The Last Rose of Shanghai(73)

Honestly, I had some more-pressing matters to think about than finding the camp. I had been living in the inn for about two blissful months, dining on the plain food the innkeeper made, which I never would have touched before, applying the cheap Snow Flake cream bought on the street, and living in the few ready-made changes of clothes Ernest had bought for me. I needed a long-term plan for our future. The day of my wedding with Cheng had passed, and it was time for me to be engaged to Ernest in a proper manner so I wouldn’t be a disgrace—an announcement in a newspaper at least. And that would require some reconciliation with Cheng, who must be cursing me, and Sinmay and my family. I couldn’t hide from them for the rest of my life. And as for my future with Ernest, we needed a home. I also needed money.

Yet Ernest didn’t seem to give it a thought. A brief mention of moving in with him. That was it. And now his preoccupation with the refugees.

Still, I gave my chauffeur a gold necklace and asked if he could help find the location of the camp. It took him a few days. Then he reported that the Japanese had sent the alien enemies to eight internment camps in Shanghai. Two were large camps: one was in the Pudong district near the tobacco factories across from the Huangpu River, and the other in the Longhua area in the southern suburb of Shanghai. As far as he knew, the Americans and Netherlanders were sent to Pudong, the British to Longhua.

Now that I knew the locations of the camps, I was reluctant to tell Ernest. It was dangerous to go to the Pudong island. There were no bridges between Pudong and the Settlement; a ferry was the only way to get across, and some ferry people, I’d heard, were unscrupulous. They might agree to take Ernest across but then leave him on the other side. Besides, the Japanese patrolled the river regularly. If they caught any suspicious people crossing the river, they would shoot the boat and capsize it.

But each day Ernest pestered me. “Did you find it? Did you find it?”

It was easy to lie, but it gave me stress to see him disappointed. So I talked to my chauffeur again, gave him a gold earring, and asked him to find a reliable ferryman. He would arrange everything for me, my chauffeur said, nodding in his nonstop way.

When I told Ernest about the camp and the ferryman, he looked so happy I wanted to change my mind.





57


ERNEST


By the dawn light, he jumped in a small banana boat Aiyi had helped arrange.

The boat wobbled away from the wooden pier, and he turned around to face the island of Pudong where the tobacco factories, cotton mills, and oil factories stood. From the Settlement, it didn’t look too far, but the river was wider than he thought. And the water was a cranky, foul monster of a swamp overflowing with rusty hulks of freighters, dunes of fetid fish innards, and piles of black sunken ships and decayed coffin planks with their lamentable owners. The river was a trap.

He held tight to the edge as the boat swayed through the channel of rusty hulls hanging with precarious sails. The wind rattled the sails, brittle and threatening to break any second. The tide was strong; the boat reeled, and heaps of broken engine parts hurtled toward him headlong, almost crashing into him. Then the boat spun sideways and got stuck among mounds of blackened weeds and a drove of bloated bodies. Ernest grabbed a spare oar and stabbed, fighting their way out, his stomach churning.

The Japanese patrol was scouring, its engines rumbling faintly, and now and then the searchlight pierced the dim dawn light. Nervous, he pulled down the straw hat on his head.

When the boat finally reached the jetty on the island, he let out the breath he’d been holding, gestured to the ferryman, and jumped onto the muddy ground. In front of him sprawled a one-story cotton mill with two towering chimneys, next to it three soot-covered oil factories, adjacent to what appeared to be a dog farm and a few shanties with clotheslines in the front yards. Beyond the factories in the far distance were the endless rice fields and a sea of reeds and grass. Several peasants with bare muddy feet walked toward him, eyeing him suspiciously.

Ernest wondered who they thought he was. A businessman? A spy? A camp runaway? For they were staring intently at his eyes and then glancing at his hat, jacket, and shoes. Alarmed, he walked quickly down the dirt road toward the cotton mill. Behind it, right in the shadow of the oil factories was the tobacco factory, a massive square brick building with murals of tobacco, where a sentry in a khaki uniform guarded the front entry. He wondered what he should do. If he walked up to the sentry and asked to visit the prisoners, the man could arrest him as an enemy alien and take him prisoner.

He circled to the back of the building from an oil factory’s side. Next to a gasoline barrel, he lay flat and watched the prisoners, all in black-and-white striped shirts, inside a tall barbed wire fence. He heard English. He had come to the right place.

Some voices came from behind him. The barefoot peasants were coming at him, holding hoes. He had yet to get up when two men caught his shoulders. “What do you want? Wait, wait! Stop!”

They took his shoes, his trousers, his hat, and his jacket. Ernest returned to the jetty, humiliated. The ferry Aiyi hired, thank God, was still waiting for him.

He crossed the river again a few days later, holding Miss Margolis’s red scarf. Walking along the barbed wire fence in the back, he waved the scarf, hoping to attract the attention of the prisoners who congregated inside. But a Japanese guard shouted. Ernest hid behind an empty gasoline barrel near a muddy track.

Never once did he catch sight of Miss Margolis.