Shanghai (102 page)

Loa Wei Fen released the oil from its reservoir with one swift swing of the rock.

At eleven hundred he shouted, “Now!” and the remaining members of the Guild of Assassins lit their supplies of phosphorus and plunged them into the huge equilateral triangle of oil beneath the streets.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then flames shot thirty feet into the air, turning night to day. The Japanese dropped their weapons in confusion and stared at the wall of flames. Then they looked up—and in the midst of the flames, seemingly suspended in space, they saw a red-haired White man holding a baby aloft, shouting in perfect Japanese, “This is God's territory. The fire demarks God's sanctuary. Be gone from that which is God's.”

And the Japanese, knowing a godly event when they saw one, stood like statues in the fire's light as their reptile skins and Komodo lips became once again the lips and skin of ordinary men. And a sanctuary that would keep almost four hundred thousand Chinese alive and safe within its two and a half square miles was born.

And the sanctuary held, although very little news came out of Nanking, as the Japanese controlled the railroads and the great river. But whispers filtered out. A cousin was still alive, a grandfather had found refuge—a red-haired
Fan Kuei
had flown with a baby in a ring of fire.

In Shanghai the uneasy peace between the Japanese occupiers and the Foreign Settlement proceeded one day at a time. Incursions from both sides were not uncommon, but the invisible boundary basically held.

The Japanese secured their hold on Shanghai and ignored the Concessions, and a kind of normality returned to the city at the Bend in the River. But the Foreign Settlement was truly “a lonely island.”

The Palace Hotel replaced its shattered windows, and businessmen could be seen playing tennis—and
even golf. Ironically, a production of Pearl S. Buck's
The Good Earth
was drawing large crowds to the Grand Theatre to see Luise Rainer's star turn.

There were, naturally enough, some new complications to life in Shanghai. Japanese soldiers were stationed at several crucial intersections in the city, and every Chinese person who passed them had to bow. If the bow was considered not deep enough or disrespectful, the Chinese man, woman, or child was immediately beaten. Trams were stopped as they passed Japanese guard posts, and all the Chinese onboard had to bow.
Fan Kuei
were exempt from this treatment, although if their chauffeurs were Chinese and they drove past a checkpoint, the Chinese chauffeur had to stop the car, get out, and bow properly to the Japanese soldiers.

Strangely, the business of entertaining the populace of Shanghai had never been better. Cabarets and bars were filled to overflowing, and places like the popular nightclub Great World were in such demand that people lined up in the street for hours to get in. It seemed that as Shanghainese worries increased, their desire for diversion grew.

In 1938, the first of the expected rush of European Jews began to arrive. Initially most were German or Austrian, but they were followed shortly afterward by Polish Jews. The Jews' exit point from Europe was often Genoa, and their month-long trip on the Italian Lloyd Triestino liners brought them past such ports as Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Ceylon, Singapore, Manila, and Hong Kong—but they were not permitted to set foot ashore in any of these places. The Italian shipping line charged them twice the normal fare, and since the Nazis permitted them to leave with only one bag and twenty Reichsmarks, they all arrived in Shanghai disoriented
and impoverished—and about to experience yet another shock. They were not permitted to disembark at the Bund wharfs, which belonged to the British and French, since refugee Jews were not permitted to set foot in those countries either. So the last part of their arduous journey was in a Chinese junk that charged them a minor fortune to take them the two miles from the Bund, up the river to the Japanese-controlled docks on the Suzu Creek.

Shanghai's Iraqi Jews came to their aid. The Vrassoons, the Ellises, the Kadooris, and Silas Hordoon (through his adopted daughter, Jiang) supplied the lion's share of the money. Many of the new immigrants were settled in bombed-out tenements in Hangkow—although the Vrassoons were eventually shamed into offering up what few unrented units they had in their fashionable Embankment House. The wealthy Sephardic Jews supplied milk for the children and soup kitchens to get the newly arrived families going.

Because many of the Jews who escaped the Nazis were people of wealth and education, they hung out shingles and began to work. Doctors found employment quickly, as did engineers. Some academics were taken into the Chinese universities. The Vrassoons and the Hong Kong Canton Bank (the name Silas had momentarily landed on for his banking enterprise) gave loans to others, who reproduced some of the life they had left behind. Some opened factories (one, a very large margarine-making concern); others opened watch-repair shops and clothing stalls; and European-style restaurants appeared, like Café Louis on Bubbling Spring Road and the expensive Fialker Restaurant on Avenue Joffre, which offered fine Viennese food. The Black Cat Cabaret on Roi Albert Avenue presented the
same cynical, biting satires that could be found in clubs on Berlin's Unter den Linden. Sachertorte and strudel were suddenly available in the city, and the newest Hollywood films appeared, as if from nowhere. Within a year the Jewish community had a newspaper, a radio station, an orchestra, and regular theatrical performances, many of which were extremely critical of capitalists like the Vrassoons, Hordoons, Ellises, and Kadooris. Debating societies—which served no real purpose, since every Jewish dinner table was actually a debating society where socialists clashed with capitalists, the religious with the non-religious, the old with the young, Zionists with cosmopolitans—sprung up like weeds in an untended garden.

Not every Jew adapted to Shanghai. Between the demands of the climate, the loss of status, and the terrible crowding of Hongkew, the dock district by the Suzu Creek where they all initially stayed, suicide was an all too common occurrence amongst the formerly powerful. But on the whole, Shanghai Jews realized that they had literally found a port in the storm, and they made the best of their new surroundings. Only Japanese-controlled Shanghai opened its doors to these dispossessed souls. The Allied nations—Great Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—turned ship after ship of Jews away.

But the twenty-eight thousand Jews in Shanghai were an insignificant number compared to the vast numbers of Chinese in Shanghai—and Chinese lives under the Japanese were getting more and more difficult. The Japanese set up the Kempie Tei—their version of the Gestapo—and ruthlessly set out, under the political cover of the quisling governor, Wang Ching-wei, to eradicate all Chinese patriots. Their reign of terror began
in February of 1938 with the public decapitation of the prominent Chinese editor Tsai Diao-tu—right across the street from a major entrance to the French Concession. Daily, Chinese businessmen and journalists believed to be patriot sympathizers received packages with severed fingers and decayed hands as a warning that they were on Kempie Tei's lists.

Only the remains of Tu Yueh-sen's Tong of the Righteous Hand, reverting to their initial anti-foreigner purpose, fought back. They shot at Chinese businessmen they thought were too close to the Japanese. One was wounded right outside the Cathay Hotel before his White Russian bodyguard returned fire. Tu's men also sent packages—these usually contained axes. If the warning was not heeded another axe, not unlike the one in the package, would find its way into the chest of the collaborator.

The Kempie Tei, from their headquarters at 76 Jesse Road, known to everyone simply as Number 76, intensified their wave of terror. Seven newspapers were firebombed. Newspaper staff, to protect themselves, barricaded themselves in their buildings. Printers and editors slept on their desks. News items came to them by phone or telegraph or as typed pages wrapped around stones thrown through open windows on upper floors. No one came in or went out—in one case, for years.

And the world continued its descent into madness.

Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and “took back” the Sudetenland. Glass tinkled in the night and a new horror began. The Nazis took Poland. Britain, France, Australia, and Canada declared war. The Nazis took Denmark and Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The Japanese signed a peace pact
with Germany. The little man with the nailbrush mustache strutted openly in the streets of Paris. German bombs landed in London, Southampton, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester. The Japanese entered Indo-China over the objections of Britain and the United States. A polio-afflicted president was re-elected in America. The Americans began to supply arms under a lend-lease program to the British and Soviets. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem went on Berlin radio to support Nazi efforts to eradicate Jews. A massive air raid on London lasted two days and two nights, but St. Paul's Cathedral, miraculously, was untouched. Inexplicably, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Yellow stars appeared on the chests of European Jews. A canister of gas was released in a sealed room in a small Polish town. The Germans took Kiev and murdered 33,771 people wearing yellow stars. Odessa fell. Kharkov fell. Sebastopol fell. Rostov fell. But Moscow and Leningrad did not. All the while, America stayed out of the “European” war.

In July of 1940, the quisling Wang Ching-wei published a black list and set loose a new wave of assassinations.

At the same time, the Japanese closed Chinese gambling houses and opium dens—and opened their own. Jiang lost three major properties that were outside the French Concession in a week, but considered herself lucky to still have her main business, Jiang's, just down the street from the Colombes' House of Paris. But she was not beyond expressing her distaste for the actions of the conquerors. Often she thought of calling her sister, but always resisted. Her mother, Mai Bao, had chosen her to control the family fortunes and enter the Ivory Compact. But these were hard times, unlike any
that her mother had experienced. And she had more of a temper than her mother—much more.

“This is Jiang's, not some Tokyo noodle shop,” she said to the drunken Japanese officer.

The man made a face and signalled to his translator, who told his superior officer what the beautiful madam had said to him.

“You are no geisha,” he slurred, then laughed to himself.

Before the translator could speak, Jiang, recognizing the word
geisha
, said, “I cannot imagine that a pig like yourself ever had anything to do with a real geisha.” She looked at the translator and said, “You're a translator, so, translate!”

The translator did.

The Japanese officer suddenly reddened, then screamed something unintelligible.

The translator responded with a quick, deep bow. Clearly he had apologized.

“Tell your commanding officer,” Jiang said, “that this is the French Concession, not Fang Bang Lu—he has no power here. Here he pays for services that I will or will not supply as I deem fit. This is Jiang's, as I said before, not some limp noodle house in Tokyo.”

The man left in a stony silence, and Jiang retreated to her private room. She was angry with herself. She had lost her temper—a bad thing to do in times of war when your side was losing—and she had an obligati3on to the Ivory Compact.

A few months later the Foreign Settlement was shocked by the departure of its entire complement of English and Australian military, all of whom had been ordered to more pressing theatres of war. In July 1940, the day after France fell, the French Concession
came under the control of the Vichy government. The next day the Americans evacuated all of their female nationals, and most American firms sent everyone but vital personnel home. Most head offices were moved to Hong Kong.

Many British families ignored the pleas of their government to come home and stayed, unwilling to give up the “good life” in the Orient. Back in Britain, few of them could have come near to affording the lavish, servant-filled lifestyle they enjoyed at the Bend in the River.

It is a choice they will all come to regret,
the Confucian said to himself as he allowed his fingers to riffle the edges of the ancient text on the table. He knew the history of the Ivory Compact better than any other living being. When the second window was opened, he'd known with a certainty that he himself was the Man with a Book—books, actually. He had the rarest collection of the twenty famous Confucian texts, known collectively as the Analects. They had been carefully maintained and handed down from one generation of Confucians to the next when the obligation of the Ivory Compact was passed on. But it was another, even rarer manuscript—of which there was only one copy—that assured him that he was the Man with a Book. This book had been added to by every Ivory Compact Confucian through the years. It contained a detailed description of each Carver, Jiang, and Body Guard who ever swore fealty to the First Emperor's vision. As well as these details there were impressions, flights of fancy, and often profound doubts about the whole enterprise. The Confucian on the Holy Mountain, for instance, had believed the First Emperor to be completely out of his wits, mad as a Canton cook. As he wrote, “Only a lunatic
would have ordered the executions of thousands of Confucian scholars and the burning of all their books.”

The Confucian read the first entry in the book again, which was dominated by doubts about the relic and the task ahead of the Chosen Three. The first entry ended with a question: “Why did the First Emperor never harm me or burn my books?”

Because he did not dare!
The Confucian thought as he closed the book.
We are a deep stream running beneath the entire structure of the state—to be respected, or the whole edifice will fall
.