by Bo Caldwell
That evening he met friends for dinner at D.D.’s in the Little Russia section of the French Concession. He mentioned the chalk line he’d seen in Hungjao, and how odd it seemed, but his comment was dismissed as inconsequential and of no pressing interest. After dinner he went alone to see Lost Horizon at the Lyceum. He’d seen it before, but he went again because my mother had loved the book. After the movie he went home. Tomorrow was a business day.
And then the world changed. At around four o’clock Monday morning, he was awakened by several huge explosions, with flashes of light that lit up the sky. The noise was terrific, like firecrackers just outside the window. He’d brought Jeannie, his German shepherd, with him and she huddled under his bed, trembling and whining softly.
When those first bangs were followed by several more, my father decided there must be some kind of Chinese celebration that included fireworks, and he got dressed and went out to see what was what. Outside, it was still dark and just starting to rain. There were no firecrackers or celebrating Chinese in the streets, so my father headed toward the Bund. But when he reached the end of Foochow Road where it met the Bund, he found the intersection blocked by a Japanese sailor dressed for war, his rifle and bayonet ready. My father strained to see the other intersections in both directions. Every street he could see was barred by armed Japanese soldiers.
Suddenly the entire Bund was lit up by fire. My father followed others as they hurried to the roof of the Palace Hotel, and from there they saw that the fire came from the HMS Peterel, which was anchored directly across the Whangpoo. Two smaller fires burned nearby, the launches alongside the Peterel.
And then someone had the news, which spread instantly: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, sinking the American battleships Arizona, California, Oklahoma, and Utah, and damaging others. Thousands of Americans had been killed, and it was rumored that the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam had been attacked as well. Japan had declared war on the United States and Britain, and was now in the process of occupying the International Settlement, starting with the takeover of the Peterel and the Wake. The Peterel’s crew had scuttled their ship rather than surrender to the Japanese. The Wake’s crew had wanted to do likewise, but had not had time before the Japanese demanded surrender.
My father was stunned. He stayed at the Palace waiting for more news. An hour later when he walked back to the American Club, the sky was filled with leaflets falling from a plane. He watched them float gently toward him and reached out and caught one in the air. He unfolded it and read an announcement of a Declaration of War by His Imperial Japanese Majesty on the United States of America and Great Britain. For the residents’ protection, the leaflet said, the Japanese military would enter the International Settlement at 10 a.m. Residents were to pursue their “normal avocations” and should not cause any kind of disorder. They should remain calm and trust in the benevolence of the Imperial Japanese forces.
At the American Club, my father found most of the club’s residents in the lobby, some in bathrobes pulled on over pajamas, others, like him, in wrinkled trousers and sweaters and coats grabbed hurriedly in the dark when the explosions had started. My father listened to the others’ frantic talk and to a British announcer on the radio in the corner. He understood that he had hugely misjudged his situation. He understood that his life might now never be the same, that staying in Shanghai had probably altered his future forever. And he understood that this day was only the start of bad fortune, and that he had to act.
He went upstairs and put Jeannie on her leash, then went back outside with her and hurried to his office on Yuen Ming Yuen Road. The streets were frantic. The air on and near the Bund was thick with smoke, the ground covered with a thin layer of ash from businessmen and government officials burning whatever documents they thought necessary before the Japanese could get them. Japanese sentries were everywhere, but my father had at least some good luck that morning, for when he reached his office, he found it unguarded. The building had not yet been sealed off.
In his office, he settled Jeannie in the corner and filled a bowl with water. In his safe, he had eight hundred dollars in U.S. currency that he’d put aside as emergency cash. He wrapped the bills in newspaper, and loosened a section of one of the wooden floorboards. In a small compartment there, he placed it with the other things he wanted to protect: his chop, and an ivory comb that my mother used to wear in her hair. Then he replaced the floorboard and nailed it down.
In the sink in the men’s washroom, he burned every receipt from Nationalist supporters, figuring those could get him into trouble with the Japanese. On his desk, he left out receipts from the Japanese military. He stroked Jeannie’s fur and told her that he would return for her soon; he was sure she was safer here until he knew more about what he would do next. The dog whined once and put her large head on her paws. My father locked the door behind him and went back to the lobby of the American Club.
At a few minutes after ten, Japanese Naval Party soldiers arrived and announced that the American Club was now Japanese Naval Head quarters. Residents were required to leave within two hours; they were allowed to take only what they could carry. My father was lucky. He’d moved to the club only a few months earlier, and for him packing would be straightforward. Many of the residents had lived there for years, and would have to choose what few belongings to take.
My father went upstairs immediately to pack. Shortly after noon, two Japanese sailors, armed with rifles and bayonets and loaded down with bottles of Chefoo beer from the bar downstairs, knocked at my father’s door. They were drunk. They let themselves in and made themselves comfortable, laughing and joking, looking through my father’s things and keeping what they wanted as he packed.
When he’d finished, he was escorted out of the club with the rest of the residents. He caught a tram to the Medhurst, a twelve-storey hotel and apartment building on Bubbling Well Road near the Race Course, where he and my mother had stayed in their early days in Shanghai. He took a room there, but he didn’t bother to settle in. The next problem was money. Apart from the cash he’d hidden in his office, he didn’t have much, so he figured the first stop was the bank. But when he reached the Shanghai office of the National City Bank of New York, a line of foreigners and Chinese wound around the block and overlapped itself. He was told that the Japanese had taken control of the Allied banks, and that funds belonging to Allied nationals were now frozen.
It was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon, and the air was freezing. My father got in line and tried to ignore the cold, which seemed to grow worse by the hour. Four hours passed before he reached the front of the line, where armed Japanese guards admitted people in groups of five. But he was lucky; the bank closed at five, and he was one of the last to be admitted. Those who didn’t make it were told to return the next day, with no guarantee of their place in line.
Inside, two Japanese officials stood with the bank’s books open before them and explained how things were. First, Allied currencies were now outlawed, so you could not withdraw funds in U.S. dollars or British pounds. Second, the amount of money you could withdraw was limited to five hundred Chinese dollars a week. My father nodded to all the explanations, then withdrew his five hundred Chinese dollars, the equivalent of fifty U.S. dollars and not nearly enough to live on.
At a street vendor on Nanking Road, he bought a plate of shrimp and sausage with noodles, coolie food, then headed back to the Medhurst. It was six o’clock in the evening, fourteen hours after those early-morning explosions, and as my father walked through the city, he was amazed how much had changed in those few hours. The winter air was thick with paper ash, and huge signboards repeating the information in the morning’s pamphlets were posted all over the city. Japanese soldiers were everywhere. They patrolled the streets and stopped passersby, demanding to see their passports. They stood guard at the Allied Consulates and the Municipal Building, at the largest banks and trading firms, at Shanghai’s top hotels and clubs. And above doorway after doorway hung the Rising Sun
—the “poached egg” was the term foreigners used—to which all were required to bow as they passed.
That night and the next few days, my father and other foreigners talked in hushed voices about what had gone on, pooling what they knew. The Shanghai Club had been taken over by the Japanese navy, and the British Country Club and Race Course on Bubbling Well Road by the Japanese army. Allied officials had been sent to the Cathay Mansions, an apartment building on Rue Cardinal Mercier, across from the French Club in the Concession. The German Consulate advocated the immediate internment of all Allied nationals, and even offered to take charge of the camps, an offer that the Japanese declined. The Japanese had taken control of the cable and radio offices, the telephone exchanges, and the newspapers. No messages of any kind were allowed to be sent, and the North China Daily News was closed and sealed. Communication with the outside world had stopped. The Peterel lay at the bottom of the Whangpoo, despite efforts of the Japanese to save it. The Japanese were able to get the Wake’s radio equipment, as well as the ship itself, a feat they considered a triumph. They renamed it the Tatara Maru and immediately made it part of the Japanese Imperial Navy.
On December 10, notices appeared all over the city informing “enemy nationals”—British, American, Belgian, and Dutch citizens—that they were required to register within three days. They were to do this by presenting themselves at Hamilton House, a modern building near the Bund, on the corner of Kiangsi and Foochow Roads. My father went as soon as the notices appeared, knowing that another long line awaited him. He was right. The line went on for blocks. As people waited in the cold, a Japanese soldier with a movie camera walked up and down the pavement and motioned for them to smile.
The process lasted most of the day. The registration office was small, the Japanese staff inadequate. Inside, my father presented his passport and a photograph, filled out various forms with long lists of questions about himself, his family, his income. When he had finished with the forms, he was given a registration card and told to carry it with him at all times. He was also informed that he was no longer allowed to change his place of residence without a permit. Watching over the process were several Japanese officials eating delicate cakes and sipping jasmine tea.
Afterward my father walked through a city he didn’t know. Enlarged photographs of the American ships sunk at Pearl Harbor and military installations ablaze were displayed on walls around the city. Confiscation notices were everywhere, posted by the Japanese army and navy, informing the public that this land, this building, the contents of this house or apartment, were now under Japanese control and belonged to the Japanese government. Even the sidewalks of Japanese-claimed buildings were Japanese territory; to pass, you had to walk in the street or cross to the other side. Either way you had to raise your hat and bow to the Rising Sun that hung in the doorway. Like many, my father quickly stopped wearing a hat so that he wouldn’t have one to tip to the Japanese flag.
Two weeks after Pearl Harbor came the most ominous development yet: in the middle of the night, the Japanese Gendarmerie appeared at the homes of some twenty Allied nationals and arrested them on the spot. No one knew why they were taken, no one knew where they went, and for several weeks, no one heard a thing. They had simply disappeared. Then Will Marsh told my father that he’d heard they’d been taken for questioning to a place called Bridge House, Gendarmerie Headquarters now, an old apartment building on the north side of Soochow Creek. More arrests followed, and soon it was rumored that Bridge House was filled with both Chinese and foreigners, some of whom had been there for many months. There were Chinese boys who couldn’t be over fifteen years old, American missionaries, well-known British and American journalists and businessmen. The head of the China agency for Dodge cars and trucks, the president of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the managers of the National City Bank, the Socony Vacuum Oil Company, the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Those who were taken were often not seen again. And if they were, they were not the same, and they never spoke of what had happened to them during their imprisonment.
My father responded to the changes around him in kind. Before registering at Hamilton House, knowing that afterward would be too late, he had left the Medhurst and rented a room over a rice and grain shop near the intersection of Hardoon and Avenue Roads in the western part of the International Settlement, about a mile from the center of the city. The apartment was in a residential section on the corner of a busy street, with a main streetcar line passing the door. Rent was cheap, though for good reason: during every heavy rain, that whole section of Avenue Road and Hardoon Road flooded until it became a lake. The shopkeeper was honest, and warned my father that at times there would be more than a foot of water in his shop. No matter, my father said, the place was perfect, first because it was practical—the grain and rice shop below would come in handy should leaner days come—and second because it was unremarkable. He had decided that his best strategy was a low profile.
Once he and Jeannie were settled in his small room, he took stock of what he had. He was poor, but so was everyone else, and a new black market was thriving. People sold china and silver, glassware and jewelry, Chesterfield overcoats and cloche hats, silver hand mirrors and silk scarves. My father sold his Norfolk jacket and his radio. With the cash, he bought as much nonperishable food as he could, tins of fruit and meat and crackers. He’d decided that canned goods were an investment as well as a staple. The price of food had doubled after Pearl Harbor, but at least it was available, a situation he suspected was temporary.
He traded his homburg hat for two white pigeons. In a small corner of the cramped yard behind the grain shop, he built a chicken house on stilts, fenced the coop with split bamboo, and locked it with a padlock he got for a pair of leather shoes. The peddler who bartered with him for the padlock said it had come from a German submarine.
The pigeons proved to be a good business venture. They began to lay eggs within a few weeks, and my father talked the owner of the rice and grain shop downstairs into giving him the shop’s sweepings at the end of the day for a few eggs, so the birds didn’t cost much to keep. My father was vigilant about their care, always feeding and watering them on schedule, gathering eggs as though they were treasure. In heavy rains, fearing the fowl might get out and drown, he rolled up his trousers and went out into the night after them, then brought them in and dried them next to the small stove.
Early in 1942, in yet another proclamation, the Japanese ordered all Allied nationals to turn in any motor vehicles they owned at a place and time specified in the Shanghai Times, which had become the Japanese mouthpiece. The proclamation didn’t affect most people’s transportation. The Japanese had taken over all gas stations, and gas had become a rare commodity. My father hadn’t driven his Packard in months. He’d talked a German veterinarian friend of his, Dr. Adler, into letting him store it in his garage in the French Concession. Every few weeks, my father went by to start it up. When he sat at the wheel, he closed his eyes and breathed in the car’s familiar smell of soft leather and patchouli, and he imagined that nothing had changed, that he was headed toward Hungjao, and that my mother and I would be waiting for him, her with a tumbler of Scotch, me with narcissus from the garden and tales of my day at school.
But keeping the car was no longer a choice. He didn’t have enough gas to drive the car to the Race Course, where he was to turn it in, so he hired coolies to push it. A few days later he traded his gold watch for a bicycle, gritting his teeth so as not to spoil the deal, amazed at what he was doing. The watch had been a gift from his father, but he saw no other choice. The buses no longer ran, the streetcars couldn’t begin to handle the city’s needs, and rickshaws and pedicabs were ridiculously expensive. A bike was the only way to get around, and soon there wouldn’t be any to buy. The thing was to keep going, to do whatever needed to be done next, and not to step out of line.
Spring and summer brought temperatures that were warm, then hot. The city was more and more crowded, with refugee camps o
f straw huts covering every bit of vacant land. Street-cleaning was a thing of the past. The streets and pavement were filthy, and beggars were everywhere. The currency depreciated, prices rose, and my father kept looking for ways to cut back. He changed the electric bulbs in his room to two- or three-watt bulbs and got rid of the bulbs altogether where he could. He ate only what was native: fresh produce, rice, grains, nothing imported. Eventually he narrowed his diet down to cornmeal, which was cheap and easy to get. He baked it, boiled it, fried it, whatever he could think of, never mind the twenty pounds he’d lost since occupation. Even Jeannie’s ribs showed.
The only cause for hope, the thing he thought of at night as he waited for sleep, was the possibility of repatriation. It seemed impossible that the home governments wouldn’t send ships to take their citizens home. There were far more Japanese in Canada, the United States, and around the world than there were Allied nationals in Shanghai. Surely an exchange was bound to be arranged.
And then he heard from Will Marsh that negotiations were progressing. News spread that the date had been set, and people were elated. Then came the news that the numbers had been fixed, and everything seemed far less certain. Repatriation ships would stop first at ports in Japan, then in Hong Kong, then at other ports in China. There were only so many spaces for British, Dutch, Belgian, and American nationals, and most of those would go to embassy and consular staffs. When Will Marsh told my father the number of passengers from China that would be allowed, my father nodded grimly. The number was low. And then another blow: the Japanese would have some say in who left and who remained.
Fewer than two hundred spots were reserved for Shanghai residents, grossly out of proportion to the enemy nationals in Shanghai versus those in other ports. The names of embassy and consular officials were followed by inmates at Bridge House, employees of the Chinese government, semi-officials like members of Customs and the Municipal Council, those deemed valuable to the war effort, doctors, the sick and aged. My father was none of those.