by Helen Zia
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ALMOST AS QUICKLY AS the bombs had rained on Bloody Saturday, as that tragic day became known, the blackened hulks of cars and other debris were swept away by an army of laborers. Repairs began on the Cathay Hotel’s roof and top-floor ballroom. Just as his father predicted, the shops and offices around Avenue Edward VII soon reopened. Unidentified human remains were dispatched for dumping at the city’s outskirts. But the acrid smell of charred flesh and the heavy, cloying stench of human blood lingered in the air. Stains from human projectiles high on building walls had to wait for heavy rains to wash them away. Everything else would be covered by a new layer of grime from the ash and gunpowder of the battles that continued to rage beyond the foreign concessions.
In September, a few weeks after Bloody Saturday, the new school year began, and Benny returned to his primary school. The teachers and students carried on as best they could, ignoring the near-constant explosions coming from Shanghai’s defenseless Chinese sections. Still, the sheltered schoolchildren of the foreign concessions couldn’t stop buzzing about what they had witnessed on Bloody Saturday. Benny described his father’s bloodstained uniform with enthusiasm. But no one came close to the tale of Benny’s schoolmate Tingchang “T.C.” Yao, whose family had lived for four hundred years in Shanghai’s old Chinese walled city, near the nine-turn bridge.
As a Chinese jurisdiction, the old walled city was a prime target for Japanese attack, so T.C.’s father had packed his eldest son and eleven other members of the large Yao family into a LaSalle sedan. They had driven only blocks away into the International Settlement, to stay at the luxury Opera Apartments, where his father’s friend kept a place for trysts with his girlfriends. By crossing into the foreign concession, T.C.’s family expected to be protected from the war. Young T.C. was out on the balcony watching the crush of refugees in the street when the low-flying Chinese planes passed overhead. He dove back into the apartment as the bombs whistled through the air. The impact shook the building. Unhurt, the boy peeked outside. The sight of human remains hurled into piles like snowdrifts so shocked him that he stood, staring and paralyzed, until his father yanked him inside. As soon as the streets reopened, his father ordered everyone back into the LaSalle, which their chauffeur had luckily parked away from the site of the blasts. This time they drove east to Hongkou to stay near Shanghai’s sizable Japanese civilian population, confident that the enemy wouldn’t bomb its own people. Their new place was next to the city’s huge hog abattoir. The loud squeals of pigs being butchered were periodically drowned out by the roar of bombs and cannon fire slaughtering people in nearby Zhabei.
Thousands of refugees from the prior day’s battle had gathered to receive food relief from charities on August 14, 1937, only to become part of the terrible casualty toll in one of the busiest parts of the foreign concessions.
T.C.’s account was so graphic that the schoolboys gasped and groaned, begging him to retell it.
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NEW WARTIME RESTRICTIONS, like the war itself, didn’t put a noticeable dent in Benny’s comfortable life. He still spent his school days enjoying himself with his friends, collecting and trading stamps, and coming up with war-inspired games, identifying fighter planes and battleships by their shapes. He took up badminton, a sport that suited him better than the demanding wushu regimen preferred by his father.
Instead of playing on Avenue Haig, Benny now spent more time riding his bike, perusing the bakeries, confectionaries, and cafés on busy Avenue Joffre, the stylish commercial boulevard that ran through the French Concession. Benny always had enough pocket money for hot chocolate and cheesecake at DD’s, a coffee shop run by White Russians. He’d sit near the window with his friends and watch the antics of other boys. Charlie and John Sie, who lived nearby, would ride their bikes up to the back of a moving trolley car and hold on, staying out of the conductor’s mirror. Then they’d coast all the way to the Bund. While Benny admired their daring, he knew to stop short of anything that might draw the anger of his father. Should Benny cause any trouble, everyone in the neighborhood knew how to reach the Shanghai Volunteer Corps officer. Also, Benny’s sophisticated mother rewarded his good behavior with special excursions, allowing him to see the latest Hollywood movies at the Cathay, the Grand, or one of Shanghai’s other gleaming movie palaces. He also liked to accompany her to the rooftop terrace of Sun Sun Department Store to ride the escalator, China’s first. When he was small, he could spend hours going up and down that escalator, his amah trailing behind, fussing and scolding.
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FOR FAMILIES LIKE BENNY’S—FROM the wealthy and middle classes of the foreign concessions—the war was more an inconvenience than a danger. The biggest disruption came from the endless wave of refugees, who seemed to multiply a hundred times over, crowding the already numerous beggars. On the heels of Bloody Saturday, 1.5 million terrified refugees had swarmed into the nine square miles of the concessions, less than half the area of America’s Manhattan. By then, the British and French authorities had put up barbed-wire barricades and gates at major intersections—to keep out refugees more than Japanese soldiers. Desperate, frightened people now occupied every square inch of sidewalk and alleyway. With each cold spell, lifeless bundles appeared along the roads and sidewalks. Sheltered in his privileged routine, Benny didn’t even notice such unpleasantries.
By December 1937, after three terrible months of heavy shelling and ground skirmishes in the Chinese sections beyond the foreign concessions, the Battle of Shanghai was finally over. Just as Benny’s father anticipated, the Japanese prevailed, and the Nationalists fell back. Still, they had fought courageously and far longer than anyone had imagined. The Imperial Japanese Command had planned for Shanghai to fall in three days. They had expected China to surrender in three months. Though Japan was vastly wrong on both counts, it had won the first major conflict of the Pacific War in what would become the Pacific theater of World War II. Shanghai and the surrounding areas fell under Japanese occupation and martial law—except for the International Settlement and the French Concession. Cut off from the rest of the city’s suffering, these foreign jurisdictions came to be called Gudao by the Chinese—the Solitary Island.
Having secured control of Shanghai, the Japanese commander in chief General Iwane Matsui ordered the victorious Japanese troops on a hundred-fifty-mile quick-time march to take the Nationalist capital of Nanjing. As incentive, the soldiers were permitted to rape, loot, and kill without restraint. Their gruesome massacre in Nanjing took place under the watch of Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, Emperor Hirohito’s uncle and emissary. Asaka ordered his men to “kill all captives.” When the Imperial Japanese troops reached the capital, they embarked on a horrific six-week orgy of mass killing and rape, torture and disembowelment, that left an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 men, women, and children dead. Most were civilians. Japanese officers posed for cameras as they competed in a contest to see who was fastest at killing 100 people with their swords. When they lost count, they held a rematch to see who would first behead 150 prisoners. Other Japanese soldiers formed killing teams, with some assigned to toss heads and corpses into piles as if they were firewood. Tens of thousands of Chinese women were mass-raped, dismembered, slaughtered. For entertainment, Japanese soldiers ordered Chinese men to commit necrophilia, incest, and other abhorrent acts. When they refused, they too were tortured and killed. John Rabe, a German Nazi who witnessed the carnage, wrote in his diary of his shock at the extreme inhumanity. Initially, the news of Japan’s barbarism was suppressed in occupied China, but reports of the atrocities began to filter out. The New York Times reported on “ghastly events” so egregious that “atrocities of all kinds reached an unprintable crescendo.” As news of the Rape of Nanjing spread, the people of China wept—and resolved to defeat the despicable enemy.
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IN THIS UNSETTLING TIME, Benny’s father decided to make a major switch in his life: He shut down his accounting practice and ended his leadership of the Chinese unit of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. Instead, Pan Zhijie signed on with the British-controlled Shanghai Municipal Police as a full-fledged inspector. Only a few years earlier, such high-ranking positions had been reserved for the British police, who reviled the Chinese whose streets they ruled. “This bunch of worthless, treacherous, yellow-skinned reptiles,” wrote one officer to his aunt in England. But Inspector Pan stood out with his fluency in English and Chinese, his years with the SVC, his St. John’s education, and his prominent family background. The pay was modest for a man from a comprador family, but the perks of such a position of influence would more than compensate, especially when everyone was desperate for protection from war’s misery.
Benny couldn’t have been prouder of his inspector father—he looked even grander in his new blue serge uniform. But the boy was too young to know that there could be a price to pay for his father’s choice at this ominous moment in history.
SHANGHAI, 1937
A lanky teenaged boy, bedraggled and bewildered, nervously stepped up from the rocking fishing boat into the noisy chaos of a city quai along Shanghai’s Bund. Water spurted from his black cloth shoes as he stumbled along the wharf toward solid ground, his dark Chinese gown clinging to him, soaking wet. Stinking, fishy water had sloshed around the boat’s hold, where he had spent a sleepless night packed in with dozens of other frightened refugees, anxious to escape the coming war with the Japanese. They were desperately hoping that the big city, with its many foreigners, would protect them.
His mouth agape, Ho Chow lifted his close-shaved head to stare at the monumental granite buildings towering before him. Such a strange sight, lined up alongside the Huangpu River, the last leg of the frightening trip from his town of Changshu, sixty miles to the northwest in the Yangtze River Delta of neighboring Jiangsu Province.
The Chow family had lived there as landowning gentry for generations. In the past few weeks, tens of thousands of soldiers had been assembling near their home. Nobody doubted that the coming conflagration would be enormous. It seemed that everyone who could was rushing to escape the bloodletting. It had been Ho’s grandmother’s decision that their family had to leave. Their boat was just one of thousands of floating vessels of every kind tying up at a Shanghai dock to unload their human cargo.
From the very start, Ho’s trip had been a nightmare. Only the day before, he’d said goodbye to his mother and fifteen-year-old brother back in Changshu. He’d never been apart from his mother, and he, too, felt like crying when he saw tears well up in her eyes. Some townspeople advocated splitting up families to ensure that someone would survive, so his mother and elder brother were headed west to a remote village further inland, near the ancient canalled city of Suzhou, while he and his sister, Wanyu, were to take a boat to Shanghai with Grandmother. But the country roads to the boat dock had been clogged beyond belief: armies of people tugging at pull carts stacked with household goods with the young and elderly seated on top and seemingly endless streams of women and men lugging bundles on their backs or balancing bamboo poles on their shoulders. Ho had clung tightly to his sister and grandmother as the human tide swept them along. Thanks to Grandmother’s strongest servants, who cleared their path, they managed to reach the dock where the boat she had paid for their passage was waiting.
At the pier, there was more pushing and shoving as people tried to buy or force their way onto any departing vessel. The gangplank onto the boat was so narrow that people could go only one at a time. First Grandmother, then Wanyu gingerly climbed aboard. Just as Ho was about to step onto the plank, the crowd surged, and the boy felt himself pushed aside, back to the dock’s edge. As the restless crowd rushed forward, the crew swiftly pulled up the gangplank, and the heavy boat slowly began to pull away—with Ho still ashore.
The unruly mob swelled, and Ho teetered as he looked down into the dark water. Just as he was about to fall in, some strong arms reached over and grabbed him, yanking him onto the ship. Ho collapsed onto the smelly deck and looked up. It was his sister, Wanyu. She had spotted him and, with the help of other passengers, managed to grab him at the last possible moment. At first Ho was too stunned to speak; then finally he cried out, “Big Sister, you saved me!”
The boat slowly chugged to Shanghai. With such a heavy load of people aboard, the captain didn’t dare push ahead too quickly—the boat was too low in the water and could capsize. Ho spent the uncomfortable ride in shock. The terrifying scene repeated in his mind: Had he fallen into the water, he’d have been crushed to death between the boat and the pier, or he could have drowned in the deep, murky blackness. This was not a propitious start to his refuge in Shanghai.
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YOUNG HO HAD ALWAYS felt secure at his home in Changshu. There, he had never had to worry about getting flattened by a boat, car, or double-decker tram. In Changshu, the Chows’ status as part of the gentry class that dominated China’s vast rural countryside was secure. Ho had been born in his large family home located near the center of town and was surrounded by the web of canals and waterways that crisscrossed and irrigated the lush farmland of the Yangtze Delta. Their home was typical of a prosperous landed family: Three long buildings sat parallel to one another, their two-story rectangular shapes separated by two courtyards. A moatlike canal spanned by a small wooden bridge surrounded the Chow home, adding to the sense of safety. Chinese families were deemed blessed with longevity and fertility when they had four generations living together. Three generations of Chows lived there when Ho was born, with plenty of room for a fourth.
More than thirty people lived at the Chow family compound: In addition to the extended family, there was a retinue of servants and employees—cooks, maids, amahs, tailors, drivers, accountants, managers, and advisers. A few had their own families living with them as well. On the Chow lands beyond the compound were the hundreds of peasant farmers who worked the rich alluvial soil brought by the mighty Yangtze River from the Himalayas and across China to coastal Jiangsu. The very name of Changshu means “ever fertile.” For generations, the Chow family had lived off the rent from their tenant farmers, whose rice and cotton were destined for Shanghai’s huge population and busy textile mills.
Life on the compound centered on the middle building, where Ho’s grandmother, as Chow family elder, lived on the first floor facing the favored southern exposure. Her three sons and their families each had their residences in other parts of the complex, and the entire family took meals together in the main hall off one of the courtyards. The adults sat at one table while Ho, his siblings, and many cousins sat together at the other, under the watchful eyes of their amahs. As a big landlord family in one of China’s most productive regions, the Chows ate well; their rice bowls were always full, with a variety of dishes at every dinner. There was no lack of vegetables and legumes, eggs and tofu, fish and even meat on the Chows’ tables. In November during crab season, they feasted on their area’s famous delicacy from nearby Yangcheng Lake: fresh hairy crab, known for its succulent meat and roe.
Ho’s father was the eldest of the three Chow sons. When his father died, he became the family’s head, inheriting the responsibility for the Chows’ lands, tenant farmers, and businesses. But Ho’s father fell ill and died at just thirty-eight, when Ho was only two. Ho’s mother was left in the tenuous position of being a widowed daughter-in-law with three young children. Ho was the youngest. His sister, Wanyu, was seven at the time, and his brother, Hosun, four.
At their family home in Changshu, thirteen-year-old Ho Chow (third from left) stands between his elder sister, Wanyu, and their widowed mother. Elder brother Hosun is on the far right. Two young cousins join them.
Although Ho could not remember his father, the boy knew well the strain that had befallen his mother after his father’s de
ath. Chinese lore is filled with stories of the mistreatment of daughters-in-law and widows left at the mercy of unkind in-laws. But Ho’s paternal grandmother was a fair and generous woman who didn’t threaten to cast her son’s family out of the compound. Instead, she enlisted the help of her son’s young widow to manage the Chow family’s enterprises. The two women proved to be capable and sharp in business. They supervised the accounts, oversaw the land, and collected the rent from the farmers, while Ho’s two uncles ran the family’s bank and shops that kept the money in the family’s network. By their own accounts, the Chow family was respected for their fair treatment of their tenant farmers. That view reflected the Confucian ideal of the benevolent ruler as opposed to the Communist condemnation of landlords as an evil, exploiting class—a view that was gaining ground among China’s vast population of peasant farmers.
Even without Ho’s father, the Chow home in Changshu was an idyllic cocoon. Ho’s boyhood was spent playing games and pranks with his cousins and the servants’ children without the slightest concern for harm or danger. His only fears sprang from what he and the other children conjured to terrorize one another. They’d hide in the large ancestral hall in the first building of the compound, with its dark urns and offerings of incense to statues of patron gods and long-dead ancestors. The servants would warn them to stay away from the ancestral shrines. “If you disturb the hungry demons and ghosts,” they’d scold, “they’ll pull you to the spirit world and you’ll never return.” When Ho was younger, he believed their superstitious talk, but once he was old enough to go to school, he laughed at their warnings about evil demons, scoffing to his cousins that they were silly to be afraid of such stories.