by Helen Zia
The abandoned girl who had always adored children found fulfillment with her own brood, which eventually numbered six. Bing kept her promise to her sister Betty: For decades she didn’t tell her husband, her friends, or her children about being abandoned or adopted, tying her childhood anguish into the knot of her shameful secret.
In the years after Frank died, Bing became the proud grandmother of eleven. Watching them thrive in loving homes, Bing could no longer contain the harsh memories of her own childhood.
I know this because Bing is my mother. When she was seventy-four years old, she first shared the secret truths of her life with me. The details, locked away until that moment, came rushing out in a torrent of revelations. After getting over my own shock at her hidden history, I encouraged her to remember and, when my journalistic instincts took over, I began interviewing her. Gradually, she opened up to other family members and friends. With each telling, the pain that Bing had repressed seemed to loosen and her healing process could begin.
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BENNY YONGYI PAN SURVIVED the ten-year span of the Cultural Revolution that separated him from his wife and daughters and subjected them to terror and torment. During President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese society was under maximum security. That year, Benny’s captors canceled his annual three-day visit to his family and put him on lockdown, fearing that the former English teacher would somehow communicate with the visiting president. When the Cultural Revolution ended after the death of Mao in 1976, Benny was released from his decade-long detention. He rejoined his family and was no longer classified as a counterrevolutionary. His St. John’s diploma, diaries, and Bible were returned—and he promptly burned them so they could never again be used against him.
Benny’s sister Doreen married Andrew, her Hong Kong beau, in 1954. His early work with textile manufacturers from Shanghai blossomed into a successful business of his own, producing ladies’ lingerie. By the time the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Doreen hadn’t heard from Benny in years and didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but she faithfully continued sending him money. After his confinement, Benny received in a lump sum all the money that his sister had sent him.
Living together again with his wife and two daughters in a very poor rural area north of the Yangtze River, Benny fretted that his daughters would not get a proper education. He and his wife, both still teachers, tutored their girls at home, while also applying to the government to change their hukou, or designated residence, to his wife’s hometown of Hangzhou. Eventually, they succeeded and were permitted to move and enroll their girls in the better schools there.
By 1980, after decades of the closed Bamboo Curtain and tight U.S. containment, China had begun to open up. When Benny’s elder daughter placed high among university applicants, she was chosen to study in the United States. Benny instructed his daughter not to return. Ten years later, in 1990, Benny and his wife received permission to visit their daughter in America. Sadly, Chen died before the scheduled trip, and Benny went alone. During his visit, President George H. W. Bush issued an executive order in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising: Chinese who had come to the United States within a certain time frame were allowed to become permanent residents. To Benny’s surprise, his visit fell within the executive order’s eligibility dates. He became an American citizen in just a few years. Later, his younger daughter was also able to immigrate to the United States.
Armed with his U.S. passport, Benny returned to Shanghai many times. After decades of separation, he reunited with his brother and three sisters—and visited the former campus of St. John’s University for reunions with his fellow alumni, including his BDG Club pal George. During his first years in the United States, Benny worked in Orlando, Florida, as a greeter for the China exhibit at Disney World. He later moved to Queens, New York, to be near his daughters. Active as a volunteer in his low-income housing project, he has been honored by the city council for his work with seniors. He remarried and for a number of years was president of the St. John’s University Alumni Association, Eastern United States chapter.
Benny and his fellow alumni around the globe spent more than a decade trying to restore historical recognition to their beloved university. They mounted a major fundraising campaign to donate funds to the school that now occupies their alma mater’s buildings. After years of effort, they hit an inexplicable roadblock. It was rumored that the Communist Party’s Central Committee rejected any acknowledgment of the “black” university. The disappointed but devoted alumni turned instead to supporting St. John’s University in Taipei and St. John’s College of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Both schools have committed to keeping alive the memory, spirit, and motto of their former school: “Light and Truth.” Benny has visited both locations with his old friends and schoolmates on several occasions, reliving the camaraderie they once had as privileged youth in the Shanghai of long ago.
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IN 1953, BING’S SISTER, Betty, and three friends debuted a new kind of restaurant on Manhattan’s east side with the financial support of her second husband and other Shanghai exiles. Located at 845 Second Avenue near the United Nations, the Peking House Restaurant was unlike those in Chinatown that largely served the hybrid “Chinese and American” fare invented by earlier generations of migrants from Guangdong Province. Betty’s Peking House won rave reviews—and not solely for the different style of Chinese cuisine it offered. With its white tablecloths, modern look, and full bar with a liquor license to serve high-class cocktails, their Manhattan venture was infused with the sophisticated haipai style of swanky nightclubs that had once proliferated in Shanghai. Peking House was one of the first elegant Chinese restaurants in an upscale midtown location in Manhattan. Adventurous New Yorkers welcomed the northern Chinese flavors—as did the Shanghai exiles. The demand for “authentic” Chinese cuisine led to popular cookbooks, turning a few educated exiles into celebrity cooks, most notably Florence Lin in New York, Joyce Chen in Boston, and Cecilia Chiang in San Francisco. It also brought competition and inevitable imitation of the Peking House.
A few years after Betty’s Peking House opened, the rival Peking Park Restaurant set up shop nearby, at Fortieth Street and Park Avenue, featuring a similar menu and ambience and a nearly identical name. The Peking Park had a better chef, a fresher décor, and the cachet of newness. Devotees of northern Chinese cuisine abandoned the Peking House for the Peking Park, which soon became a staple for social occasions. But for most of the Shanghai emigrants, even the uptown Shanghainese, restaurants like the Peking House and the Peking Park were a rare indulgence, since their prices and service were geared toward the higher-paid lofan.
Encompassing the uptown, downtown, and elite White Chinese, New York City’s Shanghai exiles reflected the great diversity of their hometown and its residents—a cliché, perhaps, when thriving cities by their very nature attract people of many talents, skills, and backgrounds. In this regard, the exodus and diaspora from Shanghai has mirrored the pattern of other migrations in history where, for example, the first to flee have generally been those with the most money, connections, and options for locating a safe harbor. Only later does the fear of imminent doom drive those with far fewer resources to run from the unthinkable. This, too, was true for the Shanghai exodus.
Yet it is commonplace in the United States and elsewhere—including among Chinese—to dismiss the migrants and refugees of this exodus as “rich Shanghainese,” as though they are all cast from the same mold. The vastly different lives of Annuo, Benny, Bing, Ho, and others in this book should work to dispel such one-dimensional mischaracterizations. Benny’s comprador family, for example, got its start in the Cantonese enclave of Shanghai, one of many urban neighborhoods with roots in distant “native places.” The families of Annuo and Ho, as well as the floating population of abandoned child
ren like Bing and Ah Mei, illustrate the dynamic nature of China’s domestic migrations. Sharp culture clashes ensued when Shanghai migrants encountered other regional Chinese cultures, whether in Hong Kong, Taipei, New York, or elsewhere, underscoring the fact that Chinese society is not monolithic. With China’s ascendance on the world stage and the growing presence of Chinese beyond its borders, a more informed and nuanced understanding of its complexities—past and present—is needed.
Even though this book examines a singular period of history, it reveals the manifold differences and conflicts that exist within even a small segment of one city’s population. As the stories of “hot” and “cold” war experiences show, to label all the people of a country or culture as the same is a folly with potentially global consequences. This alone is a valuable lesson of the Shanghai exodus, a simple insight that bears repeating, especially when migrants and refugees everywhere are still often painted in one dismissive stroke.
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ABOUT TWO YEARS AFTER the rival restaurant opened, Betty’s Peking House shut its doors, while the Peking Park Restaurant grew into a popular banquet venue. Despite the increasing numbers of Shanghainese and other Chinese exiles, two northern-style restaurants could not be sustained. Betty seized the moment to divorce her second husband and launch her quest for a third.
Ho and Theresa Junlin Chow had occasion to patronize the Peking Park Restaurant over the years, especially since the China Institute held special events there. In 1960, Annabel Annuo Liu, the journalism school graduate, had found her way to Manhattan and was working a few blocks from the Peking Park. In time, Benny, his daughters, and Doreen made it to New York. Ho, Bing, Annuo, Benny, and Doreen might have encountered one another there at some point, just as they probably crossed paths in Shanghai’s foreign concessions when they were youngsters in the besieged city.
This book is based on the journeys of these intrepid individuals, yet their stories contain what is universal among the people who endured this cataclysmic period of modern history. Where America’s World War II generation is often lauded as its “greatest,” these Chinese contemporaries of that generation deny any claim to such superlatives, especially when China’s five-thousand-year history spans hundreds of generations. Nevertheless, this particular demographic, defined by exodus and liberation, possesses the greatness that they share with all who survive the savagery of war, social upheaval, violent extremism, and the desperate scramble to find safe haven, anywhere.
What other lessons can be drawn from their ordeals? Certainly what was true for the refugees and exiles of Shanghai remains true for people fleeing from catastrophe in contemporary times, whether these migrants are driven from Syria, Myanmar, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, or too many other places. These refugees have all faced the agonizing choice of whether to stay or to flee—a torturous decision burdened with the guilt of leaving and the fear that the next boat, plane, train, or bus may be the last one out.
In a world fractured by turmoil, there is much to learn from the profound human experience shared by the uprooted and displaced, whether from Shanghai or Aleppo: their courage in setting forth on a course rife with danger; their steadfast will to survive the hardships of dislocation, often in unfriendly lands; their willingness to adapt to cultures quite unlike their own; and their ability to recognize and seize opportunity. They inspire with their resilience and teach that the human spirit is willing to risk all to find peace and shelter from harm, even if their sacrifices may not bear fruit until the next generations. There are many lessons to be learned from refugees and migrants that can contribute to the understanding needed to navigate the global tectonics, to bring people together, not drive them into flight.
For these Shanghai emigrants, the passage of seven decades has allowed the stories of their turbulent odysseys to reach light. As Annabel Annuo Liu replied when asked about her experiences, “I’ve been waiting for someone to tell our story.” If told often enough, one day such stories may become lessons for historical reflection, not broken paths to be retrod.
To all refugees from crises amok;
To the compassionate who strive
Toward a world where no one must flee to survive;
To the memory of my mother, who inspired this book.
When this book was in its infancy, years ago, I encountered some lukewarm reactions to it. One leading social scientist cautioned that “this topic is very controversial in China.” More than a few Chinese Americans signaled negative feelings toward Shanghai people, referencing their stereotype as rich blowhards. Then there was the AIDS activist from Hong Kong who was doing human rights work in China; he struggled with what to say to me after learning of my book’s subject, and he eventually blurted out, “But that’s so…ordinary.”
Looking back, I appreciate how such reactions helped me explore the events of this book from different viewpoints. I soon learned that the frenzied escape out of Shanghai had been so massive that in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan, the topic of those refugees from the Communist revolution was as ordinary as talk about the weather. I also discovered that, in the United States, this migration had been ignored by many who viewed all Shanghainese through the same lens, while, in China, the very existence of this exodus has been repressed.
Ironically, this was an “ordinary” and familiar story for me as well. From as early on as I can remember, my aunt Betty would solemnly declare that she and my mother had left Shanghai on the “last boat before the Communists.” To her, nothing more needed to be said. In addition to my gratitude to Aunt Betty for showing me that there are no limits to what a woman could reach for, I thank her for this cryptic allusion that stayed stuck in my imagination like a mysterious black hole. In time, I met many other Shanghai exiles who grieved for children and other loved ones they’d been separated from for decades, unable to reunite with them in a world fractured by ideology. Later I encountered people like myself—the grown children of Shanghai migrants and refugees whose families had all escaped on the last boat, plane, or train. Yet, everyone had fled on different transports. Eventually, I realized that a much larger story lurked behind the proverbial “last boat,” and I felt compelled to find it.
First and foremost, I give heartfelt thanks to the remarkable survivors of this exodus who generously shared their extraordinary lives. Most of my Shanghai interviewees were well over seventy when I met them, and some of their painful accounts were told through tears. I truly regret that I could not fit all of their stories onto these pages. These inspiring raconteurs include:
Betty Barr (Shanghai)
Deanna Chan (Palo Alto, California)
Florence Chang (Oakland, California)
Margaret and Bill Chang (San Francisco)
Sydney Chang (Shanghai)
William Yukon Chang (New York)
Yingying and Shaujin Chang (Milpitas, California)
Isabel Chao (Hong Kong)
Ben and Vivian Char (San Francisco)
Theresa Chenlouie (San Mateo, California)
Grace Chen (Shanghai)
Stanley Chen (Boston)
Julia K. Cheng (San Francisco)
Cecilia Chiang (San Francisco)
Rio Lieu Chiang (New Jersey)
Frank Ching (Hong Kong)
Chinyee (Princeton, New Jersey)
Evelyn Chong (Shanghai)
Bae Pao Chow (New York)
Gregory and Paula Chow (Princeton, New Jersey)
Ho and Theresa Chow (Walnut Creek, California)
May Wong and Bill Chow (Shanghai)
Philip and Sarah Choy (San Francisco)
John Chu (New York)
Kenneth Chu (Los Angeles)
Valentin and Vicky Chu (Walnut Creek, California)
Vem Chuang (Berkeley, California)
Vernon and Jeanette Doo (San Jose, California)
Yuncong Du (Hong Kong)
Robert and Doreen Fan (Mill Valley, California)
Mary Fung Fulbeck (Covina, California)
Leah Jacob Garrick (San Francisco)
Gloria-Tao-t’ai Hsia (McLean, Virginia)
Betty Hsiao (Walnut Creek, California)
David Hsiung (Vancouver)
George Hsu (Shanghai)
Sophia Hsu and Alexander Yu (Vancouver)
T. C. Hsu (New York)
Vivian Hsu (San Mateo, California)
Jane Hsueh (Foster City, California)
S. Y. Huang (Walnut Creek, California)
T. Y. Jiang (Sydney, Australia)
Chris Kao (Taipei)
