Last Boat Out of Shanghai Read online

  The Buick’s driver jumped out of the car, a clean-cut-looking fellow about her age, with slicked-back hair, a neat white shirt, and gray slacks. He was clearly a well-heeled college man. “Sorry, miss, sorry,” he said in Mandarin, a more high-toned dialect than her own Shanghainese. Even as he apologized, his eyes darted anxiously. He was clearly in a hurry to get his car back on the road.

  “You nearly killed me!” she exclaimed, frightened and indignant.

  “Please forgive me,” he blurted. “I’m Ben Char and I’m in a rush to get this car to my elder brother in Taiwan. The ship is loading today, and I have to get there. But my brakes failed, and I could only shift gears to slow the car.”

  Bing’s pedicab driver was scouring his vehicle for any signs of damage. Finding none, he launched into a tirade: “Shit-faced rich boy, stay home with your amah before you kill somebody!”

  Ignoring the insults, Char asked a passing guard about the ship headed to Taiwan, the designated island escape for retreating Nationalists. The official pointed toward another pier farther down the road, and the young man jumped back into his car. “When this madness is over, perhaps you’ll let me make this up to you?” He winked, popping the clutch into first gear after some coolies pushed his car off the curb and into a roll. The engine roared, and he sped off toward the next dock, honking and lurching as people scurried out of his path.

  Shaking off her close call, Bing again surveyed the crowd. Where was her sister? If Bing didn’t find her, she’d be left behind, since Elder Sister had all the tickets and documents. As usual, she had taken charge of everything, because she was the clever one, a point that she was fond of making. If her sister hadn’t filled the car with all her luggage, Bing could have ridden to the docks with her and her family. Now how would she find them?

  Suddenly the ship blasted a piercing baritone horn, and Bing whipped her gaze in its direction. She saw the restless crowd straighten with excitement, then surge in a wave of bodies toward the ship, as if the people could will themselves aboard. At the far edge of the crowd, she spotted a shapely woman in a bright red, formfitting Western-style dress. No question, that was Elder Sister. Even from this distance, Bing could see men slowing their gaits, turning their heads to admire her. If only they knew how tough this woman could be, they would have thought twice. Bing hurried, weaving through the crush of frantic people while bracing herself for Elder Sister’s wrath.

  “Where have you been? What took you so long? We’ve been waiting for you! One more minute and we would have left without you—and in that case, we’d lose all the money we paid for your ticket!” A thunderous barrage poured out of Elder Sister’s mouth with such force that Bing didn’t dare answer, knowing it would be best to ride out the storm. Her sister marched Bing over to the immigration table where her sister’s husband, Kristian, a tall European with slicked-back graying hair, was holding a place near the head of the line.

  “Thank goodness you made it,” he said with a look of relief, “or we’d have never heard the end of it.”

  The couple’s two handsome Eurasian boys rushed over to hug Bing. She had watched over them from the day they were born. “We would never let Mother leave without you,” five-year-old Peter whispered.

  The immigration officer snatched the papers from Kristian’s hand. After giving the biracial boys a long, hard stare, he applied red ink to his chop and stamped their passports, waving them on. He didn’t try to hide his disapproval as he glared at the older white man with the young, attractive Chinese woman. Slowly, he studied each page of their documents as though looking for some discrepancy. Failing to find any, he stamped their pages and turned to Bing. His eyes shifted from her face to Elder Sister’s, then back down to Bing’s passport with agonizing deliberation. “You say you’re sisters? You don’t look alike. She’s from Singapore?” he asked, jerking his head toward Bing.

  Before she could open her mouth and answer, Elder Sister jumped in to interrupt, hoping to distract him from noticing that Bing possessed a black market passport that falsely listed Singapore as her birthplace. Elder Sister spoke in her sweetest, most unctuous voice. “Yes, Officer. My baby sister Bing was born in Singapore but grew up right here in Shanghai. If you doubt, sir, just listen to her Shanghai dialect. She’s the governess for my sons—see how they cling to her?” She smiled warmly as she fixed her wide eyes on the gruff man.

  He looked back at her and shook his head. “Here, go on then,” he muttered with a snort, stamping his chop in red ink and onto Bing’s passport.

  Bing felt her heart lighten as she followed her sister’s rapid pace toward the big ship. Each step took her farther from Shanghai, the Communists, and her life of war, turmoil, and heartache. She could hope only that this journey to a distant land would lead to something better than what she had known in China.

  Just as they neared the boarding ramp, a voice rang out. “Bing! Bing!” At first she didn’t even bother to look at the caller, certain the shouts were for someone else since no one there could possibly know her. Finally she turned and saw that it was Ah Mei, her one and only friend. Ah Mei, nine months pregnant, edged her way over with her husband, a dark, handsome foreigner from Iran.

  “Ah Mei! You needn’t have braved the crowds in your condition.” Bing nodded toward Ah Mei’s full belly, but Bing’s pleased smile belied her words.

  Ah Mei scoffed, reaching for Bing’s hand. “Of course I had to see you off—my best friend is going to America! Everything will be wonderful for you there, just like in the movies.” When they were younger, the two had occasionally escaped from their chores to see a show at one of Shanghai’s many cinemas. Since the films had no subtitles, ushers had handed out detailed programs in Chinese while the girls had fun trying to pick up some new English words from the dialogue.

  “What about you?” Bing asked. “You can’t stay with the Communists.”

  “The Reds will surely ignore us since my husband is a Jew. We’ll be leaving soon enough,” she replied. “After the baby comes, we’ll join the airlift to Palestine with the other Jews still here. We’re going to make our home in that new country. Israel.”

  Their goodbyes hastily concluded, Bing and her sister’s family climbed the steep gangway onto the General Gordon, a World War II troop transport. After the war ended, in 1945, the American President Lines chartered it for use as a passenger ship, in 1946. Though its look was still functional and military gray, the ship seemed to welcome Bing, another wartime survivor. Soon she took a spot along the deck railing to watch the Huangpu River’s churning brown water, the color of milk tea, laced with the city’s dark sludge.

  Around her, other passengers were ebullient, glad to be on the foreign vessel, no longer on Shanghai’s ground. “Goodbye and good riddance, Shanghai!” some shouted, impatient for the ship to sail away. Others were more subdued, waving mournfully to the dear ones they were leaving behind. Bing shook her head, refusing to let the regrets of others stir her own buried memories of Shanghai. She was grateful to be safely aboard, standing at the rail, just as she’d envisioned. She wanted to relish this moment, to savor her departure from her difficult past and her passage to a more hopeful future. As the granite façades of the Bund slipped from view, Bing waved farewell with all her might—to Ah Mei, to hard times, to the parents she would never find now. To everyone and to no one.

  * * *

  —

  WITH A MAXIMUM LOAD of freight and a record number of passengers, the General Gordon sat low in the water. Columns of black smoke belched as the ship heaved down the Huangpu River toward its confluence with the great Yangtze, China’s longest river, and then onward to the sea. Modern warfare had turned that fifty-mile stretch into a harrowing passage. During the war against Japan, the Chinese Nationalist army had sunk “volunteered” commercial ships in the river to blockade the enemy. When the Japanese took over China’s coast during their eight-year wartime occupation, t
hey had mined the channel. As the end of World War II approached in 1945, American air squadrons dropped hundreds of mines into the river to hinder Japan; then the Nationalists followed suit to stop the Communists. By the time Bing was scheduled to depart, the Red Army had fought its way to the north shore of the Yangtze. Once the ship entered the Yangtze, it would have to run a gauntlet of live mines and Communist shore batteries before it reached the open sea. Their safe passage was far from assured.

  In case their vessel came under fire, all passengers were ordered to their cabins and away from portholes. The order was unnecessary—everyone was all too aware of the unlucky ships that hadn’t made it. Only five months earlier, in December 1948, the overloaded passenger ship Jiangya had exploded soon after it left Shanghai, packed with escapees bound for Taiwan. Among them had been some of Shanghai’s most notable rich and famous. Every newspaper and newsreel in China had carried the shocking story: “Between two and three thousand Chinese evacuees fleeing from Shanghai were believed to have lost their lives when the overcrowded SS Jiangya sank outside Woosung on Friday.” Journalists rank it as one of the greatest shipping disasters in world history, with fatalities far in excess of the Titanic’s.

  Within a few weeks after the Jiangya sank, in January 1949, over one thousand people drowned in another maritime disaster when the Taiping collided with the cargo ship Jian Yuan. The Taiping was said to have been dangerously heavy with the silver reserves of the Central Bank of China—headed for Nationalist coffers in Taiwan.

  Then, fourteen days before Bing’s ship had been scheduled to depart, another disaster: Communist gunners attacked the British HMS Amethyst on April 20 as it chugged toward Nanjing to protect British subjects there. In a devastating blow to the British Empire, twenty-two of its crew were killed and thirty-one injured.

  Determined to keep his old troopship from ending up like the Amethyst, its damaged hull and remaining crew still stuck in the river, trapped by the People’s Liberation Army, the General Gordon’s captain gunned his engines. Along the route, distant artillery boomed, and the acrid smell of gunpowder wafted from charred battlefields where the Communist and Nationalist armies had clashed.

  Bing lay on a hammock in the third-class hold, which was crowded with other women on double- and triple-decker sleeping berths supported by metal poles. She had boarded the ship too late to grab one of the stationary berths. All that remained were these hammocks that bounced and swayed with the ship’s motion. Bing clutched at her stomach but found no sympathy from other passengers, all preoccupied with their own woes. As the Gordon threaded its way through the precarious channel, the women around her fell into a nervous quiet. Bing could hear the murmur of their prayers above the drone of the engines. She closed her eyes and tried to banish all thoughts of the unlucky ones on the sunken vessels.

  In the days that followed, no other big ships dared to trail the General Gordon’s wake past the Communist positions between Shanghai and the sea, with some ships changing course completely to avoid Shanghai and the expected Communist onslaught. The American President Lines and other companies canceled their future Shanghai sailings in spite of sold-out bookings. Even rescue ships kept their distance from Shanghai’s waterways. Elder Sister congratulated herself for not buying tickets for the Royal Dutch ocean liner Tjibadak, the British Tairea, or the HMS Constance—they were all still moored in the East China Sea near the Yangtze’s mouth, waiting to learn if it would be safe for them to approach the port city.

  Countless thousands were still trying to get out of Shanghai. They soon found that alternatives to a sea escape were no less daunting. Communist gunners narrowly missed taking down three chartered planes hired to airlift Shanghai’s Portuguese residents to Macao. For weeks, China’s airlines had abandoned their normal schedules and were operating continuous flights out of Shanghai. As soon as a plane arrived, it was boarded in a rush, crammed beyond full with people and cargo, to be dispatched immediately in a race against time. Big foreign carriers like Pan Am and Northwest had added flights, but as the Red Army drew closer to the city, they terminated their Shanghai service. Only Alaska Airlines soldiered on when its president, James Wooten, ordered more DC-4s to help evacuees. Railways, too, had become increasingly perilous—yet train fares continued rising into the stratosphere as the trifecta of runaway inflation, the collapse of the Nationalist currency, and the unquenchable demand sent all ticket prices soaring higher by the hour.

  When the General Gordon finally made it past the mouth of the great river at Wusongkou, the captain announced, “All clear.” Everyone broke into cheers of relief. Bing rushed onto the deck, thankful to have reached the open sea.

  * * *

  —

  THE PEOPLE OF SHANGHAI in particular feared the Communists’ wrath. The very nature of their metropolis was forged from China’s century of humiliation imposed by the opium-peddling British, Americans, and other foreigners. Shanghai was a bastard city: too Western to be Chinese and too Chinese to be Western. The Bund, Shanghai’s fabled waterfront, looked more like a postcard from Europe than from China. Shanghai’s capitalist traditions and privileged urbanites encouraged a sensibility that welcomed modernity to this city “on the sea”—the literal meaning of the words shang hai.

  To the Communists, modern was synonymous with Western, while Western was interchangeable with foreign. Westernized Shanghainese were nothing but yang nu and zou gou—foreign slaves and imperialist running dogs. Shanghai’s wealthy and middle classes, intellectuals and Nationalist partisans were certain to become targets in the coming Communist revolution.

  Yet for most, the decision to flee from home, country, and all that is familiar was heart-wrenching. The Chinese people had emerged from eight years of brutal Japanese aggression, terror, and occupation during World War II. For China, that war had begun in 1937, making it twice the length that China’s allies in Europe had faced, and the country had fought with limited foreign support. When the war ended in 1945, the long-simmering civil war between the American-supported Nationalists and the Soviet-allied Communists reignited even before the ink had dried on the Japanese surrender documents. With this fratricidal blood feud raging on, the ruling Nationalists, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek since 1926, were unable to stabilize the economy, fueling a death spiral of speculation, hoarding, and hyperinflation.

  By late 1947, the United States had lost confidence in Chiang and begun withdrawing troops and material support. Some farsighted capitalists began to leave Shanghai that same year, for they had the money, means, and connections to set up a life elsewhere—just in case. Then, in the autumn of 1948, the Communists crushed the Nationalists in three major battles. The outcome of the civil war was no longer in doubt as the Red Army pressed forward to capture the prize: Shanghai.

  At the dawn of 1949, even Shanghai’s middle classes began to flee. The trickle of exodus grew into a torrent, propelled by rumors and Nationalist propaganda that the Communists would confiscate property, collectivize land and businesses, even break up families and steal wives. Nationalist officials warned of mass arrests and mass killings, further inflaming the panic.

  Any remaining faith in the old regime crumbled as the delirium of fear descended upon Shanghai’s former foreign concessions, where the better-off Chinese resided. Nearly every family there was embroiled in the same fierce debate. In Bing’s household, too, they asked themselves the same questions each day: Should they stay or leave? And if they left, where would they go? Communist rule couldn’t possibly be worse than the Japanese occupation had been, many argued. Why should they leave? And yet, how could they stay?

  Running away seemed unthinkable when everything they knew and valued was right there in Shanghai. In the calculus of possible escape, fleeing would mean splitting up families, with separation from children, elders, and other loved ones who were unable or unwilling to make the leap into the void. Running away also involved great risk: Besides the deadly
toll from air and sea collisions, newspapers were filled with stories of Shanghainese who had fled to Hong Kong with their life savings, then, after losing everything to the inflated prices there, were forced to return to Shanghai as paupers. Or they were stuck in Hong Kong as impoverished refugees, reduced to menial work, begging, even prostitution.

  Yet with each passing day in early 1949, newspapers headlined the departures of the well known and well-to-do. Numerous political officials suddenly decided they needed medical treatment abroad. The city’s middle and wealthy classes could no longer deny the inevitable: The impending Communist revolution would invert the social pyramid that had provided their status and privilege. Some of Shanghai’s wealthy industrialists managed to transfer money, machinery, and key personnel to Hong Kong, which they had always disdained as a sleepy fishing village when compared to their vibrant city. But Hong Kong was still better than Taiwan—in their view, a place fit only for country bumpkins. The burgeoning exodus included Shanghai’s many foreign residents, forced to give up their pampered expatriate lifestyles before the Communists began ridding China of the “bloodsucking imperialists.”

  By the time the Red Army surrounded Shanghai, waves of people had bolted: the city’s upper classes, the educated and resourceful, residents who had bet on the old guard—anyone who had anything to fear. Like the White Russians who had vanished from Bolshevik Moscow, the German Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Berlin, Vietnamese waiting for helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, or Syrians dodging bombs and bullets to brave the Mediterranean Sea, they fled: By boats so heavily laden they could not avoid collisions at sea; by planes so overweight they could not clear obstacles ahead; by trains with so many people clinging to every surface, the cars could only creep forward. Many had to flee in a frenzied rush, taking only what they could carry. Exile from their beloved city would be tolerable only because they expected to be gone no more than six months or a year at most. That was the longest they figured the Communist peasants would last, never imagining that more than thirty years would pass before they could return and reunite with loved ones.