Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  Well-to-do Shanghai schoolboys had no fears of conscription at a time when country boys their age, lacking strings to pull or money to hire surrogates, were dying at a shocking rate, with hundreds of thousands sometimes killed in a single battle. “Don’t use good iron to make bullets,” was the saying among the privileged. In the rarefied world of Shanghai’s foreign concessions, Benny and his friends could attend to the more refined interests of school and sports, cars and comics, dances and girls.

  Benny’s daily life couldn’t have been more different from life in the battle-scarred Chinese jurisdictions. Each morning, his amah roused him from sleep, helped him wash and dress for school, and pushed him to eat his breakfast of qifan, rice porridge, with eggs and pickled vegetables. “Hurry, Young Master. If you’re late, it will greatly displease your mother and father,” she urged when he dawdled. She prodded and pecked like a hen, hustling Benny and his school-aged siblings together for inspection by their mother, if she was up, or their father, if he had not yet left for the police station. While Benny fidgeted, waiting in line with his three sisters to greet their parents, his amah tied his shoelaces and smoothed his hair.

  If his mother wasn’t too tired after a long night of mah-jongg with her friends, she would come to the door to give them a quick glance and a nod. Her days as a society matron were filled with the details of running the household and the demands of entertaining for her husband, who was becoming prominent in certain circles. Benny looked forward to his mother’s gentle reminder, “Be a good boy, and mind your manners.”

  His father’s appearances were becoming less frequent and therefore even more special. The proud Number One Son would stand as tall as he could, his starched white shirt tucked into his gray schoolboy slacks. His father would furrow his brow as if reviewing his former Shanghai Volunteer Corps “C” Company before a dress parade. Under his glare, Benny tried to look straight ahead, but he couldn’t resist an admiring look back at his father, so magnificent in his impeccable Shanghai Municipal Police inspector’s uniform. Sometimes, if Benny was lucky, his father would pat him on the head and say, “Make me proud today, Long-Long.”

  “Yes, sir,” Benny would reply with a snap. To his mind, there was no better way for a boy to start his day.

  Then the eleven-year-old was off to St. John’s Junior Middle School, part of the preparatory pipeline that would lead to St. John’s University, his father’s college. When Benny was younger, he had taken a pedicab to school each day, as his sisters still did. But now that he was almost a teenager, he rode his bicycle whenever the weather allowed. Along the way he’d meet up with his chums, and they’d ride the mile to school together. From their bikes, the boys would peruse their favorite confectionary shops, scouting for new goodies that they could stop and taste on their way home.

  When classes ended, the boys would hop onto their bikes with a whoop. They’d head back to the shops that they had noted on their way to school that morning, ready to pick out some treats. Together, they studied movie posters outside the Cathay Theatre and thumbed comic books at the bookstalls. Among Benny’s favorite after-school stops were DD’s on Bubbling Well Road for a sandwich or hot chocolate and the popular French bakery for its famous chestnut cake.

  The schoolboys paid no mind to the various political parties and factions around them, which were heatedly debating the future of China, some resorting to terror and assassination on the very streets where the boys biked. Pro-Nationalists argued that the war could end if only the Brits and Yanks would help China halt Japan’s onslaught. They denounced their opponents as enemy collaborators and traitors. On the other extreme were those calling for cooperation with the Japanese to end the hostilities and to rid China of the Euro-American imperialists. Such arguments meant little to schoolboys like Benny when the foreign concessions acted as their protective bubble.

  Beyond Shanghai, the Nationalists had lost vast swaths of territory to Japan. Only the sheer grit and determination of China’s fighting forces had kept the enemy from advancing farther inland. Tokyo had expected to conquer China within three months. Two years of grinding war had gone by with no end in sight. What the Chinese forces lacked in matériel and skill, they made up for with courage and numbers in an uneasy united front of Chiang’s Nationalist forces, Mao’s Communist guerrillas, and various regional warlord armies. Their tenacious resistance came at a high price for civilians. Chinese troops slowed the Imperial Army by destroying China’s bridges and rail lines, sinking their own commercial ships in waterways, and giving up human casualties and territory in a cruel bargain for more time. In one instance, as many as eight hundred thousand civilians drowned after the Nationalist army blew up dams holding back the Yellow River, the second longest in China, to impede the Japanese advance.

  By early 1939, Japan controlled the Chinese coastline from Manchuria in the north to Hainan Island at the southernmost point. The Nationalist government had been able to move military and industrial resources inland, but Chiang Kai-shek desperately needed international support. In spite of urgent appeals from the generalissimo and his eloquent American-educated wife, Soong May-ling, the British and American governments were hesitant to offer assistance. China continued to fight the war alone.

  After the bombing of the Shanghai South railway station in August 1937, this photo of a burned baby brought worldwide attention to Japan’s military strategy in China: to terrorize the civilian population with saturation bombings and a scorched-earth campaign of total destruction.

  To the comfortable schoolboys who had grown up with so many beggars around them, the swarms of newly impoverished refugees from the flattened battlegrounds seemed to blend into the scenery. More than a million people made homeless by war had packed into the International Settlement and French Concession. They followed the well-fed boys with their hungry eyes, ready to grab a carelessly held package or treat. Beggars huddled in alleys and unattended spaces between buildings, just beyond the reach of shopkeepers’ broomsticks.

  Blinded by their own good fortune and privilege, the children of Shanghai’s elite didn’t notice when their own neighbors couldn’t afford to buy food. Essentials such as rice, cooking oil, medicines, and fuel became scarce at any price. The Japanese military that surrounded Shanghai controlled the flow of goods, seizing whatever it wanted for its war effort or for its comfort. Scarcity drove prices into a dizzying inflationary spiral as hoarders and speculators gorged themselves on the desperation of others—those who couldn’t afford to pay black market prices starved. Without kerosene or coal, the poorest had frozen in the two harsh winters that had come and gone since the start of the war. Bodies of the poor and homeless lay as rotting detritus on the streets and alleys of Shanghai until corpse-removal trucks eventually took them away.

  Benny didn’t have to think about the present when his future seemed predetermined and rosy, war or no war. Since he had passed the difficult entrance exam for admission to St. John’s Junior Middle School, his path all the way to its eponymous university was automatic as long as he continued to pass his courses. His parents had no worries for their son when everyone knew that doors opened for St. John’s graduates. They stood out in every crowd, speaking fluent English and carrying themselves as though they were proper English gentlemen and ladies. At both St. John’s and its sister institution, St. Mary’s Hall, classes were taught in English. Thanks to his alumni parents, Benny could already speak English well and would fit right in. So many of China’s most powerful political, business, and intellectual leaders had studied at its schools: T. V. Soong, former finance minister and governor of the Central Bank of China; Wellington Koo, representative to the League of Nations and ambassador to France; Lin Yutang, influential writer and philosopher; and a long list of others. The well-connected were well served. That was the Chinese way.

  With his pedigree and school ties, Benny was set. Still, the boy harbored a secret wish for himself. He wanted to
chart his own course, the way his father must have when he left accounting to join the police ranks. Benny hoped to pursue medicine when he reached college, for St. John’s had a medical school that was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania in America.

  But there were plenty of pitfalls in the sin city for boys like him. Shanghai was notorious for its spoiled firstborn sons who had nothing better to do than become playboys, squandering their families’ wealth on opium, women, and gambling, bringing shame to their families. Benny’s mother and her friends gossiped about the latest scandals about young men from reputable families during their all-night mah-jongg games. “Pay attention in school, and stay away from those bad boys,” she’d admonish her son afterward.

  “Yes, Mother,” he’d reply obediently. Benny had already resolved to stay away from opium. He’d known what the narcotic had done to his grandfather.

  Benny could easily have pursued a life of pleasure, as other Shanghai scions did. His family appeared to have unlimited resources. His father was thriving in spite of the war. Or as others might say, because of it.

  Just as Benny didn’t see the beggars all around him, he had never thought about the ample food and luxurious goods that his police inspector father managed to bring home at a time when rice riots were breaking out in the city. Benny didn’t wonder how his mother could continue her shopping habits that allowed her to dress in the latest foreign fashions, adorned with ever-fancier jewelry. It was unthinkable for proper Chinese children to question their parents. Even when Benny noticed that some of his father’s associates looked rather tough and unsavory, like the kind of men that his mother warned him to avoid when he rode his bicycle, he would have never thought to ask about them. They were just people that a police inspector needed to know, like the assortment of British, Americans, Russians, Japanese, and other foreigners with whom his father dealt.

  * * *

  —

  BENNY’S DAILY LIFE WAS so far removed from the war, he didn’t imagine that his own father was at the very center of it. In 1939, Pan Zhijie—or C. C. Pan, as Benny’s father was also known in English—was promoted to be departmental chief of police of Shanghai’s Western District, or Hu Xi in Chinese. The Badlands in any language. It was the same area Benny’s father had long ago declared off-limits to his son. The majority of the crime, terrorist bombings, kidnappings, and assassination attempts in the foreign concessions were thought to originate from illicit dens in the Badlands.

  Within the space of a few years, more than 150 political assassinations of suspected Chinese collaborators, enemy sympathizers, and Japanese soldiers had taken place in Shanghai, many on public streets and in public establishments—credited to the Nationalist underground resistance headed by General Dai Li. He was Chiang Kai-shek’s top spy, referred to by some as “China’s Himmler,” an allusion to Hitler’s ruthless chief of the Nazi SS. One particularly brazen execution engineered by Dai Li’s men took place on the pleasant treelined street of Yu Yuan Road, not far from Benny’s home. Spacious mansions and villas, as well as attractive brick lilong row homes, occupied this part of the International Settlement, including the heavily guarded home of the Chinese foreign minister—a puppet and traitor, according to the Nationalists. Minister Chen Lu and his wife were hosting a dinner party and had just ushered the guests into their living room. Dai Li’s assassins managed to tiptoe through the house and burst into the room while Chen’s bodyguards stood by in surprise. After shooting Chen point-blank before his cowering dinner guests, the Nationalist killers unfurled a scroll over the body that read DEATH TO THE COLLABORATORS! LONG LIVE GENERALISSIMO CHIANG KAI-SHEK!

  It was the responsibility of the new police chief C. C. Pan to quell the crime wave. Benny couldn’t have been prouder of his father’s new charge.

  * * *

  —

  AS IT HAPPENED, C. C. Pan was perfectly situated at the unseemly intersection of the British-run Shanghai Municipal Police and the city’s extensive criminal underbelly. A charismatic and smart businessman, Benny’s father had for some time been making good use of his elite St. John’s education, his fluent English, and his Shanghai pedigree to move up the police ranks. It hadn’t escaped Inspector Pan’s notice that clever officials in Shanghai at every level got ahead by leveraging their influence in the city’s complex web of police jurisdictions, where vice and crime were rampant and the mob ruled the streets. Even Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself, it was whispered, was a sworn member of the powerful underworld Green Gang syndicate. Chiang had rewarded its leader, Du Yuesheng, for his instrumental role in helping the Nationalists exterminate the Communists in 1927, naming him to such government positions as overseeing banking and opium suppression. Having gained respectability and political power while continuing his opium rackets, Du reciprocated, giving his sworn brother Chiang a percentage of his lucrative underworld profits to help fund the Nationalist government. Such mutually beneficial arrangements were commonplace in Shanghai, where it was said that money could buy anything.

  With China’s top leader cozy with the gangs, Benny’s father, too, became a sworn member of the Green Gang, his police uniform notwithstanding. By the time C. C. Pan was named chief of the Western District, he had created his own extensive network of influence, with four hundred constables and sixty detectives on his unlawful tab. At a time of war and scarcity, he and his men extracted personal favors and payoffs from businesses and the wealthy in the International Settlement. They also protected the shady enterprises of the Green Gang.

  C. C. Pan even offered his minions job protection: If any cop was fired for corruption, the chief would continue to pay his salary. In his perfect English, Benny’s father could ensure secure livelihoods for his British bobbies at a time when most foreigners in Shanghai worried about their jobs if the Japanese took over. As Shanghai’s wartime inflation shrank people’s buying power, Chief Pan doled out generous monthly retainers to his personal network. His familiarity with Western culture made it easier for him to identify vulnerable officers. Pan made offers they couldn’t refuse, and they did his bidding.

  Benny’s father was becoming a powerful and well-known man in both the policing and criminal worlds of Shanghai. His rise in status earned him a new nickname: Pan Da, meaning Big Pan. When Benny was out with his father, businessmen and fellow officers greeted Pan Da and then turned to Benny. “Hey, Xiao Pan”—Little Pan—“would you like to grow up to be like your father one day?” they’d ask.

  Without hesitation, Benny would nod his head vigorously. Of course one day he’d like to be respected the way his strong and distinguished father was.

  “Good lad,” they’d chuckle. “You’ll do well if you’re like your old man.”

  * * *

  —

  PAN DA’S JURISDICTION COVERED the extraterritorial Western District, where the British had been encroaching on the Chinese section for years. Wealthy foreigners and Chinese alike had built enormous estates in the area. Some of the most prominent missionary schools were located in the district as well, including St. John’s, St. Mary’s, the McTyeire School for Girls, Jiao Tong University, and the Fudan Middle School. But the Western District was also home to the notorious Badlands, the most crime-ridden and politically contested area in Shanghai. Pan Da’s new office was located at 76 Jessfield Road. Shockingly, “76,” this place that should have been the headquarters for maintaining law and order, was in fact the epicenter of violence.

  This was where suspected Nationalist agents were taken to be interrogated and tortured. It was where journalists and officials were “persuaded” to cooperate with the Japanese. Businessmen were kidnapped and held there for ransom. If their families couldn’t or wouldn’t pay up, they might never be seen again. The place became known as “the Black Hellhole” of Shanghai, from which few emerged alive. If they did, they were shadows of their former selves. And Benny’s father was chief at 76.

  For Benny, 76
was a private park. Chief Pan Da allowed his son to ride his bike on the spacious paths around the buildings. It was thrilling for the boy to enter the highly secured location. He broke into a grin each time he passed the gruff sentries who guarded the three levels of gates before he entered the grounds. None of his school chums were permitted to ride with him there. Benny felt like the luckiest boy in Shanghai, thanks to his father. And then another boy was allowed to ride around the secretive grounds—the son of Li Shiqun, reputed to be the principal torturer at 76, who ran the puppet Secret Service at the will of the Japanese command. Benny knew nothing of the other boy’s father and didn’t mind sharing the honor of admittance, for now he had a playmate to pal around with.

  The two raced each other from one end of the manicured estate to the other. The scent of fragrant peonies and roses in bloom surrounded them as they rode circles around the buildings. The largest, a big brick-and-stone mansion, was off-limits and blocked by fierce-looking armed men. Benny never suspected that prisoners were held in the mysterious building. He heard no frightening sounds, no screams or moans from the torture pits that he learned of much later. To Benny, it was just where his father worked, but it was also the exciting, secret domain that only he and Li’s son were privy to.

  Benny’s parents preferred that their son ride his bike there rather than in the streets. With so much factional violence throughout Shanghai, they felt 76 was a safer place for him to play. As Chief C. C. Pan’s power continued to grow, they worried that their adventurous son could be a kidnapping target.