The Last Rose of Shanghai(93)

A cry startled me. A child’s cry. Nearby. I looked around—the room was empty, the bed bare, without quilts and sheets. But the cry continued. I looked underneath the bed.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. On the dank floor lay a little bundle flinging its arms. I knelt, took ahold of the arm, and pulled. Little Star, Peiyu’s youngest, grabbed a strand of my hair and bellowed.

Maybe Peiyu, busy packing, had unknowingly kicked the toddler under the bed. Deep asleep and bundled thickly with a cotton tunic and a sweater, the toddler had not awakened. And Peiyu, with all the quilts and suitcases and other children demanding her attention, had not noticed Little Star was missing. Such accidents could happen.

Or maybe she had deliberately left the little one behind. While the older kids could help around the house, the toddler was an extra mouth to feed.

I ran into the alleyway and out to the street. The rickshaw was long gone.



When I came back to the bedroom, the abandoned little thing, garbed in a tunic and sweater that were her entire assets, was still bawling on the floor.

“Stop crying,” I said.

The little monster raised the pitch to an ear-splitting howl.

I sat on my suitcases across from her, holding my head. The cries, so loud, hurt my eardrums. I didn’t know what to do with her. Little girls were not worth much. All across Shanghai, girls were abandoned, starved, sold, or used; some were as young as five years old. I had seen them, tied with a rope, huddled in the corner near the temple in the Old City as men examined them.

It was sad to be a girl, sad to be born into this world, sad to be left alone. But the little one was not my responsibility. I stood and picked up my suitcases.





76


ERNEST


He leaned against a fallen wall coated with mold. He had never felt this tired. His back ached; his head pounded from dehydration.

All stateless people must establish their residences in the designated area, he was told. So he had gathered his strength and stumbled into a shop near the jail, where he received a registration card printed with a number and a seal. He formally became a resident inside the designated area, where everything required permission.

Permission to sell his jacket, permission to sell his Rolex, permission to buy a bowl of rice. All were granted by a shameless Jew, Goya, who somehow had won the Japanese’s trust.

With some luck, Ernest was granted permission to pawn his Rolex for one hundred new fabi, issued by the pro-Japanese government, and with the money, he rented a bamboo cot in a corner of a shanty owned by a Chinese man called Old Liang. Mr. Schmidt, Golda, and several of his fellow friends lived nearby on a street called Ward Road. “A courteous tiger is still a tiger,” the old man murmured when he saw him, quoting his words as if they meant anything. Golda had huge mood swings, cursing the Japanese, then bursting into tears.

They were truly alone, like all the refugees he had helped for almost a year. Now like them, stateless, he was homeless, helpless.



A black cat shot out from a straw mat in front of him. Under the mat, a hand, all skin and bones, poked out. Feeling dizzy, Ernest staggered back and saw more bodies strewn in the corner, filthy rainwater snaking below their white feet. He barely gave a thought to who these people were—too many these days.

It was late in the afternoon; the April sun gave no warmth. He had been walking, trying to figure out the designated area. From what he could tell, this ghetto for stateless people also had Chinese residents who had lived here before the occupation. Their dwellings were two-story shacks divided by narrow lanes.

The area, a few blocks away from the notoriously unsanitary Heime, measured about one square mile. Ernest had walked and walked, first to the east, passing blocks of shacks and abandoned godowns, and reached the muddy bank of the Huangpu River dotted with rusted freighters and half-sunk boats. In the north, he had passed dilapidated cotton mills and dog farms and came to a high wall with a barbed wire fence where armored vehicles, tanks, jeeps, and motorcycles with sidecars were parked. There was even a runway for Zero fighters. It was the Japanese military base.

To the south was the guarded Garden Bridge; to the west was a section unknown to him. It had many two-story cabin-like shacks with cardboard for doors and Chinese shops. A telegraph pole with a wooden board sign read, STATELESS PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO PASS BEYOND THIS SIGN.

There was no barricade, no sandbags or barbed wire. Only a uniformed Japanese soldier napped in the sidecar of a motorcycle. Ernest could dash away before the soldier fired at him. But what was the point of running away if there was no one to run to?



Sitting on the edge of his bamboo cot, he stared at the leather loafers on his feet, listening to the hacking coughs of other tenants around him. He had arrived at Shanghai penniless with his sister, but he had fought for survival as a refugee, lived as a lover, risen as a popular pianist, and become a businessman, an owner of a shipping company, a wealthy financier. Now, he was once again a refugee, a stateless man, and he had absolutely nothing.





77


AIYI


Her hysterical cries shook me—the loud keening of abandonment, the fierceness of her sadness, and the childish innocence in her voice. I put down my suitcases.

I gave her my sleeve to wipe her nose; she turned her head away. I tried to hold her; she thrashed and screamed more. I told her to calm down, and she screamed louder. It was exhausting, and so hard to believe, too, that such a small imp could release such powerful cries.