Shanghai (104 page)

The Japanese closed all foreign newspapers, although the British
Shanghai Times
and the American
Shanghai Evening Post
were allowed to reopen because they agreed to publish only Japanese editorials. Radio stations were closed, and a new station, XGRS, filled the airwaves with German propaganda. XGRS featured two programs of skits that mocked Allied achievements—one performed by two Americans identified only as Bill and Mack, and the other by two British subjects, a Mr. Gracy and a Mr. Johnston.

All short-wave radios were confiscated, although, oddly, American films were still allowed to be shown, as long as the theatres played a twenty-minute Japanese propaganda short before the movie.

The Japanese systematically took over all foreign businesses, and liquidated them or seized their assets.
Everything that could be shipped back to Japan was. All metal, machinery, boilers, and radiator pipes were ripped from buildings and sent off to support the war effort.

And the name “Bridge House”—designating an eight-storey building on the Hongkew side of the Garden Bridge—entered the now quickly growing Shanghainese lexicon of fear.

The Kempie Tei used Bridge House to torture journalists, businessmen, and common Chinese citizens. Few survived the beatings, the water torture, the disease, and the starvation that were common in that place.

And things got darker. On Christmas Day, 1941, Hong Kong fell, despite the valiant efforts of the Royal Scots Regiment to defend Kowloon. Nationalist radio claimed that a Chinese army of fifty thousand men was on its way to liberate Hong Kong, but like so many of Chiang Kai Shek's military claims, this proved to be a lie.

The Japanese took Singapore, Malaya, and Burma and threatened Australia by crossing the Owen-Stanley Mountains in New Guinea.

Photo exhibits showing Japanese successes and Allied failures appeared on hoardings at major intersections, always under the titles “The New Order of East Asia” or “Asia for Asiatics.”

In June 1942, Jimmy Doolittle's daring raid on Tokyo shocked the Japanese. But their revenge was quick. Many of Doolittle's pilots didn't have enough fuel to get back to base and ditched in the ocean. They were all picked up by the Japanese and brought to Shanghai, paraded half naked down Nanking Lu to the Bridge House, and forced to dig their own graves. All were shot in the back of the head.

Finally, in August 1942, two ships arrived to repatriate civilians. American and Canadian nationals left on the
Gripholm
while the British were taken away on the
Kamakura Maru
.

But neither ship was nearly big enough to carry all of the foreigners anxious to leave the Middle Kingdom. Shortly after the ships left harbour, the Japanese began “relocating” enemy nationals to concentration camps.

In February 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi Gestapo head, sent Josef Meisinger—who had so successfully overseen the butchering of one hundred thousand Jews in Warsaw—to Shanghai to enact the “Final Solution.”

Over a formal dinner, Meisinger suggested to his Japanese hosts, “It is really very simple. We wait until their Rosh Hashanah, when they all go to pray. Give them ten minutes, then barricade the doors and burn down their synagogues, complete with the rabble inside.” He looked at the stunned faces of the Japanese. He turned to his translator. “What's the problem?”

The Japanese were amazed. As far as they could see, this Meisinger looked as Jewish as any other White person. In fact, the Japanese couldn't see any difference between White people whatsoever. More importantly, the Japanese believed the Nazi propaganda claiming that Jews ran the United States, and, knowing that they would eventually have to make peace with America, the Japanese wanted to be able to point to their good treatment of Shanghai's Jews to prove they were a reliable peace partner. So over the following months the Japanese did a lot of smiling, the Germans a lot of fuming and fulminating. Finally the Japanese agreed to
force the Jews who came to Shanghai after 1937 into a mile-square ghetto in Hongkew.

Meisinger considered it at least a partial victory. He then suggested, “Give them twenty-four hours to move their asses into the ghetto.”

The Japanese didn't understand the rush, but it seemed to be important to their ridiculous ally, so they ordered the move. Jews were given ninety days to leave every residence outside Hongkew and “get their asses” into the ghetto.

¨ ¨ ¨

F
ROM THE
H
ISTORY
T
ELLER'S
N
OTEBOOK
:

 

A Japanese armoured vehicle crawls up Tienstin Lu. In front of it trudge three European families carrying suitcases, some leather and expensive, others cheap cardboard. All bulge as if their contents are anxious to spill out onto the street.

The forlorn Europeans are suddenly lost in this foreign land.

A woman stumbles. A Japanese soldier screams at her. A tall man, I assume her husband, steps forward and is forced back at bayonet point. I look at the man's face and record the shock and shame in my mind's secret memory chamber, which, like these forlorn people's suitcases, is crammed full. But I find a place—an honoured place, because the Europeans' countenance carries a profoundly Asian look. A look of helplessness in the face of overwhelming force—the stuff of another Peking Opera. But I am observing, apart, alone with it. It exists. It is—and I just watch——and sense the approach of the cold once again. I hope I am strong enough.

The History Teller closed his small notebook and reached into his pocket. Its emptiness bothered him. There was clearly something missing—and he knew it.

¨ ¨ ¨

Jews obeyed the order and moved into the increasingly overcrowded ghetto in Hongkew. Many ended up back in the public shelters, called
heimes,
that they had first occupied upon arriving. Most had sold almost everything they owned and worked furiously to get out of those filthy places, but they were literally back to where they had begun.

Food quickly became a problem, and the tension between the general Jewish population and the Orthodox yeshiva community became intense. Many of the Orthodox yeshiva Jews were receiving a stipend of thirty American dollars a month from wealthy American Jews. Thirty American dollars was enough to buy eggs and milk and fresh vegetables and meat, while their fellow Jews made do with cabbage and fell prey to dysentery and typhoid and other opportunistic infections that always await the malnourished.

Soft hands, pasty complexions, and rounded bottoms demarcated the yeshiva families.

Germans were now a noticeable European presence in Shanghai. The History Teller had actually been approached by a fish-faced German officer who wanted him to perform an opera by a man named Strauss. He had listened to the music on a gramophone for as long as he could stand it, then asked, “Is this Electra singing or just in terrible pain?”

The German had spat out some slander and then barked in execrable Mandarin, “They said you were the opera expert here.”

The History Teller had bowed slightly at the compliment but declined to introduce Strauss to Shanghai. That night every window in his family's compound was smashed and the front entrance boarded and nailed shut.
Small retribution for an insult in wartime
, he thought as he stood in the middle of the street, but he knew it was just part of the approaching cold.

—

A small boy, not yet five, named Zhong Fong, saw the attack on the History Teller's home while he and his cousins were picking up night-soil honeypots. When the attack was over, he saw the History Teller staring at the shattered windows of his house.

He wanted to say something, to help the older man, but he found his mouth dry and his pulse racing. The previous day his gentle father had taken him to see this man, the History Teller, play the Princess from the East in
Journey to the West,
and he had been enthralled by the singing, dancing, tumbling miracle that is Peking Opera.

He took a step toward the History Teller's home, but the strong hand of his grandmother landed on his shoulder and she barked in his ear, “Is that your home?”

“No, Grandma, but that's the History Teller's …”

“Then why get involved? You have a family of your own that needs every strong back we can get.”

“But …”

“Your business is your family. Not these people. Now pick up the rest of your honeypots and be quick about it or I'll send you to Hongkew and make you pick up
da pitse
's
—
Big Nose's—shit again. The dawn's coming.”

Fong hurried down the darkened city streets. He passed several bodies lying on the pavement. He hoped they weren't dead, but he knew they were. He'd already seen a lot of dead bodies.

“Do they hurt, Papa?” he'd asked.

“No. They are beyond hurt, Fong.”

Fong wondered if being beyond hurt was a good place—he doubted it was, despite the rictus smiles on some of the dead faces.

Fong picked up his pace, frightened that his grandmother would catch him loafing and beat him.

* * *

THE NEXT NIGHT, the part of Chiao Ming's necklace that Maximilian had put around her wrist—wrapped in cheap paper and weighted by a rock—sailed through the History Teller's shattered balcony window.

When he pulled aside the paper, it brought tears to his eyes and his writing brush to his hand. Instantly his confused thoughts began to take form.

That necklace had originally appeared on his makeup table one night. He'd been writing all day and had arrived at the theatre late, so he was rushing to put on his makeup for the Princess role. In his haste he slathered some of the white, pasty base into his left eye. He let out a yelp and grabbed for a towel. And when he'd cleared the makeup from his eye he found himself staring at the necklace hanging from a corner of his mirror—where, he was pretty sure, it had not been
before. He leaned in close and marvelled at the seventy carefully carved structures trapped inside the balls of glass.

Even as his hand reached for the necklace he felt himself near to something special, something holy.

As his fingers touched the necklace he tasted burnt orange on the sides of his tongue and knew the fit would be upon him shortly. He stumbled to the door and locked it. No one had ever seen him in the throes of a grand mal fit—and no one was ever going to see him like that. He steadied himself against the door and made sure the area in front of him was clear. He didn't fear the fit, but he dreaded smashing his head against the edge of a table or knocking over a gas lantern as he fell. But the area was clear—the floor awaited him.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Then it took him, like a bull lifting a man on its horns. It picked him straight up in the air and whipped him to one side. As it did, his eyes fluttered open and he was amazed to see in his makeup mirror a beautiful, tall woman holding him in her outstretched arms. She took the glass-bead necklace and put it around his neck as she whispered, “You do my play great honour.”

And that's all he remembered, until the midst of the performance, when he saw his hand—the one that carried the bamboo stick to indicate that he was riding a horse—inadvertently cut the silver strand that held the beads, and all seventy of the glass baubles fell to the floor, where they bounced and rolled into the audience.

The audience leaped to their feet and shouted their approval of this new invention in the role of the Princess from the East as they hustled forward to grab a bead or two.

The rest of the performance passed without incident, although it was generally received as one of the History Teller's very best.

Only afterward, outside the theatre, when the night-soil collector offered him back the necklace beads, did he recall a striking detail about the beautiful, tall woman who had held him and put the necklace around his neck and told him, “You do my play great honour.” The beautiful woman in his vision had a crimson line of blood around the base of her elegant throat.

He remembered giving Chiao Ming the necklace on her fifteenth birthday. She'd seen him wear it on stage and had loved it. Her wanting it had made it of inestimable value to him, and as special as a song from heaven. Her face had lit up when he placed it by her plate at her birthday dinner. “I'll never take it off, Father. Never,” she'd said, and she had been true to her words, even as, just a few years later, she had lectured him about being a “capitalist roader”—the exact meaning of which he never understood.

And now, part of it was here in his hand, not around her neck where it belonged. Now it was here in Shanghai, while she … she was in Nanking. He looked down at his hand holding the brush, then past the bristles to the paper on his writing desk. He had drawn a long, angry slash across the page with two characters:
cold
and
alone
. Chiao Ming was cold because she was dead, and alone because we all make the first and last voyages of our lives in absolute solitude, without guide or signpost.

He lost his balance and fought off the coming of another fit.

Chiao Ming dead—this could not be. It must not be. He looked at the beads in his hand … but it surely was.

He reached for the paper that had packaged the necklace and was about to throw it away when he noticed a broad ink line on its underside. He turned it over and spread it flat—and there, in crude bold characters was written, “
What Was Ours.
”

He stared at the characters.

He dipped his brush in the ink, then turned the bristles against the stone's slant so that the excess ink fell from the brush and pooled in the well.
Like tears in oolong tea,
he thought. Then he lifted the brush and wrote “
What Was Ours
” on the title page of what he knew was going to be his last and most important work.

* * *

THE JEWS STAYED PRETTY MUCH UNBOTHERED by the Japanese in their very congested, disease-riddled ghetto in Hongkew.