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Welcome home - return of a Shanghai Jew
By Adam Minter (LA Times)
Updated: 2006-01-17 10:43
Moses nods and, via a translator, explains that his family once lived on the
top floor. The tall man nods and without hesitation leads the way up the stairs
to a hallway lined with several doors. "They've changed the layout," Moses says
with a chuckle. The tall man opens the last one. A fake leather couch is set
against a wall. The blue carpet is damp. Bars screen the windows. "My birthday
is on Dec. 8," Moses says. "And I remember my parents set out a birthday table
for me covered with presents near the window."
At 4 in the morning on Dec. 8, 1941, explosions thundered across the Shanghai
waterfront as Japanese soldiers overcame a British ship anchored in the Huangpu
River. "I remember the sky turning red and boom boom boom!" Moses recalls.
"Nobody could have imagined what was happening." In Hawaii, it was still Dec. 7,
and Pearl Harbor was under attack. "I watched the sky turn red. I remember.
Red."
A few days later, Moses is enjoying a club sandwich in a Western-style café
in Shanghai's former French concession. "Children are dumb," he says between
mouthfuls. "They adapt. They don't think of it as miserable." For 10 minutes he
has been reflecting on the three years his family spent in a refugee group home
in Hongkou. "It wasn't a happy time, but comparatively, what could have
happened, what would have happened…." He pauses. "I don't want to go around
saying I had such a miserable time in Shanghai."
In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese forced the Moses family out of
their strategically located waterfront home. Lacking the resources to rent or
purchase something else, they settled into Chaoufoong Heim, one of five large
group homes—or heime—established by Jewish social service organizations for
refugees. The Moses family shared a room with two Austrian couples. Communal
kitchens serving several hundred refugees living inside and outside of the heime
provided one or two meager meals a day—more for children. "Hungry," he sighs.
"Always hungry." He ate starchy soup so often that today he cannot stomach
noodles. He remembers his father thinly slicing bread and finding worms.
From 1937 until late 1942 the occupying forces mostly left Shanghai's Jewish
refugees unmolested. But in 1943, under pressure from their Nazi allies, the
Japanese established a "designated area" for stateless Jewish refugees under the
control of an officer named Ghoya who, notoriously, called himself "King of the
Jews." Jews and Chinese needed a permit, issued only by Ghoya, to enter or leave
the area. "I remember him coming to the camp with his violin and demanding that
everyone listen to him play," Moses recalls. "And if you didn't, he'd beat the
hell out of you." The Chinese endured much worse. "I remember a coolie [a
Chinese laborer] asking a Japanese soldier for payment after a ride on a
rickshaw," he says. "And I watched the soldier beat the coolie to death. They
didn't do that to us."
Chaoufoong Heim was demolished years ago, and in its place stands a market.
Late one afternoon, Moses dodged bicycle deliverymen and slipped through its
main gate. "Why do I want to come here? I have no idea." He smiles at vendors
who look up, startled, from live seafood squirming under the knife. Voices
ricochet around the space, hitting a back wall that Moses thinks might have been
there 60 years ago. "This must be it," he says with a shrug. "But there's
nothing here. It doesn't mean anything to me."
The memories are scattered, unconnected to faces or objects but vividly
attuned to the senses. He speaks of Shanghai's damp winter cold as he shuffles
along the concrete. And he remembers summers when temperatures lingered at a
humid 100 degrees. "Every summer Jews died," he sighs. "My bad memory is that
you would sweat all the time and people were sick and there was no medicine."
But Moses refuses to become maudlin or tragic. "It was normal for us kids to
grow up there," he insists. "You take kids into an environment and then it
becomes normal for them." Thinking back, the mind first recalls the usual
"hardships" of childhood: "My parents and older people were always running
around telling us to behave." Even the hostilities of war escaped him: "I used
to play with the Japanese kids near here," he says as he pretends to sketch a
hopscotch outline in front of the market. "Watch," he instructs as he jumps on
one leg while singing a child's song in perfect Japanese.
In 1945, Moses attended school for the first time, despite the constant U.S.
bombing of Shanghai. "I remember playing soccer, and we could see the black
specks falling from planes in the sky," he says. "After a while you got used to
it." But soon the war ended and the Japanese disappeared. The Moses family moved
to the apartment that now is a noodle restaurant.
For the next two years Max Moses worked hard to find a new home, mailing
embassies, consulates, immigration departments and distant relatives who might
sponsor the stateless family. As they searched and waited, the family was often
visited by their amma, years after she had worked for them.
In the course of three weeks in Shanghai, the memory of that amma—and Jiaodi,
the old woman who is so like her—haunts Moses. "I think she is why I love these
people," he says. "Why I came back." And so, less than 24 hours before his
departure, he carries a bouquet of carnations into the lane behind the massage
parlor and knocks on the door of a child-size concrete home. Jiaodi recognizes
him with a smile and invites him inside. "I don't know why I'm drawn back to
this woman," Moses says again. "But I am."
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