decent young lady can’t go anywhere except the homes of other decent young ladies. Even then her amah goes with her! A decent young lady is the same as a prisoner!
“ ‘So I’m sitting, waiting. Sitting, waiting!! Amah sent me to work on my embroidery—an ancient, useless art! Though I am rather good at it. But I stuck myself twice when I thought I heard the car. So I threw that aside to start this book.
“ ‘I haven’t put a stroke in it since Kai-rong sent it from Italy. Father wanted me to fill it with calligraphy—another useless art I’m good at! Copies of famous poems. Amah thought that was a lovely idea. I didn’t! I know why Kai-rong sent it: So I could keep a journal the way European women do. Until now it’s been empty, because what could I write about? Whatever happens behind these walls? But now that Kai-rong’s back, things will change! Father and Amah listen to him. He’ll tell them I’m grown up! He’ll make them let me go out! I’ll finally, finally, finally get out from behind these walls! Kai-rong’s come back to rescue me!!!’ ”
That was the first entry. I took a breath.
“Boy,” said Bill.
“No kidding.”
“Girls just wanna have fun, huh?”
“Hey, give her a break! In the old days women could spend their whole lives locked up in the house. And Shanghai was a dangerous place. You’re the one who’s reading a book about it.”
“Doesn’t say much about girls locked behind walls.”
“What does it say?” I was realizing I didn’t know much about wartime Shanghai. “If it doesn’t make me sound like not a genius to ask.”
“Every word you speak makes you sound like the genius you are. Mostly it says the opposite: the place was a nonstop end-of-the-world party. Everyone who didn’t run when the Japanese came was frantically dancing and drinking, pretending nothing had changed.”
“Party like it’s 1936? All during the war, they did that?”
“What we mean by ‘the war’ was different in Shanghai. Until ’forty-two, the only way you could tell there was war in Europe was when Europeans snubbed each other in the streets.”
“But the Chinese civil war? And the Japanese invasion?”
“The civil war had been going on for years. When the Japanese came, Mao wanted to unite with Chiang Kai-shek to fight them, but Chiang wasn’t interested. That worked for the Japanese. Chiang went inland to push Mao north, and Japan set up puppet governments and occupied the coast. Everyone left Europeans alone and Europeans made money. Until ’forty-two, that was ‘the war’ in China.”
“And in ’forty-two?”
“December ’forty-one was Pearl Harbor. A few months later the Japanese locked Allied nationals—English, Belgians, Dutch, Americans—into internment camps.”
“That’s where Alice Fairchild was, one of those. So the party was over then?”
“No. Things got ugly, but the party went on.”
“Who was left to party?”
“To start with, lots of Japanese. And Germans. Vichy French. Neutrals—Swedes, Spanish, Portuguese. Filipinos, Indians. White Russians. Wealthy Chinese.”
“Indians? Weren’t they British citizens? And Filipinos—”
“They were Asian. The Japanese didn’t lock up other Asians, no matter whose citizens they were. They wanted to be loved when they took over that half of the world and Germany took over the other. They didn’t intern the Jewish refugees, either. Japan had no argument with them. To make Germany happy, they moved them to a ghetto—”
“In Hongkew. In 1943. Rosalie and Paul went there. What, you think you’re my only source of historical information?” I looked at the Xeroxed pages. “So here’s poor Mei-lin, in 1938, in the middle of a wild party, and she can’t go.”
We exited the bridge. Bill asked, “How many entries?”
I flipped through. “Hard to say, but the last one’s dated 1943. After that the pages are blank. Oh . . .”
“Oh, what?”
“Oh, I’m being stupid. You saw how it threw me when Anita told us Rosalie died so young. I just remembered C.D. Zhang saying Mei-lin had disappeared. I asked him what happened and he said, ‘It was wartime.’ ”
“So you’re worried about her, too?”
“How stupid is that? I hardly know her! I mean, obviously I don’t know her at all—”
“It’s not stupid. It’s one of the best things about you.”
“How I get carried away?”
“No,” he said. “How you care.”
I shot him a suspicious look, but he was concentrating on the road as though he were new in town.
After a moment I looked at the papers again. What a day this has been! She could say that again, I thought. To Bill I said, “I have an