Shanghai (108 page)

The Assassin looked away.

“Don't,” she snapped.

He turned back to her. “I meant no—”

“I am not ashamed to love a child, a Japanese child—and you should not be offended to watch me love her. We are living after the light—things must change—or the darkness will return and never leave.”

The Assassin took a breath and then said, “Have your people accepted your child?”

“No, but they will. They must. My stepfather married my mother, outraging both his Jewish community and my mother's Han Chinese family. It was not a perfect marriage. What marriage is perfect? But it was an important marriage, it turned the entire city around—just as a great Indiaman sailing ship turns slowly into the wind.”

“Another kind of White Bird on Water,” the Assassin said with a nod.

Jiang stared at him for a moment. Finally she said, “Rumours are spreading that the red-haired
Fan Kuei
is with you and the Guild and that he has a magic child.”

“A Han Chinese boy, not a magic child.”

“He loves this Chinese boy, doesn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, a red-haired
Fan Kuei
raising a Han Chinese boy, and a Chinese courtesan raising a Japanese girl—surely we are after the light.”

It was the kind of talk that made the Assassin uneasy. “So we support Mao's entrance into Shanghai, even with the Confucian at his side?”

“Mao is the Man with a Book, so we support him. It won't be hard. The people of Shanghai are already furious with the corruption and incompetence of the Kuomintang government, and if Chiang Kai Shek were to show his face he would be pelted with garbage.”

“Agreed. But should we hurry things along?”

“Naturally. That is what the Ivory Compact does. But the Confucian is not to be killed—he may well be more valuable to us as Mao's advisor.”

“He will turn on you and me and the Carver. He cannot permit us to continue to exist and still hold his position.”

Jiang thought about that and nodded, but then she added, “For now, we do nothing about him.” “But he is committed to the return of Confucian rule, not to the building of the Seventy Pagodas.”

“I agree. But Mao is more anti-Confucian than Chiang Kai Shek, so we shall wait and see how this plays out. Prepare the way for the arrival of the Man with a Book and perhaps the Seventy Pagodas are closer than we think.”

* * *

ZHONG FONG rubbed his eyes with his little hands.

“Don't, Fong, your hands are dirty.”

“Papa?”

“Yes, who else did you think it would be?”

“I don't know, but my eyes hurt.”

“Because you're tired.”

“Aren't you tired, Papa? We worked all night long.” Suddenly Fong propped himself up on his small elbows and stared at his father. “Why aren't you sleeping, Papa?”

“Don't be frightened, Fong.”

“Why are you dressed? Is it time to work already?”

“No, Fong, it's not time to work.” Fong saw his father take a deep breath, then he heard him say, “It's time for me to go.”

“Go where?”

“Shh—you'll wake your cousins.”

“But where are you going?”

“Be brave, Fong.”

“Why, Papa? Why do I need to be brave? Why are you dressed? It's not time for work. Where are you going?”

“To fight, Fong. It is time for me to go and fight.” Before Fong could speak, his father put his index finger to the boy's lips. “Remember the Peking Opera I took you to?” Fong nodded. “Remember how sad you were when the Serving Man didn't get to stay with the Princess from the East?” Fong nodded again. “Remember how unfair it was that the Serving Man couldn't marry the Princess? Remember you asked me why the Princess couldn't stay with the Serving Man?”

“She loved the Serving Man and he loved her, but she had to stay with the Prince of the West who didn't even like her.”

“Exactly. So you remember?” Fong nodded and began to cry. His father wiped away his tears. “Do you know where I'm going?”

Fong nodded.

“Where, Fong, where am I going?”

“To a place to make things fair.”

“Right, Fong. I'm going to fight so that the Serving Man can marry the Princess of the East if they love each other. That's a good idea, isn't it?”

“Yes, Papa,” Fong said, but his tiny body began to shake.

“Hold out your hand, Fong.”

Fong did, and he looked up into his father's kind eyes. Then he saw the two delicately cut glass beads his father held out to him. “For me, Papa?”

“Yes. The very first time I saw the History Teller play the Princess from the East his necklace broke in the river-crossing scene. The glass beads scattered, and many went into the audience. Some people wanted to
keep them, but I insisted that they belonged to the History Teller. People gave me their beads, and I gave them to the History Teller at the end of the performance. He thanked me and gave me two of the glass beads to keep—which now I give to you, my special son, my gift above all gifts.”

His father held him and said, “I have to go because it's the right thing to do. It's time that the Black-Haired people knew a little bit of fairness. You agree, don't you?”

Fong's head nodded. His father leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Fong's tiny fingers went into his father's hair and held his face close to him. He smelled the deep odour of his father, then he let him go. But as his father got to the door, Fong called out, “But who will protect me from Grandma?”

* * *

SHORTLY AFTER FONG'S FATHER, and thousands more like him, slipped out of Shanghai to join Mao's forces, the Nationalist government hit on the idea of printing enough money to keep the people “happy.” By the end of 1946, four and a half trillion new Chinese dollars had been printed. Inflation soared to the point that the money was literally worth less than the paper upon which it had been printed. One American dollar traded for over a million Chinese dollars. By 1949, the figure would reach six million Chinese dollars.

Prices were raised four times a day. Stalls were set up outside banks so that people could withdraw money and immediately spend it while it had some value. Many workers insisted on being paid in rice.

Ironically outsiders thought that Shanghai was prospering. People dressed well and ate out—they had no choice. The money they made on Monday would be worthless by Friday, so everyone spent on anything they could find. Overnight, straw sandals, the traditional footwear in Shanghai, disappeared, to be replaced by the far more expensive leather shoes.

White-collar workers and salaried employees left their offices for labourers' jobs, or they starved. To further complicate matters, over six thousand refugees arrived in the city every day, quickly swelling its population to over five million—two million more than when the Japanese marched into Shanghai less than a decade before.

Some of the truly wealthy were quick enough to avoid the Kuomintang net—big money has always been peripatetic.

The
Fan Kuei
traders initially tried to revive their businesses but quickly saw the futility of such actions. Vrassoon sold off all his Shanghai holdings and moved them, and himself, to the Caribbean. Once there, he reinvested his wealth in South America. Most of the traders followed Vrassoon's example and got out of the city at the Bend in the River.

Shanghai's inflation was a direct result of Chiang Kai Shek's refusal to share power with the Communists. It forced him to spend over eighty percent of his budget on his army. Despite American efforts to broker a peace between Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Tze-tung, by July 1946, any talk of reconciliation between Chiang and Mao had stopped and the civil war began in earnest.

America withdrew all its troops, although it continued to supply materiel and money to the Republican cause.

Mao's troops swelled to almost three million men, and by 1948, he was poised to take Manchuria and the Nationalists' cities north of the Yangtze. But it wasn't his troops that were giving Mao victory—it was the support of the people.

In a final idiotic financial manoeuvre Chiang Kai Shek declared a gold currency pegged at one new gold
yuan
to four American dollars. Three million old Chinese dollars could buy one gold
yuan,
and every-one—everyone—was required to convert all their savings to the new currency. Chiang put his son Chiang Chiing-kuo in charge of the program—and like his father, the son resorted to terror and the ransacking of private homes to enforce the new law.

Wages and prices were frozen.

The ruse worked for less than a month. Value is value and will not be denied by government fiat—a lesson that even Communists eventually learn.

Chiang's last supporters in Shanghai, the middle class, rose up against him. They had surrendered their life's savings for yet more worthless currency. It was widely believed that the whole point of the gold
yuan
conversion was to further line the pockets of the powerful.

When Chiang's son, evidently in a fit of conscience, went to investigate these accusations, the trail quickly led to such powerful families as the Kungs. Hearing this, his mother, Madame Chiang Kai Shek, flew to Shanghai and publicly slapped her son—putting an end to what little effort he had expended to make the system fair.

Meanwhile, the Chiangs, the Soongs, and the Kungs were transferring all their wealth, stolen and personal, to the United States for safekeeping. In one notable incident, a plane from Chunking heading for America had
to ditch due to mechanical difficulties. When American General George Marshall came to the rescue, he and his men were stunned to find the plane stuffed with American currency that the Soong family was sending to its bank accounts in the United States.

And the Soongs were modest in their theft compared to Madame Chiang Kai Shek and her husband.

And the people knew—so the end was inevitable.

Important Republican generals began to defect to the Communists, complete with whole battalions. The rest was just a matter of time.

Hsuchow fell, leaving Nanking open to attack.

Then Tientsin—then Beijing surrendered peacefully to General Lin Paio's Red Army.

Ten days earlier Chiang Kai Shek had resigned, “for the good of the nation.” Of course, it made no difference. His plan to rape and rob China of its vast wealth and transfer it to Taiwan was almost complete. The final movement of this extraordinary thievery happened in the dead of a February night when, without explanation, the length of the Bund was blocked off and, within clear view of people in the Bund's buildings, the entire horde of gold bullion from the Bank of China was carried in buckets at the ends of coolies' poles down the great street, out onto the public wharf, and put on a freighter that left before dawn for Taiwan.

The last few weeks of Nationalist control of Shanghai were the worst. Martial law was enforced viciously. The remaining soldiers stole anything they could get their hands on before removing their uniforms and disappearing. Daily executions of “Communist sympathizers” took place. Many young men lost their lives to Kuomintang firing squads.

Mao's troops crossed the Yangtze River in mid-April, took Nanking without a fight, then turned toward Shanghai.

The Nationalist troops left the city for Woosung, at the mouth of the Yangtze, in an action that many described as their most successful manoeuvre in the entire war.

By noon on the twenty-fourth of April, 1949, gunfire could be heard in the suburbs of Shanghai. By evening it had stopped.

The great city held its breath.

Just after midnight, the vanguard of Mao's peasant army marched into the city at the Bend in the River. They stared at the movie palaces and the towering hotels and stores bursting with goods—and the thousands upon thousands of starving citizens.

Then they passed the high wall of the Garden, and stopped, and awaited orders from Mao's Shanghai commander, the Confucian.

Slowly, the people of Shanghai came out to greet their new liberators. One, a young boy, ran for miles along rooftops looking intently at the soldiers' faces, searching.

The next morning, the Red Army marched, rank after rank, down Bubbling Spring Road. Seemingly from nowhere huge red banners proclaiming Shanghai's new freedom appeared across every intersection, and street wardens, carefully chosen, specially trained, and given their positions by the Confucian, took control of every large building. These new officials were of “good peasant stock,” and they loathed the sophisticated city of Shanghai and all its residents.

And the people saw new rulers slide into place. Many cheered. Others remembered the old saying about the devil you know.

All the while, one young boy strained to get a better look at the faces of the soldiers—to find the gentle face of his father, who had left to “make things fair.”

* * *

THE CONFUCIAN set himself up in the Vrassoons' headquarters on the Bund and summoned the forty Confucians who would be his lieutenants.

“We will subdue the tendencies of this sinful city. Every trace of the
Fan Kuei
influence will be removed. Every non-Chinese element will be removed. Remember that everyone, everyone at the Bend in the River has been infected with the
Fan Kuei
disease. Be merciless. These stiff-necked people will obey the rules coming from this office or they will feel the righteous wrath of the Revolution.”

After another half hour of this ranting he sent them away. Then he called in another man, a rat of a man, and asked simply, “Is it secure?”

The man nodded. He had, as instructed by the Confucian, taken a large piece of land on the western reach of the Yangtze and had his men begin to build a prison. It would eventually be the largest political prison in the world, and its very name—Ti Lan Chiou—would make even the bravest of the citizens at the Bend in the River think twice before breaking a rule, no matter how ridiculous or petty.