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Remembering bombing raids, rickshaw rides
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One day in early December 1937, Auntie Ma, a very good friend of mother’s, came to see us. It was several months after the Japanese planes had begun bombing the area where we lived every day.
After a long discussion, these two close friends decided that my elder brother and I, the two eldest sons of the Wang family, should immediately follow Auntie Ma to the then French concession for a few days’ refuge.
Auntie Ma was very kind to share her rickshaw with two boys, one 13 and the other 10; it was certainly very crushed and it was quite a long journey.
To us two boys this was the first time that we had been separated from Mother and the rest of the family. It is impossible to describe how we felt but we were very obedient.
When the rickshaw man arrived somewhere near the crossroads of Zhonghua Road and Rue Lafayette (now Fuxing Road M.), he stopped instead of taking us on to Dapuqiao, where Auntie Ma and her family lived. Why? We did not realize until years later that the rickshaw would have needed another license issued by the French authority. Only then would it have been allowed to run in the then French concession.
Auntie Ma told us that we had arrived in Laoximen and she led us through the barbed wire barricades where some foreign policemen were on guard; it was the first time that we had seen foreign policemen in Shanghai. Neither of us two boys dared to stare at them; we had been brought up to keep away from any policeman or gangster.
While walking to her home, Auntie Ma told us that they were French and Russian officers and Vietnamese policemen. Later, besides seeing some more foreign policemen in the International Settlement, we also saw foreign soldiers, French, British and Americans, in Shanghai until December 7, 1941, the Pearl Harbor Day.
The new foreign soldiers were even worse and we had to suffer from their rule till the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) on August 15, 1945.
Some time ago I came across a short story in an old book. In it a bossy European sitting in a rickshaw kicked the back of the rickshaw man, at the same time saying to his friend sitting in another rickshaw, “The Chinese people need masters.”
Really?
(George Wang, 89, is co-author of the English-language book “Shanghai Boy, Shanghai Girl.”)
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