The Shanghai Moon (29 page)

“In any case, soon after we set up house in Hongkew, my cousin was born, at a hospital the Jewish refugees had built for themselves. Although my grandfather’s own life grew more and more difficult, he sold family treasures on the black market to help look after us. For Hongkew, our quarters—four people in two rooms, with cold running water and a flush toilet under the stairs shared with just two other families—were luxurious. He sent food also, and books, and he came to see us. But he could not bring us out of the ghetto.

“Then in 1945 the Japanese surrendered. The ghetto was opened. Uncle Kai-rong came back and moved us to the villa. He left again, returning every few months. Until finally he came home for good, at the civil war’s end.”

Zhang Li refilled our teacups, rising to take the pot to Bill. When he sat again, I thought maybe he’d circled enough. “Mr. Zhang?” I asked. “The Shanghai Moon?”

He nodded and again looked off into nothingness. “By the war’s last days, wild chaos reigned. Shanghai was one of the last cities to fall to Mao’s army and therefore one of the last refuges of the desperate remnants of Chiang’s. Nationalist soldiers rampaged through the steets. They stole food because they were hungry, money to buy passage to Taiwan, clothing so they could discard their uniforms. They stole anything. They burned, they smashed, they beat, ravaged, and killed.

“It was a matter of time until our villa was struck. Three armed men . . .” He stopped to swallow some tea. In a voice creaky and fast, he said, “They burst in. Rags hid their faces. They rounded us up—Grandfather, Uncle Paul,
Aunt Rosalie, Lao-li, the old houseboy, and myself—and demanded our precious possessions, even as they gaped at the empty walls and bare floors.”

Zhang Li’s unsteady hands clinked the lid off his teacup. “Forgive me. This is the first time I’ve spoken of that day. As children, even allowing ourselves to think about it put Lao-li and myself in terror of calling down more bad luck, of causing the loss of someone else dear to us. We’ve never spoken of it, and I’ve done everything I could to avoid revisiting it in my own mind. The oddness is this: Through the years that day has come back at times, unbidden, as terrible moments will. I’ve always thought every detail engraved on my memory so deeply that I’d never forget a single sight, a single sound. But when I look closely, to try to explain it to you, events appear jumbled and confused. Sounds evade my hearing, sights are inexplicable. I find only fragments.” After another moment: “I remember this: Grand father ordered the intruders out. There was shouting. Their leader swung at Grandfather with his rifle butt. Grandfather slumped and there was blood . . . Uncle Paul ran at them, screaming they could see for themselves we had no riches, everything was gone. One of the men punched his stomach, knocked him down. Lao-li was shielded, as I was, behind Aunt Rosalie, but at the blood, the blows, the shouts, Loa-li began to scream.

“In my next memory, one of the men has seized Lao-li and is slapping him repeatedly. Aunt Rosalie threw herself on him, this man. A second man tore her away, but she didn’t stop shrieking and struggling. It took both the men
to force her to the ground. All this time the leader was beating Grandfather and shouting for treasures.

“Then the old houseboy—Number One Boy, who had been with the Chen family for decades, a thin man made skeletal by hard times—Number One Boy lifted a stool and smashed one of the men holding Aunt Rosalie down.

“The man crumpled. The other released Aunt Rosalie and ran at Number One Boy. Aunt Rosalie, hair wild and clothing torn, scrambled to her feet.

“The leader shouted, spun around, and fired.” Zhang Li’s eyes closed. He was silent so long I thought he’d finished, and I wondered whether I should say something, but Bill caught my eye and shook his head. Finally Zhang Li spoke again.

“Aunt Rosalie fell. Everyone turned to stone. Then Number One Boy seized the fallen man’s rifle and fired at the leader. But he was a houseboy, not a soldier. He missed his mark. The leader shot back, also wide, splintering a chair. The fallen man crawled to his feet. Their leader shouted an order, and they all turned and ran. Number One Boy chased after. I heard more shots, and finally silence. Number One Boy didn’t return.

“After that . . . I have a picture in my mind of myself and my cousin kneeling beside Aunt Rosalie, in silence. I thought he’d reach for her, try to embrace her, start to cry. He did none of those things. He didn’t move at all. I recall Uncle Paul saying in a soft voice that Grandfather was alive, then taking Aunt Rosalie’s hand. But I’d reached her first, and I knew she was not.

“Uncle Kai-rong returned two days later. We were
barricaded in the kitchen. When we heard voices in the house, Uncle Paul told Lao-li and myself to hide in a cupboard. He and Grandfather Chen seized cleavers and waited. Only when they were sure it was Uncle Kai-rong did Uncle Paul unbar the door.

“Uncle Kai-rong was devastated. Disbelieving. He wept over the garden grave Uncle Paul and I had dug for Aunt Rosalie in the dead of night. He begged her forgiveness. Then he gathered Lao-li and myself to him and said, ‘You are the treasures.’ He repeated it: ‘You are the treasures.’

“Within days, Mao’s army arrived, and order was restored in Shanghai. Number One Boy, who had been shot dead beside the gate, was sent back to his ancestral village for burial. Aunt Rosalie was given a proper funeral and reburied in the Jewish cemetery, though there were so few Jews left in Shanghai by then that some rites could not be performed.

“Uncle Paul left Shanghai a few months later, to go to America, after Mao Tse-tung made it clear Europeans were not welcome in the People’s Republic. Lao-li and I grew up in the villa, watched over by Kai-rong, whom I called uncle but who treated me like a son. Until, as young men, we came to America.”

A New York silence—quiet framed by a distant siren, an air conditioner’s hum—suffused the room. “An old story,” Mr. Zhang said softly, “from long ago. But”—he reached for my teacup, to refill it—“you are still wondering about the Shanghai Moon.”

In truth I hadn’t been. I’d been thinking about Rosalie and Kai-rong, and how they’d never gotten to say goodbye.

“Uncle Paul,” he said, “cradling Aunt Rosalie after the intruders fled, found red marks at her throat. To Grandfather, or perhaps to himself—certainly not to Lao-li or to me—he said, ‘The Shanghai Moon. They were after the Shanghai Moon.’ Weeping, he called down curses upon the gem and swore he wished it had never been made.”

“She’d been wearing it?” I said. “I thought—”

“Though the intruders found the villa empty and bare, they continued to scream for treasure. Then suddenly, after the struggle with Aunt Rosalie, they fled. Why? Unless by ‘treasure’ they meant the Shanghai Moon, and they’d gotten what they came for. Such was Uncle Paul’s reasoning. Uncle Kai-rong agreed. He cursed the gem as Uncle Paul had, and called on it in turn to curse those who now possessed it. He ordered us never to speak of it again.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling how tissue-thin the words were. “What terrible things for a child to live through.”

“Many children live through terrible things. The world is a harsh place. All we can do is try to ease one another’s way.”

“I suppose you’re right. And I have to say, the loss of a brooch seems so . . . trivial, in the context of this story. Of those terrible days.”

“Yes. And no. Uncle Kai-rong would have given a dozen, a hundred, Shanghai Moons, to have his Rosalie back. But it took on a different meaning to my cousin. In Uncle Kairong’s presence we never spoke of it, and we never spoke between us of that day, but repeatedly, to me, in the months that followed, Lao-li vowed he would recover the gem. He
was a young child who, as you say, had seen terrible things. The dream of recovering the Shanghai Moon gave him comfort. I—a child also, not much older—saw no harm in his taking refuge in that dream. I did not forsee the obsession it would become, or the trouble it would lead to.”

“Trouble?”

“As we grew to manhood, my cousin’s attention was absorbed in the study of gems and precious metals. The Shanghai of the People’s Republic, gray and stern, bore little resemblance to the wild city of the years before the war, or to the war years’ profiteering frenzy. Luxury and opulence were banished. The European jewelers had fled, and Chinese jewelers found themselves doing little beyond repairing senior cadres’ watches. Nevertheless, Lao-li found a jeweler willing to take an apprentice. After a day of Piaget screws and gears, by night he instructed Lao-li secretly on gems, their cuts, weights, colors, and flaws.

“Uncle Kai-rong was himself a senior cadre, busy with extending the generous, fierce hand of revolution to all of China. We remained in the villa—shared now, in correct Maoist fashion, with three other families—planting bok choy and beans among the sweet potato vines, giving to the poor the eggs from our chickens. For a long time, life was difficult but satisfying. Uncle Kai-rong assured us the sacrifices we were making would uplift the Chinese people through a thousand generations.”

“Why didn’t you dig up Rosalie’s jewelry? And what about the treasures your grandfather had buried?”

“Grandfather Chen’s scrolls and porcelains were retrieved
and sold abroad to feed the masses. But the villa garden itself was nourishing many mouths. Uncle Kai-rong would not permit the destruction of crops to search for the jewelry, the location of which none of us knew. He felt Aunt Rosalie would have wanted it that way. As crops were plowed under or new furrows dug, of course we searched, but we were never successful.

“Then, as my cousin and I entered our twenties, the winds of the Cultural Revolution began to blow. Everyone was scrutinized, anyone could be denounced. Uncle Kairong was a powerful man, but his class background was incorrect. And powerful men have enemies. Being cowards, his did not take aim at him directly but whispered and hissed, inflaming others. We started to hear rumors, threats. One day, returning from his work, Lao-li was set upon by a mob in the street. Perhaps you can imagine the attitude of the Red Guards toward a young Eurasian jeweler from a landowning family?”

I could. “What happened?”

“These were the Cultural Revolution’s earliest days. Some people were not yet terrified and cowed. He was rescued by neighbors and returned to us, not badly hurt. But over the months the direction of things became clear. Uncle Kai-rong, forseeing dunce caps and years of reeducation in the countryside for Lao-li, sent him to America, and me with him. He did this at great risk and no doubt would have paid a high price. But he cheated the Red Guards: He fell ill, and died not six months after I and my cousin arrived here.”

“How did he die?”

Mr. Zhang smiled sadly. “We were told his heart failed him. I have no doubt that is true. Many years before, he’d lost his Rosalie. Now he lost his son, and myself. And finally, to the Red Guards, he lost his greatest love: China. I think he saw no reason to go on.”

“Mr. Zhang, your family’s story is extraordinary.”

“No, Ms. Chin. There are many like it. Every family has its own tangles of love and consequences.”

“But not all families’ stories run through times like those.”

“That may be, though from what I’ve seen that makes their stories no easier. In any case, do you now understand why it’s implausible that this ministry official who stole Aunt Rosalie’s buried jewelry—”

“Wong Pan.”

“Why Wong Pan is unlikely to have the Shanghai Moon?”

“Because it wasn’t buried with the other pieces. But yesterday you asked me about it.”

“For Lao-li’s sake. The search for the Shanghai Moon has given shape to my cousin’s life. It’s a delusion and has been from the beginning. But it’s kept him from despair in the darkest times.”

“So you’ve indulged his fantasy and, as I understand it, financed the hunt.”

“The path he’s followed hasn’t led to the treasure he seeks. But as he wouldn’t abandon this path, I have not wanted him to walk it alone.”

“He’s lucky to have you, Mr. Zhang.”

“And I to have him. Through my young years, all I had
of my own family were memories, growing faint. My mother, my father, my brother had left me behind and were gone. Yet unlike the thousands of war orphans starving alone in the streets, I grew up wrapped in the warmth of family. I was a mouth to feed, a cry to hush, but never for a moment was I allowed to think I was a burden. No, the opposite. I was part of the family’s joy. This is a debt I can never repay. If I’ve spent money over the years helping my cousin keep hope alive, and so enabling him to live a life, with a wife and children of his own, it is no price at all. In our children and our grandchildren, the Chen, Zhang, and Gilder families still live.”

I glanced at Bill, then back to Zhang Li. “I do have more questions, Mr. Zhang. But first, there’s something else. You say your mother, your family, had left you behind.”

“I’ve never blamed them. Perhaps my mother hoped to be able to come back for me, but . . . it was wartime.”

“She did hope that. Still, what you think is not exactly what happened.”

“What are you saying? How can you know anything about those times?”

“We’ve found . . . documents. Your mother’s diary, for one thing. And . . .” I hesitated. I didn’t want to come out and say,
And your father murdered your mother, your brother told us so
. “And some other things. I’ll give them to you. They tell most of the story, and I can fill in some of the rest.”

“My mother’s diary! But Ms. Chin! How could you possibly have found—”

Another thing he might not need to know: Uncle Paul
had it all along. “We did a lot of digging. I’ll make you copies of what we have.”

“Oh, my. I’d be very grateful.”

“But now, Mr. Zhang: What do you know about a German named Ulrich? A soldier?”

“Ulrich? I don’t think I know that name. Who is he?”

“He’s mentioned in your mother’s diary. He protected Chen Kai-rong in jail. For that Major Ulrich was promised the Shanghai Moon.”

“Promised it? By Aunt Rosalie?”

“And your mother. We thought there might be a chance he’d actually gotten hold of it. But if Rosalie was wearing it years later, when the intruders came . . .”