Escape from Shanghai (2 page)

“Here is my entire family. There are no Americans here. We are all Chinese,” he said respectfully, hoping to save the officer some time as he calmly announced the obvious.

I hid behind Mom’s cheongsam or Chinese dress. But I couldn’t help sneaking a peek at those long fearsome bayonets. One quick peek at those sharp glistening points took all the courage out of me. Quickly, I retreated behind Mom’s leg. I had seen the bayonets that skewered Chinese babies.

The fearsome-looking Japanese officer, with his long Samurai sword swinging from his waist, took a slow sweeping look at all of us. Seeing no white faces, he nodded his head in agreement with Grandpa’s statement, then officiously turned on his
heels and marched his men out the door. He had not bothered to check our papers. He was looking for blue eyes and blond hair, just as grandpa had expected. We had passed the first of many tests to come.

The Japanese hadn’t connected my Chinese face with my citizenship. But my mother knew that eventually they would. A copy of my entry visa was at the American Embassy along with a record of my American citizenship. It would only be a matter of time before they found my papers at the embassy. Then it would be all over. The question was how much time we had? The one positive note was that we had entered China in June 1937. The Japanese had nearly five years of paperwork to go through. That could take weeks; it could take months; or it could escape them altogether. But the Japanese bureaucrat was tenacious and thorough. We couldn’t take a chance. It was now a race against time.

Mom had to find a way to get us out of Shanghai before they discovered my American citizenship. To protect the rest of his family, grandpa would send his children and grandchildren to live with relatives in the countryside.

The brutal and barbaric reputation that the Japanese had garnered at Nanking drove the family to take these unnatural risks. We had no choice but
to flee. My mother was horrified by the thought of a bayonet through my belly.

I grew up listening to the reports of the atrocities that had been committed at the Rape of Nanking. I had a cousin who lived in the city at the time of the massacre. Ming and two of his best friends were out searching for potable water when he heard the marching boots of the Japanese. Instinctively he dove behind the rubble of what used to be a wall. He thought his friends were right behind him, but to his horror, they were not. They had been slow to react and a Japanese officer ordered them to stand where they were. His friends froze. The officer ordered them to drop to their knees and touch their foreheads to the ground in recognition of his power. His friends hesitated, unsure of what they should do. They looked at each with fear and bewilderment on their faces. When they didn’t obey fast enough, the Japanese officer impatiently drew his Samurai sword and with two quick, precise strokes decapitated them. Then, without so much as a backward glance, the officer meticulously wiped the blood from his soiled blade with a blood-soaked cloth tied to his belt. Clearly, he had been prepared for the
day’s outing. Then he marched on haughtily as he sheathed his sword.

Ming knew that he had to escape this madness. He buried himself in a pile of dead, mostly headless bodies; some were still warm. The heavy warm smell of blood and death curdled his stomach but he fought hard to stay still and silent. He clasped both of his hands to his mouth to keep himself from retching. For several hours, he did not move. He would let the wave of soldiers wash over him. Once they had passed he would be able to make his way through their lines and out of hell.

When darkness came, he crawled from one mound of bodies to the next. There were so many bodies that the Chinese who had been forced to remove them could not keep up with the slaughter. Ming was able to cover a substantial distance while the Japanese soldiers were eating dinner and getting drunk on sake. He scurried from one pile of dead people to another like a rat in a sewer. Then he came across a series of dead, rotting bodies of school girls naked to the waist. They had probably been raped before they were killed. This abomination had been so terrifying that no one remained to bury the dead. This must have been the place where it all began, Ming thought. As if in confirmation, he suddenly broke into the relative quiet of the countryside almost as soon as he left the piles of victims behind.

He knew now he had gotten through the front lines. He was behind the attackers. Relieved, but still frightened to his bones, he decided to make his way to Shanghai. Ming deliberately stayed away from the banks of the Yangtze River because the Japanese used it to transport troops and supplies to Nanking. He stuck to the countryside, keeping the river to his left as a guide to Shanghai.

He ate grass until he came to a peasant’s house. Thirsty from dehydration, he begged for water. The farmer obliged and he even gave him some cold rice. Ming survived because he was young and in good condition. But he had lost ten of his one hundred and thirty pounds during his ordeal.

When he reached the relative safety of Shanghai, all he could talk about was what the barbaric Japanese had done. He had heard that two Japanese officers held a contest to see which of them could behead one hundred Chinese first. (The Japanese newspapers published this account and even named the two men, not with condemnation, but with respect for their skill and zeal.) Ming knew that the Japanese paper’s report was all too accurate; while he had not seen it take place, during his escape, he had seen row after row of severed heads lined up neatly on the side of a road.

And what was the justification for their barbarism? It was because the Chinese weren’t worth the price of
a bullet. What’s more, we should be honored to die by the feel of the sacred Samurai swords against our necks. But the report that affected me the most was the one where the ordinary Japanese soldier tossed babies in the air and caught them on the ends of their bayonets. Like their leaders, soldiers held their own competitions, but not with Samurai swords. These enlisted men were not allowed to wield that sacred, ancient weapon. They had to use their modern-day bayonets.

But, decapitation wasn’t quite as horrific as the sight of a sharp bayonet skewered into the belly of a baby.

How can any human being do these things?

“You know,” my mother used to say, “the worst thing that could happen to us is that we die.”

It was that simple and final. Death was the worst thing that could happen to us. Her statement defined the limit. I felt comforted, even reassured by her answer. In comparison with death, all else in life was insignificant. I grew up on this philosophy.

Still, I couldn’t avoid constantly thinking about these horrors. Japanese atrocities continued to be discussed even at the dinner table. At grandpa’s house, the men sat at one round dinner table while the women sat at another. We children sat at a
miniature table and on chairs sized to suit our little bodies. Adult conversations flew around the large dining room and between the tables. The children heard everything, but we were not allowed to talk.

The adults no longer asked ‘how could they do these things’—now, they just described what the Japanese had done in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. Incredulity was no more; one accepted the magnitude of the reality—this is who they are, and this is what they do.

The object lesson had been delivered at Nanking. Resistance was useless. The reign of terror had begun. In six short months, Japan had conquered nearly all of the industrial cities in China.

The Japanese had captured and occupied Shanghai in November, 1937. Then they marched inland to Nanking, the capital of the Republic of China, and carried out a policy of indiscriminate rape and murder that December. Sadly, most of the world didn’t even know that Japan had massacred 300,000 people in that city—all within a six-week period. That’s roughly 7,000 people killed each and every day for 42 days. Among those killed were young girls who had been gang raped then split open at the vagina with a bayonet.

What makes this 7,000 number so significant is that these were mostly individual, one-on-one killings
with swords or bayonets. This means that during an eight-hour day, Japanese officers and soldiers were killing an average of 15 people per minute, or one every four seconds, non-stop, throughout Nanking for six weeks. These numbers sound unbelievably high, but when you consider the fact that 50,000 Japanese soldiers had participated in the Rape of Nanking, then that really works out to be six Chinese killed by each Japanese soldier during those horrendous six weeks—or one person killed each week by a Japanese.

Intellectually, I’m sure we will never know the actual death toll because nobody counted all of the dead. What’s really appalling is not the numbers, but the fact that the Japanese could do these atrocious things to another human being.

But the real measure of hatred that the Japanese had, and perhaps still have, for the Chinese was reflected in the rapes against our women. These rapes weren’t limited to young girls or pretty women; they raped and mutilated older women, too. One old woman had a stick shoved up her vagina and through her intestines. They left her to bleed to death. Their hatred was so profound that symbolically, the Japanese didn’t want us to have the ability to reproduce, hence the stick in China’s womb. And that the superior Japanese people should rule China because
the worthless Chinese were clearly not capable of ruling themselves.

Ming told the story of his experiences with fear, passion and hatred—a near venomous diatribe that’s never left my mind.

After the war, I found out that my cousin Ming had joined the Resistance and returned to Nanking. He had been haunted by the images of his friends being decapitated and it drove him mad. His blood was hot with the idea of killing as many Japanese as he possibly could. No one could stop him. One night, he slipped away and was never heard from again. (The Samurai sword was such a dreaded and hated weapon that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur ordered all of them confiscated and melted down. With one stroke, so to speak, MacArthur had destroyed the symbol of Japanese aggression.)

Meanwhile, in Southern China on October 1938, the Japanese had carved out a one-hundred-mile bulge out of the fertile Pearl River delta that included the port city of Canton (Guangzhou). Within this semi-circular bulge were the British colony of Hong Kong and the Portuguese colony of Macao. Many foreign countries owned a piece of China, but few people in the outside world knew much about it. (During a substantial part of the nineteenth and all
of the twentieth centuries up to this point, China had ceded “concessions” to foreigners—pieces of territory essentially autonomous and run by American and European companies and bankers. Japan’s invasion put an end to most of these concessions and colonies. After the war a few, like Hong Kong and Macao, would survive—but not for long. Hong Kong was the remnant that, by treaty, was returned to the control of the Peoples Republic of China in 1997.)

By the end of 1938, the fearsome Japanese had conquered nearly all of the industrial north of China, from Manchuria to Shanghai and Canton, a landmass that was over one thousand miles long and some three hundred miles wide. This is comparable to taking states from New York to Florida, as well as all of Pennsylvania, the Virginias, the Carolinas and Georgia—virtually the equivalent of the greater part of the east coast of the United States.

For us to escape from Shanghai, my mother and I would have to travel a thousand miles down the coast to Canton, then somehow make our way through the Japanese lines and into free China, some one- hundred-and-seventy-five miles north of that city.

Jane Sun (Ch’i Ying Sun), my mother, received her Bachelor of Sciences Degree from Yenching University on June 24, 1935. (Now Beijing University.) My father, K.P. Huang had also graduated on that date. Mom and Dad were madly in love and they wanted to get married immediately. But, grandpa wouldn’t approve of it. He wanted my mother to get her Masters Degree in America before anything else.

At grandpa’s urging, my mother applied to the University of Michigan for a Master’s Degree. She became one of the first Chinese women to be accepted to Michigan’s graduate school.