death and doom—one of life’s ironies, Benny observed.

  At the towering front gate of the prison with its massive wooden doors, Benny addressed a uniformed guard through a small window in the stone wall. “I’m here to see Prisoner Pan Zhijie,” Benny said, using his father’s formal name. The guard grunted and waved him in toward a crowd of others waiting to be inspected by the next batch of gatekeepers. They recorded visitors’ names and checked their small packages—assortments of food and cigarettes, warm clothes and blankets, writing paper. Advancing to the next levels of security screening, he moved deeper into the bowels of the stone citadel. It seemed forever before he reached the austere visiting room of long bare tables and hard benches. Remembering his aunt’s advice, he looked for clues of impending change from the guards, but they seemed as stone-faced as always.

  With a sudden flurry, several prisoners were marched into the room. There was his father, straight-backed and proud, his face clean-shaven, hair clipped short the way he’d preferred when he was with the Shanghai Municipal Police. Even in the drab prison, he looked sharp and tough.

  “Hello, Father,” Benny said brightly from the visitors’ side of the wide table, in the same “snap-to-it” voice he’d used when he was a boy lining up for morning inspection by his uniform
ed father.

  No physical contact was permitted during the visit, but even if it had been allowed, Benny and his father had a formal and traditional relationship that did not include public displays of affection. Anything else would have felt odd to Benny.

  “Father, you look well. I brought you some dishes that Fifth Aunt prepared for you.”

  “Do thank her for me. How is school? It is good that your studies focus on America.”

  Nodding, Benny wasn’t surprised that his father still knew about his activities from his network outside the prison. His years as an inmate hadn’t broken him. If the war had ended differently, Benny imagined he could be having this same conversation poolside at Le Cercle Sportif Français, a favorite club of both his father and grandfather. He could picture his father in one of his elegant silk suits, or his blue serge police uniform, with a cigar in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other.

  Benny struggled for what to say when everything of importance had to remain unsaid. Instead, they spoke of mundane matters—the winter chill, sports at St. John’s, the unappetizing food at the campus canteen, same as when his father was a student. Benny was glad that his father never asked him about his mother. He would not have lied if his father had asked, but how could he have reported that his mother was living with his father’s former servant, bearing that man’s children? On the other hand, since his father asked nothing at all, Benny was sure that he already knew.

  As if sensing Benny’s unspoken concerns, his father looked at the ceiling and seemed to ponder out loud. “In times of war, there are no good choices. Sometimes one can only choose what is less bad.”

  Then he faced Benny. “You’re a man now, and you too will have difficult choices to make. Only you can know which choice is right for you.”

  For a moment, Benny imagined that his father knew about his schoolmates steadily disappearing to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere in the face of the big Communist victories. Benny’s friends and even his sister Cecilia in Hong Kong were all pressuring him to join the exodus before Shanghai collapsed to the Communists. Benny hadn’t mentioned any of that. As his father said, he would have to choose his path for himself.

  It was almost a relief when the dog-faced guard blew a whistle to mark the end of the visitation period. Benny handed over his package of food and clothing and said, “Goodbye, Father.”

  Standing to leave, his father said, “I know these are troubled times for Shanghai, and if you cannot visit, don’t worry. I still have my connections.” Benny’s father had once confided that Dai Li himself, the Nationalist chief of intelligence and feared spymaster, had promised that no harm would come to Pan Da, in exchange for a substantial sum. But Dai Li had died in a mysterious plane crash in 1946. No harm had come to Benny’s father, it was true. But who could say what would happen if the Communists took over?

  Pan Da walked out, back straight and head forward, and disappeared with the other prisoners into the maw of the cavernous jail.

  Outside, the afternoon shadows had grown long. Families strolled by under the watchful gaze of old men sipping coffee at a sidewalk café. The wedding party was streaming out of the synagogue. Benny felt lighter, grateful for his father’s words.

  * * *

  —

  AS THE WESTERN NEW YEAR passed and the Lunar New Year celebrations for the Year of the Ox approached, the question of whether to run away or stay in Shanghai became ever more pressing. Members of Shanghai’s elite fought over getaway tickets like an unruly mob. Benny’s closest friends urged him to leave, saying that the Communists would treat families like his even more harshly than the Nationalists had. At school, the empty desks multiplied.

  Benny had had chances to flee before. One of his best friends had invited him to join his family’s escape. And his sister Cecilia continued to implore him to go with her airman husband to Hong Kong. A radio operator with the China National Aviation Corporation, he could smuggle Benny into his cockpit, or so she claimed.

  Throughout the semesters, the St. John’s Dial had been publishing the names of students, faculty, and staff who had departed. Some argued that fleeing was unpatriotic; philosophy professor E. Hsu told his students, “Nobody should run away from our country and from the responsibility of being a Chinese citizen.” Nevertheless, the Dial reported, “The library is filled with worried students, anxiously poring over newspapers and discussing the latest news. Rumors circulate in the air, growing in proportion. The main topic of conversation is the question: ‘Are you leaving Shanghai?’ It may be some time before the turbulence will calm down and things will return to their normal course.” The student paper implied that normalcy would soon be restored—yet what would that look like when nobody wanted to be left behind?

  His own classmates were vanishing without a word of warning—or goodbye. Perhaps they hadn’t even known they were leaving. Richard Lin Yang, who lived in Benny’s dormitory, left suddenly one afternoon when a servant was dispatched to fetch him. Richard’s father had ordered him to attend a special family dinner aboard a boat on the Huangpu River. Richard didn’t return to campus that night, leaving all his belongings, even his prized stamp collection, in his room. No one could believe that Richard would have willingly left his rare Qing dynasty stamps behind. Richard’s friends said that his father had used the ruse of a dinner to get his extended family onto the boat and spirit them out of Shanghai, knowing that some family members would otherwise have refused to leave.

  Good for Richard. Good for them all, Benny supposed.

  But what should he do? So far he had declined the offers to help him run away, more confident of his future in China than as a refugee in points unknown. He was haunted by the skeletal refugees he’d seen living in the streets of Shanghai since his childhood, by the men marking time in Little Vienna, and by countless others. Richard and his schoolmates had parents who would make the difficult decisions and figure everything out for them. If Benny’s father weren’t in prison, it would have been the same for him.

  Instead, Benny was facing his future alone. His father had said that he would have tough choices ahead. Maybe he had been referring to his own decision to work with the Japanese enemy. Benny mused that his choice might be equally ambiguous.

  He weighed the pros and cons. Hong Kong and Cecilia beckoned, and he could live with his sister. But so many people were fleeing to Hong Kong that the British colony was teeming with refugees. He’d be one in a million.

  Then there was Taiwan. Hordes of Shanghainese were heading to that tiny island off the southern coast. Yet the Nationalists were the ones who had imprisoned his father. It was foolhardy to think Taiwan would welcome Benny. He wouldn’t stand a chance there.

  With no money and no guanxi connections for a traitor’s son, his only asset would be his St. John’s education—and he needed one more term to graduate. Without a college diploma, he’d have nothing. As a penniless refugee, he could even be forced to join the Green Gang, whose chiefs, including the “honorable uncles” to whom he owed his college debt, were already fleeing to Hong Kong. The best way to avoid that fate was to stay in Shanghai and get his diploma.

  HANGZHOU, LATE 1948

  Once in a while, Annuo had to pinch herself, just to make sure that this postwar peace wasn’t a dream. After enduring the treacherous four-month trek across rugged terrain to escape the bombers over Shanghai, she had to admit that her life in Hangzhou was so calm and pleasant, it seemed unreal, as though she’d been plucked from a cauldron and plopped into a painting of this celebrated city on the shores of the West Lake.

  At first her father’s decision to move the family to Hangzhou while he stayed in Shanghai had visibly upset her unflappable mother, especially when he arranged to give away all her hard-earned savings. Meanwhile, he could enjoy himself in Shanghai while he restarted his civilian life as a salt merchant. But for Annuo, these past three years in Hangzhou had provided a welcome st
ability. Her Nationalist father had been assigned a Western-style house that was bigger and more beautiful than anywhere else they had lived. Ever since ancient times, Hangzhou had been beloved for its scenic beauty. It was quite a recognition of her father’s loyal service that her family could live in a fine war-requisitioned home with such a prestigious location. Even the eldest son of Generalissimo Chiang, Major General Chiang Ching-kuo, had moved his own family to Hangzhou.

  The presence of so many high-ranking Nationalists—and their children—brought greater acclaim to Hangzhou’s famous Hungdao School, already nicknamed “the School for Nobility.” The grandchildren of the generalissimo himself were among its students, and that’s where Annuo’s mother wanted her daughter to go. But Annuo had missed nearly three years of school after contracting diphtheria. Before that, she had attended school sporadically. By absorbing all of Charley’s books and comics, Annuo had kept up her reading skills, but her grasp of mathematics was atrocious. Nevertheless, her mother signed her up to take the entrance exam for the girls’ middle school and confidently accompanied her to the test. During a break Annuo confessed that she’d skipped nine of the ten math questions. Her mother was so distressed by the thought of losing face from Annuo’s failure that she left in a huff. Annuo had to finish the test and find her way home by herself. To the girl’s surprise, she passed the exam and was admitted to the School for Nobility at the end of 1945, when she was ten. Other students’ math skills must have been even worse than hers.

  * * *

  —

  LITERATURE WAS ANNUO’S FAVORITE subject. By 1948, when she was thirteen, she had read almost every classic in the school library. She was still a shy girl who preferred to sit by herself with Anna Karenina or the Tale of the Three Kingdoms. In school, she filled her notebooks with dreamy poems and pencil drawings of her classmates. At home, she’d sit under the graceful magnolia tree next to the house, reading or watching the light dance on the pink blossoms in the spring. Their home was so spacious that her two grandmothers and some cousins moved in as well. When the magnolias bloomed, her usually dour paternal grandmother would chortle with delight and gather some blossoms, instructing the cook to lightly batter and fry each fresh petal. Annuo’s mouth would water at the very thought of their delicate flavor.