A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  He leans in. “You know the Japanese soldier who first arrived in the village? He was a relative of your great-grandfather.” He leans back.

  I put down my notebook. “What did you say?”

  “Yes, he was a relative of Tong Zhenyong’s wife. She was Japanese, you know.”

  “Yes, that I know.”

  “That soldier was his wife’s brother’s child.”

  I try to process this. If this is true, it could explain a surprising act of mercy in a war without any.

  But then Moustache Tong turns his face directly to Hat Man Tong and delivers an incredulous look. “Aah?” He is calling BS. “Aah? That is not true.”

  Hat Man is emboldened. “I know this story! The next day he explained all this to us.” He goes on to say the Japanese soldiers who’d approached had been stationed temporarily at Ping Qiao town, about six miles away. “They walked through, saw nice houses with shingles, and wanted to come loot the place.”

  At this point, Moustache Tong assumes I need a primer. “Your great-grandfather went to Japan. And he had a Japanese wife. When the Japanese devils came, he saved the village.” I nod.

  Hat Man Tong: “He was a hero, very respected.”

  This last part I know to be only partially true, at best. Several villagers have told me that during the great famine, the Tong East leaders dug up my great-grandfather’s grave and sold the wood from his casket. Then there was the issue of the historical discrimination that Hat Man’s Tong East waged against Tong Daren.

  At this point a woman joins us—someone I’ve met before. Her mother took care of my great-grandfather before he died; she was his nanny (or, rumor has it, something more). The nanny’s daughter once visited me in Shanghai, subtly suggesting I take her seventeen-year-old grandson with me to America. I have learned to speak carefully around her.

  “Did you eat?” she asks. Before I have time to mention we just went over this, she presents several watermelon slices. Our conversation turns to my great-grandfather’s personality, much of which I’ve heard before. Intellectual, good skin, tall, liked to spit.

  I have to go soon, so I try to run a few more questions by them, as quickly as Chinese Time allows. Did Tong Zhenyong come from a family of wealthy landlords?

  A rapid-fire exchange ensues.

  Hat Man Tong: “Yes, he came from a landlord family.”

  Moustache Tong: “You’re wrong.”

  Hat Man Tong: “I was here!”

  Moustache Tong: “Go ahead and say it. You’re wrong.”

  Another question: Did my third cousin Tong Daren indeed receive a letter from my grandfather in Taiwan? Does anyone know what happened to the letter? This is often cited as the reason Tong Daren had had such a hard life—his relationship with an anti-Communist relative in Taiwan.

  Nanny’s Daughter: “I know about this.”

  Hat Man Tong: “No. If he did, I would have heard about this.”

  I sigh and put down my pen. There are too many competing agendas and narratives, but more fundamentally, I have come too late with some of these questions. Too much time has gone by, and too many Tongs have departed.

  “Stay for lunch,” Nanny’s Daughter says. “Just two dishes and a bowl of soup. That’s all. It will be quick.” Again I decline and make my exit, not knowing when I’ll return or how many of these old people will still be around then.

  ***

  On December 8, 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese gunboats turned their sights on Shanghai. They fired on the last British vessel anchored on the city’s Huangpu River. Japanese foot soldiers stationed in the Hongkou northern section of the city marched into the heart of the International Settlement and took it without resistance. Japan’s wartime truce with the treaty ports of Europe and America was over.

  They crossed the Garden Bridge, where the Suzhou Creek dumps into the Huangpu. This is a famous bridge, a signature image on Shanghai postcards, and may be my favorite one in town. The metal lattice structure reminds me less of China and more of a railroad bridge over the Susquehanna River in Maryland. The bridge was built by an English construction firm in 1907, replacing an old British toll bridge that Shanghai locals despised; it served as an entryway to a park reserved only for foreigners in the International Concession. As a vestige of beat-up-on-China colonialism, it is as good a symbol as any.

  Once the Japanese took the International Settlement, the city of lights went largely dark. In accordance with martial law imposed, curfew began at 9 p.m. The residents in Asia’s most open, anything-goes city in the 1920s and ’30s found themselves under a strict registration and surveillance system. Guards at barbed-wire barriers demanded to see residence papers. Americans walked around bearing red armbands, for citizens of an anti-Japanese enemy country.

  The occupation brought food rationing. The Japanese controlled the river and the railways, cutting Shanghai off from inland farms. These shortages brought starvation, and corpses appeared in the streets—often those of children. On the black market, rice prices skyrocketed, and the inflation robbed people of purchasing power.

  But where Mildred and her family lived, further south and west in the French Concession, they enjoyed a semblance of normality. The Japanese afforded the French Concession some protection and freedom, as France’s Vichy government was controlled by a Japanese Axis ally: Germany. So Shanghai residents seeking a wartime haven poured into the concession. The massive influx helped enrollment soar at Mildred and Carleton’s Light of the Sea School, to six hundred students. The war provided opportunity for them.

  Mildred’s health improved, and she overcame a bout of rheumatism. “Chinese medicine and vitamin pills plus injections gave me a [sic] strong health now,” she wrote Anna Graves. “I am quite fat now. If you meet me on the road perhaps you could not recognize me.”

  In late 1942, Mildred delivered her third child. Like the earlier two children, this infant girl was delivered at the Shanghai Red House Maternity and Infant Hospital, established in 1884 by American missionary Margaret Williamson. The baby had the one quality universally desired in Chinese society: light colored skin. “Small and cute,” Sanjie described the baby seven decades later.

  “The youngest daughter is a darling to us,” Mildred wrote. “She is very cute and very clever. We all love her. Therefore we gave her your name.”

  The name of Anna. But there was a small problem: they had already named their older daughter Anna. So they simply swiped the name from the big sister, as if it were the last cookie from the jar, and gave it to the baby sister. The baby was Anna Sun, my mother.

  ***

  “I recognize this,” my mother says as we turn down Lane 431 in Shanghai, the site of the old Light of the Sea School. It is July 2013. The road Tenant de la Tour has been renamed since 1949 and is now Xiangyang South Road. Lane 431 goes down two blocks, just past a public men’s room with no door. The facility is being used.

  We’ve walked south from the metro stop on Line 1, following the signature leafy plane trees of the French Concession. During the old treaty port days, Parisian expats planted them to provide a rare bit of shade. The trees boast thick, knobby trunks that rise from the ground and grow into strong Y-shaped arms. They’re perfect for climbing, except that our kids learned quickly that climbing is not allowed.

  Down the lane, the building in front of us does not resemble the two-story-schoolhouse pictures from the past. This one is new, with four floors, plus office workers and an electric fence. “Doesn’t look right,” Mom says. We knock repeatedly at the gate, but there is no answer.

  We walk around the block to a parallel lane to get a look from another direction. As we approach, an old man looks down on us from the second floor of a very old apartment building and comes out to talk. He is wearing a tank-top undershirt as old as I am. One minute into our chat, his wife emerges from the kitchen.

  “I’ve lived here my whole life,” she says.

  “Do you remember the Light of the Sea School?” Mom a
sks. “I lived here as a girl.”

  “Of course! I went there,” the wife says. They don’t, however, recognize each other’s names.

  “My mother was the principal,” my mother says, at which point everyone gives a reverent pause. The woman points down the alley, apologetically. “That is not the original building. It’s been torn down.” She explains that the original structure continued to be used as a school for two decades after my mother left. Then, in the 1970s, it became an education site for special-needs kids, before falling into the hands of a Hong Kong developer. The woman lowers her voice to speak quietly, and we have to lean in.

  “The developer built this new building. He was connected to the military. What happened was, soldiers rented space here to people, to line their own pockets. They’re all corrupt! If you knock, they will never let you in.”

  To make matters worse, the new, taller building has robbed her and her husband of natural sunlight they once enjoyed. She gives an unforgiving stare. Damn the profiteer landlords from the People’s Liberation Army.

  It was time for a new topic. “Did you know Han Huilu, the teacher?” the woman asks. The name vaguely rings a bell to my mother. “We think she was actually an underground Communist spy.”

  By the time the Light of the Sea School went up in the 1930s, members of the Communist Party in the city had descended far underground. Just a few years prior, the Guomindang strongman Chiang Kai-shek betrayed his Communist allies and began a brutal Communist extermination campaign. Chiang’s ally, the Shanghai mafia godfather Du Yuesheng, carried it out. His Green Gang men forced their way into residences of union leaders and Communist safe houses, pulled out leftist leaders, and executed them on the spot. By one estimate, Du’s men murdered ten thousand Communist leaders.

  Purged from key cities, the Communists went into survival mode in the countryside, leaving party operatives in Shanghai to fend for themselves. They set up study groups, quietly recruited, infiltrated key organizations, and bided their time.

  Among them: the woman who worked as dean at the Light of the Sea, named Zhang Qiong. Zhang was a native of Hunan, the home of Mao Zedong, and protégé of Mao’s deputy Liu Shaoqi. According to her official party biography, Zhang joined the Communist Party in its second year of existence, 1922, and became a factory union organizer. She moved to Shanghai, and before long moved into a senior position at the Light of the Sea School. It would only be a matter of time before party members came out from the shadows.

  Chapter Eight

  LOST AND FOUND

  Grandmother’s Voice on Cassette

  The only way was to find this ship. If I didn’t go, maybe I’ll still be in Shanghai. Maybe I died.

  —Mildred Zhao

  I first heard my grandmother’s voice in a Boston University library. It came from a scratchy audio cassette tape recorded more than forty years ago. This was an accidental find in the summer of 2013. At the base of a box filled with archived letters and photos of Welthy Honsinger Fisher, there was a stack of dusty tapes, the same kind my friends and I used in middle school to make mix tapes of Hall & Oates, and Foreigner and the Police.

  There is something about hearing a person’s voice for the first time—any person, really: Franklin Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Charles Lindbergh, Kim Jong Un. Even more than archival video, I want to hear a person’s phrasing and cadence, the volume, any stuttering and ums. It is, to me, a window into that person’s self-confidence. It’s one thing to turn up hundreds of pages of precious letters from a person to establish the basics of a grandmother’s life. It’s an altogether different experience to hear her speaking out loud, as if she’s talking, for one moment, just to me.

  It happened at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at BU, which houses the archive collection of documents, photos, and other artifacts from the life of Fisher—my grandmother’s old teacher. There are very special rules here. First, visiting requires an appointment. Even though you don’t know what specific items are in the archive boxes, you must schedule a trip to Boston and hope to get lucky. Upon arriving, you surrender your bag, books, personal items, and cellphone to a storage locker. Laptops are okay, as are pencils. Only then can you view a summary of each collection, or “finding aid.” The materials are organized by box, so you check off the boxes you’d like, and wait.

  By the time I’ve sifted through more than twenty boxes of letters and pictures, it is midafternoon and the library will be closing soon. That’s when I spot the tapes buried at the bottom and riffle through, one hand holding back the papers on top, the other scooping and digging through the bottom. And there it is: Interview Mildred Djao—1972.

  Upon my request, the librarian brings out a boom-box tape player of the same vintage as the cassettes. I insert the tape and waste five minutes listening to side B before realizing I really want side A. When I finally fast-forward—or perhaps rewind—to the right place and push play, half an hour remains.

  Welthy Honsinger Fisher’s longtime assistant Sally Swenson is interviewing Mildred Zhao for a biography about Fisher. The fidelity of her voice is remarkably crisp. But there is no time to ponder. I hit play and transcribe the interview as fast as I can type. Sally asks what year Mildred went to the Baldwin School. The answer is 1911.

  “Third grade. Primary school,” Mildred says. “There is a famous Methodist mission school over there. So the principal wrote a letter for me, and introduced me to see Mrs. Fisher.”

  “How did you know you wanted to go there?” Sally asks.

  “Because my father took me there. My father came back from Japan, and he had worked in Nanchang. I was the only daughter in the family. It seems to me my father and mother took me there.”

  Her words flow very smoothly, with a comfort many Chinese immigrants take decades (if ever) to attain. Her voice is high pitched and has a staccato cadence, quick and piercing. The voice has an ever-so-slight accent: not exactly Hong Kong, and not typical mainland Chinese either. It’s the spoken English of someone who learned it at an early age. This, once again, punctured my image of a two-dimensional cutout Chinese grandmother who was supposed to be bossy, accented, and unreflective.

  The voice keeps talking and I keep typing. “Everything is changed now. Even my own school is changed to Communist. You see, just one week before the fall of Shanghai, I left Shanghai. The fighting was still going on. The only way was to find this ship. If I didn’t go, maybe I’ll still be in Shanghai. Maybe I died. I just took sixty US dollars to live.”

  I type up seven pages of notes, and by 3:50 I’m done. So is the librarian, who nudges me out.

  Walking down Commonwealth Avenue to my rental car, I begin to process what has just occurred. It dawns on me that I have just had, in a way, my first and last conversation with the grandmother who never got to America. She would have loved to attend Boston University, walking into classic red-brick classrooms and worshiping in the Gothic chapel with the river just behind. Indeed, her daughter eventually made it here, as did her ashes. What I hadn’t known is that her voice had also been captured in the United States for decades.

  ***

  After World War II ended, Mildred hatched a plan to attend Colorado State University. By then she was in her forties, and still sending in applications and money. But wartime inflation made the Chinese CNC currency barely worth the paper it was printed on. As part of one application, Mildred deposited a thousand dollars in an American bank to demonstrate her ability to pay tuition. She went to the Chinese black market to exchange money.

  “I have paid C.N.C. $8,000,000,000.00 for the exchange of one thousand dollars,” Mildred wrote Fisher. “Is that terrible? The exchange rate is even higher these days. It is very difficult to buy dollars at official rate.”

  I count nine zeroes. Eight billion Chinese yuan. Chinese money was worth so little that people spent it on Monday before it lost value on Tuesday. Shoppers engaged in panic buying, and hoarded goods. Banks declined to make loans for more than a month, as they were u
nsure debtors could repay. The Light of the Sea School banned students from paying tuition in cash, which was losing value by the hour. It only accepted a commodity that held value over time. So, like the emperors in imperial China, they took payments in large sacks of rice.

  By December 1948 the political situation turned very uncertain. A Communist victory over the GMD was becoming increasingly clear. The uncertainty at home convinced Mildred to stay in China rather than leave for Colorado. “It is impossible for me in leaving my work and family during such a trying time. Of course it makes me very disappointed, but one cannot help it. When the fighting is getting near to us I begin to feel that is God’s will.”

  Then she flip-flopped again, and left. Mildred found her way onto a military boat bound for Taiwan, getting her off the mainland. Her final destination: Greeley, Colorado.

  The Communists took Shanghai without resistance. By then, almost the entire Guomindang leadership had retreated. On the evening of May 25, 1949, GMD remnants staged one final “victory parade” along the Bund before fleeing after dark. At dawn, the first members of the People’s Liberation Army streamed in: peasants in ragged green uniforms and sandals. The liberation was oddly smooth; church bells welcomed the new regime, as did local police and a big city banner. Shops opened at the normal time. Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier, played in some theaters, I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now in others.

  Carleton and the children remained in Shanghai when it fell. Aunt Lily recalls that in the days after, “there were lots of huodong,” movements and parades choreographed by the new occupiers. “Many parades. We kids stood on the sidewalk and played little drums as the soldiers marched by. And we danced. There was this harvest dance—everyone did the steps in formation on the school courtyard.”