Escape from Shanghai

by Paul Huang

  The boatman that the American recommended had transported some top secret and sensitive documents through the Japanese lines from Chungking, down the Yangtze, to Shanghai.

  Uncle Jin knew of him, but never met the man. He was known to be reliable. “Opportunistic, but reliable,” was the cliché used to describe him. The next question was whether we could trust him with our lives, not just some secret papers.

  Eventually, we found the man. His small junk couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet long. Its center section was covered with a semi-circular bamboo housing, the same design as the one on Uncle Wu’s cargo junk. The housing constituted the main and only cabin on the junk. Braced against the front of the half-moon shaped cabin was a twenty-foot tall mast rigged with a traditional lug sail. On up-river journeys, this mast held the towrope.

  We still had three gold coins and four rings left in my money belt. The jewelry included Mom’s wedding band, her diamond engagement ring, a red ruby encased in a thick gold band and an 18-karat gold ring with a woven rope design. (Mom gave this ring to my wife, Jacquie, a few years ago.)

  “Well, this must be it,” Mom said. “I don’t think the river pirates will pay too much attention to this junk, do you?” she said with a smile.

  Just then a short stocky man in his forties came out of the cabin. He was dressed in faded black pants and shirt. He looked us over and raised his eyebrows.

  We were dressed in nondescript peasant’s clothing.

  “Are you Mr. Ma?” Mom asked innocently.

  The man smiled and nodded pleasantly at us. He had recognized us from Uncle Jin description. Who can miss an attractive woman with her young son in tow. “And you must be Huang Tai-tai,” he said respectfully.

  Mr. Ma invited us aboard his vessel and served us tea. Formal introductions were over.

  “Well, I was looking for something a little…a little more substantial than this…” Mom said affably, waving her hand at the junk. “Is this vessel safe?”

  “Safe?” Ma burst out laughing. “I ran the Japanese blockade many, many times. And here I am,” he smiled. “Even the pirates will not stop me. I am but a poor man,” he said with a disarming smile. “They only rob the big fancy boats.”

  “And you know the river well?” Mom asked in her most innocent voice.

  “All my life I am a river man. I know this river. I know every rock in every rapid by name. Many of my enemies have been led to a sad fate on some of those rocks. Those who dare to follow,” he chuckled at his little private bit of bravado. “My little boat darts between the rocks like a dragon dancing on the waves,” Ma waved his hand through the air as if his fingers were indeed dancing over the churning rapids.

  “I see,” Mom said with a bit of humor in her voice. “And when you’re dancing between the rocks, how would you handle the bandits behind them?”

  Mr. Ma grinned. “Why, like a dragon, of course. Like a fire-breathing dragon!”

  “I like your wit, Mr. Ma. If you are as quick on the water as you are with your words, then you’ll do. You’ll do,” Mom said with a smile.

  “Huang Tai Tai, you honor me with such kind words,” Ma replied with a bow of his head.

  Mom slowly moved her right hand to her purse. “I will pay you two gold coins for the trip to Shanghai,” she said casually.

  Ma’s eyes popped open with amazement. “Two coins will hardly feed me,” he said, appearing to be appalled by this meager offer.

  Mom looked taken aback by his reaction. “You did say that it would only take a few days to make the trip, didn’t you? Two gold coins for a few days work, that’s more than what a general makes,” she declared.

  “While it will only take a few days to go down river, it will take me a month to come back. How shall I live? What shall I eat? Will you ask a man to sacrifice his life to take you to Shanghai?” he pleaded with open palms.

  Mom almost laughed but she suppressed it to a broad grin. “Oh, but Mr. Ma, these are my last coins. I have no more.” Mom opened her small purse. There were only two gold coins in it. I had the other in my money belt. “You will have taken all I have. Isn’t that enough?”

  Ma shook his head dramatically from side to side. “Oh, no! No. It would not be right for me to take your last two coins,” he said sadly as if it pained him to even think of such a thing. Then he brightened a bit as if an idea suddenly popped into his head: “Perhaps you have a relative in Shanghai who will pay me for my return trip?” he asked in a voice full of hope.

  Mom bit her lips as if deep in thought. “I have not been in touch with my family since the war began. I do not know who is there. But, if I still have family there, I will ask them to pay you two more pieces of gold.” Once again, Mom saw concern on the man’s face. “Well, Mr. Ma, it won’t be so bad to work in Shanghai, you know. They could always use a resourceful man like you,” Mom quickly added. Then without another word, she gave him a letter from Jin.

  Mr. Ma read the letter and his face suddenly brightened. That did it. Ma bowed twice in agreement. “OK,” he said in English. “OK!”

  Captain Ma hoisted the heavy lug sail when the wind favored him especially along the calm broad sections of the Yangtze. A favorable wind generally meant a following wind that was no more than forty-five degrees off his stern. The hull of his river junk was shaped like the belly of a broad, fat fish, unlike Uncle Wu’s cargo junk that had a flat bottom. The draft was deep enough to accommodate the forces of a following wind without tipping over, but shallow enough to bounce and skip atop the turbulent waves of the fast-flowing Yangtze.

  This ancient and proven design allowed Captain Ma, and we called him Captain because it obviously pleased and flattered him, to use his long, double oars attached to each side of the junk as both a rudder and propeller. He expertly rode the river downstream very much as he had initially described it to us. His little junk danced and bobbed atop the water like a toy on a rushing stream as he furiously worked his oars to avoid the rocks. Our trip down the Yangtze can be likened to shooting the rapids on the most violent portions of the Colorado River, except that the Colorado rapids were tame by comparison. But the danger didn’t deter these intrepid river men from using this violent artery as a major transportation route.

  Captain Ma would not allow us to come out from under the cover during the day. He wanted to maintain the appearance of a sailor with his wife and son plying the river with no special purpose. He sailed stealthily during the day, stopping at strategic locations to check the safety of the next bend in the river. Seeing no danger beyond the bend, he would proceed.

  “This river dragon is like a tempestuous woman,” he said as he worked his oars to steer his little vessel between the rocks and through the churning rapids. “Look at how angry she gets when she’s in a rage!” Mom and I held each other tightly as we rode down the rushing turbulence. It was both exhilarating and frightening at the same time.

  The Yangtze River and its various tributaries crisscrossed the heart of China. It was, and still is, a vital artery for travel and commerce. Ma was one of hundreds of thousands of people who lived, worked and died on the river. People like him knew no other life. On land, they would be like fish out of water. How sad and yet how natural. People like him made commerce possible on this unpredictable body of water. Silently, we admired Ma’s courage and expertise especially in the violent brown waters of the narrow gorges. His confidence was the only thing that kept us from panicking.

  He saw the fear in our eyes as we approached our first major gorge. The Yangtze Gorges are monstrous when compared with the ones we encountered going up the North (Bei) River to Shaoguan.

  “Ah,” he sighed confidently, “do not worry, Huang Tai-tai. Think of the river as God’s hand guiding this little boat through the alternating calm and strife of life. Just look at the beauty that surrounds you!” he exclaimed, his eyes darting between the upper reaches of the gorge and the clear blue sky above. “Look skyward and you will find peace,” he pointed skyward to emph
asize his point.

  Our eyes peeled away from the churning and violent rapids. We looked at the top of the mountain gorges and lost sight of the violence on the river. Our sense of speed diminished because the sky and the mountains appeared to be stationary. From this perspective, Mom and I realized that we weren’t going as fast as we had feared. From that moment on, we simply looked skyward for calm. We felt the boat under us, pitching and yawing and being thrown about, but we no longer felt the abject fear that the sight of this great untamed and rushing river elicited. Captain Ma had given us a rational way to combat our fear of the violent rapids.

  When we reached Shanghai, the most striking sight was where the brown, silt infested water of the Yangtze met the blue-green ocean. There was a clear demarcation between the two colors. Mr. Ma explained that this is where the brown fresh water meets the sea.

  When he docked his little boat at the Bund in Shanghai, a job was waiting for Captain Ma. He would handle special shipping assignments between Shanghai and Chungking.

  The fighting had stopped, but the war was far from over.

  Mom had been told to look for a driver standing by a jeep when we docked. He was easy to find because there was only one jeep parked at the dock. There was no one else there to meet us. I climbed in the back with our two bags while Mom sat in the front seat. The driver pulled away from the dock, one hand on the horn, the other on the wheel. He proceeded to speed down the Bund as if there were no other traffic on the road. There wasn’t much car traffic, but the Bund was packed with pushcarts, rickshaws and pedestrians. Mom let out an audible gasp thinking that the jeep would run over these people, but magically, the sea of carts and people parted to let the jeep speed on. “Don’t worry, Ma’am, I haven’t hit anybody yet!” the driver said.

  Mom was concerned that no one came to meet us until she discovered the only vehicle available to transport us was this little jeep.

  The most reassuring thing about Grandpa’s house was that nothing had changed. All of my uncles, aunts and cousins were there. They had survived the war in good health. Life went on as if the Japanese had never been here, at least on the surface. But Shanghai had changed, and not for the better. There were homeless refugees living on every street in the poorer neighborhoods. Only the old International sections of the city were spared. Every morning, death wagons would patrol the streets picking up lifeless bodies and hauling them away. To where? Nobody really wanted to know, only that they be removed to prevent the spread of disease.

  The first and most important thing Mom wanted to do was to write to my father in New York. She wanted to start the process of getting a duplicate birth certificate for me. I would need it to get a new passport because she had destroyed all of the papers that linked us to America right after Pearl Harbor.

  The second thing was to enroll me in a school. I couldn’t adjust to the formal rituals of a Chinese school. It was much too strict. The students in the fourth grade behaved perfectly. They were obedient, orderly and studious. The teacher lectured and the students responded when called upon. No one ever spoke out of turn. I wasn’t used to that. Besides, I was literally four years behind my classmates.

  So, in self-defense, let me give you a hint of what it means to be a Chinese student learning the Chinese language.

  The first thing you have to learn is how to hold a brush. Unlike a pen or pencil where you’d hold the pen at an angle, you have to learn how to hold the brush straight and perfectly perpendicular to the paper. To do this, you’d use your thumb, index and middle fingers. This position allows you to write a thin line by just using the very tip of the brush, and a thick line by pressing down on the tip. Using this up and down motion, you control the width of the ink on the page. This isn’t as easy as it reads. Try it.

  Now, you can start tracing Chinese characters on sheets of translucent rice paper. The words to be traced were printed on a page underneath. You copy each brush stroke perfectly, and copy them from left to right. And there was an order to each stroke. Some words have as many as twenty brush strokes. That meant you had to memorize the proper order of those twenty strokes, too. All of this was designed for righties. If you’re a lefty, you have to use your right hand to write. It’s a tough life for you lefties.

  That’s how you learn to write Chinese. You copy the characters over and over until you’ve painted each brush stroke perfectly. You’re graded on how well you copy the words. Later, you’re graded on how well you write in freehand, without copying. To become educated in writing Chinese, you had to spend years of your young life just copying. And you’re talking about anywhere from 2,000 characters to 50,000 characters. The first would be enough for you to read the newspaper, and the second would make you a Mandarin.

  Having suffered through this process, I can guess why so many Chinese are illiterate. Learning how to read and write was a full-time job. A farmer just doesn’t have the time to sit every day and copy words for hours on end, not if he wanted food in his bowl. But what bothered me more is this: suppose you’re not manually dexterous enough to handle a brush in this precise and demanding manner? Suppose you were born with a heavy hand where your large muscles were better developed than your small ones?

  Surely, many people had been left behind in the Chinese educational system due to muscular development?

  Though I had the physical ability to handle the brush properly, I couldn’t catch up on the volume of work that I had missed. And I was considered to be a disruptive student because I didn’t know that it was wrong to ask “why?”

  My teachers sent notes home with me nearly every day. This disheartened both Mom and me. Clearly, the teachers didn’t know how to deal with a boy who didn’t know the rules of the game. And they didn’t take the time to teach me the rules. They expected me to know them.

  Thankfully, Mom ignored the reports of my absences. She knew we wouldn’t be in Shanghai much longer. Still, she felt compelled to warn me about playing hooky on the streets of Shanghai.

  “The streets are dirty, full of disease. People are dying of TB. They spit in the streets,” she cautioned as she waved at the window. “You must be careful, you know!” she said sternly.

  Other than the educated elite of China, everybody spat. It was both unhealthy and disgusting. (It would take a major re-educational effort by Mao Tes-tung and the Communist Party to stop this disgusting national habit. Today, nobody spits on the streets.)

  “What do you do when you’re not at school?” Mom asked with no recrimination in her voice or demeanor.

  “This morning, I went to the market.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “There’s a man who does magic tricks, and a strong man who breaks stones with his bare hands. They sing operas in a tent. There’s a lot to see and do—and learn.”

  The market was an exciting place. But not a place for genteel folk. Located in the International section, it attracted the servants of the rich. Servants shopped there for their employers. Furthermore, this was an entertainment center for them. A place for them to relax, trade stories about their respective employers and just hang out during off-duty hours. Rarely did a servant get a full day off. I hung out with them. And nobody thought anything about a ten-year-old boy wandering around the marketplace. This was a common sight. The poor just can’t afford school, not to mention the orphans who had to find way to survive. Children my age picking through garbage was an everyday, normal occurrence. If anything, I was the exception because I didn’t have to scavenge.

  “They have book stalls that rent all kinds of books. I read a few, too!” I told her. I wanted her to know that I was learning, but in a different way.

  “Oh,” Mom said as she raised her eyebrows. “What kind of books did you read?”

  “Classical stories.” There were pornographic books, but I didn’t mention that, though I’m sure she knew.

  Mom knew about these open-air bookshops. The classics I mentioned were pocketbook-sized with two black-and-white line illustrations
on each page. The bookstall rented the books. The writing was simple but it was the pictures that told the story.

  “You read comic books all day?”

  “No, I explored. There’s a lot to see. I learned how a moneychanger worked. The man used a hot fire to melt the gold. You should see how he does it. Then he’d pour the melted metal into a bucket of cold water. That’s just how great grandfather must have found out about his fake coin, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that is the traditional way. What else did you see?” she asked.

  “I saw the opera. I liked the fight scenes. They danced with swords and lances. And they sang. Oh, there was an orchestra, too.”

  “An orchestra?”

  “You know, drums and cymbals and strings.”

  “Which opera did you see?”

  “It was about a king and his favorite concubine. She wanted to be his queen because she had given him a son. But the king still loved his queen, so the concubine killed her.

  “And then bad things happened after that. The queen’s father attacked because his favorite daughter had been killed.”

  “Did he really come to avenge his daughter, or did he come to conquer a new kingdom?”

  “I don’t know. The marriage made peace between the families, and then there was no reason for peace. They were fighting all the time during the time of the Warring States.”

  Mom flashed a surprised look on her face. “You know about the Warring States?”

  I nodded.

  “What else did you do?”

  “Well, I walked a lot. There are lots of places to go. The other day I went to that ancient pagoda.”

  “That quite far isn’t it?” she said with amazement in her voice.

  “It was a nice walk. Not as long as those marches that I used to make with the soldiers.”

  “Did you learn anything about the pagoda?”