Escape from Shanghai (18 page)

That’s how you learn to write Chinese. You copy the characters over and over until you’ve painted each brush stroke perfectly. You’re graded on how well you copy the words. Later, you’re graded on how well
you write in freehand, without copying. To become educated in writing Chinese, you had to spend years of your young life just copying. And you’re talking about anywhere from 2,000 characters to 50,000 characters. The first would be enough for you to read the newspaper, and the second would make you a Mandarin.

Having suffered through this process, I can guess why so many Chinese are illiterate. Learning how to read and write was a full-time job. A farmer just doesn’t have the time to sit every day and copy words for hours on end, not if he wanted food in his bowl. But what bothered me more is this: suppose you’re not manually dexterous enough to handle a brush in this precise and demanding manner? Suppose you were born with a heavy hand where your large muscles were better developed than your small ones?

Surely, many people had been left behind in the Chinese educational system due to muscular development?

Though I had the physical ability to handle the brush properly, I couldn’t catch up on the volume of work that I had missed. And I was considered to be a disruptive student because I didn’t know that it was wrong to ask “why?”

My teachers sent notes home with me nearly every day. This disheartened both Mom and me. Clearly,
the teachers didn’t know how to deal with a boy who didn’t know the rules of the game. And they didn’t take the time to teach me the rules. They expected me to know them.

Thankfully, Mom ignored the reports of my absences. She knew we wouldn’t be in Shanghai much longer. Still, she felt compelled to warn me about playing hooky on the streets of Shanghai.

“The streets are dirty, full of disease. People are dying of TB. They spit in the streets,” she cautioned as she waved at the window. “You must be careful, you know!” she said sternly.

Other than the educated elite of China, everybody spat. It was both unhealthy and disgusting. (It would take a major re-educational effort by Mao Tes-tung and the Communist Party to stop this disgusting national habit. Today, nobody spits on the streets.)

“What do you do when you’re not at school?” Mom asked with no recrimination in her voice or demeanor.

“This morning, I went to the market.”

“Why did you go there?”

“There’s a man who does magic tricks, and a strong man who breaks stones with his bare hands. They sing operas in a tent. There’s a lot to see and do—and learn.”

The market was an exciting place. But not a place for genteel folk. Located in the International section, it attracted the servants of the rich. Servants shopped there for their employers. Furthermore, this was an entertainment center for them. A place for them to relax, trade stories about their respective employers and just hang out during off-duty hours. Rarely did a servant get a full day off. I hung out with them. And nobody thought anything about a ten-year-old boy wandering around the marketplace. This was a common sight. The poor just can’t afford school, not to mention the orphans who had to find way to survive. Children my age picking through garbage was an everyday, normal occurrence. If anything, I was the exception because I didn’t have to scavenge.

“They have book stalls that rent all kinds of books. I read a few, too!” I told her. I wanted her to know that I was learning, but in a different way.

“Oh,” Mom said as she raised her eyebrows. “What kind of books did you read?”

“Classical stories.” There were pornographic books, but I didn’t mention that, though I’m sure she knew.

Mom knew about these open-air bookshops. The classics I mentioned were pocketbook-sized with two black-and-white line illustrations on each page. The
bookstall rented the books. The writing was simple but it was the pictures that told the story.

“You read comic books all day?”

“No, I explored. There’s a lot to see. I learned how a moneychanger worked. The man used a hot fire to melt the gold. You should see how he does it. Then he’d pour the melted metal into a bucket of cold water. That’s just how great grandfather must have found out about his fake coin, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that is the traditional way. What else did you see?” she asked.

“I saw the opera. I liked the fight scenes. They danced with swords and lances. And they sang. Oh, there was an orchestra, too.”

“An orchestra?”

“You know, drums and cymbals and strings.”

“Which opera did you see?”

“It was about a king and his favorite concubine. She wanted to be his queen because she had given him a son. But the king still loved his queen, so the concubine killed her.

“And then bad things happened after that. The queen’s father attacked because his favorite daughter had been killed.”

“Did he really come to avenge his daughter, or did he come to conquer a new kingdom?”

“I don’t know. The marriage made peace between the families, and then there was no reason for peace. They were fighting all the time during the time of the Warring States.”

Mom flashed a surprised look on her face. “You know about the Warring States?”

I nodded.

“What else did you do?”

“Well, I walked a lot. There are lots of places to go. The other day I went to that ancient pagoda.”

“That quite far isn’t it?” she said with amazement in her voice.

“It was a nice walk. Not as long as those marches that I used to make with the soldiers.”

“Did you learn anything about the pagoda?”

“Yes. A lot,” I bragged to justify my actions. “The pagoda is a thousand years old, the monk told me.”

“You talked with the monk?”

“Yes. He gave me lunch and tea.”

“What did you talk about?”

“The war.”

Mom looked at me and ran her gentle hand down my cheek. “What did you do with your lunch money? Did you give it to the monk?”

“No, he wouldn’t take my money. He told me to spend it on good things.”

“On good things? Such as?”

“I spent it on renting books. He told me it was all right to read the comic books. They told the history of China. He said that a good emperor is like the father of a big family. We should respect and honor him. But a bad emperor is not good and we should not obey nor honor him because he does not deserve it.”

“You liked the monk, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I like talking to him.”

“I see. That’s good,” Mom said approvingly. “What else did you do?”

“I walked to the old city where Great Grandpa went. And I walked across the crooked bridge to the teahouse. Why is the bridge crooked?”

“Because evil spirits travel in straight lines, so they cannot cross the crooked bridge.”

“Oh.”

“What else have you seen?” Mom pressed on knowing that I had played hooky often.

I really didn’t want to tell her for fear that she would stop me from exploring, but I changed my mind because I wanted to know why people did things like this. “I saw a dead baby on top of a garbage can.”

Mom was visibly upset. “You did not touch it, did you?”

“I almost touched it. I thought someone had left a doll on top of the garbage can. It was so white. It
looked like a doll without any clothes. And it was fat, too.”

“Go wash your hands,” she said firmly.

“But I didn’t touch it.”

“Go on,” she said shaking her head, “God knows what kind of germs you came in contact with!” She shoved me into the bathroom.

“But that was a few days ago,” I protested.

“I don’t care. Just wash your hands. Always wash your hands when you come home, understand! It does not hurt to be careful,” she said as she stood over me.

I didn’t argue because I knew how disease-infected the streets of Shanghai were. There were dead bodies everywhere. The cleanup crews couldn’t keep up with the death rate. “Who would leave a dead baby in the garbage?” I asked.

“The baby probably belonged to a servant. She probably killed her daughter. It was a girl, was it not?”

I thought it was a doll because it didn’t have anything between its legs. I nodded in reply.

“The mother probably could not afford to feed her or bury her. It is possible that her employer told her to get rid of the child or face dismissal.”

“Why?”

“Because it is expensive to feed people.”

“That’s not right, is it?”

“No,” she said. “But people are desperate. They will do anything to survive.”

“Why is it all right to kill girls and not boys? Imagine if grandpa killed you, then I wouldn’t be here, would I? You know what else? There aren’t any women beggars, are there? All the beggars are men. Did they kill all the women?”

“In a way, I suppose they did. That dead baby you saw did not have a chance to become a beggar, did she?”

“No.”

“Unfortunately, it is more complicated than that,” Mom explained. “Women are not allowed to beg, you see. Ancient customs often do not make sense. Do you know why Chinese Emperors are all men? Or why men are the only ones who can become Mandarins and scholars? Did you know that all the famous women opera stars are really men playing a woman’s role?”

“The women in the opera...”

“Yes,” she said. “Are you surprised?”

I nodded.

“The reason that boys are more valuable than girls is that boys have a better future. Boys have more opportunities. Boys can become scholars, painters, writers, judges, policemen, governors...even women
opera stars! Girls do not have those opportunities, so we are less valuable.”

Mao and the Communists used the inequities between the sexes and between the rich and the poor to recruit people to their cause. Their movement was so successful that when they won the revolution in 1949, the poor people didn’t hesitate to kill the wealthy. Mistreated servants turned on their employers and delighted in their slaughter. No mercy was shown simply because no mercy had ever been given.

“Come, sit down. There is something important I want to tell you. We are going to America,” she announced softly, smiling.

“When? How?”

“As soon as I can arrange it,” she said. “You are an American citizen, you know.”

“I am?”

“Oh, yes. You were born in America. That makes you a citizen. We can go back to America to be with your father.”

“I’m an American? Not Chinese?”

“You are both.”

“Really? How come?”

“Well, if you are born in America you automatically become an American citizen,” Mom said. “That is how all the people in America became citizens.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I thought it was safer not to tell you. You see, the Japanese would have killed you if they knew.”

“I would have kept the secret. Didn’t I keep all our secrets?”

“Yes you did, and I am very proud of you. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have you with me.”

“We went through a lot, didn’t we?”

“They were difficult years, but we made the best of it.”

“Remember that time when we had nothing to eat all day but one egg? We couldn’t even get a bowl of rice.”

“Many people starved to death that year. We were lucky to get the egg. Life will be much better in America. The President promised that there would be a chicken in every pot!”

That was inconceivable. “What’s America like?”

“The Chinese name for America is Mei Kuo, or literally, Beautiful Country. It is big, almost the same size as China. Shanghai is on the same latitude as New York. The two cities have about the same climate. And Canton is about where Miami is. That is why your grandfather calls Canton the Miami of China, you see. People in America live in their own houses and every family owns a car.

“Americans are the richest people on earth. They have all the natural resources. They have oil, coal, steel. They can make anything. In New York, they have the Empire State building. It is one hundred stories high!”

I really couldn’t visualize such a tall building. My frame of reference was limited. It was enough that America was the only country that was capable of building such a building. Perhaps that’s why today, nearly all former third-world countries want to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. It would be visual proof that they were no longer a poor, third-world country, but one on a par with the United States of America.

“Is it true that everybody in America sleeps on inner-spring mattresses?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, all of them,” Mom said in a matter-of-fact voice.

The reason that I was so impressed by the idea of the inner spring mattress came from grandpa. He told me that at least a hundred coiled metal springs made up one mattress. To produce one million mattresses means that American industry had to make 100 million springs to put into those mattresses. Multiply 100 million people by 100 million springs
and you have a mattress-making industry that’s capable to producing 10,000,000,000,000,000 springs. The number was so big that I didn’t know what to call it. And grandpa wouldn’t tell me because he wanted me to learn it on my own.

“Do you know why Japan lost the war?” grandpa asked me. “If America can produce all those springs, how many bullets do you think they can make to kill the Japanese?”

Suddenly, I was proud to be a citizen of this powerful and wealthy country. “When can we go?”

“We have to get passports and visas. They say it will take a year for me to get a visa, and only if I bribe the right officials,” Mom explained.

“And then we can go?”

“Yes,” she said. “Now, you must not play hooky, do you understand? You must do your best to learn in school. You have to prepare for school in America, you know.”

“But if I’m going to America, why do I have to learn Chinese?”

Mom laughed.

I continued to play hooky not in defiance of her wishes, but because Mom hadn’t objected very strenuously. We both knew that learning how to read and write Chinese was going to be a waste of time. The coming challenge would be learning English. She
already knew that we wouldn’t be coming back to China anytime soon. Her tacit approval of my exploring Shanghai was a strong vote of confidence in my ability to take care of myself. This attitude boosted my self-confidence immeasurably. Moreover, she thought it would be better for me to be a street-smart kid than to be a book worm—which was most unlikely simply because I hadn’t been exposed to books, yet. She knew what I needed to learn and it wasn’t going to come from a classical Chinese education. She gave me the freedom to satisfy my curiosity.