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An image of woodcuts of war-time China 1937-1945. Picture: Leemage

Review | Tale of four real-life escapees from 1949 Shanghai fails to captivate

  • Helen Zia’s Last Boat Out of China is burdened by too much information, while the characters’ personal details seem tame compared with backdrop of war
  • We follow police chief’s son Benny; twice abandoned Bing; Ho, the son of landowners; and Annuo, daughter of a Nationalist soldier

Last Boat Out of Shanghai
by Helen Zia
Ballantine Books

Historical fiction is a hybrid art form requiring a skilful fusion of narrative and research. When done well – as, for example, in James Clavell’s superb Noble House (1981) or War and Peace and A Tale of Two Cities – the results can be thrilling and informative. But when done badly, with the author failing to combine background and story, the result can be an unfulfilling mixture of half-digested factoids and characters that don’t offer insight into their motives.

Chronicling China: Shanghai’s belle époque to occupied Hong Kong

Helen Zia’s Last Boat Out of Shanghai fits into this spectrum somewhere towards the less effective end. The novel does many things well: Zia has conducted substantial research (the endnotes run to 17 pages); its evocation of pre-war, wartime and revolutionary China feels true to life; and the fears, hopes and anxieties of the characters are express­ed humanely. It understands that choices during wartime can often be between bad and worse. And when the action hots up, it can be a fast-paced, dramatic read. The choice of topic is inspired, with the title suggesting end-of-days panic and a dissolution of the old order, and that alone should guarantee substantial interest in the book.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai follows four individuals who flee the city in the final days of Nationalist rule and find new lives in the New World and elsewhere. All real people, still living, who were children during the Communist takeover, making their experiences rather homogenous. They are Benny (from a wealthy Shanghai family, his father an accountant and auxiliary police officer before rising to become police commissioner); Ho (raised in Changshu, in Jiangsu province, and from a family of landowners, though he dreams of becoming an engineer); Bing (born in Changzhou, in Jiangsu, whose father takes her to a shopkeeper in Suzhou and heads out of the door without saying goodbye); and Annuo (whose mother is a doctor treating victims of Japanese bombing in Shanghai and her father a Nationalist soldier).

Each is given separate chapters within the novel, which is divided into four sections: “The Drumbeat of War”; “Childhood Under Siege”; “Exodus”; and “War’s Long Shadow”.  

Crowds mill in front of a rice store in Shanghai in November 1948 as Communist forces closed in on the city. Picture: Keystone-Sygma

While this approach injects variety into the book, it makes the opening section slow going. The reader does get a firm grounding in the lives and backgrounds of the four, but it’s a grind.

The focus on this quartet means that readers who come to Last Boat Out of Shanghai expecting wartime drama, battles and the pungent odour of revolution are likely to be disappointed. It’s more of a family history and is largely concerned with their education, aspirations and journey into adulthood and relationships.

This is not to say that it’s boring. Benny’s story takes in his father’s rise to police commissioner for Shanghai’s Western District, where much of the city’s vice crime takes place, his profiteering from it, and his eventual downfall, while Bing’s story, which involves two families being forced to rid themselves of her, can be heart-rending. Set against a backdrop of war and national disorder, however, the stories seem tame.

Nationalist army soldiers make their escape from Shanghai in 1949. Picture: AP

Zia appears to be more of a historian than a novelist and hasn’t learned the first lesson of fiction: show, don’t tell. All too often the narrator explains what the characters are thinking or feeling, rather than evoking or dramatising. And while Zia’s research is substantial, the shifts between narrative and exegesis are often clunky.

For example: “Some­times, after a few opium pipes, Grandfather murmured his disappointment in his second son, Benny’s father. Although Pan Zhijie hadn’t followed the family trajectory to become a comprador, he had started out on a business track by studying accounting at St. John’s University, an American missionary school that taught classes in English and imbued its Chinese students with the ways of the Western elite. Benny was also expected to go there one day. But in 1925, his father’s last year of college, he had veered off course by taking part in national uprisings known as the May Thirtieth Movement, named for the date that student demonstrators were shot and killed by the British-run police force in the International Settlement.”

While it might not be “the epic story” that the subtitle promises, it is an intimate history that is strong in several areas

Last Boat Out of Shanghai is primarily a domestic drama and Zia’s decision to focus squarely on four charac­ters prevents her from exploring the momentous times. But while it might not be “the epic story” that the subtitle promises, it is an intimate history that is strong in several areas.

Zia wonderfully illustrates the helplessness people feel amid war and strife. The train to Shanghai Annuo’s family takes before leaving for Taiwan is dangerously crammed: “Desperate people grabbed onto the outside shell and hung on, cramming their bodies onto every available space. Some sat on open window ledges, legs dangling inside while the rest of their bodies hugged the outside […] Still, those window sitters were better off than the people who stood on outside footholds with only their arms reaching into the train cabin. Most precarious were the ones sitting on the roof. With every sudden lurch, low-hanging tree branch or cable, some hapless souls were swept off the train, plummeting to a chorus of horrified shrieks.”

There’s also the occasional touch of sly wit, such as when Zia notes how Bing’s elder sister wears a padded bra when meeting a suitor, or when a doctor orders Annuo’s mother to take up smoking “to improve her weak heart”.

Zia skilfully injects intimations of events we know will come later. Ho, for example, is studying at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University when the second world war ends. Students who fled to the Nationalist-controlled interior, often on foot and dying in multitudes, to establish a make­shift university, take out their anger on those who had stayed behind during the Japanese occupation, foreshadowing the hate and murderous zeal that would be seen two decades later, during the Cultural Revolution.

Similarly, once the Communist Party has taken Shanghai, it hunts down the criminal elements who had profited from Nationalist corruption. So the “huge Canidrome in the former French Concession and the British Racecourse in the International Settlement became public arenas for public recrimination, judgment, and execution”. This, too, will feel familiar. And an uncle of Annuo asks, in 1948: “What can the Reds do that’s worse than the Japanese?”

What indeed? Many people fled China rather than find out, and it’s satisfying to finally hear some of their stories, although many will wish the tales were better told.

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