He hoped, with all his heart, that he would see her again.
Suddenly feeling exhilarated, Ernest looked around. He was standing in front of a five-story building in smooth art deco design, near a classical building graced with a statue of a Greek god and a neoclassical edifice crowned with a dome. And Sassoon’s towering hotel with a green pyramid was a few feet away. It seemed in his escape he had circled back to the bustling waterfront area again. He began to walk, searching, peering at the French, Danish, Italian, and English inscriptions on the buildings. They were international banks, American liquor trading companies, British tobacco groups, and Danish telegraph firms. Several companies hung the Star of David on the wall. He smiled, remembering that people on the ocean liner said that Jews had arrived in Shanghai to make a fortune as early as in 1843, after Britain defeated the Chinese Qing dynasty during the first Opium War. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia, many Russian Jews, fearing persecution, had fled to Shanghai as well.
The fact that his fellow men had found successes in Shanghai gave him great confidence. Surely, he would make a living here. Admittedly, there were obstacles: he couldn’t understand the language, didn’t know anyone in Shanghai, and had no expertise in banking, engineering, baking, or trade. He loved photography and piano, but photography was a hobby and he had given up on piano a few years ago. But he was nineteen, and he was willing to do anything to survive.
He decided to try his luck at a barbershop behind the building with the Greek god; it had Russian words on the door and a faded poster of Rosh Hashanah on the window—his people, after all. He walked in. The shop had five empty chairs, and a middle-aged barber with a mustache, holding a broom like an ax, frowned at him. Before Ernest could ask, the barber shouted, “Get out of my shop.”
Stunned, Ernest backed out, a faint murmur chasing him. “Refugees. Rats!”
He had been called many things; this was new. He shrugged and continued his search down the street. He walked into one shop after another, offering his services as a clerk to a Russian hardware store owner, a hauling jockey to a French businessman in a leather and fur shop, then a dishwasher, a gear polisher, a fish fryer, or anything. No one would hire him. He left the stores, his head hanging low. He had been driven out of his home for being a Jew; now, after crossing the oceans to an alien land, he was driven out again for being a refugee.
4
AIYI
On the way to my club, watching the red-brick buildings and red-tiled villas passing outside the window, I thought of the blue-eyed foreigner. He seemed different from the attackers. I could guess he was arrested because he was with me—the Sikh policeman must have realized I was a victim, but he had to put up a show to appease my attackers. Arresting the young man was unfair. Yet this was what Shanghai had become, a city so far from justice, so close to jail.
Who was he? Why would he bother to help me? Didn’t he know the rules in Shanghai?
Shanghai, my home, my city, was no longer mine after a plague of wars; it belonged to the foreigners from many countries. The British, having defeated us a century ago, controlled the rich and prosperous Settlement with the Americans, and the French built their villas in the Concession. The Japanese, armed with terrifying fighter planes and rifles, were the newly minted victors. They had established their own domain for many years in the Hongkou district, north of the Huangpu River, where they played baseball in the park and staffed hospitals with their women and soldiers from Japan, and now they marched on our streets and slept in the homes they’d seized. We Shanghainese, the conquered, were powerless. Many lost their homes in the Old City, south of the Settlement; only a few lucky ones, like my family, got to keep their ancestral homes, and many others crowded under the shadows of the art deco buildings or scattered around the rice paddies and mosquito-infested fields in the north and west.
Segregation was not a law, but prejudice was rampant like disease. We all stayed away from one another. We Chinese tended our sick at home and the foreigners cared for theirs in their hospitals. We dined in our courtyards, the Europeans drank in their coffeehouses, and the Japanese ate in their restaurants lined with tatami.
Out of business necessity, I kept friends like Sassoon and socialized with them; often we drank brandy mixed with new interest and old resentment. I was aware of the risk of mingling with them. Getting assaulted was not a surprise, but it was a surprise to be aided by a white man, a complete stranger.
My Nash turned on Bubbling Well Road and stopped on a street lined with plane trees with bare branches. I stepped out of my car, pulled my mink coat tighter to fight against the wintry chill, and walked to a stately three-story art deco building with a sleek circular overhang in white stones. The air was vibrating with jazz tunes; the evening session had started. In the dimness that was swallowing the city, One Hundred Joys Nightclub, crowned with a crystal glass dome topped by a stylish flagpole, glowed brilliantly in red neon lights. A vision of beauty and opulence, it was the first luxury nightclub in Shanghai and had earned the envy of Sassoon at its opening.