Remembering Shanghai by Claire Chao

Author:Claire Chao
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Claire Chao
Published: 2017-11-13T08:24:03+00:00

I still have no idea who it was that lost his life that day—a Japanese collaborator? A Communist spy? A merchant who owed protection money to the Green Gang? At the age of eleven, I couldn’t distinguish the good guys from the bad. Most adults were probably no better at it than I. The significance of the incident to me was less the poor fellow’s identity than the fact that I’d witnessed for the first time the cruelty of the city that I so loved.

Mom almost never speaks of being afraid as a girl in Shanghai. Yet I have long been perplexed by her fear of sleeping alone; it’s in stark contradiction to her usually sunny outlook and has dogged her all of her adult life. She attributes it to the servants’ many ghost stories, and even some of the Great World’s scarier exhibits, like the giant mechanized spider that had towered over her and given her nightmares. As much as she insists that she was unaffected by the harsh realities of 1930s and ’40s Shanghai, what still lies beneath the surface is a mystery to me.

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