Escape from Shanghai (16 page)

The war ended in China on a hot, bright sunny August day. The one radio we had blared out the news. The Japanese had surrendered to China and Great Britain on August 15 in accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. We had electricity because this was the location of the provincial government. In the countryside, word of Japan’s defeat flew across the land at the speed of sound. In some remote regions, the news came a bit slower because people had to carry the word to the next village. Eventually, everybody knew.

Then on September 1, 1945, one day before the Japanese signed the formal surrender aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the supreme military-civilian ruler of China, asked Governor-General Li, the supreme military-civilian leader of Canton Province, to resign.

Li Hanhun, his family and servants were shipped off, down the East (Dong) River, back to their home in Canton.

Li’s entire staff, cronies and thousands of corrupt civil servants were also let go. There was a complete shakeup in the provincial government.

With the Japanese surrender, their occupational currency suddenly became worthless. Those who lived in the occupied zones were holding colored paper. To avoid complete chaos, Chiang’s government
promised to exchange the Japanese money for the yuan. People were ordered to use the Japanese currency to conduct daily business until this exchange could be made. Most Chinese were living in a world of uncertainties, wondering what was going to happen next.

Meanwhile, Mom was asked to go to Chungking for a debriefing.

But the saga was far from over. Our paths with the Li’s would cross again in Shanghai.

The way to Chungking was mostly one-lane dirt roads. The mode of transport was an army truck. And we were lucky to get it. Whatever resources the army had were being used to round up the Japanese. The overwhelming issue at hand was the building of prison compounds to house the POWs. The first thing was to put them all into prisons, mostly for their own protection. Feeding the Japanese was a secondary problem. No one had any sympathy for a starving Japanese soldier on Chinese soil, especially when we went hungry ourselves.

Perhaps more damaging to the countryside was the rampaging poor who had turned to crime for their survival. Mom and I were stuck outside a
burning town gate because the citizens of the town had started a fire thinking that we were bandits intent on robbing them. One of their lookouts had seen a man with a rifle in our truck and immediately thought the worst. The ancient stone wall that housed the burning wooden gate was so hot that water turned instantly to steam upon contact. We sat and waited for the stone to cool before we could drive through the opening.

Once we were inside this remote mountain-top town, the residents again piled firewood into the arched gateway. The mayor wanted us to stay. He even offered to house and feed us because the two soldiers traveling with us would be enough to scare off the bandits.

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case in our journey. In the remote mountainous regions of southwestern China, law and order was essentially nonexistent.

When we reached Kweilin, Mom and I went to the Li River to spend a few days being tourists. This was the spot that Chinese watercolorists, calligraphers, and emperors visited to cleanse their heavily burdened minds. We spent that evening watching the sun set behind the wondrous limestone mountains that characterized its unique beauty. While the setting sun hid behind the bulbous mountains, the bright
light-blue sky cast its majestic aura over our heads. Then, magically, as if a series of switches had been thrown, spots of lantern lights flickered on. Within minutes, dot after dot of tiny lights marched across the dark broad mirror of the Li River. Out there, the lantern-lit fishermen unleashed their cormorants on the unsuspecting fish.

We were reluctant to leave, but Mom had meetings to attend in Chungking. She was clearly upset and nervous. What do they want to talk to me about, she wondered. She didn’t give me many of the details of those meetings because they had sworn her to secrecy. They had asked her not to publicly divulge her war-time experiences while under the employ of the Chinese Government. She even signed the equivalent of a non-disclosure agreement. She then made it clear to me that I was never to speak of our war experiences, too.

Though our lives had never been threatened, that unspoken danger was never far from her thoughts. Clearly, the wise thing to do would be to keep her silence.

After college, I asked her whether it would be permissible for me to tell our story. She said: “No.” When I pointed out that the Chinese government of that era no longer existed, she said that a promise is a promise. But she gave me permission to tell our
story after her death. Then she would smile and say: “I promise you this: I am determined to outlive all of my enemies.”

By that, I knew she meant Chiang Kai-shek and Li Hanhun. Though neither one of these people had ever deliberately hurt her, she still considered them her enemies because of their inability to govern in a benevolent and generous way. Selflessness was not a word in their vocabularies. My mother believed that leaders should serve their constituents, not exploit and abuse them.

At the beginning of the war, our problem was getting out of Shanghai. At the end, it was getting back. Unfortunately, what we learned in Chungking was not encouraging or conducive to our return to Shanghai. The situation was actually a lot worse than it was before the war ended. Now that the Japanese were no longer in control, their disappearance created a social and political vacuum. Powerful local politicians and self-proclaimed warlords all claimed a right to rule their designated regions. The jockeying for power was in full force because the central command was disorganized and in disarray.

The Generalissimo’s men were occupied with rounding up the Japanese. Many of his soldiers were stationed in the north trying to contain Mao Tse-tung and his band of ever-growing peasant soldiers. Chiang himself was occupied with re-establishing the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Government to a large portion of the country formerly held by the Japanese. And because the Party needed money, very often the
highest bidder got the coveted position. Suddenly, a “warlord” became a “governor.”

Left alone in the mountainous and remote regions were freely roaming bands of disgruntled, displaced peasants. They looted and pillaged the countryside for food and any valuables that they could carry, that is, if they couldn’t eat it first. For them, there simply wasn’t any other way to survive. These were landless people with absolutely nothing in their names.

One sure and ancient way for us to return to Shanghai was by boat down the Yangtze. Unfortunately, many remote stretches of the rugged and sparsely inhabited banks of the untamed, raging river were controlled by bandits. When possible, they stopped river traffic to collect a toll. And the obviously wealthy were taken and held for ransom.

But none of this deterred my mother. We went in search of a boatman who would take us to Shanghai. She had a number of leads. The most highly recommended one came from an American intelligence officer who worked with Uncle Jin.

The boatman that the American recommended had transported some top secret and sensitive documents through the Japanese lines from Chungking, down the Yangtze, to Shanghai.

Uncle Jin knew of him, but never met the man. He was known to be reliable. “Opportunistic, but reliable,” was the cliché used to describe him. The
next question was whether we could trust him with our lives, not just some secret papers.

Eventually, we found the man. His small junk couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet long. Its center section was covered with a semi-circular bamboo housing, the same design as the one on Uncle Wu’s cargo junk. The housing constituted the main and only cabin on the junk. Braced against the front of the half-moon shaped cabin was a twenty-foot tall mast rigged with a traditional lug sail. On up-river journeys, this mast held the towrope.