There'll Always Be a Shanghai

Gaudy, luxurious, exciting Shanghai, as for years its rich International Settlement thought of it, last week fast approached its end. For President Roosevelt ordered the 750 men of the Fourth U.S. Marines to depart. That order said very simply that war between Japan and the U.S. was very close. An order to stay might mean death to the Marines fighting against hopeless odds. The order to depart meant death for the International Settlement.

As the Marines made ready to leave, scores of other foreigners followed suit. To the financial depression, long since brought on by Japanese control of the city, there was added personal panic. Morbid drinkers who stared along the "world's longest bar" at the Shanghai Club fancied they could see not only the curvature of the earth but a tragic turning of destiny.

For 14 years the plutocratic International Settlement had taken pleasure in the Marines. It enjoyed their brass band, their weekly parades at the Racecourse, their curio buying. It enjoyed Marine personalities like Colonel Richard Stewart Hooker, who could "roar like a sea lion, or coo like a dove." It enjoyed the Marines' practical joking, as when four leathernecks started a Communist scare by raising a red cur tain on the U.S. Embassy flagpole. The nervous International Settlement took special comfort in the Marines after Shanghai's British garrison left last year, after the Japanese got control of the Settlement's governing council last May.

Last week many Chinese girls heard the traditional pidgin-English farewell: Long Time No Come No See. The lavish, profiteering drama of the International Settlement was ending. But outside the Settlement's barbed-wire fences there was a Shanghai that would remain much the same -- the teeming, filthy, odorous native city of 3,500,000 Chinese, the Shanghai described by Andre Malraux:

The wind which brought the subdued rumble of the city . . . and the whistles of launches returning to the warships passed over the dismal electric bulbs at the ends of blind alleys and lanes; around them crumbling walls emerged from empty darkness, revealed with all their blemishes by that unflinching light from which a sordid eternity seemed to emanate. Hidden by those walls, half a million men: those of the spinning-mills, those who had worked 16 hours a day since childhood, the people of ulcers, of scoliosis, of famine. The globes which protected the electric bulbs became misty, and in a few minutes the great rain of China, furious, headlong, took possession of the city. . . .

So long as millions of Chinese could somehow extract a Chinese living on the muddy delta of the great Yangtze, there would be a Shanghai.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.