Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  But what would you have done if I hadn’t? Benny felt like shouting. He stayed silent.

  Before she left, his mother spoke to his younger siblings as if she were sending them off to school: “Be good children, and mind your big brother.”

  Benny was speechless as he watched his mother leave with his father’s servant. At seventeen, Benny had never been responsible for anything, not even for himself. Servants had bathed, clothed, and fed him until he left for boarding school. Even there, almost all decisions had been made for him. Now this lightning bolt.

  His mother was running off with another man and leaving him with four younger siblings. His father was locked up somewhere; Benny had no idea how to find him. His dreams of college and becoming a doctor had imploded. Heaven and hell had traded places.

  SHANGHAI, 1945

  Wartime Shanghai had changed Ho Chow. His years as a teenager had been spent in utilitarian vocational school classrooms and an unfinished attic room that was so hot in summer that his perspiration left unsightly streaks on his books and assignments and so cold in winter that water froze overnight in his drinking glass. Even the room’s single five-watt bulb flickered unreliably, thanks to the enemy’s relentless austerity. The playful second son of the landowning Changshu family had transformed into a no-nonsense student and serious young man. From the moment of his arrival after his near disaster with the boat bringing him to Shanghai, Ho had associated the teeming city with war and danger, separation and loss. For him, Shanghai was the place to work hard and study, not to play, especially with his mother sacrificing a small fortune on him.

  Ho had breezed through his four years at Zhonghua Vocational, learning all he could about the practical applications of science at his nonacademic school. The lad from Changshu kept his promise to stay focused and to steer clear of trouble, even when he saw other boys having fun at the Great World Amusement Center, sneaking a peek into the Lido dance club next door to his Shanghai home, or watching the latest films in one of the popular movie palaces. He had too much at stake to get sidetracked.

  In 1942, Ho’s mother and elder brother, Hosun, had managed to rejoin the rest of the family after making their way through Japanese-occupied areas to Medhurst Road. Ho had been sad to see that his mother’s hair had turned almost completely white, the harsh years etched in the lines on her face. She soon added her voice to the cautious admonitions of his grandmother and sister, Wanyu, to stay on the straight and narrow path. Other boys his age were earning money to help their families, but Ho’s mother still encouraged his studies. Struggling Chinese families sometimes pooled the money of many relatives to support the education of a promising son, even sending him to graduate school overseas with the hope that their investment would pay off one day. Ho was grateful for his family’s belief in his ability to accomplish something worthwhile. His thoughts before he went to sleep each night were always the same: Mother, I will do my best to be a good son. I promise to make you proud.

  There was just one thing that could turn Ho’s head: a shiny, sleek automobile. He was fascinated by them, all of them. DeSotos, Fords, Bentleys, Renaults, LaSalles, Buicks, Citroëns—he admired their beauty, their utility, and the science that created them. China needed to produce its own cars, trucks, and planes to free itself from dependence on foreign imports, he believed. One day he would produce a homegrown car for his country. He was certain it could be done, and he was just the one to do it. That was his dream.

  Later that year, Ho graduated at the top of his vocational school class. Teachers there recognized his talents and encouraged him to apply to Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, the “MIT of China.” One of the nation’s most respected universities, the school had been established by the emperor himself in 1896. Many of its graduates successfully pursued advanced degrees abroad and were responsible for building China’s bridges, dams, and power plants. The more that Ho learned about Jiao Da, as the school was also known, the more he was certain that he needed to study there.

  But that would prolong the financial strain on his family. Ho reluctantly asked his mother about applying to the school, knowing that the cost of food and other necessities was skyrocketing. To his surprise, she didn’t balk. With his elder sister and brother both working, his mother was confident they’d manage. She added, “I still have a few pieces of wedding jewelry to sell, if needed. When the war is over, we’ll be able to collect rent from our land once again. It is my wish that you apply to the university.”

  Jiao Da’s entrance exam was more difficult than any test Ho had ever taken. He was competing with several hundred other middle-school graduates for only thirty seats in the mechanical engineering program. Many had gone to better schools like Fudan or the missionary schools. He knew that his preparation at the vocational school had not been as rigorous as theirs. But on the day the test results were posted, it didn’t take long to find his score: He ranked number twenty-seven for the class of thirty. He had made the cut.

  Ho’s first year at Jiao Da, starting in the fall of 1943, challenged his self-confidence. Classroom seating was determined by test-score rank. His was seat number twenty-seven at the back of the class. For the boy who had always been first, it was embarrassing to take an unfamiliar spot in the last row. He also discovered that he was nearsighted when he couldn’t see the blackboard from his seat. Ho started wearing thick eyeglasses rimmed with wire. To reduce time wasted on matters he deemed trivial, Ho clipped his hair short, almost to his scalp, not caring that other boys were styling their pomaded hair into a Clark Gable look. With his thick glasses, high forehead, and close-cropped hair, Ho looked more bookish than ever.

  Once he was able to see the classroom clearly, he had a better sense of his competition. To improve his class standing, he tried to study harder than before. He bought a secondhand bicycle, which saved him time and made it easier to circumvent military patrols. One student missed almost a full day of classes because a Japanese soldier decided to march back and forth across Nanjing Road, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Shanghai. The lone soldier, with his bayonet-topped rifle in hand, brought traffic to a standstill for hours. Chauffeured businessmen, socialites in pedicabs, rickshaw coolies, and cart pullers—no one dared to cross the path of the mad soldier.

  In 1944, when Ho was twenty and in his second year at Jiao Da, he moved from his grandmother’s attic into one of the crowded dormitories. Living as frugally as possible and studying constantly, Ho steadily advanced, step by step, to the number one seat in the class. His Jiao Da professors were encouraging him to consider graduate school in the United States. But during the war years, the Nationalist government had ceased offering the competitive national exam that granted top scorers the permissions and visas needed for overseas studies. Only the very wealthy and well connected were able to circumvent travel restrictions to send their children out of China. Students like Ho had to wait until the visa program resumed. His professors urged him to pounce if the chance arose. An engineering degree from America would top off his honors from Jiao Tong University, they said, and his family’s investment in him would pay off a hundredfold.

  When Ho shared his professors’ advice with his family, once again his mother was enthusiastic. To have a son with an advanced degree from the United States would bring great honor to their family. She promised her support, no matter what the sacrifice.

  Ho’s dream was coming into focus. He wanted to study with the world’s best engineers and scientists in America so that he could one day build his cars in China. Not even the lilting voices of the singsong girls around his campus could distract him. Other, less motivated schoolmates fell prey to the cabarets, gambling joints, brothels, and opium dens that proliferated in the former foreign concessions and the Badlands. But not Ho.

  Still, there were other, less decadent pursuits in Shanghai that could have derailed him. Protests and upheavals were common occurrences at Jiao Da, which was also known for its fervent
activism. Underground Communists, Nationalists, and other Chinese political parties always wanted to recruit Jiao Da students. Many of his classmates aspired to use scientific methods to modernize China. Ho wanted that too, but he had been warned many times by his family to shun politics. Everyone knew stories about idealistic students who disappeared, most likely meeting a tragic end. Ho had ideals—but he was also pragmatic. He believed he could best help China by keeping his head down, focusing on his dream. As the number one student in his department, he’d have a good shot at graduate study in America. Then he’d build a car factory in China and bring good fortune to his family.

  * * *

  —

  HO WAS IN HIS last year at Jiao Da when some astonishing news came over a forbidden radio that students had secretly rigged up. On August 6, 1945, the United States had dropped a deadly new “atom bomb” over Hiroshima, Japan. The blast was so strong that it had flattened the city, destroying everything in its vast range. Three days later, another A-bomb devastated Nagasaki. Thousands of Japanese civilians were reported incinerated to death or critically burned from the blasts. The Jiao Da scientists and engineers buzzed, speculating about the powerful energy this weapon had unleashed and wondering if it would be enough to halt the eight-year war.

  On August 15, they had their answer from the Japanese emperor himself. The enemy was surrendering!

  Ho rushed into the streets with his fellow students shouting, “It’s over; it’s over! Japan is defeated; China has won!” Exuberant, Ho joined in the dancing with complete strangers. Then he jumped on his bicycle and pedaled as quickly as he could to Medhurst Road, yelling as he pushed open the door.

  “Mother! Elder Sister! Brother! Have you heard? The war is over!”

  His mother reached her arms around her children as they jumped for joy together. “Finally, we can go home to Changshu,” she laughed, tears streaming down her face.

  Yet at Ho’s campus, anger soon followed the announcement when the same Japanese soldiers who had cruelly occupied the city for eight long years continued to patrol its streets. Indignant students gathered to read news posted on bulletin boards that reported on Japanese troops still fighting against Chinese—the Communists—in the country’s northeast after the surrender, logging more than one hundred clashes in September, on direct orders from the Nationalists and Americans. In Shanghai alone, one hundred thousand armed and uniformed Japanese soldiers were still in control after the formal surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. Many students believed that the decision to use “the Japanese to hold off the Communists” had been made at the highest levels in Washington, D.C.

  Shanghai’s residents could only fume as their despised enemy continued to hold them at bay. Once again, Ho’s cautious family warned him to avoid trouble. But the delay gave Japanese and German officials plenty of time to pack up their war booty. Kempeitai torturers at Bridge House burned records of their war crimes, while many enemy soldiers simply discarded their uniforms and blended into the Japanese civilian section of Hongkou. The uncertainty stymied the sixty-six hundred interned Shanghailanders, who were reluctant to leave their decrepit camps without knowing where they might go.

  It came as a relief, then, when American GIs began arriving to disarm and demobilize the Japanese—and to bring back Chiang’s Nationalists from the inland provinces before the Communists could step in. After the surrender, crews from the U.S. Tenth Air Force began flying continuous missions on their Dakota transport planes to ferry 110,000 Nationalist officials and crack troops to Shanghai and other key cities.

  Jubilant, cheering crowds lined both banks of the Huangpu River on September 19, 1945, to welcome the USS Rocky Mount, flagship of the Allied fleet, as it entered the port of Shanghai, offering indisputable evidence that the devastating war was over. Ho’s family stayed home to celebrate their survival through the war years, his grandmother and the cook arranging a special meal with dishes that Ho hadn’t tasted since he’d left Changshu.

  Three entire U.S. fleets soon followed—the Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh—with a British naval task force not far behind. Shanghai’s new pecking order was clear when the Rocky Mount berthed in the number one spot, which had been the privileged reserve of the British for nearly a hundred years until the Japanese Idzumo had taken it over during Japan’s occupation. Before long, more than one hundred thousand American sailors, soldiers, and fly-boys—farm boys who had been fighting on remote islands and jungles in the Pacific, now waiting to be demobilized—were let loose among the people and temptations of notorious Shanghai.

  Ho and his fellow students watched in amazement as nearly every other storefront in Shanghai was converted into a bar overnight to accommodate the soldiers hungry for R and R. Prostitution became more blatant than ever. The U.S. military command declared several brothel districts off-limits until venereal disease could be contained. The unenforceable order brought hoots of derision on the Jiao Tong campus, its location in the Badlands giving students a clear view of the vice dens and their eager customers.

  The Americans began to reshape Shanghai. Even the simple act of crossing the street required greater care. For a hundred years, Shanghai had observed the British left-sided traffic flow. Now American GIs were powering through Shanghai streets in their fast jeeps and trucks—on the wrong side of the road. Newspapers, freed from Japan’s censorship, earnestly reported the details of accidents and deaths caused by American soldiers, to the great consternation of Shanghai’s locals. But the Americans won the right-of-way. On January 1, 1946, all traffic in the city was ordered to switch to the right-hand side of the road—a change that many predicted would shut down the city. The process intrigued Ho, especially when Shanghai adjusted without a hitch. The British Empire’s influence on the city was waning fast.

  * * *

  —

  THEN CAME THE MASSIVE transition of power and property from vanquished to victor. At first, everyone cheered at the arrests of traitors, collaborators, and puppets of the Japanese enemy who had benefited from the suffering of their fellow Chinese. But the demand to punish war criminals exploded into sweeping recriminations. Anyone with a grudge and a modicum of authority could point a finger and shout, “Hanjian!” The initial optimism for peace was soon dampened as accusations of collaboration spread like a poisonous cloud through the former occupied areas. Colleagues and neighbors, teachers and university presidents, were arrested while well-known traitors—even Nazis and other Axis officials—avoided prosecution and landed positions in the returned Nationalist regime.

  The toxic claims began to infect students at Jiao Tong University, and other schools as well. Ho and his classmates who had stayed in Shanghai during the war found themselves publicly accused for attending the wei Jiao Da—“fake” Jiao Da. Some returning Nationalist officials insisted that the true patriots and “real” Jiao Tong students had gone inland after 1937, answering Generalissimo Chiang’s call to establish the wartime capital in Chongqing. Indeed, the faculties and students of many universities, including some from Jiao Tong, had made the thousand-mile trek inland from Shanghai on foot, with great numbers falling ill and dying along the way. Those who made it to Chongqing established makeshift universities without the benefit of textbooks, laboratories, or chalkboards. At war’s end, two parallel Jiao Tong universities emerged: the returned students from the makeshift Jiao Da in Free China and Ho’s campus in Shanghai.

  Over the weeks and months after the surrender, the split grew wider on every campus. Instead of having a joyful reunion, the students who had lived under enemy occupation were now stung by accusations. Ho and the other “fake” students were being called out as puppets and collaborators. Some accusers were embittered returnees seeking targets to blame for their years of misery, while others saw an opportunity to get revenge or to climb over the disgraced.

  Ho’s discomfort turned to alarm and dismay as his own academic record was chal
lenged. Living under the Japanese occupation hadn’t been easy. His family, too, had suffered the privations of war. Now, after all his hard work and his family’s sacrifice, everything he had accomplished was diminished, and his loyalty to China was in question. To make matters worse, the students who stayed in Shanghai were academically much stronger than the students from the interior, who had lacked essential tools for a solid education—and it showed.

  In 1946, the returned Nationalist authorities imposed a “reconversion” training program on the teachers and students who had remained in Shanghai. They declared that “fake students” like Ho were “corrupted,” just like the collaborators and traitors. They even called Ho and his cohorts “puppet students” who lacked the political understanding of the “real” Jiao Da students. The new Ministry of Education questioned the validity of the academic records of graduates from colleges and middle schools in occupied Shanghai. It created a special program in Nationalist ideology, requiring all such students to take the course. Students and graduates who failed the exam would be considered corrupted, their reputations tarnished and their diplomas and academic credits rendered worthless. Teachers were also to be tested for their loyalty to and knowledge of Nationalist principles.

  Ho was horrified—and indignant. Why should he be stigmatized solely because his family hadn’t joined the difficult exodus to the interior? He had been only thirteen in 1937. Neither his elderly grandmother nor his sick brother could have endured the journey. Everyone had personal reasons for the choices they had to make during the long war. How could all of the thousands of students in Shanghai during the eight years of enemy occupation be corrupt puppets? With such accusations of ideological inferiority, Ho worried that his dream was slipping away, falling like a stone into the filthy Huangpu River.