Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  “You stupid girl, what sewer did you crawl out of? You aren’t even worth a piece of shit—at least farmers can use shit in the fields.”

  By watching Elder Sister, Bing had learned to say nothing and show no reaction. The slightest expression of unhappiness would set Ma off on a new tirade: “You don’t like it here? The Huangpu River doesn’t have a lid on it; you can jump in anytime.” Once Ma worked herself into a froth, she’d continue late into the night, raging from her bed. She’d pause only to light a cigarette, chain-smoking while chain-cursing. On her bedroll, Bing would try to block out Ma. At times, she could almost hear the Huangpu River calling to her.

  Before going to school, Bing would help Ma prepare breakfast. It was simple fare: pao fan, leftover rice from the previous night warmed with boiling water, along with some small Shanghai-style pickled vegetables and a bit of brined duck egg if they could find any. One morning, Ma instructed Bing to bring the pot of steaming pao fan from the fire. The pot was too heavy for the slight girl. As Bing strained to lift it, the pot tipped over, and the bubbling-hot rice landed on the girl’s bare ankle and foot, instantly scalding her. Bing screamed from the searing pain.

  This time there was no cursing from Ma. She scooped Bing up and carried the wailing child down the stairs. Ma had been crippled by foot-binding, having missed being spared by the new Chinese republic’s ban against the practice in 1912, but somehow she managed to carry Bing to a nearby doctor. The burns on Bing’s foot were so bad that she couldn’t walk. Going to school was out of the question. Ma changed the dressings on Bing’s blistered skin to keep the wound clean. She fixed meals for Bing without nagging. Ma didn’t seem to mind that Bing could no longer help with the housework. Sometimes Ma even told Bing stories as she busied herself in the small apartment, describing how she had come to Shanghai years before from Changzhou with her two daughters, Elder Sister and Auntie Li, after her husband had died. Bing’s ears perked up at hearing Changzhou—the very city where she had been born, before her baba gave her away.

  As weeks went by, Bing’s skin healed slowly, with a thick scab on the top of her foot. She began to feel that maybe Ma cared for her, at least a little. Bing was unable to go out, so her only entertainment revolved around Elder Sister, whose life was a busy social whirlwind. Each morning Bing waited for Elder Sister, a late riser, to awake so that Bing could sit on her bed and watch her spend hours fixing her makeup, hair, and clothing. When she had finished, she’d achieved a look that attracted admiring stares wherever she went. By evening, Elder Sister would be ready to head to the city’s famous nightclubs with her girlfriends—and a long list of gentlemen suitors.

  Bing most enjoyed the nights when Elder Sister’s girlfriends gathered at their apartment before heading out to their favorite dance spots. It was almost like being with Shanghai movie stars. Ma never failed to offer her usual admonitions: Stay in the foreign concessions and away from the Badlands where gangsters and the puppet police run amok. Avoid marauding soldiers, crooked police, gangsters, and other assorted troublemakers. And “Remember, men in Shanghai are interested in only one thing!” Elder Sister and her friends insisted that they just wanted to enjoy themselves and forget about the seemingly endless war. Ma would snort and reply, “If you dress like bitches in heat, you’ll attract men who are no better than horny dogs.”

  But even at the dance halls, political intrigue and wartime terrorism were unavoidable. In the spring of 1938, a group calling itself the “Blood and Soul Traitors Elimination Corps” set off bombs outside Ciro’s, one of the most popular night spots in the International Settlement, as well as several other dance halls that Elder Sister and her friends frequented.

  The self-proclaimed patriots left flyers at clubs with a message titled “A Warning to Our Dancing Friends”:

  Dancing friends: Some of you can dance the foxtrot, others the waltz. Why don’t you go up to the front to kill? Some of you spend lavishly on brandy and whiskey. Why don’t you give the money to our troops so that they can buy more munitions to kill the enemy?

  Dancing friends: Why spend your money for cosmetics when your bodies smell [of] the odor of a conquered people? The only way to remove that smell is to give our warm blood to the nation….Our meager gift tonight—bombs—will help to give you added pleasure.

  Because of the curfew, Elder Sister’s girlfriends often stayed over at the Woo apartment after their late-night escapades, taking up the floor space. Bing would sit among them, soaking up the stories about their glamorous adventures. The women would gossip and laugh late into the night about foreign men—stuffy British, loud Americans, stiff-limbed Germans, smooth-talking French, emotional Italians, cold Japanese, and the hulking White Russians who grew weepy when drunk, crying about their wonderful lives before the Bolshevik Revolution. Elder Sister drew the line at Chinese men, refusing their advances. She complained that they expected to have more than one wife and when that happened, the first wife suffered. “Who needs love? A wife needs money for her children. Her life is cursed if the money goes to other wives!” The women laughed about the Western missionaries who had been duped by Chinese men claiming to accept Christian monogamy while they kept their concubines. A concubine was still a wife, and her offspring were legitimate heirs. It was the men’s mistresses and prostitutes who had no legal status.

  There was no shortage of foreign men to amuse women like Elder Sister. Yang gueizi—foreign devils—carried on with their plush expatriate lives in the midst of the war and occupation. The “Shanghailanders,” as the foreign residents called themselves, still attended their churches and synagogues, racetracks and restaurants, dance halls and theaters, bars and casinos. They sent their children to the guarded enclaves of private schools. There were the multitude of exclusive clubs, the foreigners’ oases of national pride, each more opulent than the last. The Shanghai Club of the British was on the Bund, its 110-foot mahogany bar reputed to be the longest in the world. Reflecting the club’s rigid hierarchy was the tradition that every member had an assigned seat at the bar, with seat number one being the most prestigious.

  The Shanghailanders weren’t entirely oblivious to the tensions of war. They were subject to inspections by Japanese soldiers posted at the wood-and-barbed-wire blockades that funneled and controlled all movement at major streets entering the foreign concessions. War refugees huddled in every doorway and vacant spot. The demographic mix of the foreigners was changing too, with the fifty thousand Japanese civilians becoming more numerous than all the Europeans and Americans combined. So many of them lived in the Hongkou section of the International Settlement that it was dubbed Little Tokyo.

  Initially, Bing found it shocking that Elder Sister and her friends seemed to prefer foreign men. In Suzhou and Changzhou, Bing had been afraid of foreigners, whom everyone referred to as devils, ghosts, and demons. Before the Woos had adopted Bing, Elder Sister had said that she was getting married soon, but Bing had never suspected that Elder Sister’s intended was a foreigner.

  When the tall Shanghailander Elder Sister was planning to marry first came to their apartment, Bing ran to the next room and peered through a crack in the doorway. He looked so much older than Elder Sister, who insisted that Bing come out to meet him. The foreigner flashed her a smile. His name was Kristian Kronberg Jarldane. He’d worked in Shanghai for almost thirty years as an engineer with the Shanghai Water Conservancy, charged with keeping the navigation lanes of the Huangpu River dredged and open for big ships. Bing had never met a foreign devil before. Ma didn’t seem to mind that Elder Sister often spent the night at his place. That was all right with Bing too, for when Elder Sister wasn’t home, Bing could sleep in her bed.

  * * *

  —

  TOWARD THE END OF 1939, Bing’s foot had healed enough for her to wear shoes again, but she’d missed too much school to jump back in. Ma said that she’d have to wait until the next year to repeat her grade. But now Ma actually
needed Bing at home for another reason: While Bing had been recuperating, Elder Sister had given birth to a baby boy. She and the balding foreigner weren’t yet married, but they gave their baby a Danish name: Ole Egner Jarldane.

  The foreigner said it would be two years after he had filed for a divorce from his first wife, a Russian woman, before he could marry again. When he stopped coming by soon after Ole was born, Elder Sister explained that her fiancé had to return to Denmark to complete the divorce. Ma grumbled that they might never see him again, that dirty old man. As usual, Elder Sister paid her no mind, confident he’d return.

  In the meantime, Ma oversaw the care of her new grandson while Elder Sister sprang back into her busy social life. Right after her son’s birth, she was out shopping, playing mah-jongg, and visiting with her friends again. She even treated herself to a trip to Hong Kong after the unpleasantries of pregnancy and childbirth. She hired a wet nurse to suckle the baby and left him with Ma and Bing.

  Six months later, the foreigner returned. One afternoon in early 1940 when Bing was almost eleven, he and Elder Sister went to the Danish consulate to be married. They didn’t bother with a reception, a decision that pleased Ma. “What’s the point of having a party when there’s already a baby?” she asked. Ma was surprised that the foreigner had returned. Her face even stretched into a rare smile.

  After their marriage, Elder Sister and her husband moved to a building on Avenue Joffre, the French Concession’s main boulevard. Their modern apartment had all the latest Western-style conveniences: electric stove and refrigerator, a gleaming bathroom with a flush toilet, and telephone service. Elder Sister was the only Chinese person living in the building—all the other tenants were foreigners.

  Ma and Bing moved into a smaller one-room flat on a side street closer to Elder Sister. After the morning chores, they would walk there, Ma shuffling so slowly on her painful bound feet that Bing had ample time to study the fancy shops along the way: the photography studio with portraits of beautiful people displayed in its window; a restaurant opened by two Japanese sisters who smiled and bowed as Bing and Ma walked by; the Jewish grocery in the eight-story, flatiron-shaped Normandie Apartments, with exotic-smelling salamis, cheeses, and braided breads on display.

  After lunch each day, Elder Sister left to socialize while Bing and Ma looked after Ole. When Elder Sister and her husband returned at the end of the day, they all sat down together for a dinner prepared by the couple’s cook. Bing still felt awkward around the Danish gentleman. Elder Sister conversed in English with him since, like most foreigners, he knew only a few words of pidgin Chinese: chow, chop-chop, savvy, no can do, catchee me rickshaw.

  Even more awkward for Bing was the question of what to call him. Was he her brother-in-law or “Uncle”? Elder Sister used his name, Kristian, but Ma referred to him as “Lao Touzi”—old man. So Bing started calling him Lao Touzi as well. It seemed fitting since he was a good thirty years older than twenty-one-year-old Elder Sister. He wasn’t interested in what they said in Chinese anyway. Bing learned to ignore the disapproving clucks from Chinese and foreigners alike who stared at the interracial couple and their Eurasian child. Elder Sister never seemed to mind—not when Kristian’s expatriate salary, paid in foreign currency, supported them all so handsomely.

  With Elder Sister and Ma depending on Bing’s help to watch the baby, the eleven-year-old knew there would be no more school for her. Whenever she saw other children with their books, she wistfully imagined herself in the schoolyard, skipping rope and chasing friends. But then she’d hold the helpless little baby and wouldn’t mind as much. She thought the half-Chinese, half-Danish child was beautiful. And he needed her. When he laughed, so did she, with a lightness she hadn’t known in a long time.

  Besides, going out every day on errands with Ma was an education too. They’d get boiling hot water at the “tiger stove” shop on the corner and wait in line with the ration coupons when the subsidy vendors had some salt, rice, or oil to sell. Each errand was a chance to explore the neighborhood. Bing wasn’t afraid of crowds. Small and agile, she was able to wriggle through to get closer to the front—a skill that Ma appreciated.

  The markets became Bing’s school, with lessons in math, social studies, and economics. She listened as the adult shoppers complained bitterly about the wartime price inflation from illegal manipulation of supply and demand. The enemy Japanese, they said, weren’t the only ones to blame for shortages of goods. Rich and well-connected Chinese were hoarding every kind of consumable, diverting international charity relief supplies from the starving poor and selling them as prices soared. Everyone blamed the cronies and relatives of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, especially Madame H. H. Kung, the sister of the generalissimo’s powerful wife, Soong May-ling, whose wealthy family was notorious for its godowns filled with basic necessities. The family extracted vastly inflated profits from its desperate fellow Chinese, getting still richer from the resulting windfalls. Whenever Bing went to the market, she heard angry denunciations of the greedy speculators—usually followed by an emphatic spit in disgust.

  Sometimes Bing accompanied Ma to the street corners where black markets popped up. All kinds of goods were for sale, including food, gasoline, and other items, with vendors blatantly displaying their wares on the ground, in baskets, or simply in hand. Fascinated, Bing could weave her way to the front of crowds that gathered to watch as people haggled over otherwise unavailable goods for astonishing amounts of money in silver, gold, U.S. dollars, or barter—but never in Chinese currency, which was deemed worthless. To Bing it was street theater, a drama performed by sellers and buyers until the climactic exchange that allowed both sides to claim victory.

  The most despised vendors were the shopkeepers who deliberately sold adulterated foods, such as the “red rice” that still had husks and was often mixed with gravel, birdseed, and dirt to cheat people out of receiving their full rations. At least half of each measure was inedible. Ma would rant and rave, cursing these vendors as mi ze zung—rice worms. It was Bing’s job to handpick each precious grain from the dross. She dreaded the tedious chore and silently agreed with Ma that such vendors were parasites, worse than worms and smellier than dog farts.

  Sometimes, Bing would spot a man whose clothing, or walk, or way of tilting his head reminded her of her father. Her heart would pound as she stole a glance, but it was never her baba. Nearly six years had gone by since she had last seen him. She was almost twelve and worried that he wouldn’t recognize her anymore—nor she him.

  Bing kept such thoughts to herself, never mentioning her waning hopes. It had been a long time since she had cried herself to sleep over her family in Changzhou. Sometimes she found herself thinking more about Mama Hsu than Baba. The dull ache was still present but had dimmed enough that she could focus on the everyday: watching baby Ole, assisting Ma, and doing nothing to provoke her.

  Ma made a point of teaching Bing what she thought a girl should know. She warned that Bing must always be alert for sharp-eyed street touts who might grab a girl like her, as well as “third-handed” pickpockets who lurked in crowded places. Though beggars seemed to be idly picking lice off one another while sitting on the sidewalk, they were ready to spring after anyone so careless as to drop a few grains of rice and to snatch anything not safely tucked away. Soldiers of any type should be considered potential rapists.

  When Bing seemed unhappy, Ma would ask,“If you don’t like it here, how long can you survive out there?” Then she’d point out the many young girls on the streets who were alone, orphaned or abandoned, forced to fend for themselves. Some, not much older than Bing, lingered on certain street corners to sell themselves to strange men. Ma called them hei su mei—the saltwater girls, frequented by the multitudes of sailors prowling the streets of the port city. Bing couldn’t keep from staring at their rouged cheeks and bright ruby lips, made up to look thicker and wider. Ma said their red painted faces looked
like a monkey’s ass.

  Bing found a reflection of her own sadness in some of these girls. In her French Concession neighborhood, there were plenty of girls like herself, not street girls but others who had been abandoned and adopted. Many toiled unhappily as virtual slaves. Girls like these were so common that they had their own name, “xiao yatou”—little servant girls. Some had to face the beggars and thieves by themselves each morning, something Ma wouldn’t let Bing do, saying she was too young to go out alone. But when she was out with Ma, Bing often saw other girls who were younger and smaller than herself alone on errands. In the nearby lane, a girl of seven or eight named Marlene Yang had to fetch hot water and breakfast every morning for her sick mother. Each day, before the sun was up, Marlene headed to the tiger stove shops by herself, lugging a hot water thermos in each hand. The thermoses were heavy when full and unwieldy for a girl trying to evade the beggars around her. Then there were the small bundles on the street that had to be passed by with care—crudely wrapped corpses of babies who hadn’t survived the night. Once Marlene saw a stray dog chewing on the limb of a dead infant. She screamed and ran home, the sight so grisly that she could never rid her mind of the terrible memory.

  In the harsh war years, children’s corpses could be found on the streets each morning. Several bodies are stuffed into one coffin, awaiting collection.

  If Bing expressed her sympathy for Marlene or any of the other unfortunate people she saw, Ma dispensed some curt advice: “Save your pity. It is their fate to be born into unlucky and miserable lives because of their bad deeds in a past life. Maybe they will have better luck in the next life.” Bing hoped she would have a better fate in her next life. Yet she had to agree with Ma that her life with the Woo family was better than those of the beggars, thieves, and saltwater girls whose numbers seemed to multiply each day while the rice grew scarcer. She would always be grateful to Elder Sister and Ma for that.