Night in Shanghai

by Nicole Mones

  “I know,” said Kung, “but at least they are here already. They are safe. Millions in Germany and Austria still have to get out—that’s what I want to discuss. We have a plan—a petition Sun Fo and I are going to present to the legislature in Chongqing on April twenty-second.”

  Lin Ming sat up with a little splash, because now he was talking about laws. “What? A petition to the Legislative Yuan?”

  “That’s right.” Kung turned in the water. “We’ll establish a resettlement area, a new homeland for European Jews. They are a boon, not a burden; anyone can see that here in Shanghai. Down in Yunnan, where we have built the Burma Road, we have two whole counties almost empty, ready to be developed, the new road connecting them to the world. And we can bring the refugees by sea to Rangoon, and right through Burma to our border.”

  “Ah.” Lin understood. “Because it’s British.”

  “Nowhere will the Germans be able to get near them. But I need you to set things up as it was done here—barracks, soup kitchens, all the assistance people will need who arrive with nothing. Twenty thousand are self-sufficient in Shanghai; we will multiply that in Yunnan. The main industry will be farming, at first, but the land is good, the climate ideal, and there is plenty of water. They can build what society they like, within Chinese law.”

  “Permanent resettlement?” It took its shape in Lin’s mind slowly. “Quite a gesture.”

  “China needs to make a gesture. Naturally we hope to get the sympathy of the West against Japan, but that is not the reason. I told you. God wants this done.” Kung’s face was so radiant through the steam that for a moment, Lin was moved to believe.

  But then Kung was himself again, practical. “Meanwhile, we can develop these counties easily, bring in engineers, teachers, horticulturists, men, women, children. It will lift the whole region up. Look at Shanghai. Now there are cabarets where the satire is every bit as sharp as in Berlin, there are fine Viennese bakeries, and new musicians in the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra.”

  “How many people are you proposing to bring out of Germany?” said Lin.

  Kung paddled his hands in the water and looked at him, the light in his eyes shining. “One hundred thousand.”

  8

  BY THAT MARCH, Song had been in the Communist headquarters in Yan’an almost a year, thanks to Chen Xing’s letter of recommendation, which got her promptly transferred out of the Eighth Route Army Hostel.

  Her new world had not been quite as she imagined. The town itself, situated on a bend in the Yan River between corrugated hills of yellow loess, had been bombed to rubble by the Japanese, though its imposingly high city walls had survived intact. The townspeople and Communists abandoned what lay within the walls and moved to a shadow-city of caves hollowed out of the dry canyons, cut long ago by ancient creeks. The Party University was set up nearby, honeycombed through the repeating hills, invisible to Japanese planes even as it housed several thousand students who were learning to organize and use propaganda. Into this hive of political and military activity came foreigners, including missionaries, reporters, doctors, and adventurers, almost all of whom needed the help of Song’s work unit. Most foreign visitors did not stay long, but the hospital rarely seemed to be without an English-speaking doctor from India or Australia or America, keeping the small team of translators busy.

  Song liked using her mind, and translating for doctors and visitors was better than digging terraces in Chen Lu Village, yet she still felt sidelined from anything important. She was far from the thinkers and leaders in their separate canyons. She once asked one of her fellow translators, a middle-aged woman who had worked for Shell Oil in Shanghai, about climbing the ranks in the Party, and the woman had clucked sadly, as if it would be better for Song to forget such ideas. “You and I are foreign-trained,” she said. “That’s a bad class background.”

  So even though Song was in Yan’an, she floated in a sea of separation. No one knew anything about her thoughts, her beliefs, her past. She shared a kang in one of the women’s caves with two other female recruits, who spoke to each other in Sichuanese and ignored her. She translated for foreigners, who always complimented her on her English before they left, but she had no friends; few Yan’an people even approached her. You could catch sparrows on her doorstep.

  She crawled into the kang next to the other two girls every night, thinking of Thomas, and plugged through every day. When it seemed nothing would ever change, her superior Wu Guoyong called her in and handed her an envelope.

  “Orders,” he said. “Special treatment, if you ask me.”

  She took the envelope, burning, because she knew he meant her English. When he was gone, she slit it open.

  She was to escort an American woman writer out of Communist territory and back to the Japanese-held area.

  To Shanghai.

  She was so excited she ran to the outhouse, closed the stall door, and squatted over the hole without even taking down her pants, just shaking, imagining what she would do when she saw him, what she would say—if he was still there. But he was, she knew it, she felt it. He was there, and she would see him in less than two weeks.

  Her feet barely grazed the ground as she hurried that evening to meet the American writer, Joy Homer, in the bombed-out town. Almost no buildings remained standing, and the walled ruins were off-limits during the day, the better to appear abandoned to any Japanese flyovers. At night, though, any roofless space still halfway intact was lit up and turned into a noodle stall, or a shop for the dispensing of necessary goods, or an improvised stage for opera, or a puppet show. People swarmed down from the hills to enjoy themselves.

  The meeting place was a snack stall, so when Song saw a plain white woman with a camera over her shoulder walking up the uneven lane of crumbled half walls and foundations, she asked the vendor to go ahead and prepare them a couple of dishes, and walked down to meet her.

  “Miss Song!” Miss Homer thrust out her hand.

  “Just call me Song,” she answered, and they shook. “Come. Let’s have dinner.” And they pulled two stools up to a box, overturned in the dirt, which served as a table.

  “This is some place,” Joy said, looking around. “You’re all quite young, aren’t you? It’s a young group.”

  “That’s true, I suppose.” Certainly the leaders were older, but Miss Homer would not have seen them. Song herself rarely did.

  “The soldiers at the headquarters of Marshall Yan are all older,” Miss Homer said. “Did you know we just came from there?” The question was posed with a touch of pride, for the armed camp of this warlord and Nationalist commander was famously difficult to visit. “It’s in loess hills, much like your dwellings. Fantastic place! They shaved the canyon sides down into a series of terraces for their caves, all connected by these little zigzag stairways just like a New York fire escape. The cave we slept in was forty feet deep, the kang big enough for twenty people. Do you know,” she said, leaning forward, “every night soldiers came in and spread out their bedrolls beside us. Why, I thought nothing of sleeping with twelve to fifteen gentlemen a night!” She dissolved in laughter, captivated by her own wit as much as by this strange, exotic world. The vendor set two dishes in front of them, and she reared back slightly. “What’s this?”

  “Mashed potatoes with wild vegetables, and steamed sweet millet cake.” Song plucked out the best morsels and put them on the American’s plate. “Tell me what brought you to China.”

  “Well.” Miss Homer picked at the potato. “I was sent by the Interdenominational Church Committee for China Relief, you see, as a press correspondent. I’m to gather accurate news on what’s going on, and write a series of articles about it, which will help them raise funds for war relief.”

  Song nodded, understanding why they wanted this woman leaving with a good impression.

  “You know what surprises me most about Yan’an?” Joy said. “No Russians!”

  Song looked up, jolted. “Why would there be Russians?” An explosion of laught
er rose from the stall next to them. All around, little lights were strung up, and the demolished square had the gaiety of a village market. A man nearby had set up a table from which he sold knitted socks and scarves, another sold flashlights, yet another small cook pots. The rhythmic cries of guess-fingers, the ubiquitous drinking game, sounded nearby. “We broke with the Russians,” Song said. “We go our own path.” Song knew most Americans were ignorant of this; after all, the official press in China constantly dismissed the Communists as bandits and never reported on their real positions or alliances, much less their real power. The Western public knew nothing.

  Yet Joy Homer surprised her. “Unfortunately, Americans are pretty simple. Just you being Communist is enough for them—they all think you are Russian allies, that you have Russian military aid. I can tell them you don’t, but it won’t make a lick of difference. What’s this blob, anyway?” She touched a square cake with her chopsticks.

  Song started to like the woman. “Steamed millet cake. Try.”

  Joy ate some. “Not bad. Well, I for one was certainly in the dark about your movement before coming here. And today I met a whole class full of students from your Party University—so impressive, the girls in their cute Dutch bob haircuts, the boys in their glasses. And they walked here! They walked all the way from Xi’an!”

  “Oh yes,” said Song. “Students are arriving all the time. You see their idealism.” Indeed, the sight of them never failed to stir her.

  “To the future,” Joy said impulsively, raising her chipped teacup.

  Song responded with a smile, but inside she thought, To Thomas. He will be there. He won’t have left. He’ll have waited a year. And he won’t have another woman. Everything inside her shimmered at the thought. “To the future,” she agreed.

  When Thomas first saw her standing outside his house, watching his door, he wondered if he was dreaming. He felt hazy these days, always hungry, one meal a day, dwindling down a niente, to nothing. Surely now his mind carried him away.

  But when she stepped out and started toward him, and he saw the year they had been apart gather at the corners of her eyes and spill over, he knew. Then she was in his arms again, nothing changed, even her smell the same, although she was the new Song—short hair, a loose jacket, trousers. Beautiful. “Come inside.”

  “This is the first time they sent me to Shanghai,” she said as he opened the front door.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I went to Ladow’s. They knew where you were.”

  When they climbed the little ladder together, he saw her surprise at his tiny chamber, filled by his bed, his clothes, his sheet music, and one small window that gave out on a sloping rooftop. The ceiling in the little cubicle rose at an angle, just high enough on one side for him to stand.

  “Paradise,” she said. “I have dreamed of it all my life.”

  He laughed with her, and pulled her onto the bed, and it was hours later that he asked her how long she had.

  “Three days,” was her answer, and though he tried to hide his hurt that she would leave again so soon, she felt it, and tightened her embrace. They lay with their arms and legs entwined, the way they both knew it should always be.

  “Where do you go for the yi hao?” she whispered. “The number one, the bathroom.”

  “Sorry, I don’t have a night stool. I use the outhouse in the lane.”

  “You just go down, through their room?”

  “Actually, no. The roof.” He indicated the window. “But you can’t do that.”

  “Of course I can. Let’s go.” And she was up, pulling on her clothes. “Then we’ll come back,” she whispered.

  He smiled. He didn’t want to leave the room either.

  But once they were outside in the chilly morning air, she said, “Let’s eat before we go back. I remember a place near here for xiao long bao.”

  “I don’t have any money,” he said quietly.

  Song looked at him, top to bottom, thinking that now things made sense. As glorious as the thing had been between them, she had also noticed he was thin, ready to blow over in a puff of wind. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  He fell gratefully into step beside her. “How do you have money? Du barely left you anything. Do they pay you, the Party?”

  “No. They support me and feed me in exchange for my work. I inherited a little.” She appreciated that he fell silent then, and did not ask her any more. It was inheritance, in a way, even though Du Taitai was still alive. She stopped in front of a street vendor, who lifted the lid of a giant flat-bottomed pan to show tight-packed rows of chubby pork dumplings with sesame-crisped bottoms. The vendor turned up a dumpling corner to show them. “You like sheng jian bao?” Song said.

  “I love them,” he answered, and she bought two on the spot, and brushed away his thanks. Money meant nothing to her now.

  The diamonds would stay in their stone wall, as long as she remained with the Party. On the day she had left with Joy Homer she had almost done it—taken the diamonds and turned her back on the struggle for good. But she was not yet ready.

  So when they awakened together the next morning, and he gathered her to him, she knew, with a bolt of misery, that it was time to be honest about it.

  “I know you are committed.” He brushed hair tenderly back from her forehead. “I love this about you. So why not marry me and take me with you? I know they don’t need piano players up there, but I’m strong. There must be something I can do.”

  “You’re a foreigner,” she said.

  “I’m hardly from the ruling class. Maybe you noticed.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “It’s not you, it’s everything foreign. Politics, culture, learning.”

  “Learning?” He raised his brows.

  “They welcome doctors and engineers for visits, as long as they side with the cause, but even those visitors don’t stay—almost never. And marriages between Party members and foreigners are discouraged.” She exaggerated slightly; marriage with a foreigner might be permitted, but the fact was that such a marriage would shut all the important doors to her. It would be much harder to get ahead.

  “You’re saying I could not live there with you.”

  “It would not be secure for you.”

  “For you, you mean,” he shot back, and she wilted inside. “It would cast doubts on you.”

  “Shi zhei yang de,” she said in Chinese, unhappily. “True.”

  “What kind of system is that?” he said disdainfully. “Reject people because they are different? Prejudice.”

  “Reality,” she countered. “It is natural for us to feel this way. Look what Japan has done.”

  “America didn’t do that.”

  “But America did not help us, and neither did Britain or France. They threw us to Japan like so many scraps of meat.”

  He switched tactics. “Song. You’re foreign-trained yourself. If I cannot be secure up there, how can you be?”

  “You have the point,” she said, agreeing, but her concession gave him no comfort.

  After she left, he spiraled down quickly, getting by on his one meal a day with the Huangs and some money she had left behind for him. In April, when he ran into Eugen Silverman at an audition, he mentioned he was low on money, and Eugen took him to meet a Chinese man named Mr. Pao. This man was looking to hire an American, though the job had nothing to do with music.

  “I run a newspaper,” Mr. Pao explained over tea in his modest apartment, “the Shanghai Daily. You have heard of it?”

  “Of course.” Thomas and Eugen exchanged looks; it was one of the papers whose ads they followed.

  “I need a publisher,” said Mr. Pao, and then tittered at Thomas’s horrified expression. “No experience necessary. Only the use of your name. With an American publisher, we can continue printing. They will leave us alone. I will pay you the salary. You see?”

  Yes, Thomas saw. He also saw that newspaper offices had been bombed, and their employees killed, all over town. Newspap
ers were magnets. “Sorry, pal. Too dangerous.”

  “It is a salary,” Eugen protested.

  “Too high a price.” Thomas remembered the words of warning he’d been given in Seattle: People disagree, they end up dead. Play your music and keep clear of it. “Can’t do it.”

  So his clothes grew looser on him, and he spent most of his time in his room, waiting for the evening to come, when he got food and an hour of listening to the radio. He lost himself in his dreams of Song, but in his rational moments, he was aware of life slipping away.

  Early summer had brought warm days when a man came to the door of the crowded lane house asking for Thomas Greene. He was white, European, underfed, with a shock of brown hair above soft, sensitive eyes. He carried a violin case.

  “David Epstein,” he said, and they shook.

  “Thomas Greene.”

  “You will forgive my English. Aaron Avshalomov gave me your name—you know him? Arosha?”

  “Why yes,” Thomas cried, glad to hear of his friend. “How is he?”

  “He is well. He said he thought you might be free to play. You see? I have the hope.” Epstein smiled apologetically and hoisted his instrument.

  Thomas shook his head; he had not played in so long, he was not sure he even still could. “Play what?”

  “My desire? My most constant dream since I left Vienna? To play my favorite of Mozart’s two sonatas for violin and piano in B-flat.”

  “Oh.” Thomas had never played either, though they were gorgeous. “I’ve had no piano for a year.”

  “No? If I find piano, will you play the Mozart with me? I so miss to make music.”

  Thomas considered.

  Epstein looked him up and down, no doubt noticing he was thinner than a man with enough money to eat ought to be. “We could play for tips. Make enough to eat, if we are good.”