White Ghosts

21. THE GENERAL STRIKE

The Nanking Road massacre of May 30 claimed the lives of thirteen students with dozens more injured. The next day, the Chinese trade unions announced a general strike, and now the foreign concessions have found themselves left with neither telephone nor tap water.

Garage owners refuse to sell gas to foreigners, the trams have stopped working, and rickshaw boys no longer carry white passengers. I guess this must be the reason why nobody has come to kill us so far. Wyer’s cutthroats are probably out on strike as well, and Daniel Bernard is feeling too lazy to go anywhere by foot in this heat.

Nina has come up with a new business idea. She wants to set up a security agency and hire former White Army military men to guard us and her potential customers. The demand for these sorts of services is huge: everyone who has money is terrified of thugs coming to rob them. The rich who have come to Shanghai from the war-torn provinces are in a particularly difficult situation. They have neither friends nor relatives here. The police have gone on strike, too, and the prospect of hiring Chinese bodyguards, who might easily be gang members themselves, is a scary one.

Russians make perfect bodyguards in this situation: they have no ties with the local community and no connections with the Chinese underworld. They have combat experience, and they are eager to work, exhausted by their long-term unemployment.

Nina has learned the ins and outs of business the hard way, and now she is drawing up a proper plan and calculating how much money she will need to rent a new office and train her staff. I watch her and think that the act of setting up a business is, in its own way, a form of art, like creating a novel, a painting, or an invention.

I need to be ready for the day when my wife might start earning more than me. I guess I will flatter myself that I am a “gardener” who has spent many seasons tending to a rose bush that has produced into the most exotic blossom.

When I returned to Shanghai, I had mentally prepared myself for a long spell of unemployment, but the general strike has played into my hands: the demand for news from China has soared to the heavens, and now I have started writing for Reuters.

Previously, the world didn’t care much about what was going on in China, but now it is obvious that we are all interconnected. The general strike in Shanghai caused immediate ripples in stock markets, and now the world is waiting for an explanation. What the devil is going on over here?

I have a difficult job: the Chinese are not very willing to talk to white journalists and often banish us from their meetings, claiming that we lie and distort what they say. The police are tough on us as well, dispersing demonstrations with horse charges and fire hoses. Several times I’ve returned home covered in bruises and soaked from head to toe.

The unions are prepared to call off the strike if the whites are ready to make significant compromises and reconsider the unequal treaties, but the Municipal Council is a local government and as such does not have the power to change international agreements. The strike ringleaders know this but they are doing their best to turn this small dispute into a major conflict, telling the people that the “white ghosts” are not interested in a peaceful solution. The more damage that can be inflicted on the colonialists, the harder the bargain the unions can negotiate for themselves at a later date.

White Shanghai is laying low, bristling and wrapped up in itself like a cornered porcupine. The mobilization of a Volunteer Corps has been announced, and marines from foreign ships have been summoned ashore to man the patrols. Rather than seeing these as protective measures, the Chinese mutter darkly about the foreign powers preparing for an occupation, and the situation only gets more heated.

The time and effort I spent on Wyer would now appear to be paying dividends. The small waves of discontent set in motion by my articles have grown into a tsunami of righteous wrath, and now the captain is possibly the most hated man in Shanghai. He is generally held to be the main culprit behind the events of May 30, although that Saturday he was actually out hunting ducks and only learned what had happened the next day. His very name has become synonymous with injustice, violence, and extortion, and the city is littered with leaflets calling for his death.

I don’t crave Wyer’s blood—after all, he is Edna’s father—but I do want him out of Shanghai.

The International Settlement is full of rumors of Chinese workers stoning foreign foremen and pillaging the stores of their countrymen suspected of collaborating with the “white ghosts.” In the wake of these rumors, Nina had no problems obtaining the license for her security agency and hired three dozen White Army men living in the Russian neighborhood along Avenue Joffre.

She is fully committed to her new business and has no time to deal with the calendars, leaving them to Binbin. She now spends all her time in negotiations with her new customers and signing security contracts for warehouses, shops, and weddings.

In the evening, tired and happy, we gather in Kitty’s room to play with our daughter, to dance, and to invent plays with her plush toys.

I have learned to understand Kitty to some extent. She babbles in three languages: Russian words are meant for parents, English is associated with toys and the playground, and the Shanghai dialect she picked up from her amah is used while eating, bathing, and sitting on the potty.

No one could have convinced me three years ago that the awful events of that period could have marked the starting point for my new life. Now I find it funny to look back and remember what a fool I had been. Mistrust and resentment are like dust on the window; if you don’t wash it off, the dirt makes it impossible to see what’s going on both inside and outside the room. You make one mistake after another, the window gets increasingly smudged, the room gets darker, and you end up blaming everybody except yourself.

I feel sorry for Ada, who’s making the same mistakes. I visited her at the House of Hope, but she refused to talk to me, didn’t even open the door. “You left me behind, and I hate you,” was all that she would say.

Ada won’t even entertain the notion that she might have misinterpreted events, and I can’t help her clean the window if she can’t see that it’s dirty. I’ve decided to let her be. She’s a big girl now, and frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to get into an argument with her.

Nina and I are intoxicated by our happiness. I’m constantly astonished by such simple everyday miracles as finding Nina’s hand on the pillow next to mine in the mornings. I stroke it gently in grateful wonder—just because it’s there and I can.

Our life has become a joyful round of sweet and simple rituals. At night, Nina has got into the habit of putting her head on my chest. Within a minute my breathing lulls her into sleep, and I spend hours with my eyes open, unable to believe that it is her curls that I am running my hands through.

The Aulmans’ servants left to join the strike, and Tamara and the children spend their evenings alone in the candlelight, waiting for Tony’s return. Tamara’s telephone was silent, and none of her friends offered her any help during the strike.

The bell at the front door rang.

“Daddy is back!” Roger shouted and rushed to open the door.

But it was Nina. Serious and practical as ever, she entered the living room and put a small kerosene stove on the table.

“I thought you wouldn’t have anything to boil water with,” she said. “Now let’s see about dinner, shall we?”

“Thank you for coming,” Tamara said, deeply touched.

The boys followed Nina’s every move as she deftly sorted out the pots and spoons. They had never seen a white woman cook before.

“Five minutes and everything will be ready,” Nina announced. “Boys, bring the plates.”

As they sat at the dinner table, Tony swept into the house, bringing with him the smell of horses, fires, and the sweet stiff pomade he used on his mustache.

“Oh, Miss Nina, glad to see you. Here, children, the ladies at the Anti-Strike Committee baked us volunteers some cookies today.”

“How are things at the office?” Tamara asked.

Tony waved his hand. “We found a stock of counterfeit records, but the Chinese guards were on strike, and goods to the value of twenty thousand were left unguarded. I usually negotiate with the owners; they pay my clients and we return them the goods. But if the warehouse gets plundered, we all suffer losses.”

“Do you want me to send my boys your way?” Nina asked. “They could keep an eye on your warehouse. By the way, there are a huge number of healthy unemployed men in the Russian community. They would be more than capable of solving our water and electricity supply problems if only someone could be persuaded to let them cover for the striking Chinese.”

“Can you get your workers organized quickly?” Tony asked incredulously.

“If you post an ad at the Russian church, you’ll have a whole crowd at your gate in an hour.”

Tony leapt from the table. “Tamara, we need to go to the Municipal Council and talk to Mr. Sterling. Boys, take care of your mother. Miss Nina and I will be back soon.”

Nina has acted as a mediator between the Municipal Council and the Russian community, and they have restored the water supply and got the post office working again. Our greatest success is that we managed to set free the Cossacks from the Mongugai steamer. The Anti-Strike Committee has distributed them out to the factories.

The strikebreakers have made our lives much easier. Shanghai hadn’t exactly been the cleanest city in the world before the strike, but when the coolies stopped cleaning the cesspools, the heavy smell of rot spread like a pall over the entire city. Now, thank God, we can at least open our windows.

The Chairman of the Municipal Council, Mr. Sterling, has promised Nina a reward for her services to the International Settlement—he is going to help us get U.S. citizenship. We pray for everything to work out; with our backs covered by the American government, we will be able to defend ourselves against Wyer. However, thankfully, nothing has been seen or heard of the captain recently.

Our future looks bright, but of course there are always some clouds on the horizon.

Predictably, Nina’s employees are ashamed to be working for a woman. She once told me that some of them have taken to giving her a nasty nickname and laughing at her behind her back.

She doesn’t know how to react to it all. Should she ignore her detractors or should she fire the lot of them? Nina is in a constant state of self-doubt and often tries too hard to prove herself—much to the amusement of her critics and to her own chagrin.

She wants to share her fears and experiences with somebody, but her friends are not much help in this respect. Tamara thinks that a lady shouldn’t be involved in business, and Binbin resents Nina not spending so much time with her at the publishing house.

The calendar business is like a weight around Nina’s neck. “I’ve tried so hard, and everything I do there seems to fall on rocky ground,” she complains. But she still expends a huge amount of energy trying to revive the business. If she were to let it fail completely, how would her employees feed their families?

She has taken so much upon herself, and the only solution she can see is to share her burden with me. But from the very beginning, Nina and I have had an agreement that we would never force each other to do things we are not interested in. Journalism by definition is not a particularly profitable profession, and Nina knows that this is a sore point for me. I have a hard time explaining to myself and others why my wife earns more than I do. Nina tries to avoid the subject, but I can see that deep down inside she believes that her business is more important. She’s annoyed with the fact that I spend my time writing articles rather than going to the office with her.

Once Nina blurted out, “Daniel always used to help me.” But as soon as she said it, she was mortified and asked me to forgive her. I replied that I’m smart enough not to take offense at a random slip of the tongue. But in reality, I am not.

As far as I know, Daniel left Shanghai after the strike, but I’m still overwhelmed by a gloomy melancholy every time I hear his name. For me, he has come to symbolize all the troubles and misfortunes that surround us: betrayal, sickness, and death.