Shanghai (96 page)

“Why do you smile, Father?” she demanded.

Then he said something she didn't understand. “I was thinking of a fight in Boston.”

Boston. She had no idea what he was talking about—nor did she care. He was the enemy, the enemy of the people.

That very night she struck out against the enemy. She stole her mother's jewellery, pawned it, and delivered the money to the man she thought of as the Librarian. Shortly thereafter she became his lover.

She stretched her arms high above her head.

The wind picked up and flung the airborne grains of Gobi Desert sand against her nakedness.

Then she glanced over her shoulder and saw him—saw him watching her.

The young Confucian.

She spread her arms and turned slowly in his direction.

* * *

AT THE SAME TIME, in a massive warehouse stocked to overflowing with goods the Kuomintang army had taken in the Republic's name from private homes, her elder sister, Madame Chiang Kai Shek—She Who Loves Money—turned from her inventory of “the take” to her wasp-waisted Generalissimo and said, “Where to when Shanghai falls?”

“Are you so sure it's going to fall?”

She looked at him as if he'd asked if water were wet … and finally said, “Yes. Aren't you sure?”

He ignored her rhetorical question and barked, “West.” Once again he was surprised by the control this somewhat homely girl held over him. He had been a famous womanizer for years, with his pick of the beauties of southern China, yet this cow-faced woman had him in her thrall.

She picked up a vase that her expert had tagged as “Ming Dynasty,” tilted it so it caught the light, and smiled. She liked it. She liked real things. “Move all our forces to Nanking?” she suggested.

“No. It's indefensible. We'll go farther west.”

She looked directly at him for the first time. “To attack the Communists again?” she said, clearly disappointed, since west of Nanking there was very little wealth.

“No. They are farther north.”

She thought about that. Her Generalissimo had ordered five major expeditions against the Communists—the last three led by German generals. Finally the Communists had given up and fled to the north-west. A rout, she thought, but she was smart enough not to dismiss the Communists and their Librarian leader. Although, giving perfectly good land and merchandise to imbecilic peasants struck her as madness. She wondered how much her idiot sister had to do with the choices the Communists made. Then she dismissed the thought. Number-two sister was just a stupid girl. She looked at Chiang, who was still speaking about something or other. Finally he concluded whatever it was that he was saying with, “Time to get ready to leave.”

“No need. It's done.” For the past ten days she'd had twenty servants steal everything of any value within a ten-mile radius, and now she was simply deciding
which items would be carefully moved from this warehouse and stowed on her private railway car.

* * *

THE THIRD SOONG DAUGHTER—She Who Loves China—stood outside the house in the French Concession that she had shared with her now deceased husband, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. She sighed as she remembered her husband's tenderness—and his foolhardiness. She had almost left him once, when, in a vain effort to keep peace amongst his loose revolutionary coalition, he had given over the presidency of the new Republic to the Manchu General, agreeing in return to accept the cabinet post of Minister of Railways. Over and over, in their front parlour, she had been forced to look at maps upon which he had drawn perfectly straight lines while he'd explained to her, as if she were a simpleton, “The shortest distance between any two points is a straight line.”

“The shortest distance?” she'd echoed.

“Yes, my child, the shortest distance to the New China.”

She'd tried to protect him, but it was hard. The man was a fool, and everyone knew he was a fool. In fact, now that he was gone it was easier to stand up for his ideals than it had been while he was alive. She thought of the final days with him in the awful room upstairs. His insistence that he was freezing—despite the intensity of Shanghai's August heat. Then the cries. Cries for his mother.

She thought of her father's hurt silence when she had returned from her elopement with the good doctor. Then she thought of her two sisters—one
backing Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang governing party, and the other who, she assumed, was a power broker in the Chinese Communist Party. Two sisters in opposition to each other. China in the balance. She closed the door of her now empty house and thought,
Yes, but I hold the deciding vote—I hold the balance of power in the Soong Dynasty.

It was a child who first approached the half-buried bomb behind the apartment building on what the
Fan Kuei
insisted on calling Hamilton Road, despite the fact that the street was in the midst of the Old City. The boy touched the exposed rear fin and announced, “It's hot.” Then he heard a whistling and looked up. A large grey thing was racing across the sky. He shielded his small eyes from the sun—then he heard the massive explosion a few blocks away.

Seventeen hundred lives ended in an instant as the powerful bomb ripped through the upper storeys of a huge department store on Bubbling Spring Road.

Moments later, a terrified woman came running out of her apartment on Hamilton Road and grabbed the little
boy away from the unexploded bomb, both relieved that he was alive and furious that he had terrified her so.

That was August 13, 1937—only four days after a Japanese officer, First Lieutenant Isaw Oyama of the Japanese marines, had improperly attempted to enter Hungchiao Airport. He was stopped by the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps, a unit formed after the 1932 ceasefire agreement in which the Japanese had insisted that Shanghai be demilitarized. The young Japanese officer was furious that his path had been impeded and struck one of the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps officers. Then, as his superiors had hoped, he was shot through the heart with a single bullet. The next day, August 10, the Japanese Consul General demanded an apology and went on to insist that the Peace Preservation Corps be removed from the city, and that all of Shanghai's defence works be dismantled.

The Chinese listened patiently, but said nothing.

Before the end of the day Japan had sent reinforcements to Shanghai. Twenty-four hours later Chiang Kai Shek moved Chinese troops into greater Shanghai in direct violation of the Shanghai ceasefire agreement. Although there were negotiations, no one was surprised when, the next day, a day the Chinese eventually called Bloody Saturday, Japanese bombs fell on the great city while Japanese planes flew low overhead, strafing the population.

At 9:00 a.m. on August 13, Chinese forces fired on Japanese emplacements in Zhabei, Woosung, and Jiangwan districts. The Japanese responded and brought their ships in the harbour to readiness, and that night the Japanese Imperial Navy began a bombardment of the city at the Bend in the River.

Immediately the Foreign Settlement and the French Concession were deluged with refugees. The Japanese, on the whole, were attacking only the Chinese sections of the city, and the Shanghainese knew it. By the thousands—the hundreds of thousands—they sought shelter with the
Fan Kuei
, just as they had during the maraudings of the Taiping Revolt.

Early the next morning Chiang Kai Shek ordered General Zhang Zhizhong to mount a counterattack. The Chinese had numerical superiority but were badly outgunned. They had virtually no navy, and the Japanese completely controlled the China Sea. Although they had some air force they had no infrastructure to replace downed aircraft, while the Japanese had the foremost aeronautics industry in the world. More importantly, the Chinese had inadequate artillery and few mechanized vehicles—very few tanks.

—

From the roof of their offices on the Bund the great
Fan Kuei
traders sipped their after-dinner drinks and watched the flashes of light bloom beneath them, just outside their district.

“The Chinese will root the Japs out of their nests, then drive them back into the sea,” the head of Russell and Company out of New York said as he helped himself to a generous amount of cocktail sauce for his skewered shrimp.

There were choruses of agreement from most of the other traders—but not all.

An ominous silence came from William Dent and his associates, who had been paid substantial bonuses to
build the Japanese machine-gun bunkers within the city limits. Dent knew that the cement of the bunkers was too thick for the small-calibre artillery shells of the Chinese army—a fact that was playing out on the ground just a mile away, even as the
Fan Kuei
traders drank and deluded themselves with visions of a swift Chinese victory.

—

General Zhang Zhizhong's counterattack began with an assault on the very bunkers that Dent's company had built for the Japanese. The General had assumed that the removal of the hundred or so bunkers would take less than a day. He was badly mistaken, and his men paid the price of his miscalculation with their blood. For three days they assaulted the bunkers and the other fortified Japanese positions in Shanghai, concentrating much effort on the Japanese army headquarters near Zhabei. The fighting often came within earshot of the borders of the Foreign Settlement.

Finally, after three days of fruitless attacks, the General ordered his men to take and clear the streets around the bunkers, then set up sandbags to encircle the Japanese positions. This initially worked well—but then the Japanese brought in their tanks, and quickly the Chinese called off their advance.

For three days there was an unnatural calm—then the Chinese attacked the Japanese positions on the docks on the north side of the Huangpo. But the Chinese troops were inadequately trained in combining infantry with artillery movement. They ended up blockaded behind their own tanks on street after
street—infantrymen exposed—and the Japanese used flame-throwers in combination with well-placed machine gun fire to drive the Chinese back. The Chinese suffered terrifying losses. The streets were littered with the corpses of scorched, bullet-ridden Chinese soldiers.

The next day the Japanese outflanked the Chinese troops with a large amphibious landing. After putting up brave defences, Japanese air power finally forced the Chinese to abandon the crucial towns of Baoshan, Luodian, and the lynchpin village of Dachang. The Chinese bravery astonished the Japanese. What the Japanese had thought would take only a week or two, at most, had ended up taking in excess of three months—time enough for Chiang Kai Shek to move major industry and his troops farther inland to the west.

By the end of November what remained of the Chinese army had evacuated the city at the Bend in the River, and the Japanese Imperial Army marched, uncontested, into the largest city in Asia.

—

Charles Soong's youngest daughter, Dr. Sun Yat-sen's widow, heard them two streets over, on Yen'an Lu. She pictured the Japanese troops parading down the wide avenue, Asian conquerors of the mother Asian nation.

Rifle shots cracked through the air.

She cringed. Hopefully it was just the Japanese firing their guns in the air—although she knew that bullets fired in the air in glee often fell to earth to cause much sorrow. She also knew that the Japanese were a
parsimonious people, and she doubted the soldiers would be permitted to waste bullets. So, she knew, it was more likely they had fired on a pocket of resistance that they had failed to clean up.

The firing stopped as quickly as it had begun, and the silence that followed carried the quiet of death.

She closed her door and thought about bravery—and her duty to her country.

Rumours of the emergence of a new History Teller had surfaced in the city at the Bend in the River in the early 1930s. Many dismissed the very idea that there was a History Teller in their midst. Most who first met him thought him to be freakish. On subsequent viewings of his work, though, most found him to be unusually gifted. And they watched closely as he grew in stature from a distinctively styled young actor who specialized in playing females, especially courtesans, to a Peking Opera creator. His was a talent that sought the light and demanded to be shared. It was a unique but recognizable talent.

At the relatively young age of forty-eight, he took over the company itself.

But that was nine years and seven new operas ago—a span of time that brought him from obscurity
to his present fame. From poverty to respect and modest fortune. A time from before the Japanese occupation to now.

It was a time span that began when missionaries were given a wide berth but respected, despite their folly, and brought us to now, when, to the History Teller's amazement, a young, red-haired, ghastly white-skinned missionary pulled a Japanese soldier off a fallen Chinese peasant woman and shoved him hard against the wall of an alley off Julu Lu.

For a moment the History Teller wondered if his eyes were deceiving him. He looked around. A crowd was quickly forming—and they were seeing what he was seeing. A white man attacking a Japanese soldier in order to save a Chinese woman.

—

Maximilian had seen enough. He remembered the day his father, Malachi, had stopped whaling. He'd come home and announced, “I'm finished with the violence of whaling. Finished with it.” Well, Maximilian had seen enough violence since his own arrival in Shanghai eight months earlier. He had watched Japanese brutality increase daily. And now this. This soldier holding a bayonet to the breast of a prone, pregnant peasant woman who had done nothing more than disobey his traffic directions. Directions that, in all likelihood, the woman couldn't understand. It didn't matter how loudly Japanese soldiers shouted their orders, their words remained incomprehensible to most Mandarin speakers.

Maximilian had been surprised when he felt his pulse snap hard against his forehead. He knew the serpent vein there was throbbing, like something anxious to break the
skin and escape. He looked down and was amazed to see his fists clenched and ready. But what most astonished him was the sweet taste in his mouth and the surge of joy that raced around his heart. A smile creased his handsome face. He was going to fight, and he couldn't wait. He didn't remember crossing the seven or eight yards that separated him from the Japanese soldier, but Maximilian would never forget the fear that flashed in the soldier's eyes as he yanked him from the peasant woman. Then Maximilian was on him, fists pummelling like pistons, his eyes alive with fury, the soldier's nose breaking, then an orbital bone crushing beneath the red-haired missionary's fists. Maximilian arched his back and a cry of elation escaped his lips—just as he felt the desire to bite deeply into the man's face.