by Helen Zia
At the hospital, the doctor took one look at Annuo and instantly diagnosed her condition: an advanced case of diphtheria. He chastised her aunt. “Why did you wait so long? In another hour, she’d be gone.” Annuo was so ill that she looked like a ghost. In her delirium, she thought she had become one. The doctors insisted that “Chang Tsen” stay quarantined in the children’s ward until her condition stabilized. She was too weak and her diphtheria too contagious for them to release her. Doctors worried that the crowded and unhealthy living conditions in Shanghai could lead to an uncontrollable outbreak. Japan had already attacked the Chinese with special bombs containing fleas infected with bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, and other deadly germs. Any infectious disease could turn into an epidemic, further devastating the war-weakened populace.
Several days passed before Annuo’s fever broke—or had it been weeks? Her mind cleared enough for her to know that she was in a hospital room, plain, antiseptic, white. No one from her family was there. Where was her mother? The hospital was unfamiliar and scary, with air that stank of rubbing alcohol, disinfectant, and other unsettling odors. Perpendicular to where she lay, a boy of about six was in another hospital bed. He too was feverish. Family members surrounded him all day long, his doting grandmother always by his side. She stayed until she was forced to leave at night. Annuo heard someone say “typhoid” and figured that it must have been as bad as her diphtheria. The boy’s many visitors deepened her own loneliness. No one came to see her. Annuo thought she caught looks of pity from some of the boy’s family members.
Finally, her mother stopped by to check on her but could spare only a few minutes from her work. No one else came, and days went by before Annuo saw her mother again. Each visit was brief. Sometimes her mother didn’t even sit down.
Annuo couldn’t help thinking how lucky that boy was to have so many people lavishing attention on him. She knew that her family had to stay hidden, but she still envied the loving care he received. Whenever he groaned or whimpered, his grandmother sprang up to apply a cool compress to his forehead, plump his pillows, or tell him a story. She’d made it clear that she didn’t approve of the Western medicine or the foreign-trained doctors. Whenever they left the room, she’d chant to one god or another to ward off evil spirits, and pray for her beloved grandson’s good health. Annuo found some comfort in her rhythmic chanting, a small consolation for the long days without a single visitor.
One day, against strict doctor’s orders, the grandmother brought some homemade porridge for her grandson. Because the typhoid was in his intestines, he had been allowed very little to eat and kept moaning that he was hungry. When the boy started to gobble up the delicious-smelling porridge, Annuo could almost taste the food. Wishing that she could have some, she turned away and closed her eyes. Soon she dozed off.
Suddenly Annuo awoke to the grandmother’s scream. The boy was convulsing. All at once he stopped, then stiffened as a hideous gurgle came from his throat. Annuo couldn’t bear to keep watching. Soon there was silence. In a moment, a high-pitched wail rose out of his grandmother. Nurses rushed into the room. Annuo peeked from behind her covers and saw the boy’s white face, his eyes staring ahead. His little body seemed to be shriveling as she watched. Was he hovering somewhere in the room? He’d been alive when she fell asleep. Now he was a ghost.
His bed was so close that she could have touched it. So close that his ghost body could have touched her. Terrified, Annuo curled up in the corner of her bed, her heart pounding. She turned her back to the corpse and the chilling scene around her. The boy’s body remained for hours as distraught relatives poured in, each shrieking and sobbing louder than the one before. Annuo tried to block out the wailing and the horror of what she had seen. When someone finally came to take the boy’s body away, she shut her eyes tight. But she could not shut out that look of anguish on his face after he’d turned into a ghost.
Would this happen to her? she wondered. After all, the doctor said she’d been close to dying too. She was terrified and full of questions, but there was no one for her to ask. And no one to comfort her.
Alone in her room, Annuo’s only companion was fear. A few days later, her mother stopped by, but Annuo couldn’t talk about the ghost boy or ask her anxious questions. Her mother’s visits were too short, and children were not supposed to bother their parents. But at night, Annuo had trouble sleeping. When she did sleep, she was haunted by the ghost boy. Nightmares forced her awake. On better days, she dreamed that Muma had brought her some special treats: Shanghai xiao long bao soup dumplings, petits fours from the Russian bakery, and—her favorite—roasted chestnuts. She imagined her mother sitting by her bed, peeling the chestnuts, and feeding her pieces of the precious nutmeat. Just pretending made Annuo feel a little better.
Weeks passed before the doctor would allow Annuo to go home. In anticipation of her release, her mother brought her some small cans of food—bamboo shoots and wheat gluten. It was the first regular food she had eaten in a long time, and it was the best she’d ever tasted. The black-market delicacies must have cost her mother dearly. Annuo brightened. Her dream was coming true.
Finally Annuo could leave. She couldn’t wait to return to the apartment on Avenue Pétain, to her brother and sister, and to Zhongying. Her father had left while she was in the hospital, to return to the enemy-occupied war zone in Jiangsu, she was relieved to hear.
Annuo desperately wanted to get back to school, to catch up on what she had missed of fourth grade. Her mother had bad news for her.
“You’re not better yet. The hospital released you because you’re no longer in danger. But you’re still contagious, and you must stay in until you’re well.”
Annuo became a prisoner in the apartment, quarantined from everyone, even from her younger sister. Her mother relegated Annuo to one room, explaining that even the air she breathed could make others ill. Her mother also instituted some new sanitary practices at home. She lectured her children on the health hazards of using one’s own chopsticks to jab at the food in communal serving dishes. She introduced two different colors of chopsticks: red for serving food from the common dishes, black for personal use and not to be shared. No one was to touch Annuo’s utensils or food. She was a pariah at home, retreating into her room and further within herself. There were no more thoughts of returning to school. Instead, Annuo took up her perch by the window. From there, she could watch as Shanghai passed her by.
* * *
—
ANNUO’S BIG BROTHER, CHARLEY, became her eyes and ears to the world. When he got home from school, she would ask him to make sense of what she had observed from her window: Why were there so few cars on the streets? Where had all the foreigners gone?
While trying to keep a safe distance, twelve-year-old Charley patiently shared what he knew: No one could use cars anymore because there was no gas. The Japanese and the traitors took it all. Some people fixed their cars to run on coal, but the Japanese took the coal too, just as they’d taken the rice and the good food. They’d taken most of the cars too, so the people who still had cars must have been enemy Japanese or Chinese traitors. The foreigners from countries at war with Japan and Germany—like America, Britain, and Canada—had been sent to special prison camps on the city outskirts. But plenty of foreigners remained in the city—Germans, Japanese, and their French, Danish, Portuguese, and White Russian allies. The Jews hadn’t been sent to prison camps, but the Japanese had ordered them to move to Hongkou. Everything was changing, only the red-hatted Sikh police remained the same, directing traffic and hitting Chinese with their police sticks.
Charley ended his descriptions with some brotherly advice: “When you get better, you’ll have to be very careful because the Japanese soldiers are everywhere.”
* * *
—
BEFORE CHARLEY CAME HOME from school, he’d stop at sidewalk bookstalls where vendors displayed their wares, allowing pas
sersby to browse and borrow books for a few fen. Charley loved to thumb through comics and magazines with photographs. He often brought books home, and Annuo devoured them. Kung fu novels, translations of The Three Musketeers and other foreign books, Dream of the Red Chamber and other Chinese classics—Annuo read them all. Books were her one true escape from war and illness during her months of quarantine.
Though Annuo’s condition improved, for a long time she wasn’t strong enough to go out. She could often sit unnoticed as her mother and Zhongying discussed the latest problems. She listened to them talk about the black market, where white rice was nearly impossible to buy for any amount. They speculated about the neighborhood snitches and mapped out the best routes for avoiding encounters with Japanese patrols. Annuo learned basic arithmetic and economics from their observations about prices that increased wildly each day. She listened to them compute the relative value of the different currencies being used in Shanghai: the Nationalist yuan and the Wang Jingwei puppet-government yuan, the U.S. dollar, small gold bars, and Mexican silver dollars. The complexities of daily living in occupied Shanghai provided alternative schooling to Annuo.
Still, no matter how Zhongying tried to make their rations palatable, the coarse red rice, the limited cooking oil and other foodstuffs offered scant nutrition for Annuo’s weakened body. Diphtheria had left her so emaciated that she barely had the energy to walk around the small apartment.
Beyond the walls of her home on Avenue Pétain, the seven-year war with Japan was beginning to shift. Though Japanese censors and propagandists touted their nation’s strength to cover up its string of battlefront defeats, they couldn’t hide what everyone in Shanghai could see: On June 9, 1944, the Americans conducted their first air raid on Shanghai. The United States was soon sending B-29 bombers over the city-on-the-sea with regularity, pounding Japanese military installations. Charley showed Annuo pictures of the planes, pointing out the differences between Chinese Curtiss Hawks and Flying Tiger Warhawks; American Mustangs, B-24 Liberators, and B-29 Superfortresses; Japanese Mitsubishi “Zeros” and Kawasaki fighters. She patiently kept watch for air strikes from her window. When night approached, she helped Zhongying close the blackout drapes ordered by the occupation and puppet authorities.
Japan was so weakened by early 1945 that the drone of American B-24 and B-29 bombers flying overhead had become a daily noontime event. To protect its munitions depots and garrisons, the Japanese military took over more homes, schools, and office buildings to camouflage their soldiers and supplies. Munitions were moved into the first floor of the Embankment Building, a luxury apartment complex and the largest residential building in Asia, built by Victor Sassoon. Insinuating themselves into the core of the city, the Japanese planned to hold the civilian population hostage against Allied attack.
* * *
—
NEWS OF THE AMERICAN air raids over Shanghai reached Annuo’s father in his distant Nationalist base in Jiangxi Province, thanks to the Nationalist army’s intelligence network. He feared that Shanghai was no longer safe for his family and sent a message to his wife via courier: She must leave her job and apartment immediately and move with the children to a distant post in Jiangxi Province, part of Free China, nearly five hundred miles southwest of Shanghai. He would meet them there.
In early 1945, Annuo was just turning ten. She could see that her mother was disturbed by the message. The journey to Jiangxi would be far more difficult than their last trip six years earlier. It was winter. They would have to circumvent enemy lines, cross rivers, and navigate snow-filled mountain passes. Wouldn’t it be safer to remain in the former French Concession than to cross a war zone with three children? In addition, the money Annuo’s mother had saved from her work was tied up in the apartment, from the key money and deposits she’d paid to move in to the small stash of medicines and samples she had accumulated to sell or barter. But Annuo’s father wouldn’t have any of it. He sent another message, instructing his wife to abandon everything. To ensure her compliance, he arranged for a squad of Nationalist troops in Pudong, across the Huangpu River, to escort his family.
It was disconcerting for Annuo to see her smart, competent, and beautiful mother struggle with this new directive from her husband. After all, Annuo’s mother had ensured their survival all these years while their father had been absent. Yet her modern education, style, and sensibility were no match for the weight of Chinese tradition that compelled her to obey her husband’s command.
There was at least one exciting prospect ahead for Annuo: She would be freed from her quarantine. She hadn’t ventured outside in several months, and her leg muscles had atrophied. Muma warned that it would be a long, hard journey. Annuo didn’t care; she couldn’t wait to get out.
Annuo’s mother gave her weakest child a long look as she described the trip. “Annuo, it won’t be easy, but you’ll have to try your best.” Annuo, not knowing the hardships ahead, nodded vigorously. She was elated to be freed from her cage at last! Besides, Zhongying was coming along too. Everything would be all right.
* * *
—
OUTSIDE, ANNUO SWAYED LIKE a toddler learning to walk. Zhongying helped her along at first, but soon she could stand on her own, a bit wobbly but exuberant. The five of them—the four “Changs” and Zhongying—left on an early February morning in 1945 for a remote part of Pudong, where they met their Nationalist escorts—underground soldiers of the resistance. If the Japanese discovered any of them, they would be summarily executed.
The soldiers walked while the women and children rode on moon carts—single wooden wheels with planks on either side to sit on. Scrawny laborers pushed them along over the bumpy country roads. Annuo clung tight to Charley, afraid that she might fall off and get crushed by the heavy wheel. When they reached the shore along the East China Sea, the soldiers carried the women and children on their shoulders and waded through the water to a small fishing boat. Annuo’s family and the soldiers lay at the bottom of the boat’s stinking cargo hold, packed in like sardines. Gunshots whizzed by the vessel as it ventured past the Japanese patrol lines. Once at sea, the rickety boat tossed and rocked like a toy.
The next day, they reached shore in southern Zhejiang Province. It too was in enemy-held territory. A soldier plucked Annuo out of the boat as if she were a mere chicken feather and loaded her onto a three-wheeled wagon. She thought her bones might shatter from the herky-jerky ride across the rough country trails they took to avoid Japanese soldiers. As the pathways narrowed, they switched to sedan chairs, hoisted on the shoulders of coolies. Where the sedan chairs couldn’t be used, they walked—southward through Zhejiang Province, westward across Fujian, then northeast to Jiangxi Province, the whole journey encompassing more than four hundred miles.
At night they slept in farmhouses, shacks, and small family tombs used as ancestral shrines that were scattered about the countryside. Crowding into dirty rooms, they slept on cold, damp floors, remaining fully clothed in case they had to make a quick getaway. The soldiers slept in other shelters. When they were lucky, they bought food from local farmers. For much of the trip, they subsisted on hard-boiled eggs.
The shy, delicate city girl pushed herself along, timidly crossing rugged terrain and rocky streams as they slowly made their way to Jiangxi Province. In the last, most difficult stage, the family had to walk single file on steep mountain paths too narrow for Annuo to hold on to anyone. On one side was a sheer mountain wall. On the other, a precipice of jagged rock falling a thousand feet below. Sometimes rain turned the path into slippery mud.
At one point, Annuo knew she was in trouble when her legs began to wobble. Beyond her feet was a dizzying drop. One slip and she would be swallowed up by what appeared to be a bottomless chasm. Unable to move for fear of slipping over the edge, she squatted in her tracks, terrified.
“Annuo, we can’t stop here; you must get up!” Muma implored. Annuo moved her foot and
watched a rock tumble down the side of the cliff. “Don’t look down,” her mother said calmly. “Just put one foot in front of the other. You can do it.” Annuo willed herself to get up. That night, they found a small ancestral shrine belonging to a nearby household. Inside, they each ate a boiled egg and tried to sleep amid some family’s gods and ghosts. Sleep brought Annuo little peace; she couldn’t forget that she would have to brave the mountain again with the morning’s light.
* * *
—
THE FOUR-MONTH TREK WAS more difficult than anything Annuo could possibly have imagined. Somehow she just kept going. When they finally reached Jiangxi in June, it felt like a miracle.
On the cool, cloudy day that they reached the Nationalist government outpost, her father wasn’t there. Exhausted, the family moved into a dorm-like rooming house. Eventually her father returned from the battle zone, and they were reunited, laughing and crying together. He moved them into a large ancestral shrine that was almost as big as a small house, but then he mostly stayed away, busy with his official responsibilities. Annuo saw little of him.
During their long march through remote areas, the small band of travelers had had no news of the war. They didn’t know that Germany had surrendered until they reached Jiangxi and even then didn’t realize that Japan was close to defeat. Just two months after they arrived in Jiangxi, Annuo’s father came rushing to their quarters, shouting, “The war is over! At last the war is over—Japan has surrendered!” He and Annuo’s mother jumped up and down, hugging each other and laughing. Annuo, too, shouted in both joy and amazement. She had never seen her parents so happy—or in an embrace.