Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

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  BENNY’S HAPPIEST MOMENT IN four long years came when he held his St. John’s diploma in his hands on September 14, 1949. He had graduated at last. There was no ceremony, no one to cheer him, none of the pomp and circumstance of past years when graduations had been held at such lavish venues as the Grand Theatre. Missionary-founded schools like St. John’s now faced great uncertainty. Benny was just grateful to have obtained his coveted diploma before his college might be forced to shut down.

  Finally he could look toward his future. Benny quickly landed a job with the National YMCA in Nanjing. Dr. Tu Yu-Ching, the former president of St. John’s, had become the secretary-general of the YMCA in China. Dr. Tu offered Benny a job as his secretary.

  Benny was excited to be of service to the church. Nanjing was only a couple of hours away from Shanghai by train—near enough to visit his father occasionally. It was a hopeful sign that the leaders of the Christian churches were willing to stay in China under Communist rule. If they weren’t afraid to stay, why should Benny worry?

  No matter what God had planned for him, Benny was sure he’d land on his feet. After all, he’d made it through these last rough years. But there remained one gnawing worry that he couldn’t shake: his sister Doreen. If he took the job in Nanjing, she’d be on her own in Shanghai. His trusting sister always seemed so vulnerable. If only he could take her with him. But she had no interest in going to Nanjing, and he couldn’t support her anyway. Still, he couldn’t leave the naïve and sheltered eighteen-year-old behind in a big city like Shanghai with no one to count on for help. If something happened to her, he’d never forgive himself. Benny felt stuck, not sure what to do except pray for guidance.

  The solution came in the form of a letter from his second sister, Cecilia, in Hong Kong. She was expecting another baby, her third, and wanted Doreen to come to Hong Kong and help with the children. That would solve everything, Benny thought excitedly. Doreen would be safe with Cecilia, and all his siblings would be accounted for.

  In the weeks following Benny’s graduation, the People’s Liberation Army defeated the main opposition forces left in China’s southwest. On October 1, Chairman Mao Zedong stood before a sea of millions at Tiananmen Square in his chosen capital of Beijing and proclaimed, “The Chinese people have stood up!”

  The Communist government swiftly imposed new rules for the country—including procedures that would make it more difficult to leave China. Previously, anybody with a ticket could leave for Hong Kong. Now all persons wishing to leave Shanghai had to apply for an exit visa. Under the Nationalists, it had always been possible to bend the rules, for a price. There would be no such slack with the Communists. Already it was growing difficult to get the required exit visa. On top of that, Hong Kong was so overwhelmed with refugees that the British authorities were restricting the entrance of Chinese into the colony—something they had never done before.

  As Benny made preparations to leave for his job in Nanjing, he realized that he needed to send Doreen to Hong Kong soon in case further restrictions were imposed. But his sister was suddenly balking. She was getting nervous about being so far away from Benny—and her parents. In spite of her family’s problems, she wanted to be near them.

  With no time to lose, Benny decided to apply for Doreen’s exit permit anyway. It wouldn’t be possible to buy a train ticket out of Shanghai without one, so he’d have to buy the train ticket afterward. In case he couldn’t convince her to leave, he applied for an exit visa for himself too. One of them would use the ticket.

  Soon Benny had the official response: His visa application had been denied—too many intellectuals were fleeing from Shanghai. But Doreen’s exit permit was approved.

  Benny made his way through the railway offices, as hundreds of others pushed and clamored to buy train tickets for their escape.

  Armed with the official exit permit and the money he had saved up from his odd jobs on campus, he hurried to the Shanghai North railway station. Everyone in the city seemed to have the same idea. Still muscular from his boxing lessons of long ago, Benny made his way through the crowd to the ticket counter. He barely had enough money for the ticket for a train from Shanghai to Guangzhou, leaving in two days. “Don’t complain; you’re lucky you got one,” barked the gruff agent as Benny emptied his bagful of cash. The ticket would take Doreen about nine hundred miles closer to Cecilia. Once she was in Guangzhou, the border crossing to Hong Kong wasn’t far, and he had church connections there who could help.

  Benny didn’t have much time to persuade Doreen to leave. “We have no good family connections here in Shanghai, no guanxi for your future,” he argued. “In Hong Kong, you won’t have to marry a Communist. When things settle down in Shanghai, you can always come back.” Eventually, he convinced her.

  On the morning of Doreen’s departure, Benny helped her pack. Along with her clothes and identification papers, she took the last of Benny’s cash and a few small pieces of gold jewelry from before their father’s arrest. It all fit into a small bag. She tucked the ticket into a pocket.

  When Benny and Doreen arrived at the Shanghai North railway station, they were stunned to find their mother waiting for them. There she was, her features as fine as ever, looking elegant in her high heels and high-necked silk qipao. Somehow she had learned that Doreen was leaving. She pleaded with her daughter to stay.

  “Come live with me in Suzhou,” she begged. “If you go, we’ll never be together again!”

  Benny hadn’t seen his mother since the day he had left his two youngest siblings with her. He didn’t believe that she cared about Doreen, not after the way she had abandoned them all. He figured she needed Doreen to help her with her new babies. He had to counter her entreaties, or else his sister might waver. “You’re young, and you have a chance to have a life,” he told Doreen. “Take it!”

  The train was boarding at the platform. Before Doreen could get on, she had to present her exit permit to Communist customs inspectors and submit to their questions. On the platform, she went into the “Red House”—nicknamed for its color as well as the new regime’s politics. Benny and his mother waited in uncomfortable silence.

  Inside, a scornful inspector rummaged through Doreen’s bag, zealously searching for contraband. As he dug through her things, he pontificated, saying that anyone wanting to leave the new People’s Republic must be a counterrevolutionary. The inspector found her gold jewelry and accused her of hiding it for illicit purposes. The officials seized all of her possessions and pushed her out of the Red House. She ran to Benny in tears, relaying that the inspectors had taken everything.

  As Doreen stood crying, the train engineer tooted the horn, and the conductors announced the last call to come aboard.

  Benny shouted a single question: “Where is your train ticket?”

  Suddenly Doreen remembered and reached down to her hip. “It’s in my pocket!”

  “That’s good enough!” Benny exclaimed, almost carrying her to the departing train. As Benny hustled his sister toward the car door, his mother clung to the girl’s arms, imploring her to stay, pleading that she needed Doreen to care for her as she grew older.

  “No, you mustn’t leave! I’ll never see you again!” she screamed, trying to dig her high heels into the platform as she tugged on Doreen.

  Benny was stronger. He managed to push his sister onto the train just as it began to pull away.

  From the open door, Doreen called out to him. “I have no money, no clothes. Nothing! What should I do?”

  “Go to the YWCA in Guangzhou!” he yelled to her. “I’ll contact them.”

  Doreen stared back at him in silence, her eyes wide with disbelief, as Benny waved goodbye.

  “I’ll never see you again!” their mother wailed.

  Benny spotted Doreen’s ashen face at the window where she was seated, and continuously wave
d to her as the train advanced. He tried to ignore his mother, appalled that she would try to keep her own daughter from her one chance at a better life. At least his mother had failed. He felt a twinge of sadness too, realizing that he no longer recognized the mother he had once adored.

  When the wisp of engine smoke dissipated in the gray sky, Benny finally stopped waving. He glanced at his mother, quiet at last. She was on a bench, rocking as if propelled by a metronome. She glared back at him.

  “You—my firstborn son—how dare you break your mother’s heart?” she cried.

  Swallowing hard, Benny couldn’t answer. Each word from his mother felt like a dagger into his chest.

  With Doreen gone, there was nothing else to say. For a moment, his mother glanced in his direction. He half thought she’d ask about his university studies. When he was a boy, she had tracked his schooling closely, praising his smallest progress and assuring him that he would one day follow his father’s footsteps. But now she only craned her long neck to check on the next train to Suzhou.

  “Goodbye, Mother,” he said gently, shrugging off her silence as he turned to leave, wondering if he’d see her again.

  NEW YORK, 1949

  After Ho received his brother’s cryptic letter expressing enthusiasm for the Communist Liberation of Shanghai, he had no further communication from his once prolific family. Overwhelmed with worry for their safety and the staggering guilt he felt over his inability to help them, Ho could focus on little else as he assembled tidbits of information, whatever he and his compatriots could glean from news and letters.

  If that weren’t enough, another disaster came crashing down on him: In July, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service sent him a notice to appear for a hearing. Ho had sent a letter to the INS requesting permission to work part-time. If he failed to go to this hearing or if he went and said something wrong, he could be deported. If the INS had discovered that he was already working, he could also be deported. What if someone turned him in? Had it been a mistake to sue China Motors for back pay?

  Ho knew of other students who had been detained by the INS and threatened with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interrogations, imprisonment, and deportation. Ho tried to swallow his panic, knowing that his family was being blown around China like leaves in the Communist wind. He desperately needed their advice, but he didn’t even know where they were. Just thinking about his predicament sent him into a nervous sweat.

  He had to consider the possibility of deportation from the United States—but to where? To China and into Communist hands? Or to Taiwan, where he’d never been? On the other hand, if he managed to stay in the United States, he could be dragged down by the anti-Communist tide that was rising in America, targeting anyone Chinese. His family had never favored Communism. Last he’d heard, his sister and her husband were trying to get away from the Communists, to flee to Taiwan. But that might not count for much when most Americans seemed to think all Chinese were alike—and no different from Japanese, Koreans, or anyone from Asia, for that matter.

  Most of the five to six thousand Chinese students in America were in the same dire straits, dependent on their families in China for financial support. The students had to find a way to subsist but were prohibited from working. In addition to the students, another three-to-four thousand Chinese professionals on temporary visas were stranded in the United States as well.

  A few sympathetic Americans wrote to newspapers and politicians, urging Washington and the INS to allow the students to get jobs. As early as January 1949, the U.S. National Student Association in Cambridge, Massachusetts, asked the INS assistant commissioner for rule changes to permit Chinese students to work part-time. In addition, it recommended that the INS lift the requirement that students carry a full course load, so that they would have time to work. Sororities, church groups, and college administrators made similar appeals.

  But there was nowhere for Ho to get basic information on this complicated dilemma. Once again, he turned to his most reliable source of help: other stranded Chinese students. There were nearly three hundred of them in the New York area, attending various colleges and universities. The largest concentration was at Columbia, which was one of the reasons Ho had chosen to live near the university. He’d meet with his compatriots at the student union, the International House, or any available space where they could gather informally and commiserate. Students whose families had fled to Hong Kong were the most likely to receive letters with useful details, since communications from the British colony were unhindered and the steady influx of refugees there brought constant updates on the situation in China. Letters from Shanghai and Taiwan, in contrast, were scrutinized by censors, forcing the senders to share only the blandest of niceties.

  To bypass the censors, some correspondents resorted to code. One educated member of Shanghai’s social set, having decided not to leave his home, arranged to send a message in a photo to his family, who had fled overseas: If he was standing, all was well. If he was sitting, things were bad. When he finally sent them a picture, he was lying down.

  Some students received news in the form of a rebuke. Chinyee, a painter studying fine arts at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York, never imagined that her family would lose its comfortable standing. She had a rude awakening when she wrote to her mother in the spring of 1949 asking for some new qipao dresses. Her mother sent a curt reply: “You don’t know what’s going on here in China. Life in Shanghai has turned upside down. Don’t think of coming back here or to Taiwan either; everything is chaotic. Be happy with what you have, and don’t ask for such petty things.”

  The students were by no means unified in their views about the volatile events back home. One organization at Columbia, the Chinese Students Club, had existed as a social group for a number of years. Some members argued that the club had a moral obligation to speak up about China, while others wanted to keep politics out. The openly pro-Communist students decided to organize their own campus group, naming it the Chinese Students Association. Confrontations between the two groups grew so heated that Columbia’s administration intervened and refused to continue recognizing either organization, denying use of campus facilities to both.

  When Ho arrived in the United States for study, he had joined a group called the Chinese Students’ Christian Association. One of the largest Chinese student organizations in the United States, the CSCA had been sponsored by the YMCA since the early 1900s. Though Ho had eschewed politics, as his family had often admonished, he’d figured that a Christian organization was innocuous enough—and a good place for him to meet Chinese girls. The national leader of the CSCA in early 1949 also made frequent appearances at Columbia, a Chinese Canadian named Paul Lin. It soon became evident that Lin and his wife Eileen were ardent supporters of the Communist government, encouraging students to return home to help build the new China.

  In the early morning hours of May 25, 1949, the People’s Liberation Army marched into Shanghai, passing in front of the iconic Park Hotel.

  After the Liberation of Shanghai, when there was little doubt that the Nationalist era in China was over and the Communists would soon control the country, fear of Chinese Communist infiltrators quickly grew inside the United States. The FBI increased its surveillance of Chinese students and sought out “friendly” ones who might serve as informants. The Chinese Students’ Christian Association that Ho had joined came under intense FBI scrutiny as federal agents fanned out across the country, investigating Chinese student groups and their leaders. Paul Lin was tagged with the FBI label of “rabid pro-Communist.”

  The FBI’s surveillance was hardly a secret, as the agency interviewed a broad range of students and Chinese scholars. Everybody knew someone who had been interrogated by the FBI—or had been contacted themselves. Prominent Chinese faced questioning as well, including Dr. Paul Chih Meng, director of the China Institute in New York, whose board chair was He
nry R. Luce, an influential member of the pro-Nationalist China lobby. In a declassified confidential interview, Meng told the FBI that he believed more than 80 percent of Chinese students in the United States were sympathetic to the Communist government but noted that this did not mean they were all Communists. Other FBI sources estimated that at least 90 percent were sympathetic to the Communist government, again cautioning that this was more indicative of their rejection of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, which many viewed as hopelessly corrupt. To uninformed FBI agents and American politicians, however, the political distinctions between anti-Chiang and pro-Communist viewpoints mattered little. To them, all Chinese were potential Communists.

  The volatility of the American political climate only made matters worse for the students. Congressional debates on what to do with the Chinese added to the tension as their fates swung in the wind. Under the terms of the Immigration Act of 1924, a student visa status expired upon completion or termination of studies. A debate ensued in Washington over whether to allow Chinese students to return to China—and what to do with their visa status if the students were forced to stay in the United States. Some politicians felt that the students should be barred from returning to China to prevent them from aiding the Communists with their American educations. Others, in the tradition of anti-Chinese exclusionists who tried to drive out all Chinese from the Americas, were afraid of any increase in the “Yellow Peril” population. They strongly opposed granting any form of residency to the estimated ten thousand stranded Chinese students and nonimmigrants, a number which far exceeded the official quota of only 105 Chinese immigrants allowed into the United States per year.