Night in Shanghai

by Nicole Mones

  He looked up, relief sagging every joint in his body. The brothers had been hopping and Alonzo pacing; sailors were waiting at the top of the passenger ramp.

  In a second she was beside him, and in his arms. “Thank you,” he breathed.

  “I got them.” She passed him the envelope, stamped DECEMBER 7, 1941. “But they had only four left.”

  Her words were transparent to him. “You are going back north.”

  She nodded. “I can’t leave now. Not yet. You knew.”

  “Just as you knew I would not leave without the others.”

  “True,” she said. “Pure gold proves its worth in a fire. But I have always known that about you.” They held each other until a sharp blast from the ship’s horn jolted them apart.

  “After—” she blurted.

  He stopped her. “No more of that. Just stay alive for me.”

  “I will.” He felt her arms go inside his coat, and her hand slip something into his trouser pocket.

  “Go. Ni zou ba.” Her voice broke.

  “Tails!” Charles shouted. Sailors were moving to pull up the ramp. And now he, too, saw something behind them, down the river, a shape—what? He held her face. “See you again,” he said, as Lin had said to him, and she nodded in misery and gave him a push, away from her. In a few steps he covered the salt-brined boards to where his men stood with their own America, their instruments and music, ready to go home, and he saw the first warship, its lights blacked out and its engines quiet.

  “Hurry,” he said, and followed them up the ramp.

  I watched them steam away that night, passing the first Japanese warship so close they surely could see the rows of soldiers, thousands, rifles at twelve o’clock, bayonets glinting. I shrank into the shadows as they passed, and blessed the ship that bore him away.

  I could have left then too, taken a level and more peaceful road to free China, or Hong Kong. But I belonged to the war, I was a creature of its struggle, and so I returned north. I had good years there before the winds changed, and blew fortune away from me. I was a foreign-trained translator, able to read the words of the Westerners and understand their music; maybe it was inevitable that first one comrade, then another, would denounce me as a spy. Now I live alone in a small cell. My punishment is my isolation, hunger rations, and this one, simple masterstroke: I may lie only on my left side. I must always face the door, my hands visible. There is a paradise on my right side, a place of singing angels, and I dream of it every night. Even Thomas waits for me there. But I may not turn.

  Despite all this, I am free. I think in English as I like, and roam at will through the halls of memory, still visiting every corner of that glittering world that is gone, never to return, which we called Ye Shanghai.

  Afterword

  Pearl Harbor was attacked just before three A.M. Shanghai time. A Japanese buildup around the city in the weeks prior had been noticed and remarked on, causing some to leave. Earl Whaley remained, and was interned with his bandmates at the Pudong and later the Weixian prison camps. In each place they formed camp bands, scrounging instruments when necessary (one bass player used a cello). Not all the American jazz men survived; Whaley’s pianist F. C. Stoffer died in camp. Some say Whaley’s hands were broken by his captors, but he is known to have been living in the United States after the war, at least until 1964, working variously at the post office and in real estate. Buck Clayton returned to the States before the war to play with Count Basie; his own account of his years in Shanghai can be read in his memoir. Teddy Weatherford’s orchestra continued to tour Asia as the war permitted; he died in Calcutta, of typhoid, in 1946. Aaron Avshalomov lived quietly in Shanghai through the war and later moved to the United States to join his son, the composer and conductor Jacob Avshalomov, who settled in Portland, Oregon.

  The Chinese plan for a 100,000-person Jewish Resettlement Area in Yunnan almost came to fruition, thanks to H. H. Kung, Sun Fo, and other Nationalist leaders. The Sword of David secret society did indeed send the Italian Jewish mercenary Amleto Vespa and the exiled Korean revolutionary An Gong Geun with cash and gold bars from Shanghai to Chongqing, where both were killed. Not long after, Chiang Kai-shek gave in to pressure from Berlin and vetoed the Plan. One can only imagine the long-term outcome of 100,000 European Jews surviving and being resettled in 1939 along what is now the China-Myanmar border; instead the Plan became one of history’s grace notes, forgotten except in the pages of a story like this.

  The 25,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai did survive. Some of them were saved by Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese Consul in Vienna, since many of the several thousand specious visas he wrote freed entire families. A vintage directory listing all those in Shanghai’s refugee quarter along with their European city of origin confirms the large number of Jews who made it out of Vienna. Ho Feng-Shan died in San Francisco at age ninety-six; in Israel he is honored as one of the Righteous among Nations.

  After the Japanese surrender, Du Yuesheng attempted a return to Shanghai, but his health and his power had declined. He did take a fifth wife, though, marrying the opera star Meng Xiaodong in 1948. When he left Shanghai for the last time in May 1949, both she and Fourth Wife were with him.

  H. H. Kung retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalists and later settled in the United States, where he died in 1967.

  Xie Jinyuan, the commander of the Lost Battalion, was assassinated in April 1941 by the collaborationist city government. One hundred thousand Shanghainese turned out to mourn him.

  Other historical characters, drawn as accurately as possible, include Flowery Flag, Fiery Old Crow, Big Lewis Richardson, Julian Henson, the Doron family, Ackerman, Schwartz, Shengold, Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Dai Li, Joy Homer, Earl West, Reginald Jones, Shibatei Yoshieki, General Doihara, and Miss Zhang, the dance hostess impregnated by Ziliang Soong and murdered for demanding too much money. Admiral Morioka is fictional, but his real-life counterpart in Shanghai also humanely resisted German pressures to kill Shanghai’s 25,000 Jewish refugees.

  Night in Shanghai is based almost entirely on true events, and many of its characters were living persons, but on two points the novel does veer from the record. First, Josef Meisinger visited Shanghai to demand the murder of the city’s Jews in July 1942, not November 1941. Second, the story overstates the role of the Green Gang in the city’s jazz clubs. While the Gang wielded enormous power and undeniably controlled drugs, gambling, prostitution, smuggling, protection rackets, and other related industries, it was probably not pulling the musical strings in 1930s Shanghai to the degree depicted here.

  The years Song spends in a cell, far in the novel’s future, were horrific years for most Chinese, especially for those with foreign training or connections. The hope and optimism of Song’s early years in the cause would have been withered by the Anti-Rightist Movements, the Great Leap Forward, the famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Yet in the post-1976 decades that followed these disasters, during which China opened irrevocably to the world, people like Song set about rebuilding their lives. Past traumas were not forgotten—indeed, their associated residues and reactions can often be seen today—but the rest of Song’s life would not have been about that persecution. As for the specific punishment she endures at novel’s end, it is based on a true story I heard in China decades ago from the American Sidney Rittenberg, who remained in China after 1949, was jailed during the Cultural Revolution, and forbidden for some years to turn over in bed—until the punishment was lifted and he was released.

  Of course, Du Yuesheng never had an indentured servant named Song Yuhua, or an illegitimate son named Lin Ming. But he did believe that foreign music such as jazz would weaken China, and so did the Communists, who were later to ban Western music for almost thirty years. The song by Nie Er that prompted the Japanese raid on Summer Lotus, “March of the Volunteers,” is now China’s national anthem. Shanghai is much changed. Yet the Chinese catchphrase for the city’s golden era remains Ye Shanghai, Night in Shanghai.

  Acknowledgments<
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  Thanks

  . . . to the historians without whose outstanding scholarship this novel could never have been written: Andrew F. Jones, Paul de Barros, Stella Dong, Andrew David Field, Poshek Fu, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Hanchao Lu, Lynn Pan, Gunther Schuller, and Ross Terrill.

  . . . to those who were there, and whose first-person accounts opened the door to a world that vanished long ago: Buck Clayton, Ernest G. Heppner, Joy Homer, Sidney Rittenberg, Margaret Stanley, Desmond Power, Jacob and Aaron Avshalomov, John P. Powell, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and Langston Hughes.

  . . . to the Estate of August Wilson, for generously permitting me to quote a couplet from Wilson’s play Seven Guitars, part of his ten-play cycle on African American life through the twentieth century; to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, for permission to quote a passage from Langston Hughes’s autobiography I Wonder as I Wander; and to Hal Leonard Music for permission to quote lyrics from “Exactly Like You.”

  . . . to my researcher Daniel Nieh—whose discovery of an article about the Jewish Resettlement Plan, buried in a Chinese history database, changed the course of the story—for translation of Chinese source material, chasing down endless details, and even coaxing a Japanese steamship line to pull 1937 fare schedules from their archives and e-mail them.

  . . . to Kevin Jones, Skip Reeder, Kemin Zhang, and the late Michael Turner for urging me to write this book; to the many readers who wrote from around the world with the same encouragement; and to those friends who kindly read and commented on early drafts: Reyna Grande, Jane Rosenman, and Po-Chih Leong.

  . . . to the violist Jody Rubin for answering all my music questions; to Karen Christensen and Steve Orlins for great insight on China questions; to Deanna Hogg for sending me a copy of her uncle’s diary, written while he was struggling to stay alive through the Battle of Shanghai; and to Dvir Bar-gal, for his tour of the neighborhood and buildings in which Jewish refugees lived throughout the war years.

  . . . to my editor Andrea Schulz for guiding me patiently and brilliantly through the mysteries of creation; and to my agent Bonnie Nadell, possessed of peerless judgment and a great friend besides.

  . . . to Paul Mones, always.

  And to Ben and Luke, for everything. This one’s for you.

  For a full bibliography, and extended scenes, visit nicolemones.com.

  A Note on Romanization

  Chinese terms, phrases, and names in this book appear in pinyin, except for names of persons and places already well known in the West by alternate spellings, such as Chiang Kai-shek, the Yangtze, and Ho Feng-Shan.

  1

  Apprentices have asked me, what is the most exalted peak of cuisine? Is it the freshest ingredients, the most complex flavors? Is it the rustic, or the rare? It is none of these. The peak is neither eating nor cooking, but the giving and sharing of food. Great food should never be taken alone. What pleasure can a man take in fine cuisine unless he invites cherished friends, counts the days until the banquet, and composes an anticipatory poem for his letter of invitation?

  —LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef, pub. Peking, 1925

  Maggie McElroy felt her soul spiral away from her in the year following her husband’s death; she felt strange wherever she was. She needed walls to hold her. She could not seem to find an apartment small enough. In the end, she moved to a boat.

  First she sold their house. It was understandable. Her friends agreed it was the right thing to do. She scaled down to an apartment, and quickly found it too big; she needed a cell. She found an even smaller place and reduced her possessions further to move into it. Each cycle of obliteration vented a bit of her grief, but underneath she was propelled by the additional belief, springing not from knowledge but from stubborn instinct, that some part of her soul could be called back if she could only clear the way.

  At last she found the little boat in its slip in the Marina. As soon as she stepped aboard she knew she wanted to stay there, below, watching the light change, finding peace in the clinking of the lines, ignoring the messages on her cell phone.

  There was a purity to the vessel. When she wasn’t working she lay on the bunk. She watched the gangs of sneakered feet flutter by on the dock. She listened to the thrum of wind on canvas, the suck of water against the hulls. She slept on the boat, really slept for the first time since Matt died. She recognized that nothing was left. Looking back later, she saw that if she had not come to this point she would never have been ready for the change that was even then on its way. At the time, though, it seemed foregone, a thing she would have to accept: she would never be connected again.

  She stayed by herself. Let’s have dinner. Join us at the movie. Come to this party. Even when she didn’t answer, people forgave her. Strange things were expected from the grieving. Allowances were made. When she did have to give an excuse, she said she was out of town, which was fine, for she often was. She was a food writer. She traveled each month to a different American community for her column. She loved her job, needed it, and had no intention of losing it. Everybody knew this, so she could say sorry, she was gone, goodbye, and then lie back down on her little bunk and continue remembering. People cared for her and she for them—that hadn’t changed. She just didn’t want to see them right now. Her life was different. She had gone away to a far-off country, one they didn’t know about, where all the work was the work of grieving. It was too hard to talk to them. So she stayed alone, her life shrunk to a pinpoint, and slowly, day by day, she found she felt better.

  On the September evening that marked the beginning of these events, she was leaving the boat to go out and find a place to eat dinner. It was a few days after her fortieth birthday, which she’d slid past with careful avoidance. She found the parking lot empty, punctuated only by the cries of gulls. As she reached her car she heard her phone ringing.

  The sound was muffled. It was deep in her bag. Living on the boat kept her bag overloaded—a small price to pay. She dug, following the green light that shimmered with each ring. She didn’t answer her phone that often, but she always checked it. There were some calls, from work, from her best friend, Sunny, from her mother, which she never failed to pick up.

  When she looked at the screen she felt her brows draw together. This was not a caller she recognized. It was a long string of numbers. She clicked it. “Hello?”

  “Maggie? This is Carey James, from Beijing. Do you remember me?”

  “Yes.” She went slack with surprise. Matt’s law firm kept an office in Beijing, and Carey was one of its full-time attorneys. Matt had flown over there more than a few times, on business. Maggie’d even gone with him once, three years before. She’d met Carey—tall, elegant, faintly dissipated. Matt had said he was a gifted negotiator. “I remember.”

  “Some year,” he said, his manner disintegrating slightly.

  “You’re telling me.” She unlocked the car and climbed in.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m surviving.” What was this about? Everything had been over months ago with the firm, even the kindness calls, even the check-ins from Matt’s closest friends here in the L.A. office. She hadn’t heard from any of them lately.

  “I’m calling, actually, because I’ve come across something. I really should have seen it before. Unfortunately I didn’t. It’s a legal filing, here in China. It concerns Matt.”

  “Matt?”

  “Yes,” Carey said. “It’s a claim.”

  “What do you mean? What kind?”

  Carey drew a breath. She could feel him teetering. “I was hoping there was a chance you might know,” he said.

  “Know what? Carey. What kind of claim?”

  “Paternity,” he said.

  She sat for a long moment. A bell seemed to drop around her, cutting out all sound. She stared through her sea-scummed windshield at the line of palms, the bike path, the mottled sand. “So this person is saying—”

  “She has his child. So I guess you didn’t know anything about this.”


  She swallowed. “No. I did not. Did you? Did you know about a child?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Nothing.”

  “So what do you think this is?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. But I do know one thing: you can’t ignore it. It’s serious. A claim has been filed. Under the new Children’s Rights Treaty, it can be decided right here in China, in a way that’s binding on you. And it is going to be decided, soon.” She heard him turning pages. “In—a little less than three weeks.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then if the person who filed the claim wins, they get a share of his estate. Excluding the house, of course—the principal residence.”

  To this she said nothing. She had sold the house. “Just tell me, Carey. What should I do?”

  “There’s only one option. Get a test and prove whether it’s true or false. If it’s false, we can take care of it. If it turns out the other way, that will be different.”

  “If it’s true, you mean? How can it be true?”

  “You can’t expect me to answer that,” he said.

  She was silent.

  “The important thing is to get a lab test, now. If I have that in hand before the ruling, I can head it off. Without that, nothing.”

  “So go ahead. Get one. I’ll pay the firm to do it.”

  “That won’t work,” said Carey. “This matter is already on the calendar with the Ministry of Families, and we’re a law firm. We’d have to do it by bureaucracy—file papers to request permission from the girl’s family, for instance. It would never happen by the deadline. It won’t work for us to do it. But somebody else could get the family’s permission and get the test and let us act on the results. That would be all right.”