Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  Benny no longer buried himself in the library. He cast off his self-imposed solitude. When a colleague asked if he’d be willing to teach English and Russian, he accepted the position. He left the library, estimating that he had typed catalog cards for five hundred thousand books. During his many long days at the typewriter, Benny had assumed that he’d never get married. Who would want to marry him, the son of the worst possible kind of running dog? But Chen Ling didn’t think of Benny that way. The fact that she could like him helped him slowly gain confidence. After a year of their deepening friendship, Benny asked Chen Ling to marry him. She said yes. He couldn’t imagine anything more joyful.

  Chen Ling and Benny Pan were wed in July 1957. Benny was almost thirty. In the new China, weddings were no longer big and ostentatious. They had a civil ceremony in Nanjing with no relatives present. In Benny’s previous life, before all the troubles, his family would have planned a huge celebration to mark the marriage of the Number One Son of his generation. His mother used to say that she’d have the marching band of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps lead the wedding party down Bubbling Well Road. Dennis and George would have been his groomsmen, and his parents would have held court, looking splendid.

  Coming from a traitor’s family, Benny hadn’t dared to dream that he’d ever find someone as wonderful as Chen Ling.

  Such extravagances meant little to Benny now. All that mattered was that he and Chen were making a new life together. They rented a white lacy wedding dress with a long train for Chen and a tuxedo for him, complete with cummerbund. The “masses” still looked to old ways to commemorate their weddings, and such bourgeois frivolities were still allowed. The photo of the radiant bride and the dashing groom could have been taken decades earlier.

  After the wedding, they received time off from their work teams and took a train to Hangzhou, a few hours away. Benny met Chen’s mother and younger brother, who had been unable to leave work for the wedding but happily gave the couple their blessings. Before returning to Nanjing, Benny asked Chen’s brother to send a letter to his sister Doreen in Hong Kong to tell her of his marriage and whereabouts. Because Benny was labeled as black, he felt it would be too dangerous for him to write directly to his sister in the imperialist colony, especially with the “Anti” campaigns under way. The government postal censors would no doubt take notice. But Chen’s brother lived in a different city and was younger, without a political history. It would be safe for him to send a letter.

  Back in Nanjing, the newlyweds were off to a fine start. They both had good jobs as teachers. Neither noticed that their married life coincided with a new political wind: the Hundred Flowers Campaign, aimed specifically at intellectuals. They had been planning their wedding when Chairman Mao and the Communist leadership had encouraged intellectuals to criticize excesses of the party, to “let one hundred flowers bloom and one hundred schools of thought contend.”

  A torrent of pent-up criticisms came gushing from disenchanted intellectuals—criticisms of the party, its workings, and the revolution itself. Party leaders who had authorized the criticism, including Mao himself, were caught off guard by the vehemence of the critiques. They swiftly ended the campaign and turned the spotlight on the intellectuals instead, especially those who had spoken up.

  As teachers, Benny and Chen were intellectuals, but neither had participated in the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Benny knew better than to open himself up to attack. But universities and schools became the targets of the new Anti-Rightist Campaign. No one was exempt. This time, the party mandated that intellectuals experience the hardship of the masses. Only then could intellectuals reform themselves, root out their bourgeois thinking, and embrace the revolution. Chen was sent to the countryside first—to a place called Yancheng, in northern Jiangsu Province, a few hours away. Many people in the urbanized southern part of Jiangsu, next to Shanghai, considered people north of the Yangtze River to be ignorant peasants. The area was very poor, and teachers were needed there. The couple would have to live apart, but they knew the assignment could have been far worse. Benny was relieved to learn that Chen was being sent to work in the rural town as a teacher, not a laborer, and they wouldn’t be too far from each other.

  For Benny, there were more interrogations. What were the names of the foreigners he knew from his days at the black imperialist training school? Were they spies? Did he have any more contact with them? In his English classes, why did he teach, “The sun is covered by clouds; the sun was covered by clouds; the sun will be covered by clouds”? Was he saying that Chairman Mao, the sun, would be covered up? Who were the clouds? How would they cover up the sun?

  Like others who endured such “struggle sessions,” Benny was ordered to put his confessions in writing. He had to list every place he had lived, everyone he had known. He repeated all that he had previously confessed about his counterrevolutionary father and family. No, he was not in contact with any foreigners. No, his foreign teachers at St. John’s were not spies. He didn’t know any spies. Benny confessed to what he could. Yes, Chairman Mao was the sun and light of China. Yes, it had been wrong of him to mention the sun and clouds when he was teaching the passive voice of the English language. He criticized himself for being born into a bourgeois family and denounced his counterrevolutionary past. He told his inquisitors what he thought they wanted to hear. He wrote and rewrote his confessions several times. Any deviation from a previous statement was additional fuel for more questions and criticisms.

  After numerous struggle sessions and confessions, the verdict was rendered. Because Benny had done nothing his inquisitors could use to label him a Rightist, he was spared from a harsh punishment. But he would not be permitted to remain in Nanjing. Since he was an intellectual of the worst bourgeois sort, he was sent down to be a laborer in a village outside of Wuxi, a city not far from Nanjing. Benny was again grateful that the decision had not been more severe. Others he knew of were sent for indefinite periods to harsh regions in Xinjiang in the distant northwest beyond Mongolia, or the frigid northeast of Heilongjiang.

  Not afraid of hard physical work, Benny threw himself into the farm labor of the peasantry. His tormentors allowed him to keep his Bible, his St. John’s diploma, and his wedding photo with Chen. These were his companions. After a year, Benny was released and sent to Yancheng to teach again. And to be reunited with Chen.

  In Yancheng, Benny and Chen could live a simple but comfortable life. The area was so desperate for teachers that the couple was treated with respect. In their teaching jobs, Chen and Benny each earned sixty renminbi per month, equivalent to less than ten U.S. dollars. Still, their combined pay placed them at upper income levels in a poor area like Yancheng. A half pound of beef or shrimp cost less than one renminbi.

  Benny became the English instructor at Yancheng Middle School, where Chen had already been teaching biology and embryology. The families of their students aspired to send their children to college, an impossible dream before the revolution. But would-be students still needed to achieve a minimum grade on the national entrance exam. A foreign language like English could add critical bonus points to their overall score. Benny became so popular as an English teacher that the dean of the school asked him to serve as assistant dean.

  In 1960 Chen and Benny had a baby girl. Her birth coincided with the start of a devastating famine in China after a terrible drought and a series of major crop failures. Basic food essentials were unavailable in towns and cities. Millions across China starved to death with no more than grass and tree bark to eat. Benny’s family was able to make it through the famine years with the help of Doreen’s packages of rice, powdered milk, and cooking oil from Hong Kong. Food essentials were more precious than the money she sent. He could thank her only in his prayers, for it would have been folly for him to write to anyone overseas. A few years later, Chen and Benny had a second daughter. Chen’s mother came from Hangzhou to live with them and help care for the children.
With the money from their savings and from Doreen, Benny bought the first television set in their neighborhood of Yancheng. The whole community would gather to watch TV at their small cottage.

  That was the lull before the next storm. In 1966, when Benny’s elder daughter was six years old, the Communist Party under the leadership of Chairman Mao launched a massive political campaign intended to change Chinese culture and traditional ways of thinking. Calling it the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao shut down the universities and middle schools and radicalized a generation of youth into an army of Red Guards. These teenagers and children were unleashed to root out “capitalist roaders” from among intellectuals, bureaucrats, party members, neighbors, and family members. It was a way for the aging Mao to assert his power against opposing factions within the Communist Party. With the imprimatur of the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao Zedong, the Red Guards broke into homes, destroying books, art objects, and personal property and attacking the occupants in their quest to eliminate the “Four Olds”: old ideas, customs, habits, and culture.

  At the middle school where Benny taught, all teachers and administrators came under attack. Teenaged Red Guards rounded up their school elders and locked them up separately in a few classrooms for an indefinite period. Benny was forbidden to leave the school with the struggle against him and the others under way. His file of previous confessions was brought before him again, and his home was searched. This time, his Bible, diploma, diaries, and various letters and photos were confiscated as evidence of his crimes.

  Once again, Benny’s life was scrutinized. This time the questioning was more aggressive and hostile than ever before. It was both terrifying and interminable. His bourgeois upbringing. His father. His family. Traitors and class enemies.

  “You rode a bicycle on the grounds of 76—that enemy place of unspeakable evil?” the Red Guards asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, but I was only a boy. I knew nothing about the place,” Benny replied truthfully.

  His accusers were relentless in their criticism of his education at the imperialist St. John’s University, his belief in an oppressive religion, his acquaintance with foreigners. They grilled him on his sisters in Hong Kong. Why did Doreen send him money and food? Were his sisters spies? Was Benny a spy? He was ordered to list the names of everyone he had known—and the Red Guards sent investigators to check on them. One of the investigators went all the way to Guangzhou to dig up something on Benny. His interrogations in the previous movements had been mild in comparison to this. But the investigators could find nothing that proved him to be a capitalist roader.

  He remained locked in the classroom, unable to see his family. One year stretched into three. Occasionally Chen could get a message to him. He was let out for interrogations, meals at the canteen, and to perform chores of sweeping and cleaning the school. No classroom teaching took place during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. When the Red Guards couldn’t put a capitalist “hat” on Benny, they worked on Chen, pressuring her to divorce her imprisoned husband. Because she refused, they sent her away from Yancheng to work in a village where there wasn’t even a cottage for her to live in. Accompanied by her elderly mother and two young daughters, Chen built a small hut out of twigs and mud with their help, using her bare hands. When Benny didn’t hear from her after a long while, he was overcome with worry. Eventually, the Red Guards told him where his family was and that he would be permitted to see them once a year, three days per visit.

  Though Benny hadn’t been charged with any crime against the people, his captors weren’t releasing him. Still, his incarceration was better than the fates of his colleagues at the school who were sent to faraway regions to reform their thoughts. Some had died from the harsh conditions and the stress of the brutal interrogations.

  After a while, Benny was the only teacher remaining at the school. Three things kept him from sinking into despair: the image of Chen and his young daughters, always on his mind; the Lord’s Prayer, which he repeated several times a day; and the knowledge that he had done nothing wrong. Sooner or later, this political movement would come to an end. He prayed that it would be soon.

  One of Benny’s Red Guard interrogators revealed some tragic news, apparently uncovered while digging into Benny’s past. His childhood friend Dennis, one of his BDG Club pals, had been the son of a rich capitalist. After graduating from St. John’s, Dennis had joined his family’s business. According to Benny’s captor, Dennis had jumped to his death from a third-story window after one of his struggle sessions. Benny was certain that his friend had been subjected to intense pressure. From the bits of information Benny could gather, the Red Guards in Shanghai were more radical and destructive than anywhere else. Benny had to wonder what might have happened to him had he remained there, where his father’s crimes were well known. Would he, too, have been driven to suicide?

  Alone in his classroom prison, Benny thought about his good friend, who had always been generous with him, welcoming him into his home when Benny had nowhere to go. Of the three boys in the BDG Club, Dennis had been the most carefree, the one who had experienced little hardship, unlike Benny or George, who was a boy when his father was kidnapped and murdered.

  Benny wondered if Dennis had killed himself because he hadn’t known suffering and couldn’t withstand the torturous assaults of the Red Guards. Benny reckoned that, in some strange irony, his family’s troubles helped him to survive these new challenges. Like the Chinese people, he had been through the bitterness of war and invasion, economic and social chaos, abandonment and loss. Now revolution and revenge. The Red Guards weren’t through with him yet, he knew, and he prayed that the merciful Christian God had not forgotten him. But if he could endure years of confinement, separation from his family, and continual harassment with no end in sight, surely he’d be able to overcome whatever trials the future would bring.

  NEW YORK, 1950S

  Sitting at the table covered by white linen in midtown Manhattan, Bing listened as Elder Sister spouted a litany of grievances against her second husband, a Shanghai-born businessman she had met and married in New York after her divorce. “That son of a rotten turtle egg” had lied to her about having a green card, she complained bitterly. The two women sat near the restaurant’s sleek entrance flanked by floor-to-ceiling mirrors trimmed with red and gold accents. From this spot, the impeccably coiffed Betty could watch for any approaching customers.

  With just one ear tuned to her sister’s nonstop diatribe, Bing deftly aimed a pair of plastic chopsticks at a small dish of thinly sliced braised beef, served cold in its shimmering aspic. Her imitation-ivory utensils were imprinted in red with the words “Peking House Restaurant” in English and Chinese. The Peking House was one of the few eateries in North America where Chinese exiles from Shanghai, Beijing, and provinces north of Guangdong could taste the familiar flavors of their regional cuisines from home.

  Bing lifted a sliver of beef to her mouth. She closed her eyes and for an instant was transported to Shanghai and Suzhou by its heavy salty-sweet flavors—until she was abruptly jostled into the present as Elder Sister cursed the “no-good smelly dog turd.” At that very moment, the door to the restaurant opened, and a group of neatly dressed Chinese stepped in. Without skipping a beat, Elder Sister rose and smiled warmly. “Good evening. Welcome to the Peking House!” she purred in her genteel, honey-smooth English. “May I help you?”

  Judging by the sophisticated air of the patrons, Bing guessed that they, too, were from Shanghai, but with high-class educations, unlike hers. The men sported business suits, and all the women but one wore beautiful silk qipaos. A man with thick wire-rimmed glasses responded to Elder Sister in equally confident English. “Good evening. We have reservations. Under Chow. Ho Chow.” On his arm was an attractive, petite woman who, like Bing, wore a loose maternity top over a tapered skirt and high heels. The two expectant mothers exchanged smiles.

  * * *
/>
  —

  IN 1953, THE KOREAN WAR had ended in a cease-fire and stalemate. An estimated 2.7 million Koreans, or nearly one in ten, had died as a result of the war, with the civilian death rate rivaling that of World War II. After the inconclusive truce, Korea was still divided, while China and the United States grew more polarized than ever. In Cold War rationale, American leaders believed that China had to be “contained” to prevent Communist expansion. As a result, following Truman’s stunning flip-flops in U.S. policy, Taiwan was resuscitated overnight and declared to be strategically important to the United States. It would retain its newfound protected status indefinitely. Hong Kong, dependent on trade with China for its financial health and choking with refugees, faced economic collapse when the United States imposed an international embargo against the Communist mainland. Disaster was averted with the help of industrial entrepreneurs who had fled Shanghai; with their economic and social capital, Hong Kong transformed from a trading portal to a global manufacturing center. Both Taiwan and Hong Kong found renewed purpose and stability after the Korean War, energized in no small part by the resourcefulness of Shanghai exiles who brought their expertise in manufacturing, shipping, and international commerce.

  Back in Washington, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of anti-Communist hysteria collapsed from its own excesses, his Red-baiting having gone too far in his ever-widening net of accusations, leading to his censure by the Senate. But the damage to U.S. foreign policy toward China had been done: The State Department and other influential institutions had exorcised their most seasoned diplomats possessing experience in China and Asia. The resulting void on the American side of the “Bamboo Curtain” clouded U.S. policy decisions for decades, persisting even into the present.