by Helen Zia
On December 11, 1948, Wanyu wrote:
THERE HAVE BEEN LOTS OF RUMORS IN CHANGSHU IN THE LAST FEW DAYS. PEOPLE’S HEARTS ARE WEIGHING WHETHER TO FLEE OR TO STAY. LOTS OF PEOPLE IN OUR PROVINCE ARE RUNNING TO SHANGHAI, WHILE THE RICH PEOPLE IN SHANGHAI ARE RUNNING TO HONG KONG, TAIWAN, OR EVEN TO AMERICA. MOTHER AND I HAVEN’T LEFT CHANGSHU YET. IT’S NOT BECAUSE WE AREN’T SCARED, BUT (1) WE HAVE PROPERTY IN OUR HOMETOWN; (2) IT’S VERY EXPENSIVE TO MOVE OUR BIG FAMILY TO ANOTHER CITY; (3) I AM HOPING TO FIND A JOB IN SHANGHAI; (4) MY HUSBAND IS WORKING IN NANJING TEMPORARILY. HE MAY HAVE A CHANCE TO GO TO TAIWAN, BUT THE ODDS ARE SLIM.
As 1948 came to a close, the letters from Ho’s family continued to chronicle the last gasps of Chiang Kai-shek’s army and government. In the northeast, the Communists surrounded two Nationalist armies that had retreated to the city of Changchun, laying siege to the walled city for months, starving an estimated 100,000 soldiers and 150,000 civilians to death and forcing those remaining to surrender. At the same time, the Communists had gained the support of millions of farmers by promising land reform—to redistribute the acreage from rich landlords to poor farm families. The Red Army, now called the People’s Liberation Army, had killed or captured more than a million Nationalist troops, taking critical firepower from the defeated army’s tanks, heavy artillery, ammunition, and other weaponry, much of it from the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops, from foot soldiers to generals, were defecting to the Communists. Replenished, the Communists were ready to advance south to the Yangtze River and the city of Shanghai.
Ho’s heart sank as he imagined the soldiers bivouacked in the Chow family compound, helping themselves to whatever they wanted. He could picture the panicked buying sprees and bank runs in Shanghai, workers getting paid and then rushing out to buy anything they could grab that would hold its value better than the near-worthless paper money. Most of all, he could feel his family’s pain as the Nationalist government continually raised taxes on everything, on top of the sky-high inflation. He knew that it would be impossible for his family to send him more money.
The troubles back home meant that Ho’s internship was more important than ever. As much as his heart ached for his family, Ho needed to focus on learning how to take an engineer’s design into production, from blueprints and machining the tool-and-die works to producing a finished product. Together with some other engineers, he built a prototype of a simple car, a three-wheeled motorized vehicle that could be mass-produced in China. Inside the immense industrial building that housed China Motors, Ho and his colleagues drove around in their little car. They nicknamed it “the Playboy.”
When Ho wrote home, he kept his letters upbeat to assure his family that he was fine. There was no point in adding to their concerns when he was safe in America and they were facing disaster. He painted a rosy picture of the factory, its prospects for business, and his experience of building a prototype car. He was making progress, he averred, toward his dream of opening a factory of his own. As often as he could, he’d send a five-dollar bill to his mother along with photos of himself at the factory or in New York City.
But in fact all was not good at China Motors. The company was relying on Chinatown merchants in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to fund its vision of selling manufactured goods to markets in China. With the Nationalist economy in a nosedive, the business model was collapsing, and investors were abandoning the venture.
For Ho, the first sign of the company’s troubles came when payroll was delayed by a week in early December. Then the paychecks stopped completely. Without his stipend, Ho couldn’t pay his rent. He quit his rental and moved into the cavernous factory, where he slept on an old couch in the frigid, unheated building.
The new year began with Ho caught in his own crisis, while the economic turmoil in Shanghai was so desperate that his sister and brother were advising their mother to sell some of the family’s land. In the countryside, the growing land reform movement in Communist-influenced areas made it difficult to collect rent from tenant farmers as well as harder to find buyers for their choice farmland. More relatives from the extended Chow family in Changshu had moved to the house in Shanghai, all crammed together. No longer able to afford domestic help, they let their servants go. Even more shocking, one of Ho’s uncles, a big landlord, had killed himself, unable to bear the pressures of the Communists’ land reform measures. Chairman Mao had declared landlords to be the class enemies of the peasant farmers.
Other students in Ho’s circle shared letters telling of mass meetings in rural farm areas that targeted rich landlords. In Communist-liberated areas, landlords were being “liquidated” in the name of land reform and their confiscated land redistributed. Norwegian missionaries observed landlords and other targets being severely beaten, tortured, sent off as beggars, with a death sentence for anyone offering them aid. Some reports estimated that one in six landlord families had had at least one family member killed in these political movements as the Communists gained strength in northern China. Ho realized that none of this could bode well for his family.
Then Hosun wrote on January 1, 1949:
PLEASE IMMEDIATELY SEND NINE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS TO US OR AS MUCH AS YOU CAN DEPENDING ON YOUR SITUATION. MOTHER AND I ARE ANXIOUS DAY AND NIGHT. THIS TIME IT’S THAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS ASKED FOR MORE TAXES. IF WE DON’T PROVIDE IT, WE COULD BE ARRESTED.
Ho’s brother wanted back the nine hundred dollars that he had sent only a few months earlier. Ho had been counting on that money for his doctoral studies, but he knew that his family must have been desperate to ask for it back—especially when their losses in transaction fees would be doubled. Scrambling to find out how to send money to his family in Shanghai, Ho followed the advice of his Chinese colleagues—he wired the U.S. dollars to his family via the Xinhua Bank in Shanghai, for conversion into Hong Kong dollars. He sent all that he had.
By early 1949 the great flight out of Shanghai was in full swing—industrialists, intellectuals, businesspeople, the middle and affluent classes, Nationalist loyalists, foreigners, landlords, missionary converts, Eurasians, the frightened and the anxious. Those who lived in the rural countryside headed to regional cities, where they felt they would be more secure from advancing soldiers. Meanwhile, those in the provincial cities with the means to reach Shanghai fled there, hoping to find safety in its large numbers, and of course those in Shanghai with a reason to fear the Communists were rushing to get out of China. Everyone was looking to escape to a safer place. Ho’s family, with its large landholdings, would undoubtedly encounter the wrath of revolution. Yet it was still unthinkable that a peasant army could take control of a city like Shanghai, let alone all of China.
Ho felt utterly helpless, unable to do anything to assist his family and struggling to sort out his own tangle of problems. To maintain his student visa status, he needed to be enrolled at a university, especially since his internship at China Motors was in trouble. He made an urgent appeal to the University of Michigan for a fellowship to continue his studies, but immediate funds weren’t available. He frantically began to search for alternative schools that could enroll him and sponsor his visa. Desperate, he persuaded a mechanical engineering professor at New York University to take him on as a doctoral student. Ho would receive no financial aid, but he had just enough cash from his internship to register. At least he’d keep his student visa and not face deportation.
Amid this swirl of uncertainty, Ho learned that on January 21, 1949, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was forced to resign from the presidency of the Nationalist government, ceding his title to a political rival, General Li Zongren. The news was a shocking confirmation that Chiang’s military was in retreat and his government doomed. His resignation was headlined on the front page of The New York Times: CHIANG RELINQUISHES POST.
Ho and his fellow students were so unnerved that they conferred daily to glean any information that might help them piece together what w
as happening to their own families. The tectonic shifts back home were so stunning that Ho’s hands shook whenever a thin blue aerogram arrived.
With Chiang’s resignation, Communist leader Mao Zedong temporarily ceased fire, attempting to reach a settlement with the new president, General Li. But Chiang still held the real control of the government and its treasury. With little power and no money to pay his soldiers or officials, Li was in no position to bargain. His peace talks with Mao failed, and the Communist advance toward the Yangtze River continued.
On January 22, 1949, the day after Chiang Kai-shek resigned from the presidency, China Motors shut down. Ho was owed more than a month’s back pay. He was not only out of work; he was homeless.
* * *
—
ALL HIS LIFE, HO HAD relied on his mother, elder sister, and brother to make the important decisions for him, to guide him on what to do. Should he rejoin his family in Shanghai? At least then they’d be together in this disastrous time. Where in America could he find help? Ho turned to the list of Jiao Tong students that he had volunteered to compile on his transpacific voyage just sixteen months earlier, when his future had seemed so bright. This social network of Jiao Tong alumni was becoming a lifeline for students like him who were caught up in China’s upheaval. He contacted some Jiao Tong graduates in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan near Columbia University, an area popular with former residents of Shanghai and northern China. They offered him a place on the floor of their small apartment on West 114th Street, just as families had done in wartime China. Ho gratefully accepted.
At the same time, Ho needed cash to support himself, as well as to answer his family’s request for money. But he was torn. He had come to America with the expectation of returning with a PhD. Wasn’t his family depending on him to accomplish that goal? Ho had penned a letter with his conflicted feelings and his questions to his mother, asking if he should continue working toward an engineering PhD, keep working in America, or possibly return home. Even with her world collapsing around her, Ho’s mother sent an immediate reply.
In a letter dated January 23, 1949, Ho’s mother wrote:
SON, YOU ASKED WHETHER YOU SHOULD GO FOR FURTHER EDUCATION OR FIND A JOB. IT IS GOOD FOR YOU TO WORK. FURTHER EDUCATION IS NOT THAT URGENT. WE DON’T KNOW WHETHER WE CAN DO THE FOREIGN EXCHANGE ANYMORE. IT IS SCARY TO LOOK TO THE FUTURE NOW. WE ARE QUITE PESSIMISTIC. DON’T PLAN TO COME BACK. ONE DAY WHEN THE SITUATION IS SAFE, YOU CAN RETURN.
At the end of his mother’s letter, Ho’s brother had scribbled a somber postscript:
WHEN YOU RECEIVE THIS LETTER, WE DON’T KNOW WHERE WE’LL BE. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING RAPIDLY. THIS IS A TRULY CATASTROPHIC TIME, AND WE DON’T KNOW WHAT LIES AHEAD. WE SHOULD EACH TAKE CARE OF OURSELVES. I HOPE WE CAN MEET AGAIN SOMEDAY.
Ho felt as if his blood were draining from his body as he read his family’s messages. Would he see them again? Was his brother saying goodbye? Tears welled up in his eyes. What should he do? What could he do? Every instinct in his body said to rush home, to be with his family, and to comfort the mother who had always sacrificed for him. But his mother had told him not to come back. Ho agonized over his impossible choice.
He learned that a hundred or so students were trying to return to China: Some wanted to go home to reunite with their spouses and children; others had run out of money and thought they’d be better off in Shanghai; still others wished to join the Communists to rebuild their homeland. His few acquaintances in this latter group seemed motivated more by their zeal to aid the long-suffering Chinese people than by any love of Communist ideology. None of those rationales were compelling to Ho, but they added to the churn within him as he lay on the floor of the crowded apartment, unable to sleep. One night he realized, with a start, that he’d begun to rely on himself as he forged a life in America.
* * *
—
DESPERATE FOR MONEY, Ho heard that other China Motors employees had hired a lawyer to get their unpaid wages. He, too, filed a claim, for back wages of $312. He followed his mother’s advice and decided not to return to the University of Michigan to complete his doctorate, even though he’d been surprised to learn that he’d receive a fellowship after all. That came too late; he had already decided to register with New York University as its first mechanical engineering doctoral student. Ho figured that New York was a better place to be during this crisis, since he’d be less isolated and might find a job more readily there.
Ho’s other vexing worry was how to maintain his student visa status when he couldn’t pay for tuition. If he messed up with immigration authorities, he could face deportation. Unsure of what to do, he wrote to the INS office in Detroit, telling them of China Motors’ collapse and his enrollment at NYU with the possibility of a return to Michigan one day. He didn’t mention that he was looking for work or that he was suing China Motors as his former employer, which could also get him in trouble with the INS.
After several nervous weeks, Ho landed a part-time job thanks to his Jiao Tong University network. Lin Yutang, the renowned Chinese intellectual in New York whose popular books on China were acclaimed in America, was looking for a clever engineer to help him design a Chinese typewriter. Ho got the job at two hundred dollars per month—a welcome increase from his stipend at China Motors. Now that he had an income, Ho rented an apartment with some friends at 620 West 115th Street, still in the Columbia University neighborhood where many other Chinese lived.
By April 1949, the Communists had swept over Beijing and Tianjin, unstoppable in their drive southward. Much to Ho’s surprise and relief, the news reported that no looting or mass destruction had occurred in those big cities. Even so, the panicked exodus from Shanghai swelled to epic proportions. Every petty official seemed to find an excuse to use official transport out of the city. Shanghai’s American-educated mayor, K. C. Wu, who had previously urged calm, announced his own sudden illness requiring treatment outside of China—and that he was unlikely to return.
Ho received word that his sister and her husband were on the run somewhere to the west of Shanghai in Anhui Province. They had managed to send a hasty letter to Ho while fleeing from Communist troops in a desperate effort to find a passage to Taiwan. Their stark message, dated April 2, 1949, read:
DO NOT COME BACK TO CHINA. THE SITUATION IS REALLY BAD. ARE YOU GETTING ACCURATE REPORTS IN AMERICA? NORTH OF THE YANGTZE RIVER, THE COMMUNIST PARTY IS EVERYWHERE. WHAT HAPPENED IN NORTHEAST CHINA IS REALLY SHOCKING. THE NATIONALISTS’ STRONGEST ARMIES—THE NEW FIRST ARMY AND THE NEW SIXTH ARMY—COULDN’T DEFEAT THE COMMUNISTS. IF THE AMERICANS DON’T HELP, I’M SURE THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL COLLAPSE IMMEDIATELY. IT IS BEYOND OUR WILDEST IMAGINATION.
THE NATIONALIST GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN LYING TO THE PEOPLE BY PRETENDING THAT THE SITUATION IS GOOD. THEY HELD A LEGISLATIVE SESSION AS THOUGH ALL IS NORMAL, AND THEY EVEN ELECTED A NEW PRESIDENT. IT’S SUCH A PRETENSE, LIKE THE END OF THE SONG DYNASTY IN HANGZHOU. GREAT PARTS OF THE COUNTRY ARE LOST, AND THEY STILL PRETEND THAT EVERYTHING IS OKAY. WE WILL NOT BENEFIT FROM THE COMMUNISTS, BECAUSE WE ARE LANDOWNERS AND PETITE BOURGEOISIE.
Don’t go back? How could he stand by in safety when his beloved family and everything he held dear was on the brink of destruction? Ho could only share his worries with his fellow students, meeting up with them at every opportunity to discuss the latest news published by China correspondents and newswire reporters. Ho was glad that he had decided to stay in New York where there were many other students in his situation. At least he could always find a New York Times, with its frequent coverage of China’s crisis.
On April 21, 1949, the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yangtze River, the vast natural barrier that had kept hostile armies away from the prosperous southeastern region for centuries. No longer. Two days later, there was worse news: The Communists had seized Nanjing, the Nationalist capital. Government officials had already fled the countr
y—in spite of public vows that they would make Shanghai “their Stalingrad” with an all-out defense.
By month’s end, the Nationalists were so afraid that the ordinary people of Shanghai could turn against them with riots to protest the worthless yuan, the food shortages, and their inability to govern, that they mounted machine guns on top of the city’s landmark skyscrapers, turrets pointed at the residents below. Raw recruits in full field gear stormed through the fine restaurants of the Park and Cathay Hotels, startling guests who were dining and setting up their billets inside the luxurious hotels. Other soldiers were so awed by the elevators at the Broadway Mansions, home to many foreign reporters, that they rode up and down for hours, refusing to get off for the residents.
More frightening was the action on the streets as Nationalist soldiers summarily executed dissenters, black marketers, and suspected Communists right on major downtown sidewalks and intersections, including outside the American Club as the lunchtime crowd watched. Nationalist troops dug foxhole trenches at the Bund’s Public Garden next to the British consulate in anticipation of the coming battle.
To Ho, each day’s news was more unsettling. He worried constantly about his mother or brother getting struck by a stray Nationalist bullet or trampled at the market, if they had money to buy anything at all. By mid-May, embassies issued final warnings to evacuate for Americans, British, and other foreign nationals, while Operation Flying Dragon airlifted Shanghai Jews to Canada. The Nationalist police in Shanghai were using martial law to clamp down hard on those who remained. With the government’s arrests and executions, requisitions of property, tight censorship on local and foreign reporters, and destruction of villages and homes, many were more afraid of the Nationalists than the Communists.
On the night of May 24, the residents of Shanghai climbed onto rooftops to watch the sky light up with missiles and firepower aimed at the Bund by Communists in Pudong. The New York Times headline of May 25, 1949, brought the news that Ho dreaded: “Red Troops Enter Shanghai, Seize West, Central Areas; Nationalist Forces Flee.”