by Jennifer Lin
Lin Pu-chi planned to escort his sons as far as Hong Kong. It was a risky move. Assuming they arrived safely, there was no assurance he’d make it back to Shanghai anytime soon, especially if fighting intensified. His sons had no passports, no visas, and, so far, no plane tickets. The Nationalist government in Nanjing had fled to the southern city of Canton before the foreign office had time to process their applications for passports. There was no other option, Lin Pu-chi concluded. Time was against them. Rumors were rife that the Nationalist forces, fearing a Communist advance on Shanghai from the Pudong District, might shut the busy Huangpu River to all but military ships. He got three tickets on one of the last coastal steamers bound for Hong Kong.
At home, Ni Guizhen was in Paul’s tiny second-floor bedroom getting her son’s things ready. She moved slowly, as if trying to put off the inevitable. Reaching under his cot, she pulled out a leather suitcase she had bought just days before at a shop on Nanjing Road. On the front, in big gold letters, were the words DR. PAUL M. LIN and then, in parentheses, the three characters of his Chinese name, Lin Baomin. She ran the tips of her fingers back and forth across the embossed letters like a mother stroking the head of a sleeping child. Paul was twenty-two, barely a man; Jim, just three years older. And here she was, sending them off to work in hospitals in American cities that she could not find on a map.
Lin Pu-chi hurried up the tight circular staircase from his office two floors below and handed the envelope to his wife, who tucked it between the covers of Paul’s English-Chinese dictionary, which was as big as a brick. The night before, she had used remnants from her sewing basket to stitch a cloth cover. Paul seemed to have as many books as clothes. In one pile on his bed were a small English-language Bible and two enormous medical textbooks—one devoted to internal medicine, one for surgery, easily weighing more than ten pounds. In another pile was his white physician’s coat with his name stitched in red; a thick gray sweater she knitted him with a giant “P” for Paul in front; and a hand-me-down tweed blazer from a missionary family. In between the pages of the dictionary, Ni Guizhen slipped a black-and-white family portrait, taken the previous autumn at a studio a few blocks away. She and Lin Pu-chi, dressed in his clerical collar, sat in the center, surrounded by Martha in a traditional floral qipao dress and all the men—Paul, Jim, brother Tim, and Martha’s husband John—dressed in dark Western suits and ties. Ni Guizhen had gotten everyone together to sit for a portrait, sensing perhaps as only a mother can that this moment was coming. Her mind raced as she closed the suitcase and tightened a strap holding it together. Paul was going to the seaside resort of Atlantic City, Jim to a hospital in the nearby city of Paterson. Everyone reminded her that these places were not far from New York City, as if proximity to that famous city made the anonymity of their destinations somehow less unsettling. Even if they arrived safely, adjusted to life in America, did well, the thought remained: Would they ever return? When the PLA arrived in Shanghai, would there be more years of fighting? House-to-house combat—or a bloodless retreat like in Beijing? She shook the questions out of her head, but they kept returning like unwanted visitors banging on the front door.
It took hours for Lin Pu-chi and his sons to travel by rickshaw from their house to the docks on the Bund and their waiting steamer. Along the way, worlds collided at busy intersections. Displaced rural families pulling carts piled high with possessions and children were gridlocked with chauffeurs in black sedans and shirtless rickshaw drivers trying vainly to deliver their impatient patrons to destinations. At the wharf, Paul and Jim followed the tall figure of their father as he led them up the gangplank to the steamer. They had a third-class cabin that was cramped with floor-to-ceiling bunks on each side. No one minded the utilitarian berths. They had made it. As the ship pulled away, Paul and Jim stood on deck, watching the Bund disappear.
In 1948, months before two of the Lin sons departed for the United States, the family posed for a final portrait. Ni Guizhen tucked a copy of the photo inside the suitcase of her son Paul. Clockwise from bottom left: Lin Pu-chi; John Sun, husband of Martha; Tim; Jim; Paul; Martha; and Ni Guizhen. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
For the Chinese of Shanghai, if you were lucky enough to have money, you could buy a seat on a steamer or plane to Hong Kong. If you weren’t, you might be able to force your way onto an overstuffed train, even if it meant clinging perilously to the side of the locomotive or sitting on the roof of a car. And if you were a destitute refugee trying to stay one step ahead of the fighting, good luck. Shanghai was walled off as the city girded for a showdown with the People’s Liberation Army. Outwardly, the Nationalist government flexed its muscles for the sake of residents, marching soldiers through the streets and parking howitzers side by side along sidewalks. Troops stood guard at sandbag bunkers by banks and government offices as workers boarded up the windows of commercial buildings and shops to protect against the inevitable onslaught. Newspapers, under tight government control, declared that the city could hold for months if not longer.
St. John’s, on the western side of the city, was on the front lines of the action. Most students had gone, leaving only a skeleton staff on campus. Across Suzhou Creek, an encampment of Nationalist troops had taken over the athletic fields.
On May 24, as staff and teachers were nodding off in afternoon naps, a great explosion jolted everyone awake. The windows in the magnificent library and administration building shattered, sending shards of glass flying. Chunks of plaster dropped from ceilings, and a thick steel beam, hurled through the air like a red-hot spear, landed in the lawn by a giant camphor tree. This is it, everyone on campus thought as the dust cleared. But this was not the work of enemies; it was a desperate move by allies. Retreating Nationalist forces did not want their Communist foes chasing after them so they blew up a nearby railway bridge without bothering to warn anyone on campus.
The following morning, the PLA drew closer and occupied parts of the former French Concession, just south of St. John’s. Shanghai’s mayor fled by air from the Longhua Airfield after the city government flew a white flag of surrender. In the face of defeat, the Nationalist soldiers who were billeted on the other side of Suzhou Creek shifted from protecting the university to looting it. They turned their rifles toward the campus and tried to scare away the handful of Americans by shooting into their homes. Some soldiers crossed the creek by boat, tore down fences, and ran toward classrooms and residences. A history professor called the US consulate, pleading for help. The diplomats told him there was nothing they could do; they had their own buildings to secure.
Families took cover, listening to bullets whizzing by their windows and bracing for looters. Instead, as if on cue, a single file of PLA soldiers marched through the campus gate. Hundreds of young soldiers in crisp khaki uniforms and soft-soled cloth shoes streamed onto the grounds. Communist-leaning students at St. John’s had tipped off the PLA about the mayhem caused by fleeing Nationalist soldiers. Coming to the rescue, Communist troops marched right up to the edge of the creek and goaded their Nationalist foes with shouts of “Fight or give up!”
All day, the two sides traded barbs and gunfire, but by nightfall, the PLA was in charge. The young soldiers set up camp around Mann Hall and dug foxholes to secure the area. Peasant fighters who had never seen anything as grand as the stately campus buildings or manicured grounds of St. John’s walked around wide-eyed. Most seemed to be teenagers and, to the missionaries, surprisingly well behaved. That night, American professors looked on in puzzlement as the PLA soldiers sang and played a game that looked a lot like a Chinese version of “Farmer in the Dell.”
By morning, the troops decamped, but not before asking the Chinese staff what they owed for using their electricity for one night.
On May 27, Shanghai was theirs.
Hong Kong
It took Lin Pu-chi and his sons three days to sail eight hundred nautical miles from Shanghai to Hong Kong, with stops to dis
charge evacuees in ports in Taiwan. After docking in the British colony, Lin Pu-chi hurried to the home of his sister, who had lived in the British port for years with her husband, a close colleague of Watchman Nee. No sooner had they dropped off their bags than they immediately returned to the docks to catch a ferry to Canton. The Nationalist government had moved its offices to the South after the capital of Nanjing fell to the PLA in April. Lin Pu-chi hoped that somewhere in the piles of paperwork of the Foreign Ministry were the passport applications of his sons.
In Canton, the makeshift offices of the Foreign Ministry were jammed with people from all over China just as frantic as the Lin sons were to escape. Just that morning, the South China Morning Post reported that military sources held little hope of defending Canton from the PLA, which was advancing southward from Hunan. Civil servants in the Nationalist government were making plans yet again to evacuate—this time to the safety of Taiwan. The line for passports snaked out the door and around the block, everyone pushing and jockeying to hold their positions. Lin Pu-chi felt a jolt of panic. What if all of his well-made plans for this exodus fell apart because of lost paperwork? What if the Nationalist government retreated again? He had exhausted the family’s money. This was his last chance.
Hours passed before they made it through the front door and faced a harried, impatient clerk. He snapped their Chinese identification cards out of their hands and wrote down their information, noting that they were born in Fujian Province. The clerk looked at the Chinese characters for their names—Lin Baomin and Lin Junmin—and looked at their faces. Again, he looked at the characters, then at their faces.
“Do you know Lin Xinmin?” the clerk asked Lin Pu-chi.
“Yes, he’s my nephew,” replied the minister, recalling his younger brother’s second son, who had stayed with the family in Shanghai at the start of the Sino-Japanese War.
“He works here,” the clerk said, hurrying into another room and calling out, “I’ll get him.”
The clerk had recognized that the middle character of the Lin brothers’ names was the same as his friend’s—something Chinese families did to identify a generation of the same clan. He studied their faces, too, and noticed a family resemblance. Thanks to that stroke of luck, this Fuzhou cousin got Paul and Jim their blue-cloth-covered Republic of China passports in hours instead of days.
The Chinese have a phrase, guanxi, which describes the intricate web of relationships that help a person to survive. It’s using your connections to get what you need. It’s the “you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours” strategy. And for the next week in Hong Kong, Lin Pu-chi tapped every relationship he had to see that his sons made it to America. He sought out the help of the Right Reverend Ronald O. Hall, the head of the Diocese of Victoria, whom Lin Pu-chi had met at previous meetings of the Sheng Kung Hui. The arrival of Lin Pu-chi and his sons coincided with a special service to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the diocese. At St. John’s Cathedral, which had the letters “VR” chiseled into the bell tower in honor of Queen Victoria, Lin Pu-chi delivered greetings at the service on behalf of the Sheng Kung Hui. Afterward, the influential bishop pulled strings with the American consulate next door on Garden Road to expedite a meeting with a visa officer. The bishop’s guanxi paid off. On June 3, three weeks after leaving home, Paul and Jim paid $2.50 apiece to an American consulate clerk for US visas.
Days later, Lin Pu-chi watched as his sons climbed up the steps of a charter flight en route to Everett, Washington.
The gunmetal-gray plane transported troops during World War II. Now all of its passengers were Chinese. Many were wealthy overseas Chinese who had been living in Shanghai and wanted to return to the United States before the inevitable Communist takeover. In the air, as American stewards walked down the aisle serving food and drinks, the brothers privately made note of this unusual role reversal. In Shanghai, they rarely if ever saw Americans waiting on Chinese customers. Now a brawny young man leaned over, asking, “Whaddya like?”
After refueling first in Tokyo and then at the Shemya Air Force Base in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, the brothers arrived in Everett, Washington, thirty hours after taking off from Hong Kong.
In the light of morning on their first day in the United States, Paul and Jim faced a world bearing little resemblance to the one they left. The air was clear and crisp, scented with pine and saltwater—a wonderful change from the thick, fetid odors of Shanghai. Great granite peaks loomed behind a calm harbor with tall sailboats, ferries, and fishing boats. It was all so new—not only what they saw, but what they didn’t see. For starters, where were the people? They knew Everett was a small town by American standards. But still, even in China, a harborside village would be brimming with humanity. Here, everything seemed empty and uncluttered. Pedicab drivers didn’t swarm around cars. Vendors didn’t jam sidewalks hawking steamed buns or fried youtiao crullers. Mothers didn’t hang laundry from bamboo poles in alleys as toddlers crawled in doorways.
Even though they had spent most of their lives in the most sophisticated metropolis in China, they were still surprised in ways big and small at how things were done in America. It started from the moment they got to the Everett train station. Jim had to go to the bathroom and followed the sign for “Men.” Inside the restroom, he tried opening the door of the stall, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried the next door, and it, too, was locked. Jim left the men’s room and asked Paul to take a look. He, too, couldn’t open the doors. “Why are they all locked?” he asked Jim in Chinese.
“You need to put in a nickel,” came a voice from a stall.
A nickel? A toilet flushed as a husky white man, tucking in his shirt, emerged from the stall.
“You need to put money into the slot to open the door,” the man explained. “Do you have any nickels?”
Jim shook his head with embarrassment.
“Here,” the stranger said, slipping a coin into the slot, turning the knob, and opening the door. The brothers left the restroom feeling like the peasant bumpkins they used to mock in Shanghai.
When they got to San Francisco, a woman from a local Episcopal church—one of the many contacts Lin Pu-chi had notified in advance via telegram—met their train and ushered them to a local YMCA. They stayed only a night and departed by ferry at 11:00 a.m. the next day for Oakland, where they caught the San Francisco Overland to make the same eastbound journey as their father had thirty years before.
In Chicago, the brothers parted ways. Jim boarded another train, to New York City via Buffalo, while Paul continued on to Philadelphia. They split the money they had between them, leaving each with about fifty dollars.
“Zai jian, Xiguatou,” Jim said in parting, using his younger brother’s childhood nickname. “See ya, Watermelon Head.”
America’s Playground
As the commuter train from Philadelphia approached Atlantic City, saltwater marshes spread for miles like a welcome mat to the resort town, renowned for its Boardwalk, beaches, and hotels. No other shore town on the East Coast served up the glamour or allure of Atlantic City. Paul had ended up here because of Josiah McCracken from St. John’s medical school. Now living in Philadelphia, McCracken had helped medical students fleeing Shanghai to secure work in the States. He reached out to his son, a physician in Atlantic City, who got a spot for Paul as an intern.
Forty-five days after sailing from Shanghai, Paul walked up the front steps of Atlantic City Memorial Hospital and, in his most polished English, announced to a receptionist, “My name is Paul Lin and I’m here to work as an intern.”
He was taken to a dormitory for interns next door to the hospital and two blocks from the beach on Ohio Avenue. His tiny room had a bed, a dresser, a chair, and a bedside table. Setting down his leather suitcase, he tossed his wallet with $36.50 on the bed and headed to the cafeteria for dinner.
Returning to his room, exhausted from days of train travel, he flopped on his
bed and reached for his wallet. Picking it up, he immediately noticed that it felt lighter. He opened it. His heart skipped. All the money was gone—every bill, every coin, gone. He looked under the bed and in the drawer of the bedside table. He opened his billfold again, just in case he was mistaken. Empty. The first day of his new job and he was literally penniless.
Welcome to America.
Dr. Paul M. Lin, an intern at Atlantic City Memorial Hospital, on the beach in Atlantic City in the summer of 1949. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
With those early days to himself, Paul explored Atlantic City. He walked the entire seven-mile length of the Boardwalk. Often he simply sat on a bench looking at the sea of beachgoers sunning on towels or resting on chaise longues. In an odd way, this city of sixty thousand reminded him a little of Shanghai. With its constant stream of promenading crowds, the Boardwalk was like the Bund with a beach. And certainly some of Atlantic City’s grandiose hotels—the Traymore, Claridge, or Blenheim—would feel right at home next to Astor House or Cathay Hotel in Shanghai. This, too, was the first place in the United States where he saw anything close to a rickshaw, but the Boardwalk version was made of wicker and had passengers sitting in front with someone pushing on foot from behind. Even the billboards—like the giant ad for Camel cigarettes with the smiling face of a blond model in front of the sixteen-story Traymore Hotel—made him think of Shanghai.
In late August, two months after his arrival in Atlantic City, another intern asked Paul a puzzling question.
“You ready for the big pageant?” his colleague wanted to know.
“The what?” Paul asked.