by Jennifer Lin
On August 13, news from home shattered their idyll: that morning, more than ten thousand Japanese troops fanned out across Shanghai. By 4:00 p.m., Japanese warships on the Huangpu River began shelling the city from all directions. Inside Lin Pu-chi’s school on Haskell Road, terrified staff escaped from the building as bombs rained down on the neighborhood.
This was war.
Frantic, Lin Pu-chi bought tickets for the family on a cargo ship bound for Hong Kong. They did not have a berth but would instead have to sleep on the deck with hundreds of other evacuees. Lin Pu-chi gave his wife instructions that once they arrived in Hong Kong, they could wait out the fighting—a few weeks, maybe months—with his sister and her husband, a close friend of Watchman Nee.
After they were safe at sea, he purchased a one-way rail ticket for home.
• 10 •
Island of Shanghai
Shanghai, 1937
The family had just sat down to dinner when there was a tap at the door. Ni Guizhen rose to answer it. Standing before her on the front step was a tall man with a weathered face, Caucasian, not Chinese, and a scraggly gray beard that reached down to his chest. His jacket was filthy, and he gave off a pungent odor. Was he Russian? A German Jew? He said nothing but cupped his hands and raised them to Ni Guizhen in the universal wordless plea: “Feed me.”
As her teenage sons looked on in shock, she led him inside their home. She gestured to her own stool at the round table, set with steaming bowls of noodles. The stranger’s face showed relief, gratitude, and ravenous hunger as he sat down and began shoveling hot food into his mouth in one long slurp. The stranger held the bowl to his lips and tipped every drop of broth into his mouth. When he finished, he stood up, kissed the hand of Ni Guizhen—such a strange gesture!—and politely left. Ni Guizhen grabbed a rag from the kitchen and wiped the table.
The boys understood the message: Do not look the other way. They’d learned it from Bible parables like the Good Samaritan, they saw it in their mother’s daily actions, and of course they heard it from their father. This was wartime, and Lin Pu-chi preached from St. Peter’s pulpit about helping the refugees who had flooded Shanghai, and he wrote about their needs on the pages of the Chinese Churchman. As editor, he used his Christmas column to acknowledge the despair piercing the lives of all families in Shanghai. The fighting that had started in August dragged on for three months and displaced thousands from obliterated neighborhoods outside the International Settlement. “People usually sing in elation at this time of year,” Lin Pu-chi wrote. “But my country, the most vast territory in East Asia, overflowing with resources, has been invaded and encroached upon. . . . We have fallen into the hands of our intruders. Millions of us struggle as we fight bloody battles. Countless refugees fall prey to death and are left unburied. Our cities are crumbling, as are our houses and farms.”
Christians, he reminded his readers, had a responsibility to help others. “At every glance our gaze captures the grief that has swept our land,” he observed. At this time of year, thoughts usually turned to “Peace on Earth.” But this Christmas was different. “We are up in arms, swords drawn and ready to ignite explosions that have made the Second World War so devastating. Armies have fallen in East Asia and Western Europe. But true peace can only come from inside the heart, and through the spirit.”
To the rest of China, Shanghai was gudao. The lonely island. Terrified refugees from all over the country, indeed all over the world, struggled to reach its shores. Russians fleeing Bolsheviks and Jews fleeing fascists knew that if they could get to Shanghai, where they did not need a passport or entry visa, they would be safe.
The ten square miles of the International Settlement and adjacent French Concession, normally home to 1.5 million people, saw its population more than double with the outbreak of war in 1937. People from surrounding areas escaped the hellfire of war for this zone of neutrality. Soldiers of Emperor Hirohito controlled the area outside the boundaries of the international enclave and never let locals forget who was in power. Any Chinese resident crossing the Garden Bridge from the occupied area to the Bund, for instance, had to pass through a barbed-wire checkpoint and bow deeply to Japanese sentries.
When fighting flared in Shanghai in August, the Nationalist government tried to make a stand, throwing all of its military weight against the Japanese occupiers. The Nationalists had established a new capital in the western city of Chongqing in what became known as “Free China.” But the advancing Japanese troops overwhelmed the forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. During the three-month Battle of Shanghai, which spread to riverfront towns along the Huangpu and then west toward Nanjing, the Chinese side lost three hundred thousand troops. The enemy plundered Nanjing, raping women and slaughtering civilians.
The Sino-Japanese War would not be contained. Bombs fell on Fuzhou in the spring of 1938, triggering more streams of refugees. Among this tide of evacuees were thirty men, women, and children from one extended family who secured passage on an overcrowded coastal steamer bound for Shanghai. When they stepped ashore at the Bund, they piled into rickshaws and shouted the address of the one place they knew they would be safe and welcome: 170 Jiaozhou Road.
The Lin boys thought it an adventure to suddenly see so many relatives show up at their doorstep. There were uncles and aunts, faces they vaguely remembered from their childhood in Fuzhou, plus assorted cousins from toddlers to teens and their tiny sixty-four-year-old grandmother. The old woman brought her small-city ways with her. She had a revulsion to Shanghai’s chlorinated tap water, preferring to drink rainwater collected in a barrel. Lin Pu-chi, his wife, and his four children moved into one bedroom on the third floor while his relatives spread out on the other floors. Family loyalty was the bedrock of Chinese society; you looked after your own in times of crisis. Like now.
These were the lucky ones, the refugees who had family to double up with in Shanghai. They had somewhere to go, someone to help them. The unlucky ones survived on the streets, living like barnyard animals, crammed into alleyways or huddled under straw and bamboo huts on vacant lots. Waifs in rags begged for coins and swiped steamed buns or fruit from peddlers. Mothers with nursing infants and grannies cradling tots slept in doorways and gutters. Tens of thousands of refugees survived in camps throughout the city that were plagued by epidemics of diseases such as measles. No safety net could stop the misery. Before dawn, trucks made the rounds, picking up bodies at a rate of sixty a day—beggars, indigents, babies, their bodies discovered in alleys, along roads, in vacant plots or stuffed into makeshift coffins.
By the fall of 1938, Fuzhou was calm enough for the relatives to return home, and life on Jiaozhou Road returned to an altered state of normal. Lin Pu-chi’s job as an assistant headmaster remained the same, but the location of the Public School for Chinese Boys was moved to the heart of the International Settlement. During fighting in 1937, the neighborhood around Haskell Road had become the focus of gun battles and shelling. The school was destroyed, including the six-thousand-volume library, forcing it to move to a safer location inside the settlement on Gordon Road, not far from Lin Pu-chi’s house.
Lin Pu-chi’s three sons had transferred to the middle school affiliated with St. John’s University, while his daughter, Martha, enrolled in its medical school. As an Anglican cleric, Lin Pu-chi could send his children on scholarship to the American-run St. John’s.
The sprawling university campus became a wartime refuge for Anglican missionaries and their families from outlying cities. Japanese soldiers, too, were billeted in classrooms in the Science Building on the north side of Suzhou Creek, territory under their control. It galled students to stand on the banks of the creek and watch enemy troops commandeering barges to load with looted furniture, valuables, and artwork from Chinese families who lived upstream in defeated areas. They seethed at the thought of purloined property finding its way to Japanese homes in Shanghai or Tokyo. Powerless, the students w
ould express their outrage in English compositions—which instructors immediately destroyed. If such hostile essays fell into Japanese hands, it would mean certain punishment, perhaps imprisonment, for the authors.
On campus, foreign teachers and Chinese students shared the same fear: Japan had a noose around Shanghai’s neck, ready to yank it at any moment.
That moment arrived on December 7, 1941.
In the South Pacific, Japanese fighter planes screamed across the sky over the island of Oahu at 7:53 a.m., dropping bombs on American battleships in Pearl Harbor, pulling the United States into the war.
Two hours later in Shanghai, in the predawn of December 8, special Japanese forces startled the sleeping crew of the USS Wake and captured the river gunboat before the Americans could put up a fight. Nearby, a Japanese officer climbed up the ladder of the HMS Peterel and informed its captain that Japan and the United Kingdom were now at war. When the officer demanded his surrender, the British captain bellowed, “Get off my bloody ship!” Japanese gunboats shelled the Peterel, setting it ablaze before the ship sank into the muddy depths of the Huangpu, taking six sailors with it.
Students entering the campus of St. John’s for Monday morning classes were startled by the buzz of low-flying planes that dropped a snowstorm of leaflets. As the papers fluttered to the ground, professors and students read in Chinese and English that American and British residents were now considered enemy subjects. They could go about their business but could use only certain roads to enter or leave the settlement. The leaflet said the Japanese Army would protect law-abiding citizens and respect property rights but would not tolerate anyone who disrupted public order.
By 10:00 a.m., Japanese soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles marched into the International Settlement to take up positions behind sandbag bunkers at major intersections. Tanks and armored cars rumbled across the Garden Bridge, past hotels on the Bund and department stores on Nanjing Road. Atop major buildings—city offices, police barracks, banks, railway stations—soldiers hoisted the Rising Sun flag. They took over the US and British consulates, the American Club, YMCA buildings, and even a hospital run by St. John’s for refugees. Doctors and patients had until January 15 to clear out and make way for Japanese secretaries and military officers, who wanted the building for headquarters. The American physician in charge, Josiah McCracken, told a hospital worker not to raise the US flag; he didn’t want to give the enemy the satisfaction of pulling down the Stars and Stripes and replacing it with the Rising Sun.
Japanese troops toppled symbols of British power. At the grandiose headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, a sign on the front door read: occupied by the marines of the great japanese empire. Soldiers removed the iconic brass lions with their polished paws that stood guard at the entrance. Across the street and down a bit, another group pulled down the statue of Sir Robert Hart, one of the most influential westerners in the Qing dynasty.
All of Shanghai had fallen.
Camps
The roundup of foreigners did not happen immediately. As a first step, citizens of enemy nations had to register with Japanese authorities and wear armbands, designating their country of origin: A for America, B for Britain, H for Holland, or X for other. Allied enemies also had to turn over cameras, binoculars, telescopes—anything with a lens that could be a tool for would-be spies. They also had to relinquish cars. From now on, only Japanese officials were allowed to drive.
As the weeks passed under Japanese occupation, the economy of Shanghai was crippled, and tens of thousands of Chinese and foreigners faced starvation and sickness. Runaway inflation stripped money of value. Food supplies grew scarce, and “rice riots” broke out over dwindling supplies. Ni Guizhen sent her children in pairs from Jiaozhou Road to her mother’s house in a far western suburb to buy rice. The older woman, who had relocated from Fuzhou to Shanghai, lived closer to farmers where supplies were easier to find than inside the International Settlement. But the trip sent the children through Japanese checkpoints. Once, after making the long journey and loading bags onto their bicycles, Martha and Paul had to watch silently as a soldier, checking for weapons or contraband, pierced a burlap sack with his bayonet, sending a cascade of rice to the ground. The siblings quickly swept up the precious kernels with their hands, not uttering a word as they bowed and sped off.
The people of Shanghai had to accept that the city was no longer theirs. At St. Peter’s Church, the parish gave free classes in Japanese. At St. John’s, Japanese regiments took over two buildings on campus to use as warehouses. Mandatory Japanese classes became part of the curriculum at the middle school. In an act of passive protest, Paul, the youngest son of Lin Pu-chi and an outstanding student in every way, refused to put any effort into his language study, learning little more than the obligatory arigato and konnichiwa, “thank you” and “hello.”
The summons that foreigners had been dreading for more than a year arrived on January 31, 1943. American and British residents were notified that the following day they had to report to internment camps. Each prisoner needed to bring an enamel cup and bowl for meals, plus clothing and necessities. Lin Pu-chi’s colleague, the bishop of Shanghai, the Right Reverend William Roberts, was sent to a camp in the Zhabei section of Shanghai; the bishop’s brother Donald, a St. John’s professor, crossed the Huangpu for internment at an empty warehouse of the British-American Tobacco Company. Chinese friends gave their foreign colleagues canned food, newly knitted sweaters, and warm slippers. Ni Guizhen put her children to work making peanut butter—an excellent protein source—for missionary friends to take with them to the camps. Martha shelled and roasted the peanuts in a wok, and her brothers ground them into paste.
The Roberts brothers, along with all American and British residents, were marched through the city to waiting trucks and river launches to take them away. Chinese crowds lined streets in a show of support; some people even grabbed suitcases out of the hands of internees to lighten their loads. In the first half of 1943, Japanese authorities sent 7,600 men, women, and children to internment camps. This presented a crisis for Lin Pu-chi. Among the prisoners was the British headmaster of his school. The city’s Education Department informed Lin Pu-chi that he would be expected to take over running the school. With the onset of war, the Shanghai Municipal Council, mostly made up of Americans and Britons, ceased to exist, which meant Lin Pu-chi would have to report to education officials in the new city government installed by Japanese occupying forces.
The thought of working for the puppet government repulsed him. After all he had seen in the past decade—the misery, hunger, and desperation of refugees, the wanton cruelty of Japanese warriors, the loss and suffering inflicted by years of fighting—it was unfathomable to consider working for enemy occupiers. But he needed the job. He had his family to worry about. How could he find work that paid anything in this chaotic environment?
Lin Pu-chi pushed fear aside and refused to collaborate. His conscience would not allow it. And so at the end of the year in 1943, he resigned as assistant headmaster. Now he was jobless like countless others and equally as desperate to find work. His mother-in-law pestered him to ask his brothers-in-law for help.
Without a better alternative, Lin Pu-chi relented and approached the Ni family business.
Ni Guizhen had a younger brother, George, who was a brilliant chemist with a degree from St. John’s but little aptitude for business. In contrast, her other brother, Watchman Nee, was a congenial sort with innate skills for organizing but no experience in the world of commerce.
Her father brought the brothers together. He leaned on Watchman Nee to help George run the business, which the patriarch had started as Zion Laboratory in 1936. George was the brains behind the venture, mixing formulas in a home lab to create antiseptic salves and antibiotics such as sulfathiazole. When Watchman Nee became involved, around 1940, he began expanding the operation and changed the name to the China Biologic
al and Chemical Laboratories (CBC). The factory on Jiaozhou Road, a quarter mile from the Lin home, was the first in China to manufacture sulfa drugs, in addition to vitamin B concentrates; antibacterial products such as Mercurochrome and, later, the insecticide DDT. Located in a walled compound, it occupied the former residence of a wealthy merchant and two utilitarian buildings with rooms for synthesizing chemicals, preparing liquids, packaging and sealing products, and storage. At its peak, CBC employed as many as two hundred people, including a half-dozen chemists. Before the war, some of its scientific staff included Americans. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the business shifted much of its production to a second manufacturing site in Nationalist-controlled Chongqing, playing an important role in supplying the government during the war.
Lin Pu-chi was assigned to the personnel department, but it was a job in name only. He had no real responsibilities and spent most mornings reading the newspaper or pacing the CBC compound. It was pointless yet necessary. He had close friends whose families were starving. His colleague from St. Peter’s, Pastor Yu Ensi, who became a bishop, died in 1944 of complications from exhaustion and malnutrition. Instead of a salary, Lin Pu-chi received one hundred liters of rice a month, enough to feed his wife, four children, and mother, who had not returned to Fuzhou with the rest of the family in 1938. To earn cash, he picked up work on the side teaching English at St. Mary’s Hall, the girls’ school affiliated with St. John’s, where a friend was principal. At CBC, even the sons of Lin Pu-chi were put to work. During summer breaks from school, they helped at the factory, doing manual jobs like hauling five-gallon drums of hydrochloric acid from storage to laboratories. They were paid in rice or canned vegetables.