Escape from Shanghai

by Paul Huang

  China and a million American lives in exchange for peace with Japan.

  In January of 1945, during this Japanese offensive, the temperatures at Governor Li’s Provincial Headquarters hovered in the 40s and rose to a pleasant 60 or higher by noon. Not far from his house was his big black Buick parked with rows of trucks that formed the motor pool. Next to these vehicles were tall stacks of metal gasoline drums. Hundreds of fifty-five gallon drums of precious gasoline filled the large fenced-in compound.

  The men in the motor pool generally looked after me. I liked to watch the mechanics work on those big army trucks. I didn’t have to go to school simply because there wasn’t one. And I didn’t like being tutored along with the general’s children. They made me feel like a second-class citizen, an employee’s child. When I described the situation and my unhappiness at being treated like a servant, Mom agreed to let me “work” with the soldiers instead. Clearly, there are different ways to learn about life.

  An old man guarded the compound that stored the gasoline supply for the army. He was thin and frail as if he had not been properly fed for most of his life. He sat by the big wooden doors guarding the tall stacks of precious flammable liquid. The heavy odor of gas permeated the area, but he had gotten used to the smell. On cold mornings, he would crack the big door a foot or two to let the sun warm him. But the sun didn’t provide enough heat to suit him. Between his feet and in front of his rocking chair sat a chipped and dented white-enamel wash basin. The basin had a rounded bottom and it was about twelve inches in diameter and four inches deep. In the middle of this metal basin were lumps of hot, glowing coals.

  He sunned himself, smoked his pipe and warmed his feet and hands over his portable stove. He seemed oblivious to the gasoline stacked behind him.

  Seeing a ready and available audience, he would call me over to join him. “Sit and warm yourself,” he said.

  I used to sit on my haunches in front of the glowing red charcoal and listen to his stories.

  “My boy,” the old man said, “do you know how many years I’ve been working for the general? Thirty. Thirty years,” he said proudly. “I was his rickshaw driver. When he got a car, he got rid of the rickshaw. But he still thinks very highly of me. And do you know why? Because I’m important to him. He trusts me. I’m not like the others who deal in the black market,” he said with pride.

  He raised his right arm and pointed his thumb at the drums just behind his shoulder. “You know how much money they charge for gasoline? I could make a fortune, I tell you. But the general trusts me. That’s why he put me here, to watch over his gasoline. This is a very important job, watching the gasoline. There are thieves everywhere. That’s why the gasoline is here, behind this compound where no one can steal it. Smart huh? Yeah, the general is very smart. He’s smart to keep me here to watch over things for him.”

  I sat and listened, but it wasn’t long before the old man ran out of stories. When he began to repeat himself, I lost interest. I drifted away to watch the mechanics work on the trucks.

  Then, one cold morning, there was a loud commotion at the gas depot. Thick, black, heavy smoke bellowed into the sky, followed by a loud roar and a huge ball of fire. In seconds, the entire area was consumed by thick pitch-black smoke. A huge black cloud mushroomed high into the sky. The metal drums of gasoline had completely disappeared. The heat from the flames peeled the paint off the nearby trucks. Hundreds of soldiers ran about tossing buckets of water on anything that was in flames.

  Half dazed and blackened by smoke, the old man staggered about in the center of a circle of angry soldiers. “It wasn’t my fault,” he cried, “I fell asleep, that’s all.” Then he turned wildly to grab a nearby soldier. “It wasn’t my fault!” the old man screamed for everyone to hear. “The pan tipped over.” When he realized what he had just said, he covered his face and fell to his knees.

  A soldier cursed him then roughly pushed him to the ground.

  Mom ran into the circle of soldiers. “Has anyone seen my son?” she cried several times.

  Luckily, I was in the truck repair area, away from the gasoline. I waved and called out to her.

  “Thank goodness you are all right!”

  The old man sobbed. “Someone turned over my pan...they...they...I couldn’t stop the fire. It just got bigger and bigger...” The ring of angry soldiers glared unmercifully at him. The Old Man propped himself up on one elbow. His body trembled uncontrollably with fear and panic.

  Mom grabbed my hand and forcefully took me away. She knew what was about to happen.

  Then I heard two shots.

  Everything was in complete shambles. The decision had already been made. We would have to evacuate immediately. The general was certain that the huge column of black smoke could be readily seen by the Japanese. The threat of the oncoming Japanese was foremost on everyone’s mind.

  Mom took me aside to explain the situation.

  “You know, the fire is a very bad thing. The Japanese will see the black smoke. They are very close. We have to leave now,” she said firmly. Behind her, high up in the air, a long column of black smoke lingered in the cold blue sky.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We are going inland, away from the Japanese. The entire army is leaving.”

  “Are we going in the Buick?”

  “The car is only big enough for the general’s family. His children and their amahs will leave first. We will follow later with the rest of the army.” Then she sat down beside me and took my hand. “I’m going in one of the trucks with all the important papers.” She paused to clear her throat. “You’ll be going with the soldiers. The sergeant of the motor pool will be in charge of you. You do what he tells you,” she said. “We won’t be separated for long. Five days at most.”

  I was nine at the time. That would make it four years since Mom and I escaped from Shanghai. And during those four years, whatever fears that I might have had, had been locked up inside of me. I hadn’t sobbed or cried when the Japanese soldier patted me on the top of my head. My hand didn’t tremble when I gave him his roll of money. In fact, I remember calmly looking up at him, as if this were the most important game in the world. And it was because I had fooled him.

  During those four, formative years, fear was not an emotion that I exhibited. It wasn’t a question of male pride that to show fear would mean being weak. I was too young to know about the macho aspect of being a “man.” After all, I was a young boy whose hormones hadn’t developed sufficiently to experience that macho feeling. I focused on being a good, obedient boy because that’s what boys are supposed to do.

  When Mom told me that we might be separated for five days, I knew what she had really meant to say. There had always been the possibility that we would not survive. This had always been the unspoken truth. This time was no different, though the circumstances might have been more intense and threatening.

  Under these circumstances, I nearly always thought that the worst thing that could happen to me was to die. Once that thought crossed my mind, fear was not the issue. Survival was.

  In fact, I told her that I hope she had enough gasoline in her truck to make the trip. Then we would meet at the end of it. That was our only choice.

  To re-supply Li’s army with gas, American transport planes would have to fly the precious liquid from Burma over the Himalayas into Kunming. From there, the gas would be trucked over hundreds of miles of twisting, narrow dirt roads. But even that was no longer possible. The Japanese blitzkrieg had taken a corridor of land from Vietnam in the south all the way up to Peking (Beijing) and into Manchuria. Their 1944 offensive had cut China in half. The Japanese owned the middle section of China, leaving the western portion of the country to the Generalissimo, and a portion of the coast between Shanghai and Canton to Governor-General Li.

  General Li was now completely isolated from the wartime capital of Chungking. His territory consisted of a bulge of land that included the eastern portion of Canton Province; Fukien Provi
nce to the East; and most of Kiangsi Province to the North. The General was left on his own. There was no contact between him and his commander, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

  During the entire war, Governor-General Li had not faced the Japanese in a major battle. This time, he retreated from Shaoguan to Longchuan.

  Longchuan is about 170 miles to the southeast on the banks of the East (Dong) River.

  The arrow shows Governor-General Li’s retreat from Shaoguan to Longchuan into unoccupied territory.

  Suddenly, the gold from the Bank of Canton was in danger once more. With the gasoline supply gone, the soldiers siphoned the fuel out of most of the trucks and topped off as many as they could. The vehicles with empty fuel tanks were abandoned.

  The gold, along with the important files, was loaded onto the operational vehicles.

  Mom traveled by truck with the rest of the high-ranking bureaucrats and army officers. Many sat on the crates of bullion. She was going ahead to help set up a new office and find a place for us to live.

  Thousands of foot soldiers earned their names. They walked.

  The sergeant ordered me into an open bamboo sedan chair mounted between two thick bamboo-carrying poles. Two soldiers, one at each end, hoisted the poles onto their shoulders. I had an unobstructed view of the road as I bounced along in rhythm with the soldier’s steps, my head a foot or so above theirs. I could see two long lines of foot soldiers winding down the single-lane dirt road. Each line hugged the ditch on either side. The men were prepared to dive for cover the moment they heard an aircraft engine.

  At the first sound of an aircraft engine, my two soldiers would lift the bamboo poles off their shoulders, take a few quick steps into the ditch and drop me to the ground. The three of us would huddle together for protection. Luckily, the bullets whizzed by missing us. I have no idea how close we were to death because my two army buddies were on top of me and my face was buried in the dirt.

  But not everyone was so lucky. The loses were heavy because we were in flat farmland with very little cover. The wounded suffered unbearable pain because we had no morphine. Many wounds were wrapped with the uniforms of the dead. We had no medics. Men died unnecessarily for the lack of sanitary bandages and professional care.

  Once, we thought we heard an aircraft engine and promptly dove for the ditch. It turned out to be a truck. When the vehicle roared by, nearly all the soldiers waved an obscene gesture at that unlucky driver.

  Luckily for me, I had been protected by my two buddies. (I’m sad to say that I don’t remember their names. In hindsight, they probably saved my life during our march together.) While I saw the wounded and heard the dying moans and cries, they insulated themselves and me from the trauma. We lowered our gaze and adopted a detached feeling of resignation. We huddled beside a stone roadside shrine for protection. There weren’t many ways to insulate yourself against such inhumane conditions.

  After all, the worst thing that could happen to us is that we would die. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. After that first day, the Japanese left us alone, probably because they were running short of bullets, too. Besides, they had already won. There wasn’t much we could do to fight back.

  The march from Shaoguan to Longchuan, our ultimate destination, took much longer than anyone had expected. We weren’t sure where we were going since the battlefield was fluid and the intelligence faulty. The Japanese was moving toward Suichuan Airfield, which was just northeast of our location. So we headed southeast to avoid them. Good thing we did because they took that airfield in February, just weeks after the fire.

  Mom had nearly given up on ever seeing me again. We were walking which took much longer than her ride in the truck. And the army had taken the long way around to avoid running into the Japanese. Meanwhile she waited and waited, getting more anxious with each passing day. It didn’t help that there was no news. The Chinese Army didn’t have any working radios. Finally, two weeks later, I caught up with her. Our reunion was subdued. Though we were joyous to be reunited, our happiness had been overshadowed by the constant pang of hunger. Our rations had been cut to the bone. We hadn’t had any meat in weeks.

  Perhaps the happiest man there was Sergeant Wong, the man in the motor pool who had been ordered to look after me. He was happy and relieved to have delivered me, unharmed, to my mother. As a reward, she shared her last can of Spam with him and my two buddies who had carried me across the mountains. Mom had been saving the meat for a special occasion, and this was it. But we had to eat it in secret, away from everyone. This can of Spam was probably the last one in China.

  For the Japanese to win, all they had to do was just sit and watch us starve to death.

  Most days, we had little to eat that winter. What kept us alive was watery, meatless congee that the soldiers cooked. I’m not sure why the motor-pool soldiers took me to be one of their own, but they did. Maybe it was because of the rumor that Mom and I were related to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, but I’ll never know.

  What I do know is that we spent most our days scrounging for food. By the time we settled into our new location, the spring planting season still hadn’t arrived yet. Crops don’t grow overnight. Or in the cold. The army’s food reserves were dangerously low because we didn’t have the trucks to take the army’s food supply with us. We could only take what we could carry or load onto pushcarts. The whole thing was a disaster.

  The government used to print truckloads of money to pay, house, feed and equip the soldiers. But now that we’ve been cut off and isolated by the Japanese, even the soldiers’ pay couldn’t be delivered.

  Many soldiers deserted. If they weren’t going to be paid or fed properly, then they might as well go home to be with their families. The prospects might be better there. But they weren’t the only people to leave.

  My two buddies and I were sitting in the middle of a rice field looking forlornly at the fallow land wishing that there were rice to be harvested. And as we sat there contemplating the land, I heard yelling and screaming from the nearby farmhouse. A family of four was being driven out of their home.

  Puzzled, I turned and asked what was going on?

  “The army has requisitioned their farm,” came the sad reply. “These peasants have been ordered to leave.” Two soldiers with rifles and bayonets goaded the peasants off their land.

  “Why?”

  My buddies were unsure of how to answer the question. “Maybe you should ask your mother,” came the reply.

  I ran home. Mom confirmed the fact that General Li had ordered the removal of the peasants from their homes so that the army would have enough food for the troops. It was a tragic and heartrending sight, to see families with children forcefully removed from their homes. More tragic still because whatever food reserves that they had was confiscated, too. The peasants were only allowed to take what they could carry.

  Many of the soldiers couldn’t look these people in the eyes because they knew that they would be eating the farmers’ winter rice reserves.

  Henceforth, the army would take over the farms and work the fields. The general wanted to control the food supply. The only way he could keep his authority was to own a standing army. And the only way to keep his army was to feed it.

  Since the majority of the general’s recruits had been peasants themselves, they knew that the shortage of food would get much worse before it got better. Furthermore, they sympathized with the men, women and children who had been driven out of their ancestral farms.

  Disillusioned and angry soldiers abandoned their positions and disappeared into the countryside. They took the only things of value with them: their rifles and bullets. But that practice was quickly stopped when their weapons were stored under lock and key.

  Former officers turned themselves into warlords, promising their followers a better life and a better government. These newly minted warlords carved out their own territories. Many had received financial backing from friends and family. Their strategy was to negotiate a permanent position with Chia
ng Kai-shek after the war. China was reverting to the days of fiefdoms and overlords. These people no longer had any faith or trust in the central government.

  Mean spirited people turned themselves into bands of roaming bandits. Those with rifles and bullets became leaders of these gangs. One gang terrorized the Yangtze River. They would swoop down the side of the mountain to capture passenger junks and hold these people for ransom. Worse, they would sell captured young girls to anyone who had the money to buy one. More disheartening was the fact that there were people who bought these girls.

  There was no one to stop these criminals. Chaos ruled because no one else could.

  And what happened to the displaced peasants? Many died from starvation. Those who survived had nowhere to go but straight into the arms of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists. They joined Mao’s peasant army because he promised to share their hunger with them and not take food from the mouths of their children. Mao promised that they would fight and work together to get what was rightfully theirs. And everyone would share in the bounty, not just the privileged few.

  Mom tried hard to maintain an optimistic attitude for my benefit, but it didn’t work. Both of us worried about food and where our next meal would come from. I didn’t know any better, but Mom worried about our health and our daily intake of protein. We were always hunting for farms that had egg-laying chickens. I don’t remember the details of how it happened or why, but at one point, the only thing that Mom and I had to eat that day was one hard-boiled egg. And we paid dearly for that egg, too. After all, you can’t eat gold.

  I’m ashamed to say that we probably survived that winter because the army rationed the peasants’ rice reserves for our use. And I can’t help but wonder whether we all could have survived had we shared and rationed the rice rather than forcefully throwing the peasants off their land. Maybe this thought is too humanitarian and liberal to contemplate.