Shanghai at night, shanghai at night, shining metropolis that never knows the night,
Lights on, music on, sing and dance like you could never again.
The Hostess wears a smile, yet no one learns her trial:
Entertaining folks at night, so as to live through another night.
Even if the drink fails, you’d be intoxicated by everything else.
Drink! Drink! Till all your days fade in your drink!
Till the sun rises and everybody returns homes with sleepy eyes!
Hearts jolt as the wheels rotate,
Leading you to the New Heaven and New Earth,
The New World that awaits.
Relive Shanghai nights like faded dreams.
Zhou Xuan, “Marilyn Monroe of China,” Shanghai at Night
Like many Chinese families at the time, mom and dad were separated until 1973, as they took their respective jobs in Jiangnan and Shanghai. At the time, the only feasible way for them to communicate the love, care, and thoughts was through postal mail. In summer and winter vacations, dad would visit Jiangnan by train, and occasionally mom would take a leave and visit Shanghai with me.
A place in the second-class sleeper coach cost 14 yuan and a written permit of the state (for mom, the permit was issued by the Railway Station itself). Mom and I spent a whole night in the coach and shared the lower bunk, with two more bunks hanging above us. With five dimes, I could get myself a serving of gravy with minced pork and vegetable over rice. What a feast it was!
When I turned six, Chairman Mao encouraged young red guards to travel freely across the country (known as da’chuan’lian) and reach out to their comrades. The train was full of passionate boys and girls in forest green, proudly donning Chairman Mao badges and red armbands and carrying Little Red Books. A single locomotive failed to get the whole train started, so some ingenious staff managed to hook another engine to boost the horsepower. As I felt the urge to answer the call of nature but could not move an inch further, I called for help. The kind red guards lifted me above their heads, guaranteeing a heart-warming, secure, and speedy roundtrip to the train toilet.
Finally, we arrived at the Old North Station, where we took a 3-wheel motorcycle to Xujiahui. There we took a bus to Shanghai High School, where dad served as a teacher. If dad had leisure to personally pick us up, the three of us usually made a detour to Xujiahui or Nanjing Road, the latter of which is one of the world’s busiest shopping streets.
If Jiangnan was the center of my life, Shanghai was the center of the whole world known to me, being the magnificent metropolis once dubbed “Oriental Paris.” Tap water here did not exude the pungent smell of the bleach powder. Milk, daily delivered by the milkman, was cooked on the natural gas stove. The tinkling of the trams still rang by my ears as I relive my visits to the Bund, where all those baroque revival and art deco halls with granite facing by the Huangpu River, once owned by the imperial colonists of the International Settlement (Omnia Juncta in Uno), charmed my young self with their century-old majesty and splendor. Besides technical marvels like elevators and escalators, just look at all the merchandise blatantly displayed on the shelves of the 1st and 10th Department Stores! Dad granted my wish and bought me a real toy — a pull toy horse made with pristine plaster, completed with a carriage. Full of joy and excitement, I sprinted on the pebble sidewalk of the Bund imagining myself being a member of the Red Cavalry. Then I turned back my head, only to notice a fragile hind leg of the horse yielded during the bumpy ride. I cried and never felt so sad in the rest of my life.
The father of my dad used to teach Chinese at reformed high school. He was a knowledgeable, rigorous scholar, who was well respected by his peers. As the eldest son, dad tried his best to meet the high expectations of a traditional Chinese family. For one, at the age of seven he was sent to Yunnan to be a boy scout, following the vision of the Generalissimo. As a top graduate of the best high school of Jiangnan, he was recommended to attend Xiamen University, with the ambition to become a competent automobile engineer who could help ROC drive off the Japs. Nevertheless, dad caught tuberculosis on campus and had to drop out. Driven by a pure heart and sheer will, he recuperated and continued his studies in Beijing, eventually completing his college education in Political & Economics at Fudan University, the most prestigious university in Shanghai that ranked the third in country.
In the meantime, my other grandpa was elected as a representative of the ROC National Assembly, then the mayor of his hometown. After completing his term, he moved to Nanjing, the ROC capital, and resumed his teaching career. My dad, loyal and faithful as he was, visited him every weekend, having not realized that he was already tailed by communist plainclothes. Grandpa was swiftly captured, then publicly tried and executed for the crime of issuing death orders against rebelling CCP partisans while in office.
“Blood shall be paid in blood!”
Since then, dad had never recovered from remorse and PTSD in his whole lifetime. In his final years, his condition deteriorated into Alzheimer’s disease. Nevertheless, he never faltered before the natural duties of a Chinese man, and did whatever he could to take care of his mother and seven young siblings. Upon graduation, he got a desk job at nationalized petroleum company in Shanghai. However, the company tanker was attacked by the ROC (Taiwan) gunship on the high seas. It did not take long for dad to lose his job as the son of a convicted Kuomintang member, on the suspicion of leaking the course coordinates to the enemy state. After many trials and errors, he wound up as an English teacher at Shanghai High School.
The time dad spent at Shanghai High School turned out to be his golden age. He bonded with his students, many of them becoming accomplished professionals, PLA officers, cadres in government and state-owned enterprises, and CAS scientists and paying final homage during his funeral in Jiangnan. Lofty yet discriminated, dad did not meet his destined other half until 40. Thankfully, his golden hearted aunt who also happened to be my grandma asked him to take the hand of my beautiful mom who also happened to be her stepdaughter.
“After all, we are a family to begin with.”
Wearing nearsighted glasses with -8.0 power, dad had a penchant for reading, note-taking, and political analytics from newspaper, radio, and television. A college graduate, he had the privilege of subscribing Reference News, the foreign news digest service run by the state-owned Xinhua (New China) News Agency, just like a communist cadre. He generously shared such privilege with Mr. A Sr and others who requested. The only chore he could take would be trimming his own moustache, yet out of the goodness of his heart, he was always ready to give a lesson to his friends and family on the pillars of life and other matters.
Like father like son. Being the only son of my dad meant he would only wish the best for me. He often mailed me packages containing premium art supplies from Shanghai, while demanded me to send him diaries and journals from time to time. I simply asked my grandpa, who spoiled me so much that he would kill pigeons to cook soup for me, to draft the homework so I could later make a copy in my own handwriting. My parents were somewhat worried about me, the Troublemaker, and once whispered behind my back:
“Will he be able to feed himself after he grows up?”
In those memorable summers, I lived alone in Nanjing Road (to give my parents some space and privacy). With one yuan in my pocket, I fetched Xinmin Wanbao, the local newspaper, for dad. Then I happily and lavishly spent the rest of the money, relishing wonton soup in the prestigious Shen Dacheng Noodle Shop or cifantuan from street peddlers. In the morning and afternoon, I usually loitered at the Department Stores, watching people from all China taking the escalators — stumbling and falling over as they didn’t know where to put their feet, all for the sake of having a good laugh about the naivete. I took evening walks in the Bund, where dozens of stylish lads and lasses hung out. Determined red guards would come out from nowhere, revolutionizing slicked-back hair, bell bottom pants, and miniskirts with scissors. Hapless girls tried to resist futilely by stretching their skirts with hands — usually no leniency was shown towards them.
To find myself some company, I used to catch a jin’jin’chong, beautiful scarab with metallic hue. I gently tied a cotton string around its back and petted it whenever mom visited clothing and shoe stores. I fed it with watermelon rind and released it in the luffa field of Jiangnan when I returned.
City folk of Shanghai turned out to be a peculiar bunch: Like Hongkongers, they are shrewd, orderly, and secretly or openly looking down upon anyone who is not one of their own. One day, mom and I were having wonton soup together in a noodle shop. A bald gentleman in his 50s sat next to us and was enjoying his wontons as well. Suddenly, he beckoned to the waitress, complaining that there weren’t enough wontons in his bowl in the first place. Knowing the oddity of this particular customer well, the waitress immediately brought him a saucer with two extra wontons. Seeing that I, a little child from “the countryside” (a phrase which is the synonym of non-Shanghainese in Shanghai), was staring at him, he blushed: “Kiddo, just take time with your meal.”
Shanghai High School is on the edge of Xujiahui, boasting a huge campus that was the envy of most Chinese universities. I used to fetch lunch and dinner for the three of us in the cafeteria: an aluminum lunchbox filled with pork chop and greens over steamed rice. This, when combined with peanut butter, sesame paste, meat floss, and pickles, really gratified my gourmet craving. I also joined father’s class when they worked in the cotton field next to the campus, a place that served as the “classroom” where I learned to speak Shanghainese. On Sundays, fellow teachers would greet us on the way to the bus shop. “Going to town?” “Aha! Here comes the little Jiangnanese again!”
Chairman Mao said: “Dig deep, hoard foods, refrain from being a superpower.”
It was another summer, and I was cozily taking a nap on bamboo cot which I had placed in front of our shack, wearing nothing saving shorts. A ricocheted bullet went right through our makeshift kitchen, startled me with the high-pitched sonic boom. Mom sent me to Shanghai the following day and returned alone for work. Without much adult supervision, I made several local friends and spent day watching them catching cicadas with a stick. Their tool turned out to be much sophisticated — a delicate pouch made of white gauze attached to the end, whereas we dipped the tip into the tar back in Jiangnan. Thus, when we attempted to separate cicadas from the stick back home, the wings of the poor insects were usually ripped off.
Early in the morning, heavy machinery worked to remove the road surface around the neighborhood, and trucks went to and fro to transport unwanted dirt and sand. By evening, the new tunnels were already sealed with cement walls and ceiling, which would serve as vaults in the impending nuclear doom. I suppose these had the same level of effectiveness of the “duck and cover” procedure. Posters listing the crimes of the mayor and first secretary were all over the campus.
By the 1970s, Zhang Chunqiao, the trustworthy ally of Jiang Qing, decided to turn Shanghai High School into an institute that would serve as the incubator of revolutionary operas. Teachers became much agitated, and dad managed to send his Yongjiu bike, the equivalence of a Range Rover in 2020s, to Jiangnan, much to my delight. In my last summer vacation in Shanghai, I attempted to pull a nasty prank against dad by placing a basin filled with water above the front door. A member of the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Corps of Shanghai Workers (PCW) walked in and got absolutely soaked. Touching wet hair with his right palm, he yelled in unbelief: “Naughty little bastard!” Mom was totally embarrassed and went inside in search of the 3-feet feather duster. I escaped from dad’s dorm like there was no tomorrow, only to ran right into him by the end of the alley minutes later.
For years, mom planned to transfer to the Railway Station of Suzhou, a quaint town sitting next to Shanghai. But after the Zhenbao Island Incident, Suzhou was chosen as an option for wartime capital and the headquarters of Vice-Chairman Lin Biao. Consequently, dad transferred to the 1st Jiangnan Railway High School instead, so he could finally live with us.
Mrs. F was a kind lady who also served Shanghai High School. Just before I left with my parents, I found many PCW members gathering around her first-floor dorm. As a matter of fact, Mrs. F was humming and patching her quilt by the window, and a Little Red Book was also placed on the desk. A passerby thought she had crossed the illustrious face of Chairman Mao on the LRB front cover with string and reported her as a reactionary. I never learned about her fate.