Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  He grew extremely restless, wanting to be somewhere fighting, not sitting in a room. He wanted a weapon, not a horn, something he could assemble, aim, and fire. He gave himself another month. If Seiko hadn’t found him passage, he would go over the Pyrenees to Spain, join up with the English or Dutch, fight with the Allies. He would get to Shanghai on a troopship. He would . . .

  One night Seiko knocked on his door, switched off the light, and sat down. “I’ve been recalled to Tokyo.”

  He had managed passage for both of them, escorting one of the last groups of refugees to Shanghai. Keo clasped him by the shoulders. Before he could speak, Seiko gripped his arm.

  “We must leave. Now. There’s a night train to Bordeaux.”

  He bent for his suitcase beneath the bed. The man’s grip tightened.

  “Now. This moment. I have learned your name is on their list. Do you understand?”

  One glance around the room, then he left, leaving everything. His clothes, his horn. At every street corner, every encounter with Germans, he weighted his features into a blank, looking almost bored. On his false passport, visa de sortie, a name that sounded Indonesian. With thick eyeglasses, battered briefcase, he passed for a rubber exporter returning home to Jakarta.

  At Bordeaux, they pushed through mobs, presented their papers, and boarded the ship. Keo stood on deck clutching the rail—they could still come for him. He held his breath until land slowly receded. He felt breezes build, the ship settling into the Atlantic, shouldering its way south toward the coast of Spain. Then the long, long slide down Africa. Probably the same route Sunny took. At night he woke calling out her name.

  Two weeks later, at Dakar, men from relief agencies boarded the ship with medications, lighter clothes, for refugees. As the climate changed, so did wardrobes and appearances. Keo saw how pale the refugees were, how emaciated. He began to listen, to understand what they had lived through in ghettos and camps. Some were so damaged, they never moved, just stared at the ocean. Others came to life as if for the first time.

  A woman stood on deck cutting her hair, flinging it overboard. Cutting off the old life, she said. Folks rounded a corner, coming face-to-face with someone thought dead. They would live, because Shanghai had opened its doors for them. He thought of his Rom Gypsy friends, for whom no doors had opened.

  Once more, Keo found himself sailing into the unknown, like a man trying to get to the core of things. Some nights he sat on deck for hours, thinking of Sunny who had taught him how to suffer. Before her, he had known nothing of real pain.

  One night Seiko sat beside him. “If you find her, be prepared. A lovely girl, but . . . restless. Some women will always move on.”

  He wanted to tell Seiko he was wrong, that he knew nothing of Sunny. She may have taught him heartache and chagrin—her leaving had been like finding himself skinned, his flesh all raw and vivid—but she had also taught him to be a man. She had been his witness.

  His lip was healing but he missed the pain, even missed the small scabs he was always wiping from his mouthpiece. Sometimes his fingers curled round the handle of his trumpet case. He looked down, shocked to see it gone. Nights, he fell asleep fingering imaginary valves, remembering the feel of the trumpet in his hands like a smart, stiff pet, missing the cool metal blossom of its bell. Without it he felt paralyzed. Playing was the only way he understood anything at all.

  Weeks later at Capetown, relief agents boarded again with medical doctors, and supplies. People whose eyes and skin changed in the slow evolution eastward. Continents seeped into him, new tongues, new scents. The ship sailed into the Indian Ocean, stopping at Calcutta. Then the Malacca Straits, turning into the South China Sea.

  Heading up the China coast, he stood on deck trembling. Ahead was Shanghai, and Sunny. And far to his right, nestled in the Pacific, his birthsands.

  PILI P KA HANU

  To Hold the Breath in Fear

  SHANGHAI, AUTUMN 1941

  SEIKO TRIED TO PREPARE HIM FOR SHANGHAI, SEETHING ENTREPÔT of the Far East, the city foreigners called Whore of the Orient.

  “Meretricious glamour,” he warned. “Evil that will fascinate. Beware.”

  Keo shrugged. “All I want is to find her.”

  “Ah, yes. But sometimes life has other plans.”

  They turned up the great Yangtze River that brought commerce and trade to China’s interior. But where the Yangtze was intersected by the Whangpoo River that fronted Shanghai, the waters became an abattoir. Acres of sewage rocketed by—bloated oxen, a human corpse. Near the docks, they passed Chinese junks, cargo freighters, British and American warships, so that the harbor seemed a city unto itself.

  Within hours Seiko would sail on for Yokohama. Now he returned Keo’s American passport, and they embraced.

  “If war comes,” Seiko whispered, “please, think well of me.”

  Outside customs clearance, armed Japanese soldiers in white leggings pushed crowds back behind barbed-wire barriers. In this city of millions, Keo looked up, stunned. The soaring architecture of Shanghai confused him, somewhat resembling Paris. Art Deco skyscrapers, neo-Gothic office blocks. Except that certain buildings listed eerily like ships. He would learn Shanghai was built on shifting silt, so nothing stayed put in the ground. Buried coffins drifted to sea. The weight of gold stacked in vaults caused banks to tilt dramatically.

  He was shoved down the Bund, the main boulevard along the riverfront, and into the onslaught of strange, frightening faces. Wild-eyed Russians, Mongolians, and Finns. South Africans, Egyptians. Pompous “Shanghailander” Brits and Scots. Americans, Australians, Sikhs. And hordes of “under-races,” Malaysians, Indonesians. Waves of yammering humanity that made Paris seem provincial.

  Rolls-Royces pulled up before luxurious hotels two steps away from coolies thin as crucifixions, sleeping under rickshaws. Starving Chinese women held their infants up for sale. He saw food stands and barbershops flourishing in gutters, prostitutes stalking sailors. The air smelled of sewage and English cologne. Gangsters roamed, knocking people down for their money. Orators stood on soapboxes haranguing each other while a woman waving a pistol chased an armless man. Rounding a corner, Keo almost fell into a hole full of little corpses. He jumped back, screaming.

  A White Russian shoveling lime laughed up at him.

  “Hah! Another squeamish darkie. This here’s the Girl-Child Pit for newborn females. In five-coat weather, you’ll see their spirits frosting round.”

  He backed off, momentarily slowed by signs pointing to a stadium:

  PUBLIC EXECUTIONS, BEHEADINGS, STRANGULATIONS

  (For Criminals and Thieving Politicians)

  Then he was swept into a giant souk—stalls of jade from Indochina, rubies from Burma, vermilion silks from Tashkent, lush rugs from Kashmir. A man in a raincape of seal intestines offered ermine pelts from Siberia. Everything looked tainted by odorous air. A sense of dreadful greed, dreadful suffering. Concubines passed in sedan chairs, rouging their lips, while sightless beggars fingered their pustules. Even rich whites passing in Bentleys looked sickly.

  He bought cheap shirts and a secondhand suitcase with strange currency, piastres. A Chinese beggar followed on his heels, eyes bright with starvation. He snatched Keo’s suitcase from his hands, pointed to his naked, bony chest. He would be his porter, his guide.

  “Hotel!” Keo cried. “Cheap, cheap. You savvy?” He felt instantly ashamed, for this was how tourists spoke to native Hawai‘ians.

  The beggar nodded, chattering in singsong, his ribs glowing like glass rods. Jumping a corpse hit by a car, Keo followed him down Canton Road, passing two naked white men in leather gloves boxing in an alley. A man in a lurid red turban jumped rope. Farther on, three fat Turks sat playing tric-trac, spitting indigestible things at mangy dogs.

  They stepped out on Avenue Foch, a tree-lined boulevard separating the International Settlement from the French Concession. Again, armed Japanese soldiers, and barbed-wire barriers holding back mobs of screaming Chinese. In
broken English the beggar explained they were refugees trying to flood into the city from villages ravaged by fighting between Japanese and Chinese armies. Then the man stopped, this was as far as he would go. He pointed down the street, waving Keo’s suitcase.

  “Cheap, cheap. Hotel Jo-Jo! You pay me now.”

  Keo overtipped him, then, waving his documents at police, he was pushed through the checkpoint into the French Concession. Down the narrow Rue Ratard stood Hotel Jo-Jo. Hotel Double-Charming. A shabby place of fake Tudor run by an expat Frenchman and his delicate Indochinese wife.

  “Amazing,” the Frenchman said. “You left Paris for this madhouse?”

  Accepting a cognac, Keo explained about Sunny, how he had come to find her.

  The man shook his head. “Hundreds of thousands of girls here. You’ll never find her.”

  Keo gulped his drink in a desperate way. “The sister, Lili—she limps. A clubfoot.”

  The Frenchman roared with laughter. “Forgive me, it’s too drôle. To search for such a girl in a city of bound feet.”

  “She may be working in a silk mill.”

  He spat on the floor. “Hellholes, every one. Child slavery. Their little hands are needed to pull cocoons from boiling water. They’re scalded, terrible infections—every week young corpses carted off in trucks.” He hesitated. “Is your fiancée pretty?”

  “Oh, yes,” Keo said. “And very smart. She was at university.”

  “If she and her sister are trying to get out, they would be reckless, do reckless things. . . .”

  Keo leaned forward, not understanding.

  “Beautiful girls are in demand as . . . hostesses at sporting and gambling clubs. Posh maisons tolérées for whites and rich taipans.”

  Keo almost knocked him down. “Brothels? She would never sell herself.”

  The Frenchman smiled. “Then she is not in Shanghai. This is a city of desperation.”

  He walked the streets trying to get his bearings, dodging trams and limousines. Chauffeurs screamed from their cars, trying to penetrate wave upon wave of humans. In smothering humidity, crowds looked fanatic, faces lacquered with oily sweat. Clothes seemed to drip from their bodies. Then fog rolled in, and people turned into floating shrouds. Keo had never tried to envision hell; now he imagined it as something like this city. The Devil would thrive here.

  Traversing avenues and alleys day into day, he began to see how Shanghai was divided into sections. The International Settlement with its neo-Grèque skyscrapers, fake Tudor houses, was made up of mostly Americans, Brits, and Western internationals. The French Concession was a little less chic with its French and honorary Western population. Then the old Chinese City, where most Orientals lived, a place of medieval filth and squalor. Here several million Chinese huddled in tiny windowless row-huts like furnaces, no electricity, no running water. Thousands slept in the streets, hugging their rice bowls.

  He haunted the Chinese City, knowing that would be where Lili lived. He pressed through crowds wearing nosebags against cholera, floating debris. He stared at faces, walked in and out of a hundred tea parlors and laundries, describing Sunny and the sister with the clubfoot. Old men in cheongsams stared at him: a dark man looking for two girls. They dragged their daughters from the shadows and offered them.

  At night Keo tossed and shouted in his dreams, feeling her slip through his fingers. Some nights he heard armies fighting outside the city, the distant BOOM of naval guns striking at shore batteries. He wondered how long before skirmishes became full-fledged war. Only the privileged seemed oblivious. In warm, sticky mornings after the rains, Keo saw Englishmen in tennis whites, talking through speaking tubes to chauffeurs. Walking down Theodore Road he heard orchestras from garden parties, saw blond children diving into pools, their amahs holding clean towels.

  One day he paused before a pawnshop. In the window a cat gnawed what looked like the skull of a rat. To the left of the cat, a trumpet. Keo walked out with the glowing horn under his arm. Shanghai was alive with jazz bands; he lingered in several clubs until he heard the right sounds. At a place called Ciro’s he approached the bandstand, asking the Japanese sax man who seemed to be the leader why they had no trumpet.

  “Called home to Tokyo. The army.”

  Keo waved his horn, offering to sit in.

  “Where you from?” the Filipino drummer asked.

  When he said Honolulu, the man looked instantly amused.

  “Sure you don’t play ‘ukulele, pal?”

  “I can do that, too,” he said.

  He screwed in his mouthpiece and started to play, not smooth, not Continental, the way bands played for Shanghai crowds. He stood there plumbing the heart of jazz, inspired by work songs and field hollers, spirituals, the blues. Then, for twelve minutes straight, he blew chorus after chorus of Duke Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” When he finished, the band was very still.

  Within a week his name was in the showcase outside the club. Each night after every set, just before the band broke, Keo stepped up to the mike.

  “I’m looking for my sweetheart. Anybody come across a girl named Sunny Sung from Honolulu, tell her Hula Man is playing here at Ciro’s.”

  Audiences loved it. Whether it was true or not, it gave him a poignancy that nicely balanced his cool, controlled demeanor. One night he sat with the sax player, telling his story.

  The man shook his head. “No address? No photograph? Not even a private eye could help you.” He hesitated. “Although, I know a place, House of Sighs. Very high class . . .”

  Keo tensed. “She won’t be in a brothel.”

  “Then the only way to search is street by street.”

  He went to the American Embassy where he learned that, since Korea was a Japanese colony, the sister, Lili, would be classified as Japanese. They were now prohibited from entering the U.S. or its territories such as Hawai‘i. Keo sat down, utterly depressed. If Sunny had found her sister, she would never leave without her.

  One day he stood in an alley of silk shops. Over each doorway hung banners of German swastikas beside flags of the United States and Great Britain. Tourists bought small replicas of them in souvenir sets of three. He walked in and out of shops, asking the names of silk mills. Most were in the factory section called Pootung.

  Outside a factory surrounded by fences Keo approached a Chinese security guard. Holding out money, he tried to question him. The guard grunted and Keo moved closer, not understanding. In one motion, the man slashed his shirt from shoulder to waist with razor-tipped brass knuckles. Others came running, waving rifles.

  The Hotel Jo-Jo owner explained the guards were part of “protection” gangs.

  “Mills pay them. Otherwise they’d burn them down. Gangs own the mill girls, they bring many of them in from villages as laborers. They thought you wanted to buy a girl. I’m amazed they didn’t kill you.”

  Each mill he went to was “protected” by gangs. Chain-link fences, armed guards. He learned to stand some distance from the mills. When women changed shifts, he approached, asking if they knew Sunny or Lili Sung, a cripple. Women ran, afraid he was a kidnapper, a slave trader. He haunted bars and ballrooms. He studied dress clerks at Wing On and Sincere department stores.

  At Ciro’s he met White Russian bodyguards who spent their days balanced on the running boards of limousines, guns slung over their shoulders. They moved though the city’s strata, knew members of the Green Gang, Red Gang, the underworld societies. They had an eye for beautiful women, but no one had heard of Sunny Sung from Honolulu.

  Keo pressed on, through a city he felt was sinking, whose very air made him sick. In early dawn after finishing at Ciro’s, he leaned against buildings retching as “honey carts” passed by. Night soil was used for manure, which made fresh produce a death trap. His chest and groin were raw with rash. He suffered eye infections from floating bacteria, and learned to wear a nosebag, a gauze muzzle with straps fastened behind his ears. Raw sewage leaked from the ground into the city�
�s water supply. He was forced to sterilize everything, even coins, even his horn.

  Death seemed to stalk the city. Syphilis, typhus, rabies. Children died like flies; each day trucks hauled off the dead. One night a bouncer at the club walked home through a flood with a sing-song girl, both drunk and barefoot. Something entered the soles of their feet. Within weeks they died in each other’s arms, legs blown up like watery balloons.

  Yet midst depravity there was paradoxical beauty, too. One day Keo came upon a Chinese prostitute, a little girl of nine or ten. Rouged and costumed, she sat on a pier at sunrise, singing her heart out. With the tiny voice of a child—exhausted, besotted, beyond shock or dreams—she sang and sang. Swinging her feet over the edge of the pier, her embroidered slippers catching the light, she sang until the sun rose, until she was a flickering dot in its center.

  In that city of tilting skyscrapers, a camel driver and his herd appeared magically at dusk. Twilight made the camels seem aquatic. The streets they traversed looked suddenly submarine, their silhouettes antediluvian. Keo stood thinking how, long ago, their saurian necks might have thrust above waves, legs paddling left and right like fins. Now the sea had disappeared for them, they had turned into steeds, preserving rhythms of ocean waves. They made him long for his own warm seas, slow adagio of his islands. He sat down and finally wrote his family.

  One day, in the Old City, on a street where scribes wrote letters and marriage contracts for illiterates, he followed crowds to a bridge built in nine zigzags which led to an ancient pavilion on its own little island in the heart of a lake—Wuxing Ting Teahouse. On the seventh zigzag, unaccountably he looked up. Ahead, two women sitting in the teahouse, profiles in a window. One of them was Sunny. Keo stood as if struck, then shouted her name, climbing over crowds on the rickety bridge. People laughed, watching him fall, shouting as he struggled to his feet. Between the eighth and ninth zigzag, he looked again. The window was empty.