Escape from Shanghai (19 page)

Shanghai was a great place to explore. For the equivalent of a few pennies, I can see the old moving picture shows. You look into an eyepiece, turn a crank and watch a series of still photographs flip from one frame to the next. The people in the photos appear to move from frame to frame. Naturally, these moving picture shows were all pornographic. And the vendor didn’t stop me from watching as long as I paid him the money.

The CARE packages from America used to contain these small sample packs of Camels or Lucky Strikes with three to four cigarettes in them. You could barter one of these sample packs for a bowl of hot noodles. It was the same with a Hershey’s Chocolate bar. And if you were lucky enough to get a CARE package, you could live on it for a week. The
poor scrambled for them. The crooks hijacked truck loads of them. And the bureaucrats routed them directly to their homes, right from the ship. Very few poor people got those life-saving packages.

The CARE packages were worth more than the yuan. They had real tangible value while the yuan was just printed paper that lost value everyday.

Once I came upon a long line of people. There was an open army truck parked at the head of the line. I asked someone what he was waiting for and he said that they were giving away loaves of bread. With nothing else to do, I decided to stand in line. I waited and waited, wondering why it was taking so long for the three men on the truck to give the bread away. Meanwhile, word had spread and the line grew longer. Finally, I looked up at the man standing on the tailgate. I asked for a loaf. He studied my face for a long moment, and then decided to grant me his largess as if he held my life in his hands. And for most of the starving poor in line, I think he did just that: people’s lives were in his hands and he knew it.

During that hour or so, this small-minded bureaucrat must have felt like an all-powerful king giving bread to his poor starving people. And he had the arrogance and audacity to take his time to dispense the food. It was as if he wanted to lord it over us.

This loaf of uncut bread was as hard as a brick. God knows how long it had been sitting in the truck before the bureaucrats thought it was time to deliver it to the poor people of Shanghai. I couldn’t even break the bread into chewable chunks. I walked away and discreetly handed the loaf to a dejected-looking little girl standing nearby. She had given up. She knew that by the time she got to the head of the line, all the bread would be gone.

I knew how she felt because I used to wait in line for the CARE packages. I didn’t even get close to the truck before all the packages were gone. I would have had to get up at dawn to get in line to wait hours for a CARE package.

Today, I can envision this very same scene being repeated again and again around the world. It wasn’t a pretty sight then, and it isn’t a pretty sight now.

Men bought sex with cigarettes from the CARE packages. The trade was so blatant that a child could see it.

Once, out of curiosity, I tried to buy sex with a chocolate bar. The girl agreed and took the chocolate. I knew what to do from watching the peep shows but I was only ten years old and too young to do anything. The girl was my age. She enjoyed the chocolate. I enjoyed the experimentation, and maybe she did too. This was classic “You show me
and I’ll show you.” (It would appear that this game is universal.)

While life was moving right along, every morning people showed up dead on the streets. The first time I saw a dead man on a Shanghai street, I thought he was asleep on the sidewalk.

By 1946, Shanghai had regained her stature as a shipping center. Incoming ships brought relief supplies from America, while outbound ships of all types and sizes were loaded with Japanese prisoners to be shipped home. At the end of the war, there were approximately 2,000,000 Japanese soldiers in China waiting to be shipped back to Japan.

One day, when Mom and I were walking to the Bund, we passed a large white Victorian-style mansion surrounded by a tall, black wrought-iron fence. A group of Japanese prisoners were sitting on the lawn. When they saw us, they rushed, en mass, to the fence. They were naked but for a white loincloth, like a sumo wrestler’s mawashi It was a hot summer day. They waved and shouted at us.

“Buy my watch, cheap!” one shouted as he stuck his arm between the iron bars.

“Here! A gold ring!”

“Do not even look at them,” Mom said. “They are disgusting. Like animals.”

“What do they want?”

“They want to sell the watches and the rings that they stole. They want money, food and cigarettes. Do not look at them.”

“How come they’re here?”

“They are waiting to be shipped back to Japan. Shanghai does not have enough prisons.”

“How come they don’t wear any clothing?”

“That’s their traditional loincloth. The Japanese are barbarians.”

Mom lowered her head and walked away in obvious disgust.

What’s significant is the fact that none of the captured Japanese soldiers were decapitated or slaughtered,
en masse
, after their surrender. China certainly had the opportunity, but not the will. We waited for the war-crimes trials to dispense Justice. But that is not to say that people didn’t take vengeance into their own hands. I’m sure many Japanese soldiers were killed by angry vengeful citizens.

Meanwhile, the Chinese people are still waiting for a formal apology from the Japanese government for the Rape of Nanking. Japan’s refusal to admit wrong-doing and the Chinese restraint from
extracting vengeance is a telling reflection of the two societies.

For the Japanese to apologize would mean that they would have to admit that their soldiers behaved in a barbaric and dishonorable way in Nanking. This would be a near impossible thing for them to do because the Japanese think of themselves as a polite and proper society. They tend to defer to their superiors and they bow with respect to each other at every meeting. They are so polite and thoughtful that they don’t count their change at a cash register. Why? The thinking is that if you count your change in front of the cashier, then you would be insulting him for not trusting in his ability to count. This would be an insult and a loss of face. After all, a cashier should know how to make correct change. He’s paid to do that job.

The Japanese people are extremely sensitive to this kind of behavior because they fear that the person who has lost face would commit suicide. Consequently, they cannot believe that their soldiers would do such unspeakable things in Nanking. After all, it is the Samurai Code to uphold honor until death. There is no honor in massacring women, children and the helpless. A Samurai who violates his honor code must commit seppuku or ritual suicide. Consequently, to admit that they committed
the massacre at Nanking would be to admit that they did a dishonorable thing. And, taken to its logical but extreme conclusion, the consequence of such an admission of dishonor would be to commit mass suicide. Clearly, this is something that they cannot do, and this is why Japan has not apologized.

It would be up to the newer generations of Japanese to make the necessary attitudinal changes to allow this to happen, but this is unlikely because the Rape of Nanking is not mentioned in Japanese textbooks. The Japanese simply cannot accept the fact that their soldiers had raped and pillaged Nanking.

With the resumption of commercial shipping, mail began to arrive at regular intervals from America. It had been nine years since Mom had heard from Dad.

“Your father said he’s looking forward to seeing us. He wants us to send him a picture. He does not know what you look like, you know. You were just a baby when we came back to visit grandpa. We will have to get reacquainted with him. We will be starting a new life in America.”

Once reliable mail delivery from America had been established, Mom began to get letters from
my father. Invariably, there would be crisp new bills carefully folded between sheets of letter paper. Mom had requested tens and twenties because they were the preferred denominations for bribing Chinese officials. And we would need a steady supply of dollars to get our travel documents.

I treasured the envelopes with the cancelled American stamps on them. The really valuable ones were those that showed a clearly legible New York City postmark.

Each letter from my father meant that we were so much closer to leaving Shanghai. The city had become a frightening place. My mother would no longer take me out for a movie at night. The last time we went, a thief reached into the rickshaw and snatched her gold-framed glasses from her face. By the time she screamed and the rickshaw driver stopped, the thief had disappeared into the darkness.

Ever since that incident, Mom would clutch her handbag securely to her side. She instructed me to walk next to her with my arm touching her purse. That way no pickpocket could get at her money without first brushing me aside.

We always took a safe, less busy but longer route through the secure international section. Here, the streets were broad and clean and nearly deserted. The large estates that lined the wide boulevards were
well maintained; the lawns sparkled like fields of green gems.

We finally exited the wide streets into downtown Shanghai. Ever cautious, she clutched her purse tighter against her body. People overwhelmed the sidewalk and overflowed onto the main thoroughfare, choking traffic. Drivers maneuvered their cars and trucks with one hand on the wheel and an impatient palm on the horn. Rickshaw drivers ignored the cacophony and made their way through the mass of bodies by following their own invisible path.

Mom led the way to an open plaza in front of the large white, Greco-Roman-style bank.

Moneychangers hovered about its grand white marble steps. They converged on her like prospectors after gold.

“Best price for American dollars!” they shouted as we approached.

“How much?” Mom said.

That was what they wanted to hear. The rush was on.

“How many dollars?”

“Twenty,” Mom said.

“1,400,000,” said one voice.

“1,450,000,” said another.

With that quote, most of the moneychangers left.

“1,500,000.”

“1,600,000.” said a gambler. He knew that in a few days, it would reach that height.

That ended it. The winning bidder motioned to his subordinates. They brought over a suitcase. Mom inspected the bundle of neatly wrapped 10,000-yuan bills. Satisfied that she had received all 1,600,000 yuan, she gave the man her twenty-dollar bill.

Mom hailed a rickshaw and she securely wedged her bag of money between us. When we reached the old section of the city, she covered her mouth and nose with her handkerchief. She made me do the same because she didn’t know whether the smell was raw sewage or rotting flesh. In either case, the air was not healthy to breathe.

We followed this routine whenever Mom needed Chinese money. The moneychangers in front of the bank gave better exchange rates than the official banking system.

The dollar and the British pound sterling were the only currencies that people wanted. She used to give me a 1,000-yuan note to buy an after-school snack. As the hyperinflation continued, my daily snack allowance increased to a 10,000-yuan bill a day.

Mom exchanged her U.S. Dollars for yuan only when absolutely necessary. American dollars were as good as gold.