Night in Shanghai

Afterword

Pearl Harbor was attacked just before three A.M. Shanghai time. A Japanese buildup around the city in the weeks prior had been noticed and remarked on, causing some to leave. Earl Whaley remained, and was interned with his bandmates at the Pudong and later the Weixian prison camps. In each place they formed camp bands, scrounging instruments when necessary (one bass player used a cello). Not all the American jazz men survived; Whaley’s pianist F. C. Stoffer died in camp. Some say Whaley’s hands were broken by his captors, but he is known to have been living in the United States after the war, at least until 1964, working variously at the post office and in real estate. Buck Clayton returned to the States before the war to play with Count Basie; his own account of his years in Shanghai can be read in his memoir. Teddy Weatherford’s orchestra continued to tour Asia as the war permitted; he died in Calcutta, of typhoid, in 1946. Aaron Avshalomov lived quietly in Shanghai through the war and later moved to the United States to join his son, the composer and conductor Jacob Avshalomov, who settled in Portland, Oregon.

The Chinese plan for a 100,000-person Jewish Resettlement Area in Yunnan almost came to fruition, thanks to H. H. Kung, Sun Fo, and other Nationalist leaders. The Sword of David secret society did indeed send the Italian Jewish mercenary Amleto Vespa and the exiled Korean revolutionary An Gong Geun with cash and gold bars from Shanghai to Chongqing, where both were killed. Not long after, Chiang Kai-shek gave in to pressure from Berlin and vetoed the Plan. One can only imagine the long-term outcome of 100,000 European Jews surviving and being resettled in 1939 along what is now the China-Myanmar border; instead the Plan became one of history’s grace notes, forgotten except in the pages of a story like this.

The 25,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai did survive. Some of them were saved by Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese Consul in Vienna, since many of the several thousand specious visas he wrote freed entire families. A vintage directory listing all those in Shanghai’s refugee quarter along with their European city of origin confirms the large number of Jews who made it out of Vienna. Ho Feng-Shan died in San Francisco at age ninety-six; in Israel he is honored as one of the Righteous among Nations.

After the Japanese surrender, Du Yuesheng attempted a return to Shanghai, but his health and his power had declined. He did take a fifth wife, though, marrying the opera star Meng Xiaodong in 1948. When he left Shanghai for the last time in May 1949, both she and Fourth Wife were with him.

H. H. Kung retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalists and later settled in the United States, where he died in 1967.

Xie Jinyuan, the commander of the Lost Battalion, was assassinated in April 1941 by the collaborationist city government. One hundred thousand Shanghainese turned out to mourn him.

Other historical characters, drawn as accurately as possible, include Flowery Flag, Fiery Old Crow, Big Lewis Richardson, Julian Henson, the Doron family, Ackerman, Schwartz, Shengold, Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Dai Li, Joy Homer, Earl West, Reginald Jones, Shibatei Yoshieki, General Doihara, and Miss Zhang, the dance hostess impregnated by Ziliang Soong and murdered for demanding too much money. Admiral Morioka is fictional, but his real-life counterpart in Shanghai also humanely resisted German pressures to kill Shanghai’s 25,000 Jewish refugees.

Night in Shanghai is based almost entirely on true events, and many of its characters were living persons, but on two points the novel does veer from the record. First, Josef Meisinger visited Shanghai to demand the murder of the city’s Jews in July 1942, not November 1941. Second, the story overstates the role of the Green Gang in the city’s jazz clubs. While the Gang wielded enormous power and undeniably controlled drugs, gambling, prostitution, smuggling, protection rackets, and other related industries, it was probably not pulling the musical strings in 1930s Shanghai to the degree depicted here.

The years Song spends in a cell, far in the novel’s future, were horrific years for most Chinese, especially for those with foreign training or connections. The hope and optimism of Song’s early years in the cause would have been withered by the Anti-Rightist Movements, the Great Leap Forward, the famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Yet in the post-1976 decades that followed these disasters, during which China opened irrevocably to the world, people like Song set about rebuilding their lives. Past traumas were not forgotten-indeed, their associated residues and reactions can often be seen today-but the rest of Song’s life would not have been about that persecution. As for the specific punishment she endures at novel’s end, it is based on a true story I heard in China decades ago from the American Sidney Rittenberg, who remained in China after 1949, was jailed during the Cultural Revolution, and forbidden for some years to turn over in bed-until the punishment was lifted and he was released.

Of course, Du Yuesheng never had an indentured servant named Song Yuhua, or an illegitimate son named Lin Ming. But he did believe that foreign music such as jazz would weaken China, and so did the Communists, who were later to ban Western music for almost thirty years. The song by Nie Er that prompted the Japanese raid on Summer Lotus, “March of the Volunteers,” is now China’s national anthem. Shanghai is much changed. Yet the Chinese catchphrase for the city’s golden era remains Ye Shanghai, Night in Shanghai.