Most of them had given up moving. They huddled at the curb, against walls, on any step they could find. Nanking Road was a refugee camp, a reluctant one which offered neither refuge nor safety.
I recall that we came out of the Palace and stood there for a while, looking at the crowd, as my father probed away at a molar with a toothpick. I held his left hand. Across the street were the Sassoon House and the Cathay Hotel. But they were only a couple of buildings to me at the time. In the distance we could hear the crunch of shells as Chiang’s big Northrup bombers tried to knock out the Idzumo, the Japanese flagship, a superannuated cruiser that had been built by the British. The Japanese Third Fleet was then in the Whampoa River and its cruisers were shelling the Chinese troops, mostly the crack 87th and 88th Divisions, softening them up for the Japanese infantry which had landed at the mouth of the Whampoa at Wusung. I liked the noise because it sounded like firecrackers.
My father started to say something, but just then the Chinese Air Corps’ Northrups came over, heading west, and we both looked up. Some cylindrical things fell out of one of the bombers and glistened in the sun.
The first bomb hit the Cathay Hotel across the street. It blew out all the windows. Another bomb ricocheted off the Cathay and into Nanking Road where it exploded. The blast blew us against the red brick wall of the Palace Hotel. Then another bomb hit the Palace and hurled us back into the street. I found myself lying there in the street, still clutching my father’s left hand. There was the hand and the wrist and part of the forearm. And that was all. I couldn’t find any more of him as I wandered among the dead, trying not to step into pools of blood or on pieces of flesh. Everybody seemed dead. I walked around, still holding my father’s hand so that the end of his forearm dragged in the dirt and blood. It was quiet. Almost the only sound I could hear was my own voice, speaking Mandarin, asking a man without a head, “Have you seen the rest of my father?” I looked around and saw another man’s body smeared flat against the red bricks of the Palace Hotel. Some parked cars had caught fire. Streetcar lines were down and tangled like old fishing line. I stumbled over the lower half of a woman’s body. There was no top half. I kept asking the dead if they had seen the rest of my father and when they didn’t answer I started walking up Nanking Road, the blood squishing in my brown high-topped shoes. I still carried all that was left of my father.
For a block there was nothing but mangled bodies. A dead traffic cop was doubled over the side of his control tower, his eyes open. Flies crawled over them. I passed Honan Road where Nanking Road curves slightly and kept on going through a crowd that gradually came alive and chattered and moaned and screamed. They hadn’t been hit. I passed Chekiang Road and the Sincere and Wing On department stores and kept on going. A Sikh policeman stared at me once and then looked quickly away. My amah had told me to stay away from the Sikh cops because they were mean. The only ones who were meaner, she said, were the Annamites that the French had brought into their Concession. They call them Vietnamese now. I suppose the Sikh cop looked away because he didn’t want to fool with a four-year-old foreigner smeared with his own blood and that of others, dirty, disheveled, and bawling, who stumbled through the crowd, panicky, carrying a man’s hand, wrist, and forearm against his chest much as he would hold his favorite teddy bear. I remember that after the bombs exploded there was that Godawful silence, so profound that all I could hear was my own voice and the tick of the watch which was still strapped to my father’s wrist.
I must have gone two or three streets past the department stores before I saw her. She wore an organdy dress with lots of ruffles and flounces in a style that I later found had been popularized by an American actress called Deanna Durbin. I’ve yet to see one of her films.
I thought then, and perhaps still do, that the woman in the organdy dress was the most beautiful person in the world. She stood there at the curb, waving a silk parasol, and yelling for someone called Fat Li-san. Her blond hair was capped by a wide-brimmed, floppy hat. Dark green, I remember, a color that almost matched her eyes. Slightly behind her stood a Chinese woman who also yelled for Fat Li-san.
I stumbled over to her and stood there, gazing up at her face, my father’s remains clutched tightly to my chest. I bawled. She looked at me, frowned, and gestured that I should go away. When I didn’t, but just stood there bawling some more, smeared from top to bottom with blood, she turned and snapped something at the Chinese woman. She spoke French, but I didn’t know it then. All I knew was that my cuts and scratches and abrasions hurt, that I was lost, and that I couldn’t find the rest of my father.
The Chinese woman came over to me and knelt down and began speaking softly in English. I knew it was English but I couldn’t understand very much of it and when she saw that it wasn’t working too well, she switched to the Shanghai dialect. That was better. She wanted to know who I was and how I’d gotten hurt and where my parents were. The blond woman in the floppy hat kept waving her parasol and yelling for Fat Li-san. I told the Chinese woman that I was Lucifer Clarence Dye and had she seen my father? The woman in the Deanna Durbin dress moved closer, but not too close. She said something in French to the Chinese woman, who turned out to be her amah. The amah shook her head, rose, and backed off. The woman with the big floppy green hat grimaced and stretched out her hand.
“Donnez la moi!” she said. Or so she told me later. Much later. I didn’t understand her then, but the outstretched hand made things plain enough and I hugged my father’s severed forearm, wrist, hand, and watch even closer. I bawled some more, partly because I was one of the 865 wounded by the Chinese Air Corps which bombed its own city and partly because my father was among the 729 who were dead for the same reason.
The woman in the green hat stripped the white glove from her right hand, snatched all that was left of my father away from me, and started to throw it in the gutter. However, she saw the watch and paused long enough to remove it from the wrist. She was always quite practical. After that, she tossed it into the gutter. A dusty red dog covered with sores nuzzled my father’s hand, picked it up in his jaws, and trotted off down the street. The dog seemed to be grinning.
The woman in the floppy hat smiled at me and started to pat me on the head, but thought better of it. My hair was matted with blood. “We go my house,” she said in her best pidgin English. I understood that and asked her, this time in Mandarin, if she’d seen my father. I wasn’t too familiar with death, not familiar at all really, and I’d have liked to have given my father back his hand and wrist and forearm and watch.
“We go,” she said and once more yelled for the missing Fat Li-san. A large maroon 1935 Airflow Chrysler, an automotive abortion that was to be rivaled by the Edsel years later, bulldozed its way to the curb, clipping a rickshaw. Fat Li-san had finally arrived. The woman in the green hat sent him off for some newspapers and when he returned he spread them over the back seat so that I wouldn’t bleed all over the mohair. The amah got in the front with Fat Li-san and I was guided to the newspapers. The woman in the green hat got in at last. Fat Li-san leaned on the horn and bluffed his way through the jammed traffic.
The blond woman started talking to me. She used a mixture of pidgin English, some of which I got, French (which I didn’t understand), and Russian (totally incomprehensible). With the help of some interpretative asides from the amah in the Shanghai dialect, I gathered that I could stay at her house until she located my parents; that I was to call her Tante Catherine or Katerine, and that if I were good, she would give me something nice.