The men looked all around, frantic to find her. She counted four of them, including Thomas. She checked, and counted again. Four.
Life, or love?
She fanned the tickets out in her hands. She always had to choose. Why did fate always force her? When she was young, it was her happiness or her family’s survival, not both. Now she could be a patriot, or a woman. But not both.
Four men waited for her below.
Just then she heard a long, low boat horn calling from downriver, and because of where she stood, she could see far. She strained into the night, watching the form of something in the river come closer, something large, until she saw it was a battleship, and behind it steamed another, and another behind that, a whole line of warships coming up the river.
So the attack was starting tonight.
Anger ignited within her, rage she had felt at her father, and at Du, and at those who would keep down girls like Plum Blossom, like herself. Watching the line of ships, she understood that without this feeling, she would wither and die. She would go cold. And then he will go cold to me too.
She fanned out four of the tickets, and let the rest drop from her hands to the dark river below, where they vanished. “Thomas!” she called.
He looked up, relief sagging every joint in his body. The brothers had been hopping and Alonzo pacing; sailors were waiting at the top of the passenger ramp.
In a second she was beside him, and in his arms. “Thank you,” he breathed.
“I got them.” She passed him the envelope, stamped DECEMBER 7, 1941. “But they had only four left.”
Her words were transparent to him. “You are going back north.”
She nodded. “I can’t leave now. Not yet. You knew.”
“Just as you knew I would not leave without the others.”
“True,” she said. “Pure gold proves its worth in a fire. But I have always known that about you.” They held each other until a sharp blast from the ship’s horn jolted them apart.
“After-” she blurted.
He stopped her. “No more of that. Just stay alive for me.”
“I will.” He felt her arms go inside his coat, and her hand slip something into his trouser pocket.
“Go. Ni zou ba.” Her voice broke.
“Tails!” Charles shouted. Sailors were moving to pull up the ramp. And now he, too, saw something behind them, down the river, a shape-what? He held her face. “See you again,” he said, as Lin had said to him, and she nodded in misery and gave him a push, away from her. In a few steps he covered the salt-brined boards to where his men stood with their own America, their instruments and music, ready to go home, and he saw the first warship, its lights blacked out and its engines quiet.
“Hurry,” he said, and followed them up the ramp.
I watched them steam away that night, passing the first Japanese warship so close they surely could see the rows of soldiers, thousands, rifles at twelve o’clock, bayonets glinting. I shrank into the shadows as they passed, and blessed the ship that bore him away.
I could have left then too, taken a level and more peaceful road to free China, or Hong Kong. But I belonged to the war, I was a creature of its struggle, and so I returned north. I had good years there before the winds changed, and blew fortune away from me. I was a foreign-trained translator, able to read the words of the Westerners and understand their music; maybe it was inevitable that first one comrade, then another, would denounce me as a spy. Now I live alone in a small cell. My punishment is my isolation, hunger rations, and this one, simple masterstroke: I may lie only on my left side. I must always face the door, my hands visible. There is a paradise on my right side, a place of singing angels, and I dream of it every night. Even Thomas waits for me there. But I may not turn.
Despite all this, I am free. I think in English as I like, and roam at will through the halls of memory, still visiting every corner of that glittering world that is gone, never to return, which we called Ye Shanghai.
Afterword
Pearl Harbor was attacked just before three A.M. Shanghai time. A Japanese buildup around the city in the weeks prior had been noticed and remarked on, causing some to leave. Earl Whaley remained, and was interned with his bandmates at the Pudong and later the Weixian prison camps. In each place they formed camp bands, scrounging instruments when necessary (one bass player used a cello). Not all the American jazz men survived; Whaley’s pianist F. C. Stoffer died in camp. Some say Whaley’s hands were broken by his captors, but he is known to have been living in the United States after the war, at least until 1964, working variously at the post office and in real estate. Buck Clayton returned to the States before the war to play with Count Basie; his own account of his years in Shanghai can be read in his memoir. Teddy Weatherford’s orchestra continued to tour Asia as the war permitted; he died in Calcutta, of typhoid, in 1946. Aaron Avshalomov lived quietly in Shanghai through the war and later moved to the United States to join his son, the composer and conductor Jacob Avshalomov, who settled in Portland, Oregon.
The Chinese plan for a 100,000-person Jewish Resettlement Area in Yunnan almost came to fruition, thanks to H. H. Kung, Sun Fo, and other Nationalist leaders. The Sword of David secret society did indeed send the Italian Jewish mercenary Amleto Vespa and the exiled Korean revolutionary An Gong Geun with cash and gold bars from Shanghai to Chongqing, where both were killed. Not long after, Chiang Kai-shek gave in to pressure from Berlin and vetoed the Plan. One can only imagine the long-term outcome of 100,000 European Jews surviving and being resettled in 1939 along what is now the China-Myanmar border; instead the Plan became one of history’s grace notes, forgotten except in the pages of a story like this.
The 25,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai did survive. Some of them were saved by Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese Consul in Vienna, since many of the several thousand specious visas he wrote freed entire families. A vintage directory listing all those in Shanghai’s refugee quarter along with their European city of origin confirms the large number of Jews who made it out of Vienna. Ho Feng-Shan died in San Francisco at age ninety-six; in Israel he is honored as one of the Righteous among Nations.
After the Japanese surrender, Du Yuesheng attempted a return to Shanghai, but his health and his power had declined. He did take a fifth wife, though, marrying the opera star Meng Xiaodong in 1948. When he left Shanghai for the last time in May 1949, both she and Fourth Wife were with him.
H. H. Kung retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalists and later settled in the United States, where he died in 1967.
Xie Jinyuan, the commander of the Lost Battalion, was assassinated in April 1941 by the collaborationist city government. One hundred thousand Shanghainese turned out to mourn him.
Other historical characters, drawn as accurately as possible, include Flowery Flag, Fiery Old Crow, Big Lewis Richardson, Julian Henson, the Doron family, Ackerman, Schwartz, Shengold, Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Dai Li, Joy Homer, Earl West, Reginald Jones, Shibatei Yoshieki, General Doihara, and Miss Zhang, the dance hostess impregnated by Ziliang Soong and murdered for demanding too much money. Admiral Morioka is fictional, but his real-life counterpart in Shanghai also humanely resisted German pressures to kill Shanghai’s 25,000 Jewish refugees.
Night in Shanghai is based almost entirely on true events, and many of its characters were living persons, but on two points the novel does veer from the record. First, Josef Meisinger visited Shanghai to demand the murder of the city’s Jews in July 1942, not November 1941. Second, the story overstates the role of the Green Gang in the city’s jazz clubs. While the Gang wielded enormous power and undeniably controlled drugs, gambling, prostitution, smuggling, protection rackets, and other related industries, it was probably not pulling the musical strings in 1930s Shanghai to the degree depicted here.