Shanghai Shadows (27 page)

Authors: Lois Ruby

“I'll never forget you, Mrs. Kawashima.” I kissed both her cheeks and started up the gangplank. There were hordes of people everywhere, and the ship's whistle warning that we'd be pulling up anchor soon.

One familiar voice cut through the throng. “Wait, missy, wait for me!” I spun around, and there was Liu parting the crowd. He rode Peaches like a unicycle, with his arms straight up in the air, just as I'd seen once in a circus. He tried to pedal up the gangplank, but a white-uniformed crewman blocked Liu's path. I watched a ferocious argument between the two and made my way down to the dock to rescue the crewman from Liu's badgering and the loss of his wallet.

“Liu, what are you doing here?” The crewman backed away, clearly relieved.

“We go to America,” Liu said merrily.

“I go. You don't have a ticket.”

He waved an envelope. Did he have a ticket after all? Was he planning to go with us to set up his con artist enterprise in America! Was America ready for the likes of Liu?

The envelope was gray and crumpled and sweat-stained. “Somebody give this to me for you, missy. Long time ago.”

“Who?”

Liu shrugged his shoulders, motioning someone tall, sad-eyed. What an actor! “He told me, when missy leave China, give her.” Still straddling Peaches, the combat boots he'd finally grown into flat on the ground, Liu said, “Good trip to America, missy. I watch out for Shanghai till you come back home and whistle.”

Home. This city was as much home as anywhere, yet never
home
.

“Bye-bye, missy, so long,” Liu called to me, saluting like an American soldier as he stormed his way through the crowd on Peaches.

I scurried up the gangplank seconds before the crew pulled it up into the belly of the ship.

Most of the passengers were on the deck watching as we sailed out of port. The voices on the shore called out: “Bon voyage!” “Auf Wiedersehen!” “
Sayonara!
” “
ZÃ ijiÃ n!
” But it was the silence and solitude I craved, not the farewell party, so I locked myself in my cabin. Beside my bed was a crystal pitcher of pure, cold water, so clear that I could read the clock on the other side of the room through the water and glass, even in the late-afternoon shadows.

Liu's envelope looked like something salvaged from the trash, which was Liu's home, of course. Clutching the envelope, I lay down on crisp white sheets that transported me to a distant memory of Viennaâsticky, wet starch and Mother's hot iron sizzling on a sheet still damp from the clothesline. Clean, everything in my cabin was clean and clear and quiet.

I turned the splotched envelope front and back. No writing on it. Liu said someone had given it to him for me, but the one thing I knew for sure about Liu was that you couldn't believe most of what he said. Maybe he was embarrassed to admit that it was really from himself. I tried to imagine what might be inside. Certainly not a farewell letter, since Liu couldn't read or write a word, not even his own name in his own language, and anyway, a good-bye letter would be too sentimental for hard-boiled Liu. And it wouldn't be money, since he had none, although I suspected he had a cache of booty stashed away under a pylon somewhere, and one day he'd be rich as a warlord, growing fat on sweetmeats and hundred-year-old eggs.

Liu, yes, I'd even miss the conniving bandit.

I opened the envelope, and out slid a rough sheet of sketch paper. Charcoal from the face side had bled through. My trembling hands unfolded the paper with my heart racing in anticipation. And there it wasâa delicate sketch of a short bridge that dipped and rose gracefully like a harp. Smudges of black represented a Japanese couple strolling arm-in-arm across the bridge, suspended above gently rolling waters. In neat block letters the artist had captioned the sketch:

Kobe, Springtime

D.R. 1943

The motors churned, and the ship's whistle signaled that we were pulling out of port. Soon Shanghai would be a dot on the far horizon. So much behind. So much ahead.
Maskee!

Author's Note

When I was five in 1947, I lived on a Caribbean island. The Dominican Republicâfor its own self-serving reasonsâwas one of the few countries that opened its borders to Holocaust survivors without passports and without quotas or restrictions. My mother, then a young widow, worked for the American embassy as a translator for the Jewish refugees who poured into that country. She met a Polish man who had survived Hitler by escaping to Shanghai. Now he needed an American wife so he could immigrate to the United States. In an act of enormous generosity and faith, my mother married the manâand divorced him within weeks, according to their agreement. He never lived with us, and I have no idea what became of him once he settled in America.

Since then I've had a simmering curiosity about the Jewish experience in Shanghai. What was it like for European Jews to live in so alien a place as China? How did it feel to be stateless? To know that your homeland would never welcome you home again? To wonder where on earth
was
your home? And if the Japanese were aligned with Hitler, why did they shelter some twenty thousand Jews in their midst?

Years ago my husband and I went to Shanghai to capture details for this book. We visited a site dedicated to the “stateless Jews of Europe,” in a lovely new park greening the ghetto of Hongkew (now spelled Hongkou). With tears running down our faces, we stood in front of that granite monument and read the words engraved in English, Hebrew, and Chinese. Around us stood a respectful half circle of elderly Chinese people who must have been puzzled by the reactions of such sentimental foreigners. This book,
Shanghai Shadows
, began to take form that day, and it has been with me every day since.

Two bits of information tie up the loose ends of this story. You have read about an entire Polish yeshiva (rabbinical seminary) of some four hundred students, teachers, and their families, all of whom were transported to Shanghai through the defiant courage of a Japanese diplomat named Chiune Sugihara. These men of the Mirrer Yeshiva continued their religious studies with barely an eyeblink of interruption. I've wondered where all those future rabbis ended up, and now I can account for one of them. My youngest son married a woman whose father grew up in Toronto. As a boy, he studied at a religious schoolâunder the rigorous tutelage of one of those rabbis who survived Poland, moved through Japan and China, and resettled in Canada. Many years passed, and now my husband and I share a beautiful granddaughter with that Toronto man.

But that's still not the end of the story. In May 2002 I presented a paper on Jewish children's literature at an international symposium in Nanjing, China. My novel sprang to life during that trip. And so with the publication of
Shanghai Shadows
, and the birth of Hannah Miriam, to whom this book is dedicated, the story begun more than a half century ago comes full circle.

Selected Biliography

BOOKS

Barber, Noel.
The Fall of Shanghai: The Splendor and Squalor of the Imperial City of Trade, and the 1949 Revolution That Swept an Era Away
. New York: Coward, McCann & Geohagen, 1979.

Bloomfield, Sara J., ed.
Flight and Rescue
. Washington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001.

Davidson-Houston, J. V.
Yellow Creek: The Story of Shanghai
. New York: Putnam, 1962.

Dong, Stella.
Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City
. New York: William Morrow, 2000.

Gilkey, Langdon.
Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure
. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Heppner, Ernest G.
Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto
. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

Kranzler, David.
Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938â1945
. New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976.

Lu, Hanchao.
Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Mochizuki, Ken.
Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story
. New York: Lee & Low Books, 1997.

Pan, Guang, ed.
The Jews in Shanghai
. Shanghai: Shanghai Pictorial Publishing House, 1995.

Pan, Lynn.
Tracing it Home: A Chinese Journey
. New York and Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1993.

Patent, Gregory.
Shanghai Passage
. New York: Clarion Books, 1990.

Sergeant, Harriet.
Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures, 1918â1939
. New York: Crown, 1990.

Tobias, Sigmund.
Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai
. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Tokayer, Marvin, and Mary Swartz.
The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II
. New York and London: Paddington Press, 1979.

Wei, Betty Peh-T'i.
Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China
. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.

PERIODICALS AND PAMPHLETS

Hannah, Norman B. “Strudel in Shanghai.”
National Jewish Monthly
(October 1979): 35â47.

“Jews of Shanghai: The Story of Survival.” Canadian China Society, March 21, 2002.

Kersey, Mary E. “Refugees Pour Into Shanghai.”
Living Age
(October 1940): 159â163.

Kuhn, Irene Corbally. “Shanghai Revisited: A Postscript.”
Gourmet
(April 1990): 102 +

“Ohel Moishe Synagogue.” Jewish Refugee Memorial Hall of Shanghai, [1998?].

About the Author

Lois Ruby is the author of eighteen books for middle graders and teens, including
Steal Away Home
,
Miriam's Well
,
The Secret of Laurel Oaks
,
Rebel Spirits
,
Skin Deep
, and
The Doll Graveyard
. Her fiction runs the gamut from contemporary to historical and from realistic to paranormal.

An ex-librarian, Ruby now writes fulltime amid speaking to bookish groups, presenting at writing workshops, and touting literacy and the joys of nourishing, thought-provoking reading in schools around the country.

No one would love to have a spirit encounter more than Ruby, so she explores lots of haunted placesâMyrtles Plantation in Louisiana, Theorosa's Bridge in Kansas, dozens of ghostly locations in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and even a few spooky spots in Australia, Morocco, and Thailand. No spirits have tapped her on the shoulder yet, but it could still happen; she hasn't given up hope.

Ruby and her husband live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the foothills of the awesome Sandia Mountains.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Julianna Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1365-9

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com