Shanghai (107 page)

He looked at the bird and nodded.
Only a Confucian would see the benefit of using the old systems,
he thought.
Who would think of pigeons when there are telephones and telegraphs?
He answered his own question.
Someone attached to the old ways, locked in thinking from the past.

He allowed the paper to flutter from his hands. The wind picked it up and threw it up the river, toward the sea.

Then, in July 1945, a new sound filled the skies over the Bend in the River—the drone of American B-29s, from their airbase on Okinawa.

A Flash of Light

The two crowned willow warblers perched on wires on opposite sides of the dojo's roof—their
kikinashi
calls the first step in their creation of a new life. The male hopped three times to his left and then lowered the register of his song. The female's tail feathers flared and she whistled shrilly. The male puffed out his chest, opening his wings to display his full glory. The female stuttered two steps, then took flight. She flew high into the air, then, with a remarkably sweet song, headed earthward—and the male met her halfway.

In mid-air they circled each other.

Below them, life in the large city was just beginning. Shinto priests were completing their morning ablutions;
wives wrapped kimonos around themselves and lit the morning fires. The two crowned willow warblers touched beaks—then …

 

With a flash of light,

everything in Hiroshima—

and the world—

changed.

The History Teller's writing pad suddenly took light. He stepped back, then looked at the brush in his hand as he wrote:

 

Momentary high noon brilliance

where there had been only murky dawn …

then a profound darkness, to shame the night.

 

The History Teller turned to the east, then rose and walked out onto the balcony of the second floor of his
shikumen
. He scented the air—and discovered something new there.

 

Something new in the world has been born

a brilliant light …

that brings on an infinite darkness.

 

He shivered. The reek of ozone had been replaced by something for which he had no name. He returned to his writing table and took a fresh piece of rice paper. He felt the world spin beneath his feet—and he began—at the beginning—something new—something new for a new world. He watched the characters form on the beautiful paper:

 

Something born; slouching—no,

relearned,

unchained,

and now at large and hungry—in the new world.

 

He looked carefully at the characters. He thought of the naked
Fan Kuei
on the Bund all those years ago, then of his daughter's necklace that now rested in what he thought of as “the missionary's hole in the ground.” Then he wrote the phrase that he had written more than any other:

 

What Was Ours.

 

And he thought of a brilliant light that brings darkness.

He felt it approaching—faster, now. So much faster.

He permitted his mind to still—then beckoned it.
So it is this new darkness that I have sensed coming toward me for so long,
he thought.

Then it wormed a cold tendril into him.

Good,
he thought. His kidneys suddenly ached and his bladder contracted, but he resisted the urgent impulse to urinate. He lost all feeling in his feet but he refused to put on shoes. The evil was testing him. Thinking him weak and frail. Frail perhaps, but not weak. “Come on, all the way in,” he coaxed. “Grow in me, then enter the halls of my temple—there we will
do battle—and I'll gain access to your secret self, to your hidden self, to your interior darkness where your poetry lies, awaiting my light.”

Then it bloomed icy fingers in him—racing along his veins, reaching, clawing—singing to him, luring him, seducing him to the sanctuary of sleep—but he fought off the temptation and took his brush in hand.

 

The icy tears streak the maiden's face

As darkness falls upon the world.

 

He held up the rice paper and the wind fluttered it dry. He placed it on his writing desk and put a small jade stone on its centre. As he did, he looked at his right hand—his writing hand. The top joint of his thumb had turned in and large, hard nodules were quickly forming on the knuckles of his index, middle, and ring fingers. Only his baby finger remained untouched. He smiled and said, “To remind me what beauty was—what I have lost—
What Was Ours
—very clever.”

He reached for a second sheet of rice paper and stationed it on his writing table.

This time he wrote no words, just allowed the brush to lead him. The ink formed a mountain, with a high alpine lake, a woman in front of her frozen laundry staring at her hands—and soldiers, soldiers everywhere.

He'd dreamed this before—so had many Han Chinese over the past twenty-one hundred years.

He lifted the paper and committed it to the wind, which plucked it from his fingers and flung it toward the river. “That takes it to the sea,” he said aloud. Then he repeated the phrase.

He grabbed another sheet of paper, ignored the pain in his hand and wrote:

 

To the sea on the day of darkness

All creatures run.

 

Then he secured this sheet beside the other with another small jade stone.

He thought of the earlier History Teller's classic play,
Journey to the West,
of the devotion of the Serving Man and the futility of his love for the Princess. His performance of the Princess had been his first major success. He'd played it several times since, always to more and more acclaim.

He allowed his back to arch and his feet to point as he lifted his head high on his neck—and felt the woman he became as the Princess turn to fight the darkness he had allowed into his body.

“The flash of light is hope itself—the profound darkness, the challenge to hope,” he said aloud, not even noticing that he had written the same thing he'd spoken. He looked down and smiled. Then he wrote the Mandarin word for hope—
xi wang
—three times.

He stared at the words, then wrote:

 

From the tears of Nanking

A hope to view the sea

And regain What Was Ours.

 

The darkness inside him shifted, bolts of angry cold shot through him, he felt a light tingling in his fore-arms—a tingling he knew presaged a serious attack on his hands. He allowed the brush to fall from his fingers to the floor. He had no desire to soil a fine piece of rice parchment.

He waited—watched his fingers twist and turn as if they were trying to free themselves from his hand—but he ignored the pain.

He managed a smile as the grand mal fit took him. He had found the way through the darkness—hope would lead him to the dawning of the sea—to that which was his—not his,
What Was Ours
.

Surrender and After

The loudspeaker that had been set up at the intersection of Nanking Lu and the Bund was cranked up to such a volume that it distorted wildly—yet its message was clear to the thousands of Chinese who had gathered to hear what the world had in store for them. The words “new and most cruel bomb” pierced the static, then the high-pitched voice of the “Sacred Crane,” Emperor Hirohito, paused. Static followed, and then clearly the words urging his subjects to “bear the unbearable.” This somewhat contradicted the famous edict of his war minister, Koreichiki Anami, who had vowed that “The great soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army will fight to their last breaths, even if it means chewing grass, eating dirt, and sleeping in the fields.”

How easy it is to commit soldiers to their deaths from the safety of a government office.

Shanghai immediately began to celebrate. Blackout curtains were ripped from windows and dress clothing that had not been worn for years was donned as every citizen at the Bend in the River who could danced in the streets. Bamboo victory banners appeared, and firecrackers filled the sky well into the night.

A Communist army was within two days' march of Shanghai and would have accepted the formal surrender of the Japanese, but Chiang Kai Shek and his troops beat them to the city with the help of a massive American airlift.

Chiang Kai Shek's first order upon accepting the Japanese commander's surrender was to give control of the city back to the Japanese, whom he entrusted with keeping the peace. So the soldiers of the defeated Japanese Imperial Army patrolled the streets of Shanghai and accepted the jeers of the locals. While they did, their superior officers loaded ship upon ship to the gunwales with goods they had confiscated from the
Fan Kuei
and wealthy Chinese. Bonfires burned all day and night disposing of evidence from Bridge House. Once all proof of their perfidy was nothing more than piles of charred paper, the Kempie Tei torturers removed their uniforms and disappeared into the human sea that is Shanghai.

By the end of the week, American ships of the Seventh Fleet entered Shanghai Harbour to wild cheers. When the American flagship
Rocky Mount
anchored at the number-one buoy, the cheering grew so loud that it could be heard miles away.

Quickly American GIs were everywhere, smiling, giving out chocolates, dancing in the cabarets, pulling rickshaws—seeking out Shanghai's famous prostitutes.

American aid flowed freely into the city and was distributed by a United Nations agency, which, as is usually the case, was completely unprepared for the complications they faced on the ground. It didn't take long for the lion's share of the aid to go directly into the pockets of such powerful families as the Soongs, Kungs, and Chiangs—and from there directly to the black markets that had sprung up faster than mushrooms in the fall.

Over three billion dollars of authorized aid effectively disappeared. T.V. Soong caused most of this, as he, in his capacity as Finance Minister of the Kuomintang, insisted that all aid be distributed by his Chinese Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. As several American newsmen noted, “Within a day of receipt, UN goods were being sold at ludicrous prices from newly erected stalls whose merchants didn't even bother to remove the UN or Red Cross labels before sale.”

As T.V. Soong had this scam working in high gear, the rest of Chiang Kai Shek's Republican comrades went on a theft spree without precedent in the history of the world. Anyone of any wealth was named a traitor, and all their goods were confiscated by the Nationalists. Others lost their businesses to the Kuomintang with the accusation that they were Communist supporters. Within weeks the Nationalist government had seized virtually every business in Shanghai. Anyone who had stayed in Shanghai during the occupation was considered a collaborator. Every lawyer who had come to the bar between 1942 and 1945 was immediately disbarred. In fact, few actual collaborators were brought to trial. Those that did were sometimes given light sentences and then invited to join the Nationalist government. The quisling Wang Ching-wei died of natural causes a few days
before the bomb fell on Hiroshima—the last jest of the gods of justice who had utterly abandoned the city at the Bend in the River.

Quickly the Shanghainese realized that their Kuomintang liberators were just different persecutors … and Mao's forces were on the move.

* * *

“WE HAVE BEEN BETRAYED,” the Assassin said, in a flat voice that matched the flat distance in his eyes.

Jiang sat quietly with her Japanese daughter on her lap and nodded slowly.

“Never before in the Ivory Compact—”

“To the best of our knowledge,” Jiang interrupted. “To the best of our knowledge, no one of the Chosen Three in the past has betrayed the Compact.” Her words sounded like an echo of some ancient voice.

“Our Confucian fancies himself to be the Man with a Book,” the Assassin said.

“Men with photographs and scholars with books …” she muttered, then cooed to her daughter.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I repeat, our Confucian believes—”

“Ridiculous. Mao Tze-tung is the Man with a Book.”

“Of course.”

“But think, Loa Wei Fen, although the Confucian may be trying to betray us, he is still, despite himself, fulfilling his obligation to the Ivory Compact. Mao and his men will take the city at the Bend in the River and give it back to the Black-Haired people, who are the ones who must build the Seventy Pagodas—so we are still in concert with the First Emperor's wishes.”

“But he tried to betray the Compact. And he must die for that.”

“Why? He is still doing the Compact's bidding, even if he doesn't realize it.”

“For now.”

“What does that mean?”

“He does the Compact's bidding for now, but as soon as he has power he will create a future for China that is good for him and his kind, and you know that.”

Jiang nodded slowly.

“And you and I would stand in the way of that, wouldn't we?”

That sat in the air between them like something hot and angry. Finally Jiang said, “Perhaps the Compact has never been betrayed before by one of the Chosen Three, but certainly, no member of the Compact has ever killed another. You are not to be the first, Loa Wei Fen.”

“Agreed. But it will not be me who moves against the other members of the Compact. It will be the Confucian.”

“Why?”

“Because we endanger the one thing he values.”

“Which is?”

“Power.”

Jiang nodded slowly, then picked up her little girl and nuzzled her chest. Her Japanese daughter giggled.