Escape from Shanghai (8 page)

Mr. Wu let go of his tiller, took two steps, reached down and grabbed me by the hair. He saw what must have been a funny look on my face because when he pulled me aboard he threw his head back and laughed. Shocked and shivering from the chill in the air, seeing him laugh made me feel as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Wu handed me to my mother and asked his wife to give me some hot tea. Then he casually went back to work.

From that day on, Mom always made sure that I went to the bathroom on shore. After all, there was
no speedy way to turn the junk around. If Mr. Wu hadn’t caught me by my hair, then I probably would have drowned.

Mom taught me how to swim.

This was a story that the entire crew would tell, over and over, generating new laughter with each telling. Eventually, I took pride in the event. My misadventure had made them laugh.

Life aboard this transport junk never varied. Mrs. Wu would prepare breakfast at the first appearance of light. After breakfast, the crew would pole the junk up river for a few hours, then they would take a tea break and a short rest and return to work until lunch time. After eating, they napped or rested. Then a few more hours of work before afternoon tea. The crew worked until late afternoon when Mr. Wu would start looking for a suitable place to anchor for the night. Mrs. Wu would begin to prepare dinner.

At dinnertime, Mr. Wu anchored his junk alongside the muddy riverbank. To reach shore, two members of the crew dropped a long gangplank over the side. Then they would either drop anchor or tie the boat to a tree. Sometimes, they did both. The tough, muscular coolies wore faded and patched black pants
and gray cotton shirts opened in front. They rolled their long, loose sleeves up to the elbows, exposing their dark muscular forearms. They would wash their hands and forearms in the river, chatting and joking, happy that the day’s work was over. They were ready to eat.

Because the kitchen area was so compact and small, there was no room for everyone to sit and eat. We lined up in front of Mrs. Wu and she would fill a large bowl with food and hand it out to us. We would then find an available space, sit, and eat.

After dinner, the men smoked, drank tea and talked about the war. The commonality of the conflict brought everyone together. Once in a while, a crewman would go ashore and disappear behind some bushes. Urinating in the bushes was acceptable practice. Number Two was confined to outhouses that dotted the riverside.

By sunset, we would all be ready for bed.

At dawn, we woke to the soft chant of men poling the junk through the water. Here, the river ran between low banks along a relatively flat plane of land. It was broad and shallow with a slow current. Judging from the watermark of the bamboo poles, the river was about four feet deep. The beamy, shallow-draft hull was designed to resemble a flat-bottomed barge.

After a few days of poling, we left the heavily populated waterfront areas. Here, towns and villages were separated by towing paths that lined the river’s banks. The crewmen stowed their poles and put on towing harnesses. They strapped them across their right shoulders then secured the ends of their harnesses to the long towline. The four men were tied to the end of this rope on shore. They were shirtless now, and they had rolled their pant legs up to their knees. Their hard thin dark bodies strained against the towline. Even though the three-inch wide harnesses were padded, the pressure cut into the right side of their necks and bodies. They pulled with their bodies leaning forward, nearly parallel to the ground. The men chanted to keep a steady rhythm. Their bare callused feet gripping the muddy shoreline with each measured step, they pulled the heavily laden junk up river.

The cluster of straining crewmen was about a hundred feet ahead of us. The long towline hung in the air behind them ending at the top of a fifteen-foot tall mast. This sturdy mast kept the towline high and dry, thus avoiding water resistance. Mr. Wu constantly worked the tiller against the slow-moving current. His job was to steer the junk away from shallow water since the force of the towline tended to pull the junk toward shore.

We moved up river one step at a time. Meanwhile, Uncle Wu was wondering aloud why we hadn’t seen any Japanese patrol boats. Perhaps they were planning another invasion inland?

The way we moved up the waterways of China in 1942 hadn’t changed since the beginning of Chinese history. Descriptions of junks being poled and towed on the eleven-hundred-mile Grand Canal date back as far as the Fifth Century B.C. For American-educated people like my Mom and grandpa, this continued use of ancient technology was exactly what they wanted changed. They had seen the future in America and they believed that modernizing China was the answer to the country’s poverty and backwardness. One internal-combustion engine on the junk would have shortened our trip to a few days rather than weeks. But this meant a total reworking of the traditional ways of doing business. And nobody knew how to do that. Up until recently, of course. It took a violent revolution and an evolutionary forty years to make the changes.

One of the things that has always bothered Mom was the fact that we never quite knew where we were in our travels. We didn’t have any maps and we couldn’t
buy any. When the Japanese invaded, maps of China were taken off the market and destroyed. The theory was that the invaders wouldn’t know how to get anywhere. Of course the Japanese had made their own invasion maps, but we weren’t going to make it easy for them.

So, we went wherever the Wu’s took us. Consequently, I’ll never be able to retrace our old route. At least not Mr. Wu’s route.

What we were able to figure out was that we started our trip on the Pearl River, then we meandered across the Dongping Waterway, and up the Bei (North) River to Shaoguan. At Shaohuan, we turned left to the Wujiang River and up to my father’s birthplace.

Mr. Wu had docked his junk at a market town earlier than usual that day. The announcement of his arrival brought out the local salt merchant. This was Mr. Wu’s route, one that had been in his family for generations. His junk carried about 10,000 pounds of salt for sale and distribution along his territory. On his return trip, he would carry rice to Canton.

Wu’s sons had been killed by the Japanese, so he knew that his business would die with him. He decided to devote the remainder of his life to fighting the Japanese. He was just one of many patriots who worked with Uncle Jin.

Over a cup of hot tea, the local salt merchant would bring him up-to-date on the latest news, then they would haggle over the price of salt. The two men sat and sipped tea. It was a slow, amicable process. They had been doing business together all of their adult lives. Each knew what the other’s profit margin was so the haggling was more of a social ritual than a business transaction. After the crewmen unloaded the one-hundred-pound bags, Wu told them to take the afternoon off.

Mom and I went with Mrs. Wu to shop for food. We usually ate the fish that we caught in the river, but not today. On this day, she went to the butcher and bought a pork shoulder. She stewed the whole shoulder all afternoon. The meat was a special treat.

The next morning, we discovered why. First we heard the roar of the water, then, after we rounded a turn in the river, we saw our first white-water rapids.

There were three junk tied to the shore ahead of us. We became the fourth in line waiting to be towed. After we tied up, the crewmen on the first junk began to pole their junk to the middle and deepest part of the raging river. A two-hundred-foot long hawser was attached to its tall towing mast. On shore, a gang of thirty coolies strained their thin tight bodies against their harnesses, their left arms swinging with each step they took while their right hand pulled on the
harness rope to help ease the pressure against their shoulders.

Though Mom knew that this method of transportation existed on the major rivers in China, she had not expected to see it here. Concerned and frightened at the same time, she asked Mr. Wu whether it might not be better for us to walk along the shore to help lighten the load.

He smiled at her suggestion. “Your weight makes little difference when compared to our cargo,” he told her. “We will stay on board. It is safer. You will see,” he smiled enigmatically.

Twenty minutes later, the first junk disappeared around a bend. Now the second junk in line poled it’s way to the raging white water. Another gang of thirty coolies began towing the vessel up the rapids. Minutes later, we saw the first group of coolies return. They had delivered the first junk into the calm waters ahead and were on their way back to take the next one in line.

We were the last and the most heavily laden junk that morning so we had to wait for both gangs of coolies to tow us over the rapids. As we made the left turn into the bend of the river, we came to understand Mr. Wu’s enigmatic smile. The coolies’ towpath wasn’t a path at all. They walked by the side of the river, ankle deep in water over rocks, stones and
pebbles. Up until that point, the towpath was wide enough so that three to four men could pull side by side. This large cluster of men worked shoulder to shoulder and step by step up the onrushing water. But up ahead, the path narrowed. One by one, the men would detach his harness from the hawser then reattach it behind the man in front until all of the men were in single file, pulling in unison like a long line of well-choreographed men on the march.

We could not have walked in that rough, rock strewn riverside. What made it more dangerous was that nothing prevented the men from being pulled into the rapids other than their combined strengths of body and will.

I sat and watched the men haul us up the river. If just a few men faltered, it would have been over for all of us. But no one faltered or fumbled. They just plodded on and on, step after step.

By late afternoon, we came through the rapids into a broad, calm bowl-shaped lake. The dark-green waters were ringed on both banks by gentle sloping mountains. The scene looked like nature’s hand had scooped out a handful of earth here and filled it with calm, dark water. The roar of the raging river was gone. The silence reinforced and accentuated the calm. Ahead was nothing but clear blue sky. It had taken us all day to travel just a few miles.

Further up river, we stopped at the foot of a gorge for the night before attempting to pass through the rapids. The sky was bright, light blue, with the hilltops on either side of the river crowned by the golden light of the sun. And down by the riverbank, a long dark shadow was climbing slowly up the mountainside at the speed of the setting sun, making the towing path a shadowless gray—and cool to the bottoms of my bare feet. The shoreline was dangerously rocky, paralleled by a smooth, well-worn, narrow footpath.

I had been bored sitting on a slow-moving junk all day so I decided to explore this beautiful shoreline. And as I rounded the bend of the footpath, I walked right into a band of river coolies. They were dressed in either faded-black or light-gray pants, rolled up to the knees. A few had gray shirts draped over their backs, but most of them were still bare-chested and hot from the day’s work. The last boat of the day had passed through their gorge, and now they sat on their haunches, a huge bowl of rice in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other. The men sat in a near perfect circle around a pot of fish in brown gravy, a large dish of vegetables, a huge streaming bucket of soup, and a wooden bucket of steamed rice. They ate with gusto amidst a lot of loud chatter. Every now and
then one or two of them would reach in to replenish their bowls with more vegetables, or fish, or both. They worked their chopsticks like miniature shovels, pushing and scooping the right amount of food to the edge of the bowl. Then they’d bring the bowl to their mouths and proceed to shovel the prearranged mixture into their mouths. They ate with unabashed slurping sounds as if they were sucking the food into their mouths. Eating was supposed to be an orally satisfying event, and they clearly relished it.