Excerpts
Gudao, Lone Islet
From time to time a city steps onto the world stage as the embodiment of modernity to which people flock for fame and entertainment, power, money and limitless opportunity. In the 1930s Shanghai was such a place. Thus begins Margaret Blair’s multi-faceted powerful and moving story.
From page 195
Under a darkening sky the ship pulled away; the low grey clouds rolled out beyond the reach of our eyes all the way that we were going: along the Whangpoo, across the Yangtze, to the roiling brown waves of the China Sea. And engrossed in its own affairs Shanghai, the love of my life, the place of my birth, turned its back.
On the wharf, a dead seagull, its wing lifted by fitful gusts of wind, waved goodbye.
From page 109
I jerk starkly awake, to the sound and feel of my mother slammed back across my bed propelled by blows from a drunken Japanese guard.
His loud, enraged staccato creates a harsh discord … In the random flashes from the guard’s torch as he waves it about, our bleak room with its bare walls and worn wood floor springs haphazardly into focus like some grim jigsaw puzzle. I see the peeling paint of the ceiling with no light bulb, the small metal table where we eat, my yellow teddy bear, blue giraffe, baby doll and well-thumbed books on the floor; the other two beds (for my mother and brother) and the curved sword of the guard’s companion. I wonder whether he is going to shoot, or cut us to pieces.
From page 58
Along the Bund jostled the usual throng: middlemen, brothel keepers, compradors, boat people, opium runners, sing-song girls, workers, shopkeepers, monks, bankers, officials, policemen, priests, gangsters, taipans, gamblers, beggars, patriots, pickpockets, rebels, street vendors, soldiers, conspirators, actors, sailors and opera singers, Chinese, British, American, French, Russian, Jewish, Parsee, Japanese and Sikh; these formed the cavalcade of Shanghai.
From page 51
I always found the walk along Bubbling Well Road exhilarating. The road had a personality of its own. It was much noisier than the quiet enclave of our compound. It also played out a heady life-and-death type of drama. The traffic roared along in a densely knotted, rank mass of different types of vehicle and pedestrians, trying to move at different speeds, rubbing and chafing at each other. …
From page 160
Here, the dust storms started. Then, the wind howled for hours. Each storm swirled grittily around the camp, holding us prisoner twice over. It created a fog of sand through which we could not see, a wall of wind through which we could not walk, a barrier of sound through which we could not hear. Stale-smelling dust flew through the porous buildings settling on and in everything. We cowered on our beds. It was strange that there were no dust storms when we lived our halcyon, pre-internment camp days just minutes away: but it seemed appropriate that we should be so tormented now. Outside the bushes would be green, and all the fields: but the bushes were dour and dusty, the hard ground dun coloured, here, in this desolate place.
From pages 167-168
From our higher window we were able to see over the convent wall into the grounds of the hospital and barracks. At our new vantage point my brother and I could see the details of what was happening across the road.
We could see all Japanese military patients who were not confined to bed being drilled at early morning exercises until some of them collapsed. The drillmaster shouted and kicked at the fallen men until they fainted or somehow managed to stand up again. These exercises took place twice a day. As soon as a man could stand, even with bandages on, he was made to exercise. In this way my brother and I saw at first hand some of the brutalizing of the Japanese troops, a policy that created a fighting force that behaved particularly cruelly to its victims.
From pages 188-189
The British Armed Forces took over our camp and unlike the Americans began to charge us for our now reduced ration of food. The troops were battle-weary and less well fed than their American colleagues. Their surly behaviour struck a sour note. Across from the front gate of our former prison the British set up a death camp where they placed wounded horses from the Japanese cavalry and provided no food or water. Here I heard an injured horse give a soft groan as he slowly lowered his head to crop a single blade of grass from the hard mud of the compound. I wondered how people from the green land of Jeremy Fisher could bear to force a wounded horse to starve and die of thirst, even in a foreign place. As I looked through the woven bamboo fence a Japanese soldier came and brushed some flies from an open sore on the horse’s shoulder. His eyes met mine in a look of fatalistic understanding. Here we were, both powerless to stop this fresh atrocity, both at the end of our time in China.
