Night in Shanghai

Part II

黑暗世界

After the Japanese took over, the Green Gang split apart. Some worked for the resistance, but most crossed the line to serve the enemy. They were dog’s legs, the sort of men who had to serve some master, so when the great jazz ballrooms were no more, they turned to enforcing the casinos, dance halls, opium dens, and pleasure houses of the new Japanese vice zone, the Badlands. Our era had been permissive, but the Badlands was vile. Any service could be bought, any form of sex, any wager, any drug, even murder, some said, if the price was paid. It was a cruel parody of what had been.

Yet when it came to what I wanted for my country, which was to stand up to Japan, Shanghai had not let me down. She had fought to the end, laying down a quarter-million lives to the enemy’s seventy thousand, putting the lie to their boast that they could conquer Shanghai in three days. Nevertheless, our time was finished, and an exodus of souls had begun, a migration away from what now was a prison everyone called Hei’an Shijie, the Dark World. Some went abroad, to Hong Kong, or to the interior-west into the White areas if they followed Chiang or north into the Red if they followed Mao.

I was reborn first through the movement, and then again, through him. After our time together I knew, no matter where the two of us were, that while he lived, I would never be alone. I knew I would return to him. But just as much, I knew I needed to go north.