Escape from Shanghai

by Paul Huang

  “Yes. A lot,” I bragged to justify my actions. “The pagoda is a thousand years old, the monk told me.”

  “You talked with the monk?”

  “Yes. He gave me lunch and tea.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “The war.”

  Mom looked at me and ran her gentle hand down my cheek. “What did you do with your lunch money? Did you give it to the monk?”

  “No, he wouldn’t take my money. He told me to spend it on good things.”

  “On good things? Such as?”

  “I spent it on renting books. He told me it was all right to read the comic books. They told the history of China. He said that a good emperor is like the father of a big family. We should respect and honor him. But a bad emperor is not good and we should not obey nor honor him because he does not deserve it.”

  “You liked the monk, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I like talking to him.”

  “I see. That’s good,” Mom said approvingly. “What else did you do?”

  “I walked to the old city where Great Grandpa went. And I walked across the crooked bridge to the teahouse. Why is the bridge crooked?”

  “Because evil spirits travel in straight lines, so they cannot cross the crooked bridge.”

  “Oh.”

  “What else have you seen?” Mom pressed on knowing that I had played hooky often.

  I really didn’t want to tell her for fear that she would stop me from exploring, but I changed my mind because I wanted to know why people did things like this. “I saw a dead baby on top of a garbage can.”

  Mom was visibly upset. “You did not touch it, did you?”

  “I almost touched it. I thought someone had left a doll on top of the garbage can. It was so white. It looked like a doll without any clothes. And it was fat, too.”

  “Go wash your hands,” she said firmly.

  “But I didn’t touch it.”

  “Go on,” she said shaking her head, “God knows what kind of germs you came in contact with!” She shoved me into the bathroom.

  “But that was a few days ago,” I protested.

  “I don’t care. Just wash your hands. Always wash your hands when you come home, understand! It does not hurt to be careful,” she said as she stood over me.

  I didn’t argue because I knew how disease-infected the streets of Shanghai were. There were dead bodies everywhere. The cleanup crews couldn’t keep up with the death rate. “Who would leave a dead baby in the garbage?” I asked.

  “The baby probably belonged to a servant. She probably killed her daughter. It was a girl, was it not?”

  I thought it was a doll because it didn’t have anything between its legs. I nodded in reply.

  “The mother probably could not afford to feed her or bury her. It is possible that her employer told her to get rid of the child or face dismissal.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is expensive to feed people.”

  “That’s not right, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “But people are desperate. They will do anything to survive.”

  “Why is it all right to kill girls and not boys? Imagine if grandpa killed you, then I wouldn’t be here, would I? You know what else? There aren’t any women beggars, are there? All the beggars are men. Did they kill all the women?”

  “In a way, I suppose they did. That dead baby you saw did not have a chance to become a beggar, did she?”

  “No.”

  “Unfortunately, it is more complicated than that,” Mom explained. “Women are not allowed to beg, you see. Ancient customs often do not make sense. Do you know why Chinese Emperors are all men? Or why men are the only ones who can become Mandarins and scholars? Did you know that all the famous women opera stars are really men playing a woman’s role?”

  “The women in the opera...”

  “Yes,” she said. “Are you surprised?”

  I nodded.

  “The reason that boys are more valuable than girls is that boys have a better future. Boys have more opportunities. Boys can become scholars, painters, writers, judges, policemen, governors...even women opera stars! Girls do not have those opportunities, so we are less valuable.”

  Mao and the Communists used the inequities between the sexes and between the rich and the poor to recruit people to their cause. Their movement was so successful that when they won the revolution in 1949, the poor people didn’t hesitate to kill the wealthy. Mistreated servants turned on their employers and delighted in their slaughter. No mercy was shown simply because no mercy had ever been given.

  “Come, sit down. There is something important I want to tell you. We are going to America,” she announced softly, smiling.

  “When? How?”

  “As soon as I can arrange it,” she said. “You are an American citizen, you know.”

  “I am?”

  “Oh, yes. You were born in America. That makes you a citizen. We can go back to America to be with your father.”

  “I’m an American? Not Chinese?”

  “You are both.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “Well, if you are born in America you automatically become an American citizen,” Mom said. “That is how all the people in America became citizens.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I thought it was safer not to tell you. You see, the Japanese would have killed you if they knew.”

  “I would have kept the secret. Didn’t I keep all our secrets?”

  “Yes you did, and I am very proud of you. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have you with me.”

  “We went through a lot, didn’t we?”

  “They were difficult years, but we made the best of it.”

  “Remember that time when we had nothing to eat all day but one egg? We couldn’t even get a bowl of rice.”

  “Many people starved to death that year. We were lucky to get the egg. Life will be much better in America. The President promised that there would be a chicken in every pot!”

  That was inconceivable. “What’s America like?”

  “The Chinese name for America is Mei Kuo, or literally, Beautiful Country. It is big, almost the same size as China. Shanghai is on the same latitude as New York. The two cities have about the same climate. And Canton is about where Miami is. That is why your grandfather calls Canton the Miami of China, you see. People in America live in their own houses and every family owns a car.

  “Americans are the richest people on earth. They have all the natural resources. They have oil, coal, steel. They can make anything. In New York, they have the Empire State building. It is one hundred stories high!”

  I really couldn’t visualize such a tall building. My frame of reference was limited. It was enough that America was the only country that was capable of building such a building. Perhaps that’s why today, nearly all former third-world countries want to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. It would be visual proof that they were no longer a poor, third-world country, but one on a par with the United States of America.

  “Is it true that everybody in America sleeps on inner-spring mattresses?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, all of them,” Mom said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  The reason that I was so impressed by the idea of the inner spring mattress came from grandpa. He told me that at least a hundred coiled metal springs made up one mattress. To produce one million mattresses means that American industry had to make 100 million springs to put into those mattresses. Multiply 100 million people by 100 million springs and you have a mattress-making industry that’s capable to producing 10,000,000,000,000,000 springs. The number was so big that I didn’t know what to call it. And grandpa wouldn’t tell me because he wanted me to learn it on my own.

  “Do you know why Japan lost the war?” grandpa asked me. “If America can produce all those springs, how many bullets do you think they can make
to kill the Japanese?”

  Suddenly, I was proud to be a citizen of this powerful and wealthy country. “When can we go?”

  “We have to get passports and visas. They say it will take a year for me to get a visa, and only if I bribe the right officials,” Mom explained.

  “And then we can go?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Now, you must not play hooky, do you understand? You must do your best to learn in school. You have to prepare for school in America, you know.”

  “But if I’m going to America, why do I have to learn Chinese?”

  Mom laughed.

  I continued to play hooky not in defiance of her wishes, but because Mom hadn’t objected very strenuously. We both knew that learning how to read and write Chinese was going to be a waste of time. The coming challenge would be learning English. She already knew that we wouldn’t be coming back to China anytime soon. Her tacit approval of my exploring Shanghai was a strong vote of confidence in my ability to take care of myself. This attitude boosted my self-confidence immeasurably. Moreover, she thought it would be better for me to be a street-smart kid than to be a book worm—which was most unlikely simply because I hadn’t been exposed to books, yet. She knew what I needed to learn and it wasn’t going to come from a classical Chinese education. She gave me the freedom to satisfy my curiosity.

  Shanghai was a great place to explore. For the equivalent of a few pennies, I can see the old moving picture shows. You look into an eyepiece, turn a crank and watch a series of still photographs flip from one frame to the next. The people in the photos appear to move from frame to frame. Naturally, these moving picture shows were all pornographic. And the vendor didn’t stop me from watching as long as I paid him the money.

  The CARE packages from America used to contain these small sample packs of Camels or Lucky Strikes with three to four cigarettes in them. You could barter one of these sample packs for a bowl of hot noodles. It was the same with a Hershey’s Chocolate bar. And if you were lucky enough to get a CARE package, you could live on it for a week. The poor scrambled for them. The crooks hijacked truck loads of them. And the bureaucrats routed them directly to their homes, right from the ship. Very few poor people got those life-saving packages.

  The CARE packages were worth more than the yuan. They had real tangible value while the yuan was just printed paper that lost value everyday.

  Once I came upon a long line of people. There was an open army truck parked at the head of the line. I asked someone what he was waiting for and he said that they were giving away loaves of bread. With nothing else to do, I decided to stand in line. I waited and waited, wondering why it was taking so long for the three men on the truck to give the bread away. Meanwhile, word had spread and the line grew longer. Finally, I looked up at the man standing on the tailgate. I asked for a loaf. He studied my face for a long moment, and then decided to grant me his largess as if he held my life in his hands. And for most of the starving poor in line, I think he did just that: people’s lives were in his hands and he knew it.

  During that hour or so, this small-minded bureaucrat must have felt like an all-powerful king giving bread to his poor starving people. And he had the arrogance and audacity to take his time to dispense the food. It was as if he wanted to lord it over us.

  This loaf of uncut bread was as hard as a brick. God knows how long it had been sitting in the truck before the bureaucrats thought it was time to deliver it to the poor people of Shanghai. I couldn’t even break the bread into chewable chunks. I walked away and discreetly handed the loaf to a dejected-looking little girl standing nearby. She had given up. She knew that by the time she got to the head of the line, all the bread would be gone.

  I knew how she felt because I used to wait in line for the CARE packages. I didn’t even get close to the truck before all the packages were gone. I would have had to get up at dawn to get in line to wait hours for a CARE package.

  Today, I can envision this very same scene being repeated again and again around the world. It wasn’t a pretty sight then, and it isn’t a pretty sight now.

  Men bought sex with cigarettes from the CARE packages. The trade was so blatant that a child could see it.

  Once, out of curiosity, I tried to buy sex with a chocolate bar. The girl agreed and took the chocolate. I knew what to do from watching the peep shows but I was only ten years old and too young to do anything. The girl was my age. She enjoyed the chocolate. I enjoyed the experimentation, and maybe she did too. This was classic “You show me and I’ll show you.” (It would appear that this game is universal.)

  While life was moving right along, every morning people showed up dead on the streets. The first time I saw a dead man on a Shanghai street, I thought he was asleep on the sidewalk.

  By 1946, Shanghai had regained her stature as a shipping center. Incoming ships brought relief supplies from America, while outbound ships of all types and sizes were loaded with Japanese prisoners to be shipped home. At the end of the war, there were approximately 2,000,000 Japanese soldiers in China waiting to be shipped back to Japan.

  One day, when Mom and I were walking to the Bund, we passed a large white Victorian-style mansion surrounded by a tall, black wrought-iron fence. A group of Japanese prisoners were sitting on the lawn. When they saw us, they rushed, en mass, to the fence. They were naked but for a white loincloth, like a sumo wrestler’s mawashi It was a hot summer day. They waved and shouted at us.

  “Buy my watch, cheap!” one shouted as he stuck his arm between the iron bars.

  “Here! A gold ring!”

  “Do not even look at them,” Mom said. “They are disgusting. Like animals.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They want to sell the watches and the rings that they stole. They want money, food and cigarettes. Do not look at them.”

  “How come they’re here?”

  “They are waiting to be shipped back to Japan. Shanghai does not have enough prisons.”

  “How come they don’t wear any clothing?”

  “That’s their traditional loincloth. The Japanese are barbarians.”

  Mom lowered her head and walked away in obvious disgust.

  What’s significant is the fact that none of the captured Japanese soldiers were decapitated or slaughtered, en masse, after their surrender. China certainly had the opportunity, but not the will. We waited for the war-crimes trials to dispense Justice. But that is not to say that people didn’t take vengeance into their own hands. I’m sure many Japanese soldiers were killed by angry vengeful citizens.

  Meanwhile, the Chinese people are still waiting for a formal apology from the Japanese government for the Rape of Nanking. Japan’s refusal to admit wrong-doing and the Chinese restraint from extracting vengeance is a telling reflection of the two societies.

  For the Japanese to apologize would mean that they would have to admit that their soldiers behaved in a barbaric and dishonorable way in Nanking. This would be a near impossible thing for them to do because the Japanese think of themselves as a polite and proper society. They tend to defer to their superiors and they bow with respect to each other at every meeting. They are so polite and thoughtful that they don’t count their change at a cash register. Why? The thinking is that if you count your change in front of the cashier, then you would be insulting him for not trusting in his ability to count. This would be an insult and a loss of face. After all, a cashier should know how to make correct change. He’s paid to do that job.

  The Japanese people are extremely sensitive to this kind of behavior because they fear that the person who has lost face would commit suicide. Consequently, they cannot believe that their soldiers would do such unspeakable things in Nanking. After all, it is the Samurai Code to uphold honor until death. There is no honor in massacring women, children and the helpless. A Samurai who violates his honor code must commit seppuku or ritual suicide. Consequently, to admit that they committed the massacre at Nanking would be to admit that they did a dishonorable thin
g. And, taken to its logical but extreme conclusion, the consequence of such an admission of dishonor would be to commit mass suicide. Clearly, this is something that they cannot do, and this is why Japan has not apologized.

  It would be up to the newer generations of Japanese to make the necessary attitudinal changes to allow this to happen, but this is unlikely because the Rape of Nanking is not mentioned in Japanese textbooks. The Japanese simply cannot accept the fact that their soldiers had raped and pillaged Nanking.

  With the resumption of commercial shipping, mail began to arrive at regular intervals from America. It had been nine years since Mom had heard from Dad.

  “Your father said he’s looking forward to seeing us. He wants us to send him a picture. He does not know what you look like, you know. You were just a baby when we came back to visit grandpa. We will have to get reacquainted with him. We will be starting a new life in America.”

  Once reliable mail delivery from America had been established, Mom began to get letters from my father. Invariably, there would be crisp new bills carefully folded between sheets of letter paper. Mom had requested tens and twenties because they were the preferred denominations for bribing Chinese officials. And we would need a steady supply of dollars to get our travel documents.

  I treasured the envelopes with the cancelled American stamps on them. The really valuable ones were those that showed a clearly legible New York City postmark.

  Each letter from my father meant that we were so much closer to leaving Shanghai. The city had become a frightening place. My mother would no longer take me out for a movie at night. The last time we went, a thief reached into the rickshaw and snatched her gold-framed glasses from her face. By the time she screamed and the rickshaw driver stopped, the thief had disappeared into the darkness.

  Ever since that incident, Mom would clutch her handbag securely to her side. She instructed me to walk next to her with my arm touching her purse. That way no pickpocket could get at her money without first brushing me aside.

  We always took a safe, less busy but longer route through the secure international section. Here, the streets were broad and clean and nearly deserted. The large estates that lined the wide boulevards were well maintained; the lawns sparkled like fields of green gems.