Escape from Shanghai

by Paul Huang

  “This is where we’re staying?” I asked in amazement.

  “If they’ll have us,” Mom replied. Then she handed a slip of paper to the rickshaw driver. “Please deliver this,” she said as she pointed at the houseboat.

  The driver bowed and ran off to deliver the note. A few minutes later, an elegantly-dressed man in a white silk suit accompanied by a beautiful and elegant woman appeared on deck. She wore a light pink cheongsam speckled with little white flower buds. She looked so beautiful that I’ve not forgotten what she wore that day.

  Two male servants trotted across the gangplank. They bowed, then took our two small suitcases.

  Unconsciously, Mom looked down at her nondescript, peasant-looking dress, tugged at it to take out the wrinkles then smiled.

  “Jane!” The woman in pink called out

  “Oh, May! It’s been such a long time,” Mom said as she walked up to greet her.

  “It’s so good to see you. Welcome. Welcome! Please, please come aboard. But watch your step. The gangplank can be tricky.”

  Mom hugged May in a rare display of public affection. This just wasn’t done in China, but these two were modern, western-educated women. They stood arm in arm like two long-lost sisters.

  “And who is this, may I ask?” The man in white said as he bent down to gaze into my eyes.

  “This is my son, Paul. And, this is your Uncle Jin and Auntie May.”

  They really weren’t my aunt or uncle. Those were honorary titles for very good family friends.

  “Come in, come in. Let’s get you settled and we’ll catch up,” Jin said with a twinkle in his eyes. “Too many years have separated us. And so much has happened since,” he said with a glance in my direction.

  May and Jin were Mom’s classmates at Yenching University in Peking (Now Beijing.).

  Mom met K.P. Huang at about the same time that Jin started dating May. All four of them were in the class of 1935. The intelligentsia in the 1920’s and 30’s was trying hard to move away from the old ways and into the twentieth century. Arranged marriages were still the norm at that time, but it was permissible and “modern” for Mom and May to chaperone each other on dates and other social events. The four students became very close friends.

  Jin and May married shortly after graduation. While K.P. had also proposed to my mother, grandpa didn’t approve of the union. He wanted Mom to get her MS in Child Psychology first, especially since she had been admitted to Michigan. Her acceptance was a singular honor and grandpa didn’t want anything to distract her from achieving her goal.

  The four good friends went their separate ways. Because communication was so difficult in those good-old days, they lost touch. Now, after all these years, they had a lot of catching up to do.

  “When father found out that I had been accepted to Michigan, he bought me a First Class ticket to America,” Mom said. “What he didn’t know was that K.P. had been accepted, too. We had applied together in secret, you see.

  “I remember that it was a very cold day in January of 1936, when my mother, father, brothers and sisters saw me off on the S.S. President Coolidge. Father was so proud that I was following his footsteps by going to an American university. I really hated to deceive him, but I was so much in love that I didn’t feel any sense of guilt at all. I was thrilled to know that K.P. was already on the ship waiting for me. I had arranged everything, you see,” she said. “I even had him bring my wedding gown.”

  “Well, go on. Go on,” May interjected. “Please don’t keep me in suspense!”

  “Once out to sea, the minister aboard ship married us. Oh, it was such a wonderful and romantic wedding!” Mom hugged me and squeezed me. I had heard this story before. “Nine months later, my beautiful boy was born.”

  “I knew you were going to do something like that. You were always the daring one among all the Yenching girls! I would not have had the courage to elope,” May gushed.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jin added. “All of you girls were a bit modern. Maybe too modern,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t listen to him, Jane.”

  “He may be right. I believe I’m the first in our group to have a child.”

  “Yes, yes, keep talking,” May urged.

  “Well, due to my pregnancy, I didn’t finish my degree,” Mom said with a hint of disappointment.

  “Didn’t you have an Amah to help you with the baby?” May asked.

  “They don’t have servants in America,” Mom replied.

  “Oh, of course,” May said.

  “It is difficult to raise a baby without servants.”

  “Did you do the cleaning, cooking and washing, too?” May continued.

  “Yes. The American girls did it. They showed me how and they helped,” Mom recalled fondly. “They used to laugh at me for not knowing how to do the simplest things.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do either, Jane.”

  “Anyway, K.P. had two more years in his Doctorate program, and I just couldn’t wait two long years to see my parents. My elopement hurt them, I know that. I really wanted to show my beautiful son to them. It wouldn’t have been fair to keep their first grandson from them. So I decided to come home.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “No. All three of us came home. We came for a two-week visit. We arrived in Shanghai in June of 1937. He was eight months old,” she said looking directly at me.

  “All was forgiven once my parents saw him,” Mom said. “But the astonishing part was that Bou Bou (“grandma” in the Shanghai dialect) thought that Paul looked exactly like her first born son. My older brother died at the age of one, you see. Bou Bou thought that this was a glorious omen. She doted over him like he was the reincarnation of her own son. She wouldn’t let his Amah take care of him. And she couldn’t bear the thought of our leaving in two short weeks.”

  “Well, I don’t blame her, do you?” May said.

  “No. Bou Bou convinced me to stay for a few more weeks. I didn’t have to go back right away. We could follow later. But K.P. couldn’t delay his return. He had to go back. So, K.P. left for the States in July as originally planned.”

  May and Jin looked at each significantly. “What bad timing,” Jin said. They knew that on August 14, 1937, the Japanese bombed Shanghai. Their navy blockaded the coast. No ship could enter or leave China.

  “So you were in Shanghai when the bombs fell,” Jin said.

  “Oh, yes,” Mom answered. “We didn’t have much warning. We barely got to the shelter before the bombs hit. They exploded one after another. The ground shook. We were nearly knocked off our seats from each explosion. One bomb came so close that the concussion caused blood to spurt from my baby’s nose. Oh dear God, I didn’t know what to do! All I could do was wipe the blood from his dear little face and hope for the best. He was only a baby. Just a baby.

  “Then, suddenly the explosions stopped. The silence and stillness surprised me. I didn’t think it would ever end. But it did, just as suddenly as it had begun.

  “We had survived. When we emerged from the shelter, the family compound had been completely destroyed. Father had built it much too close to his beloved rail yards. Rail transport was one of their first targets in Shanghai, you see.” (I was too young to remember much of that house. My only clear memory was grandpa’s miniature steam locomotive towing two passenger cars and a caboose. Each passenger car had been designed to seat a child. I remember sitting in the passenger seat while the train wove through the garden. Mom was never one to talk about her family’s position or wealth. Consequently, I never pressed her for details because it just wasn’t important. The net result was that I never knew how much real estate the family owned in Shanghai or how large a share grandpa owned in his railroad.)

  “So, father moved us to our townhouse in the International section of Shanghai. And now, we’re here,” Mom said with a shrug. “Enough about us, tell me about you two. Where were you when they bombed us?”

  “We were here. We
were appalled to hear what Chiang Kai-shek had done to his own people. Is it true that he would not let anyone leave the city when the Japanese attacked?”

  “Yes. Refugees were swarming to get out of the city. But his army blocked the roads and would not let them leave. The civilians were sacrificed to help defend Shanghai.”

  “But to no avail,” Jin said with a hint of anger in his voice. “When they moved on to capture Nanking, I knew it would only be a matter of time before they came down here. If they were going to conquer the world, then they would need our rice to do it. I considered joining the army...”

  “But I wouldn’t let him,” May interjected. “It would be a waste of his talents.”

  “Well, we discussed the situation. What could we do that would help our country fight the Japanese? That was a difficult question for us to answer. We knew that Chiang’s Secret Service was more interested in spying on his political enemies than fighting the Japanese. So, we decided to create an informal organization of Yenching University graduates, a sort of alumni association, to help graduates with special skills fight the Japanese.” Jin stopped and looked at May.

  “The idea was simple. We’re college graduates. Many of us are bi-lingual. We should use our brains, not our arms,” May said, with some pride. “We spoke with our parents. Thank God they supported us. They preferred this to Jin becoming a foot soldier.

  “So we decided to contact a few of our best friends and classmates. It was delicate at first because we didn’t know the politics of some of the ones we contacted. We didn’t run across anyone who sympathized with the Japanese. But, to protect ourselves, we decided to form cells. May would work with five trusted friends, and I would work with five trusted friends. And each of our friends would work with five others. We kept the group small. Everyone in the organization would only work with people that we knew personally. No strangers. And no outsiders. And then, all of a sudden, you came back into our lives!” May exclaimed.

  “You two saved our lives,” Mom said emotionally.

  Both May and Jin came from wealthy families and both decided to devote their financial resources to fighting the Japanese. They had determined that only private funding could create a workable underground movement. They didn’t want to be beholden to anyone or any political organization. In effect, their wealth allowed them to create their own intelligence operation. Only their mission was not spy on anyone, but to deliver the needed resources, both human and material, to the areas that needed it. This was how China worked at the time. Anyone with money could buy his own army. That’s how “warlords” were made. Unfortunately, the line separating a warlord from one of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Generals depended on where you stood. The separation between legitimacy and illegitimacy wasn’t a line at all, it was money.

  Furthermore, it was clear that Chiang Kai-shek’s government was incapable, both financially and philosophically, of supporting May and Jin’s idealistic group of operatives. Instead, his secret police preferred to work with the Chinese criminal organizations known as the Triads. They raised money by trafficking in opium. Worse, Chiang lacked the will to cooperate with his own people to defeat the Japanese. The Generalissimo was always fearful of losing his hold on power. He feared and hated Mao and the Communists. Chiang fought a two-front war in his own country, Mao on one front and the Japanese on the other with the people of China in the middle. Ultimately, he lost on both fronts.

  By the time the Japanese reached Canton, Jin had already established himself as a playboy whose main occupation was to smoke opium and throw lavish banquets. Even the conquering Japanese could not ignore his public persona. Naturally, Jin only invited the upper echelon to his elaborate banquets. And since he was apparently an apolitical party giver, in time, Jin’s guests included high-ranking Japanese officials, both civilian and military.

  Jin did his part right under the noses of the Japanese while living on his decadent-looking houseboat.

  Since the time of Confucius, people lived and operated businesses from houseboats, sampans, junks and various other types of watercraft on the Pearl River delta. The size and design of which depended on the wealth of the individual or the nature of the waterborne business. A poor river fisherman lived and worked on a 15 foot sampan; ocean-going fishing vessels measuring 70 to 100 feet plied the sea; floating restaurants, some as long as 300 feet, fed hungry customers; shallow-draft barges that measured anywhere from 20 to 60 feet shipped rice, salt, wood, bamboo, hand-woven silks and a host of products to and from wherever the demand originated. Even during wartime, business flourished. The Japanese bought food and other products with occupation money. People took their paper because they still had a life to live.

  Furthermore this vast alluvial plain grew multiple crops each year due to its temperate climate. The most important one was rice.

  Three major rivers, the East (Dong) River, the North (Bei) River and the West (Xi) River, fed the Pearl River Delta like a three-pronged fork. A system of natural tributaries as well as man-made canals criss-crossed these flatlands. This interlacing waterborne highway system carried a wealth of goods from the interior of the country to the port cities of Canton and Hong Kong.

  Historically the bulk of the opium trade during the 1840’s took place here. When Great Britain defeated China in the Opium Wars (1856-1860), it acquired Hong Kong precisely because of this network of waterways. After all, Hong Kong sat at the mouth of the Pearl River where it flows into the South China Sea. From Hong Kong opium flooded its way up the three rivers to poison millions of people in the interior of China, while gold and silver flowed down the rivers into the British banks.

  What happened to the civilized western nations that they would abandon all moral propriety to sell opium to the Chinese? The answer begins with Marco Polo. He found the Chinese living in unbelievable wealth. They wore silks; read printed books; ate from finely crafted porcelain plates; and drank tea out of delicate little teacups while the average European wore itchy, coarse wool, had no printed books, and ate from wooden bowls.

  After several hundred years of countries like Britain buying Chinese silks, porcelain, and tea, the balance of trade was overwhelmingly in China’s favor. What to do about this imbalance? Great Britain’s answer was to sell opium grown in colonial India to the Chinese. By 1860, the surplus that China had accumulated over several hundred years of legitimate trade was gone. When the Empress Dowager Cixi died in 1908, China was effectively bankrupt, and it was because of the opium trade.

  Now, the Japanese invaders had arrived, only their goal was not to sell opium, but to take China’s rice. The Pearl River delta is one of the most fertile, rice-producing areas in China.

  Uncle Jin’s family fortune came from this vast, vibrant area. His family controlled and coordinated much of the commerce in the Delta. The family business connected the inland producers with the wholesalers in Hong Kong. Conversely, imported goods out of Hong Kong went inland through his network of shippers. His business dealt with hundreds of family-owned cargo junks. These cargo junks were the Chinese version of the independent truckers of today.

  His job in the underground resistance was to send people and intelligence to the Chinese Armies fighting in the interior. Unfortunately, our sudden and unexpected appearance made life more complicated for Uncle Jin. We had been scheduled to live in Grandpa’s Canton house to await Jin’s call. Now, he was under pressure to get us out of Japanese-held territory. For security reasons, contact between underground agents was not allowed, unless, of course, they were on the same mission. But my mother had not been assigned to a group operation. She was to operate independently. Her job was to be the Private Secretary-American Liaison Officer for GovernorGeneral Li Hanhun of Canton Province. (Or Quangdong Province. Or Guangzhou in pinyin. It’s very confusing, that’s why I’ve been using Canton, the original name for both the city and the province.)

  Mom’s job initially was to act as a translator-interpreter between General Chennault’s famous Flying Tigers
(a volunteer force of American fighter pilots) in his Kunming office as well as American Army Headquarters located in Chungking, the wartime Capital of China. She would be responsible for any and all English communications that arrived or left Governor-General Li’s Office. More importantly, General Li thought that it would be more politic if his requests to the Americans for supplies and equipment were written in English rather than in Chinese. Li’s Army had to acquire weapons, ammunition, gasoline and an untold variety of equipment to fight the war. And America was the only ally that could provide these supplies.

  Thus, when Uncle Jin sent my mother’s resume to the Governor, he immediately agreed to interview her.

  Officially, Li Hanhun had multiple titles: 1938 to 1939, Deputy Commander in Chief 8th Army Group; 1938 to 1945, Chairman of the Government of Canton (Quangdong) Province; and 1939 to 1945 Commander in Chief 35th Army Group. And he was the Chairman of the Nationalist Party in Canton Province.

  As decorated and as powerful as he was, Governor-General Li could neither read nor speak English. And he had no one on his staff who could communicate effectively with the Americans. There was an urgent need for a person with Mom’s bi-lingual skills.

  Uncle Jin quickly arranged transport for us to go to Shaoguan, the wartime capital of Canton Province where the governor had his headquarters. Li had moved his capital to Shaoguan in October 1938 when the Japanese took Canton.

  Shaoguan was about one hundred and seventy-five miles, as the crow flies, north of Canton. But it was closer to 250 miles by boat up the winding rivers and canals. Most times, it would take two weeks to get a message up the North (Bei) River to Shaoguan and another three days to get a reply downstream. Given the time constraint, communication with Li’s headquarters before our departure was impossible. And to complicate matters, his headquarters was repeatedly relocated to avoid Japanese bombing attacks. Governor-General Li was afraid of being assassinated by the Japanese.