by Helen Zia
Bing was stunned by this sudden reversal. She tried to please Ma, to do whatever she asked, even though Bing had never done such things before. Setting up the opium pipe and lamp was especially challenging. Ma needed Bing’s help with her paraphernalia, but she didn’t trust Bing to handle the expensive “black gold” that she bought from the itinerant peddler.
When Ma’s sisters or friends stopped by, Bing was to bring out the opium pipe and accessories. Ma and her visitors would lie down in her bedroom as the sweet, unmistakable fragrance filled the air. Once when Bing was cleaning up, Ma accused her of throwing out some tiny scraps of the drug. Ma flew into a rage, berating Bing for hours. “Stupid girl, you are no better than a mule’s penis!” When Ma was cross, she lashed out at Bing with her endless nagging in the most florid language. That was yet another part of Bing’s new life.
She had to fight back her tears the first several times that Ma scolded her. Then she realized that Ma cursed Elder Sister just as often. When Elder Sister took Bing out to see a movie or to shop with her at the big department store with the moving stairs, Ma would direct a torrent of angry words at Elder Sister as soon as they walked through the door: “If you spend money like a whore, then go out and get money like a whore! Even a beggar on the street is smarter than you!” No matter what Ma said, Elder Sister never talked back, never seemed bothered by the harshness, never said a sharp word in reply. Bing tried hard to do the same.
School offered Bing a welcome relief from Ma’s volatile temperament. Walking the few blocks to get there, when she looked south from the French Concession toward the Chinese jurisdiction, she could see only charred rubble before her, the devastated remains from the intensive Japanese bombing raids. She imagined that Mama Hsu was headed to a war zone like that. She wants me to be safe in Shanghai, to spare me from the bombs, Bing told herself.
Elder Sister’s busy social life kept Ma’s critical eye distracted from Bing. Elder Sister and her girlfriends often went out dancing. They were mindful to stay in the foreign concessions and to avoid the Badlands where gangsters and the puppet police ran wild. But Ma harangued Elder Sister anyway, warning her that women out at night had to be on alert for rapacious soldiers, sailors, crooked police, gangsters, and assorted other Shanghai ne’er-do-wells.
Bing learned to recognize the other tenants, including the famous Shanghai movie director Bu Wancang and his girlfriend, but she soon realized that she had to be very cautious in her own building. A new tenant, a single man named Mr. Lo, had moved into the room on the floor below. He was a pleasant man. Whenever he saw Bing, he made a point of asking, “How’s the young miss today?” He whistled a cheerful but unrecognizable tune the way her father used to. Ma was suspicious of him. He never had visitors, but he occasionally knocked on Ma’s door, asking to use the telephone. Ma would pretend to be busy while she listened in on his conversations—almost always about arranging meetings at different hotels in Shanghai. One day, a dozen or so police officers came bounding up the stairs looking for Mr. Lo. They forced his door open and searched his room.
As Bing peeked over the stairwell, Ma whispered, “These are not ordinary police; they are from 76,” referring to the deadly police headquarters at 76 Jessfield Road. The police found a gun and concluded that Mr. Lo must have been an underground agent for the Nationalists, tasked to kill Japanese and traitors. Ma murmured, “When they find him and take him to 76, he’ll wish he were dead.” After the police from 76 left the building, Ma got on the phone and called her sisters and friends, describing her brush with 76 and the would-be Nationalist assassin downstairs. When she finished her calls, she wagged her finger at Bing. “Remember, you must never trust any strangers, not even if they smile at you. They might have guns and kill you!”
* * *
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BY THEN BING HAD learned to nod in silent agreement at whatever Ma said, no matter how outrageous. As Ma frequently pointed out, the streets of Shanghai were full of children abandoned or orphaned by war. The girls were likely to end up as virtual slaves in households, sweatshops, or brothels if they didn’t die first from hunger. Bing was lucky to have been adopted, Ma would insist. Occasionally, Bing allowed herself to think about her gentle Suzhou mother and her kindly ways. She wondered where Mama Hsu was now. Maybe the Year of the Rabbit, 1939, would be a luckier year for Bing. But she knew better than to count on it.
SHANGHAI, 1937
The tiny girl cowered in fright from the loud blasts and the shrill whistle of the missiles that streaked toward their targets on August 13, 1937, that terrible day when the war with Japan came to Shanghai. The walls of her family’s small flat in the French Concession seemed to recoil from the rain of bombs on the Chinese jurisdiction just a few blocks south of them. Little Annuo Liu crouched in a corner. Her five-year-old brother, Charley, tried to reassure her. “Don’t be afraid; I’ll protect you,” he promised as the windows rattled. He told her the stories he heard in school, about patriotic Boy Scouts and Girl Guides only a little older than they who were delivering messages and ammunition across enemy lines to aid China’s cause.
After days, then weeks, of the unending cacophony of war, the little girl no longer ran for cover with each explosion, but her eyes still widened with alarm when the floor shook beneath her feet and the acrid smell of charred wood and burning diesel filled her home. The Imperial Japanese Command had introduced a new military tactic in the course of their attack on Shanghai: the relentless aerial bombing of civilian areas, designed to terrorize and annihilate the population. The Nazi Luftwaffe would later employ the same type of blitz attacks over Europe.
Countless civilians were killed or maimed in the massive destruction of Shanghai’s densely inhabited Chinese neighborhoods. People rushed to the aid of hundreds of newly orphaned babies, donating money, food, beds, and diapers. Annuo’s mother, Shangying, jumped at the chance to offer her services at local hospitals. She was trained as a physician but had been pregnant with Charley when she graduated at the top of her medical school class and hadn’t yet gone into medical practice. After her son was born, her husband, Yongchio, had discouraged her from working. But when the Japanese attacked Shanghai, Yongchio had been away for months, working for the Nationalist government in a distant province. Without him to dissuade her, she rushed to the makeshift hospitals to tend to the injured and sick, exposing herself each day to the risk of enemy fire. Annuo anxiously followed her mother to the door when she left each morning.
The young girl would wait by the window for Muma, as she called her mother, in the Shanghai dialect. When Muma came home, disturbing smells would waft in with her: disinfectant, rubbing alcohol, gunpowder, vomit, blood. After her mother changed clothes and washed away the frightening odors, Annuo would feel more at ease. Muma said the Chinese army was bravely continuing to fight the Japanese in Shanghai in order to give the government time to retreat. People and equipment were moving far inland, nearer to where Annuo’s father had been working to establish the Republic of China’s fledgling Nationalist administration in spite of the growing influence of the Communists among China’s peasant farmers.
After nearly three months, the saturation bombing finally stopped. By the end of October 1937, the Chinese army was in full retreat. Japanese martial law was imposed on the Chinese sections of Shanghai. “The enemy is in control now,” Muma warned Annuo and Charley. “You mustn’t tell anyone about your father’s work.”
The two children were never put to the test, for word of the Chinese defeat and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai soon reached Annuo’s father, Yongchio Liu, stationed in the southwestern province of Guizhou, more than eleven hundred miles away. Millions of retreating soldiers and residents of China’s east coast migrated toward that inland region. With more of China falling under Japanese military rule, her father worried about his family’s safety. He dispatched a courier to Shanghai with an urgent message for his wife: Leave the enemy-occupied city at once,
and join him in Free China.
* * *
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MUMA HAD TO PLAN a circuitous trip around the war zones: First she booked their passage to Indochina on the Empress of Japan. It galled her to take the enemy’s ship, but there was no other choice when Emperor Hirohito’s navy controlled the harbor. At least they wouldn’t bomb their own vessels, she reasoned. Once in Indochina, they would have to cross mountainous jungles on dirt roads and remote waterways to journey back into China from the south until they reached Guizhou.
Charley was terribly seasick most of the way. But not Annuo. The cheery girl was friendly and playful, glad to make so many new friends on the trip. She sang and danced at every opportunity, happily entertaining her captive audience. But long and difficult trips to escape danger were nothing new for Annuo. From the time she was born in 1935, she’d been moved from one place to another in search of a safe haven.
In 1935, Yongchio Liu had decided that he and Shangying Dai would stop living the pampered party life of Shanghai socialites. They had come of age when Shanghai was at the peak of its bright and hopeful decade that began in 1927, after Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek united various regional warlords under his leadership while crippling his Communist rivals. Annuo’s parents and their generation of forward-looking Chinese intellectuals had reveled in the possibilities of a brave new Republic of China. During those ten years of Nationalist rule before Japan’s invasion, the Chinese republic envisioned by its founder, Sun Yat-sen, had finally seemed within reach.
Yongchio and Shangying were students in Shanghai then. Both born into wealthy, landowning merchant families, they had been pulled toward the dynamic, magnetic city from the neighboring provinces of Anhui and Jiangsu. They met by chance at the home of a mutual friend—she an aspiring doctor at Dongnan Medical School, he a charming, ambitious student at Dongwu Law School.
Annuo’s parents epitomized the Chinese republic’s brief golden age. They were eager to break from the old ways of the feudal dynasties. Shangying had been a girl who was determined to get an education. After convincing her father to halt the agonizing foot-binding process that had begun to mutilate her feet, she had then persuaded him to send her to school. Yongchio had had his own childhood challenges, becoming the head of his family at the age of eight. Dressed in fine robes and carried to meetings with advisers in a sedan chair like a child emperor, he had been tasked to make the important decisions about the family’s welfare and business enterprises. When Shangying and Yongchio first met, they had long been betrothed to others through marriage contracts that would benefit their families. But in Shanghai, where audiences flocked to movie palaces to watch films of romance and adventure, a new generation of Chinese wanted marriages based on love. To the dismay of their families, Shangying and Yongchio broke their respective engagement contracts and took their vows in a newfangled love marriage.
As an educated young couple in Shanghai’s boom years of the late twenties and early thirties, Annuo’s mother and father enjoyed the thrills that the big city could offer its privileged elites. A newly minted lawyer, Annuo’s father entered a law practice that defended petty criminals. Some may well have been linked to the Green Gang, the city’s largest criminal syndicate. Regardless of that, he was paid handsomely at a time when businesses soared in the years after Chiang Kai-shek and the Green Gang worked together to kill off labor leaders and suspected Communists. Construction projects boomed, with each new building more extravagant than the last. China’s upper crust—the bourgeoisie of wealthy businesspeople and the big landholders from rural areas—flocked to the international city. So too did profiteers and adventurers from around the world. A flourishing middle class of professionals, intellectuals, and shopkeepers emerged to meet the city’s growing needs. Publishing houses, modern schools, hospitals, and universities blossomed in those gilded years.
On Yongchio’s extravagant salary, Annuo’s parents embraced Shanghai’s glamour: its skyscrapers, elevators, automobiles, electric lights, telephones, indoor plumbing—all the conveniences of a new era. They danced at glitzy nightclubs with big bands, dined at foreign restaurants that served ching lung—Western-style cuisine made palatable to Chinese tastes. They rented apartments in the brand-new buildings that sprang up like bamboo in the foreign concessions, with more modern conveniences than were widely available in New York or London. The international set and foreign intelligentsia—from Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell to George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Emily Hahn, Noël Coward, and W. H. Auden—visited the blossoming Chinese city.
Shangying and Yongchio were part of a generation looking toward China’s rebirth in a bright and modern future. In 1932, a year after their marriage, their son, Charley, was born. Annuo came along three years later.
But Shanghai’s golden decade had come at a steep cost. Following the birth of the Chinese republic in 1912, the conservative wing of the Nationalist Party, with which Chiang Kai-shek was associated, was challenged by several competing warlords, parties, and factions, including the Communists. To consolidate his power as he unified China militarily, in 1927, Chiang embarked on eliminating his Communist rivals in Shanghai and other industrial cities. In the words of the consul general of the French Concession, Chiang made a “pact with the devil” by joining forces with Shanghai’s powerful and notorious Green Gang. The gang’s leader was Du Yuesheng, known as “Big-Ear Du” for his prominent earlobes. Du claimed to command one hundred thousand armed thugs—more foot soldiers than in all the foreign garrisons combined—and could mobilize them at a moment’s notice.
With the aid of British, French, and American authorities, the unholy alliance of Nationalists and Green Gang mounted a bloody massacre of labor activists, leftists, and Communists on the streets of Shanghai. The “White Terror” extermination campaign began on April 12, 1927, and continued for several weeks. Chiang’s henchmen executed suspected leftists and labor activists on the spot. Women sporting bobbed hair were meted out special punishment for their modern hairdos: After torture and execution, their decapitated heads were placed on men’s headless bodies to mock the women’s “radical” behavior. The violent purge spread to other cities, until the leftists and Communists were driven deep underground and into the hinterlands, where Chairman Mao would greatly strengthen his base among the struggling farmers of rural China.
Shanghai’s capitalists and industrialists flourished in the golden decade of the bourgeoisie, with labor demands and disruptions quelled in China’s most industrialized city. But not everyone reveled in Shanghai’s burgeoning wealth. The vast majority of the city’s population lived in poverty and squalor just beyond the fashionable foreign concessions. Yongchio’s elder brother, a renowned Paris-educated bacteriologist, scorned what he saw as his brother’s self-absorbed pursuit of Shanghai’s good times. He dismissed Yongchio as a playboy, a label that many Chinese applied to wealthy young men who spent dissolute days and nights partaking of Shanghai’s temptations.
By the time Annuo was born, her father was ready to quit his party life. Perhaps the growing patriotic fervor against Japan’s aggressions prompted his change of heart. He, too, came to believe that his extravagant life, funded by his defense of criminals, was decadent. When his close friend, photographer Wu Yinxian, decided to join the Communists to fight the Japanese, Yongchio intended to accompany him. At the last minute, he came down with a fever and couldn’t go, while his friend became Mao’s personal photographer. Yongchio soon found another calling when the new Nationalist governor of Guizhou offered him a job as an administrator helping to bring that distant province under the seven-year-old government’s authority. Like many Chinese who were moved by patriotism more than by ideology, Annuo’s father didn’t draw a big distinction between the parties. He accepted the challenge to help strengthen China.
Annuo’s father had departed for remote Guizhou just days after she was born. Thinking that his wife and children w
ould be safer living in his mother’s household, he dispatched them to his hometown of Yangzhou, about 170 miles to the northwest of Shanghai. That was the beginning of newborn Annuo’s life as taonan running to escape from the dangers of war. But Yongchio’s mother resented the educated woman who had broken up her son’s arranged betrothal, and she made Shangying’s life miserable. After two years trying to please an intractable mother-in-law, Annuo’s mother packed up the children and returned to Shanghai, having decided that she’d be better off alone as a single mother in the city than spending another moment with inhospitable in-laws. For a brief time, she put her hard-won medical education to use, helping to treat the overwhelming number of casualties in the weeks following Bloody Saturday—until her husband sent for her and the children.
As Japan’s invasion and occupation engulf Shanghai in 1937, Annuo’s physician-trained mother, Shangying Dai, must soon flee with the two-year-old and her five-year-old brother, Charley.
* * *
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NOW TWO-YEAR-OLD ANNUO WAS a taonan again, this time running from occupied Shanghai to join her Nationalist father in Guizhou. He had left so soon after her birth that he was a stranger to her. After singing and dancing her way across Indochina and the southernmost Chinese border, Annuo finally came face-to-face with him. The toddler stared at the handsome man who was tall and commanding in his khaki Nationalist uniform. She watched as he laughed and joked with the people around him, all of them deferring to his every word. Muma had told her and Charley that their father was an important man who ruled over the entire county for the Nationalist government.