Night in Shanghai (25 page)

Yet when it came to what I wanted for my country, which was to stand up to Japan, Shanghai had not let me down. She had fought to the end, laying down a quarter-million lives to the enemy’s seventy thousand, putting the lie to their boast that they could conquer Shanghai in three days. Nevertheless, our time was finished, and an exodus of souls had begun, a migration away from what now was a prison everyone called Hei’an Shijie, the Dark World. Some went abroad, to Hong Kong, or to the interior—west into the White areas if they followed Chiang or north into the Red if they followed Mao
.

I was reborn first through the movement, and then again, through him. After our time together I knew, no matter where the two of us were, that while he lived, I would never be alone. I knew I would return to him. But just as much, I knew I needed to go north
.

I
N THE WINTER
of 1938, north China was split between areas controlled by Japan, the Whites, the Reds, and independent warlords loyal to one Chinese side or the other. The Communist hub was Yan’an, a backward settlement in upper Shaanxi Province. It was carved into dusty loess hills along a sluggish, silt-brown river, but to Song it was a city of gold.

Even as a Party member, she could not just travel to Yan’an and present herself. First she had to go to Xi’an, which was in the White area, Chiang’s area, yet functioned as a neutral portal for anyone who wished to pass into Communist territory as a partisan. Song was coming on her own, without written introductions; she knew she would be expected to remain in the hostel of the Eighth Route Army Liaison Office for a few weeks while they considered her. Operations were tighter in the north, it being a military center, while the Party in Shanghai was really a propaganda organization. Maybe she should have written to Chen Xing for his help after all.

The taxi came within sight of the rambling complex of buildings, and she told the driver not to stop, since ahead she could see a Buddhist pagoda, rising above the low-slung courtyard buildings. “There,” she said. One hand strayed to the tiny sewn-in pouch she had carried all the way from Shanghai; it would not do to take twenty-seven diamonds into the Eighth Route Army Office.

She had told no one, and she felt especially bad about keeping the secret from Thomas, but it was only for now. She would pull out the little pouch someday and show him. Right now, though, it had to be put someplace safe.

She walked a while with her travel-bundle, scanning the featureless stone walls. There was no hiding place, not even a small park where she could knock loose enough earth to make a hole under a rock.

She walked back to the pagoda to pray at the temple, and think. After dropping some coins into the earthen pot, which earned an approving gaze from the bald saffron-robed monk at the altar, she lit a clutch of incense sticks and bowed and then sank low, arms outstretched, hoping for an answer. After a minute she stood, and added her incense sticks to the others burning in the dish of sand.

“Sister,” said the monk, “you look tired. I must leave for a dot of time, but remain here if you like. See? There is a small meditation chamber. You may rest there.” And with the serene purpose of his kind, he left.

The temple was unheated, but it was positioned to give shelter from the winds, so she passed gratefully through the door, and found herself in a smaller room, a sort of side chapel, with a tiny window giving onto a grassy back court. Looking out, she saw the court was crowded with a miniature forest of steles, all erected and inscribed over the centuries in honor of the Buddha; she counted twelve of them along with a gnarled tree, limbs naked now in the February cold. The walls were high, no one could see into the courtyard. Was this the open door, the key, the escape hatch? She did not want to cross the threshold of the Eighth Route Army Office unless she had a way to get back to Thomas. She slipped out and began a search of the walls for a loose tile or stone.

Half an hour later she was back on the street, unencumbered. The package that had seemed to burn a hole in her chemise was gone, she was free, light. She walked into the liaison office like any other believer, shoulders square and purposeful.

When she stepped in, she felt she was slipping back in time. The windows were paned in rice paper instead of glass, filling the room with a milky light, and the only telephone was the old cup-and-cord type. Everyone wore loose trousers and a pajama-style tunic, belted at the waist.

Her plain, long skirt, low boots, and layers of padding against the cold had been carefully chosen to look neutral and proletarian, but suddenly seemed carelessly rich, and attracted stares.

From behind the main desk, a heavyset older woman with a close-cut cap of graying hair gave her a form to fill out. Song reached for the cheap bamboo pen and dipped it in the ink as she scanned the onionskin page. It was easy enough to write her name, and give the details of having been sworn in and commissioned as a member of the Shanghai branch, but there was no space to list anything else. She added a neat, modest note about her language abilities at the bottom and handed it back. The woman stamped it with no expression, and waved her on.

No one asked her about her skills, not even the leader of the temporary work unit she was assigned to the next day. They worked in the laundry, washing the linens and uniforms of the officers. She washed her own tunic and trousers down on the banks of the muddy Yan River with a lump of soap and a rock, but the officers got starch and steam ironing. She didn’t mind, and ignored the blisters that formed on her hands and only half healed overnight before opening again the next day.

Nights were the hardest. As soon as she crawled into her cot, beneath the blankets, her dreams were her own again, and she could close her eyes and be with him. Every night they had spent together unfurled in her, and she kept herself awake with it for hours before falling asleep. In the daytime, he receded, a pleasurable secret.

She soon realized that now she was thinking about him the way, in her old life with Du, she had thought about the Party; he had become her private world. As she looked around, she saw young men here, Chinese men, partisans like herself, but she was not drawn to any of them. Her private world was better.

Almost as a challenge to herself, she cut her hair short in the Party style, and let her face become sunburned for the first time ever. Some of the women with good figures could not resist cinching shiny leather belts extra-close around their waists, but Song wore her tunic loose and her hair stubbornly uneven.

In the evenings she attended a newcomers’ class at the Party’s informal school. There she expected to read Marx for the first time, or discuss Party ideology, but instead found herself pressed by questions about Shanghai. Everyone seemed suspicious of a city whose people all came from someplace else and thus had no real home, and would never commit. This was not exactly true, for almost all Shanghainese, including the wealthy elite, still identified emotionally with their clan seats in the provinces, and even made occasional nostalgic visits to their family tombs and lineage temples. Still, the other young recruits in her class all agreed that the city was a place of spiritual pollution, a
da ran gang
, or giant dye vat so powerful that even jumping into the Huangpu could not clean off the stain—this was the view of Shanghai in traditional China, and here in the class, she was Shanghai’s representative. She learned to say little. Such old-fashioned ideas showed Song that in their own way the Reds were just as fundamentalist as Du and Chiang and the Nationalists, only with a different orthodoxy.

At the same time, in other ways, the place was genuinely progressive. She was accepted, made welcome, and given work, even if it was in the laundry. She saw that the other women in her dormitory were grateful to be here too. They were young and, unlike her, mostly not well educated; all were first-timers who’d had no prior contact with the movement. As the days passed and she heard a little about their lives, she realized they were all running from something—one escaped an arranged marriage, another an enslaving mother-in-law, a third the Japanese. They were not so much true believers as girls who had made a dash for their freedom, and all of them, including Song, had found refuge.

One day in early spring she heard shouts and ran out to the side of the building. Singing! And then from around the corner marched a group of students, in step, twenty or thirty boys and girls wearing bright kerchiefs and rucksacks, all singing in three-part harmony.

“They have walked all the way from Chongqing,” said the girl standing next to her, drying her hands on a towel.

Song gasped. “That is at least a thousand
li!
”

“Plenty of time to practice,” the girl cracked.

As the students marched up the broad street toward the Liaison Office complex, they sounded to Song like a fleet of angels, pure and high. Everything felt squared inside her at that moment, sure and true. Even her feelings for Thomas did not seem to pose a problem.

Walking back into the laundry, still floating on her optimism, she was stopped by the head of her unit, who handed her an envelope. “Your orders,” he said.

Finally
.
Please make it Yan’an, the nerve center, the real headquarters—
her fingers shook with anticipation as she tore it open, and then her brain seemed to stall. “Chen Lu Village?”

“Time for you to learn from the peasants,” he said.

Thomas had prepaid the rent on his studio until February 1, 1938, and then he lost the room. The piano had to go, since he could not pay to move it, and it felt almost like having an arm or leg taken off to close the lid on those keys for the last time. A piano had been there waiting for him, on the floral rug in the parlor, before he was even born, and now, for the first time, he would have to be without one.

As he would have to be without her. He had known she would go north, had been able to see it in the way her suitcase sat by the bed. But it left a hole in him that never closed.

Luckily, the need to find someplace cheap to live took his mind off her absence. He set himself to scouring the ads in the
Shanghai Times
, and there found a
tingzijian
, a pavilion room, which was really only a closed-off loft above some other room, an eight-by-ten box with a single small window.

He had learned about pavilion rooms a year before, his first winter in Shanghai, when he was walking during Chinese New Year with Lin Ming. They had met an acquaintance of Lin’s, and stopped for the two to have an exchange in Chinese before walking on.

“What did he say?” said Thomas.

“He said, ‘May you become a second landlord this year.’ Everyone says that at New Year’s.”

“What is a second landlord?”

“A man lucky enough to lease a house and carve it up and rent every room out to other people. Usually the second landlord will live with his wife and children in the kitchen, or the largest bedroom, or the main parlor. And every other corner will be rented, including the little lofts, which are always the cheapest places.”

Thomas’s new building lay in an alley off a leafy stretch of Route Louis Dufour, and his room hung above the kitchen, in which there lived a family of four, the Huangs, his “second landlords.” The loft-cubicle came with one meal a day, and just as he had done when he moved into the studio, he used a considerable part of the money he had remaining to pay his rent out far in advance, so he could guarantee at least his room and the one daily meal, because he wanted to wait here for Song.

Ensconced, he covered the city looking for work, and ate the rest of his meals on the street, parsing out his coins to the vendors who sold hot, sustaining soups of noodles and meat and vegetables, and the large pan-crisped, sesame-bottomed pork buns called
sheng jian bao
. Once a week he put on one of his useless suits and walked to Ladow’s Casanova to see Alonzo and Charles and Ernest. That was always a happy hour, talking with them while they set up.

But his cash was disappearing. He spared a few coins every Wednesday morning to get an early copy of the
Shanghai Times
on the day the new employment ads came out, but there were really no clubs left, at least not any that he could play in.

The Badlands, between Yuyuan and Jessfield and Great Western roads, could not even be considered. The Japanese had forced foreigners out of their mansions and then turned them into vice clubs, just as they had done with the Royal. They filled the ground floors with gambling tables and roulette wheels, constantly jammed with customers and patrolled by guards bristling with guns. Everything else was divided into curtained cubicles for smoking opium, or for sex. Thomas noticed the thick haze and the sweet-sick smell when he walked through midlevel places like the Celestial and the Good Friend. The smell hung in the air even at the top club, the Hollywood, a huge low-ceilinged labyrinth of drug dens and gambling halls into which ten thousand Shanghainese streamed every day and night, from motorcars and rickshaws that clogged the streets all around. But there was no serious music.

The rest of the city was unstable, even though the battle was well in the past. The resistance fighters and collaborationists were still attacking each other by bombing the offices of newspapers and magazines, and assassinating anyone who took too strong a position. One day in February, walking down Rue Chevalier, Thomas saw a human head hanging from a lamppost, eyes wide in terror, staring right at the Frenchtown police station. He could not read the note beneath it, but soon learned that it said “Look! Look! The result of anti-Japanese elements,” and that the head belonged to Cai Diaotou, who edited a society tabloid. Policemen who investigated the decapitation received human fingers in the mail, and soon other severed heads started appearing around Frenchtown, with warning notes. Still, he had to go out, to look for work, or he would starve.

He tried the pit orchestras at the theaters, film studios, and recording studios, and answered ads for rehearsal and accompanist work. He went to every open call for a piano player, and found them crowded with applicants, classically trained like him, many of them very high level, and all of them Jewish refugees.