Expatriate Adventures

By Fred Richardson

The book is a memoir about my life; thus, I am qualified. I lived in Shanghais International Settlement and French Concession, protected by foreign troops and warships, from 1926 to 1940, then in Cuba195355; Venezuela, 195559; finally Guatemala, 196570, the years of my memoir. Today, at age eighty-seven, I live with my wife in a retirement community, Rockwood Forest Estates, in Spokane, Washington State.

Its a nonfiction memoir, Expatriate Adventure. It tells of my life in Shanghai from age two to fifteen, 192640, in the French Concession and International Settlement, eventually surrounded by Japanese armies who had driven out Chinese troops from the area surrounding these foreign jurisdictions in the Sino-Japanese war beginning in 1937, ending with the defeat of Japan in World War II.

Later, married and with a growing family, we lived as expatriates in Latin America, beginning as a trainee in Havana, 1953; then assistant manager in Caracas, Venezuela; then regional manager in Guatemala City, for eight countries. These assignments were not consecutive, being interrupted by assignments in New York, not described because its not expatriate living and therefore outside the theme of this memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466941663

Fred Richardson

The book is a memoir about my life, thus I am qualified. I lived in Shanghai's International Settlement and French Concession, protected by foreign troops and warships, from 1926 to 1940, then in Cuba — 1953-55, Venezuela, 1955-59, finally Guatemala, 1965-70, the years of my memoir. Today, at age 87, I live with my wife in a retirement community, Rockwood Forest Estates, in Spokane, Washington State.

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Copyright 2012, 2014 Fred Richardson.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-4165-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-4167-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-4166-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012916218

Trafford rev. 03/20/2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction to Expatriate Adventures

Part A: CHINA

Chapter 1: Bellevue to Shanghai

Chapter 2: Foreigners In A Chinese Sea

Chapter 3: Young Master At Home

Chapter 4: Public School For Boys

Chapter 5: Enclave In The Japanese Occupation

Chapter 6: Expatriate Events—with Consequences Later

Part B: LATIN AMERICA

Chapter 7: Road To Latin America

Chapter 8: Initiation: Cuba

Chapter 9: Tales of Venezuela

Chapter 10: The Guatemala Regional Office

Chapter 11: Guatemala, Land Of Magic—Life And Friends

Chapter 12: Departure From Guatemala

Dedicated to my wife, Mary

Acknowledgments

G ood fortune in writing this memoir is that friends have commented favorably, thus encouraging me. But how much is friendship, for which one is grateful, and how much is fascination with the content of the memoir? One is not sure. So I single out those who have encouraged me to persist, even to begin.

Debbie Peterson, a Doctor of Physical Therapy, read some of my work which I foisted upon her. She is not a history buff, but said that the history presented should be preserved, by publication. She, skilled in the use of computers, gave me technical help as well. I am not a computer maven. Had it not been for her, you would not be reading this. Thank you, Debbie.

John Weekes has been a strongly motivating factor, constantly asking how I’m progressing. I had loaned him a copy of Small Foreign Devil: A Shanghai Boyhood, essentially the same as the China portion of Expatriate Adventures. Next day he telephoned to say that when he picked it up and started reading, he didn’t put it down until he had finished it, an extraordinarily encouraging compliment. Later, in Chapter 7, you will read how he joined me in surmising how I lost my best friend of Shanghai days, Allen Holt, in Korea, a mystery still open and unsolved in the U. S. government’s records. I owe much to you, John.

In some ways, Carolyn Lothian, an attorney, got me started on this. I had been writing because I like to do so, much as my wife Mary likes to play the piano. Carolyn is a member of a ladies’ book club in Spokane, as is Mary. The club had assigned to its members a novel about a young Chinese lady in Shanghai in the 30’s, my times. I read some of it, and found it accurately and most interestingly depicted those days., and told Mary. At the next meeting of the club, when the ladies were discussing the novel, Mary mentioned that I had written a memoir about my Shanghai life in those years. Carolyn took it upon herself to come to our home and request a copy to read. After she had done so, she returned it with the comment that it should be published. You, dear Reader, are experiencing the result. Thanks, Carolyn.

Lois Neswick, a neighbor, has supported my efforts, for heartening reasons. She and Carolyn are members of the same book club as Mary, but I don’t think that was a motivating factor. I suppose I paraded my efforts before her one time when Mary and I were at her house. She praised them—praise is definitely encouraging. Recently I asked her why she liked it, perhaps testing the market. In reply, she mentioned an interesting writing style, and the relevance of the places mentioned, and an extra touch of credibility because of my personal involvement. My writing style was developed decades ago when working in Latin America. That was before the internet and e-mails, telephones often enough brought problems if the person one wished to speak to was not available, so in AIU, at least, we relied heavily on cables.

They charge by the word, and we sought to hold down expenses. I, and surely you, have seen writings by authors who are linguistic artists, but I strove for conciseness and clarity—and hope that some survives today. As to the relevance of places mentioned, I can only say that when Mary and I visited her home nearby, I would note the material she reads, perhaps reflecting her life before. No large number of Americans reads the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) monthly magazine, for example, even though it is free. She and I, perhaps because of the lives we had led, had similar perceptions of what was important. She led me to believe that I wrote clearly and that my view of important events was reasonable, even though many people might give it less importance. Indeed, I have tried to make these views more important to readers, by telling of life and work in China and Latin America. Thanks, Lois.

Dan Hoerner contributed in two vital ways. Technically he is simply outstanding, going far beyond his job requirements to advise, with reference to inserting the photographs that, in my view, make the stories come alive. You and I owe much to him. His second contribution, of value to me, was that when I had printed out an earlier version of the Adventures, not proofed, full of errors, disconnects and omissions, he found a chance to read it, and praised it most fulsomely. When I’m struggling with my errors, this lights a beacon of hope and encouragement for me. Thanks, Dan.

Introduction to Expatriate Adventures

A dventure as an expatriate began, for me, in the comfortable life of growing up in Shanghai, from age one in 1925 to departure at age fifteen in 1940. The last years were far from the small world of a small child, unaware of the turmoil of 1926, and culminated in the troubled year of 1940.

For my family, expatriate life began in Cuba with our two children, then Venezuela and Guatemala for them and our next two children. It left its mark of awareness on all of them, as they had experiences from 1945 for some to 1969 for others, not to be had in America.

For some of the family, they included revolutions. But it was the daily life of an expatriate that occupied them and me, and forms the basis of much of Expatriate Adventures. You will also see tales of events long after—decades or more—our expatriate life ceased and we became residents of the United States. But these events all have their origins in our lives as expatriates. All these are offered for your interest and entertainment.

Part A

CHINA

CHAPTER 1

Bellevue to Shanghai

T his is a tale of life in the turbulent China of the thirties. The thread that ties it all together is a little American boy growing up there—me. I was a small foreign devil, a " hsiao yang gwei tze ." I like the Chinese, and had a wonderful childhood, with parents who were loving and a lot of fun. The story begins here. I do hope it entertains you.

THE BEGINNING

This is how I got to China. I was born in 1924. My mother, Myra, and father, George Frederick Jeff Richardson, were living in Seattle.

Dad, a lawyer, was unable to make a living in Seattle practicing law. Law clerk salaries were infinitesimal and he was unsuccessful in attracting clients in order to practice law on his own.

Soon he was forced to move us all to live with his sister, Flora, older by twenty-one years or so, and her husband, Jesse Rose, on their little five-acre farm, the Do More Place, close to the center of today’s Bellevue. Dad once told me that those were the blackest days of his life. I have no recollection of the year-and-a-half I lived there.

A friend at the Plymouth Congregational Church told Dad that an American banker from Shanghai, Frank J. Raven, president and owner of the American Oriental Banking Corporation, was seeking to employ a lawyer to work at his bank in Shanghai. Dad contacted him and got the job.

We left Seattle sometime in November, 1926, on the S. S. President McKinley, for a new and more prosperous life in China.

Here are Dad, Mom holding me, and Grandma Sarah Harrold, who came to see us off in Seattle on the President McKinley.

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The McKinley docked in Yokohama and Kobe, my parents’ first contact with the Orient. I stayed aboard, being baby-sat, but my parents went ashore.

Here you see Dad sightseeing in Yokohama en route from Seattle to Shanghai. What an extraordinary change has taken place in Japan, from a poor primitive nation where coolies pulled rickshaws, to one that is modern and prosperous, in just one generation.

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SHANGHAI ARRIVAL

We arrived in Shanghai on December fifth in troubled times. Chiang Kai Shek’s armies, including Soviet-supported Communists, were marching north from Canton to overthrow the Peking government.

Anti-foreign feeling was strong. Foreigners up country were beaten, robbed and sometimes killed. Chinese mobs overran Hangkow’s British Concession; the troops protecting it had been ordered not to shoot.

The foreign powers were determined, however, to defend Shanghai, and brought troops and naval vessels to protect its International Settlement and French Concession.

Below you see a French Army post at the border with Nantao, the old Chinese city.

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Along that border, they searched for arms Chinese seeking to cross from Nantao to Frenchtown.

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Below you see Mom and Dad at the barbed wire boundary between Frenchtown and Nantao.

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The two-story wooden buildings in Nantao could be seen from the French side, and the upper story was empty, no inhabitants looking out, apparently having been evacuated.

Below is the small city ground in Frenchtown, which the French Army used to train for assaults. The Chinese in the houses around it hung their laundry to dry on that training ground.

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EARLIEST MEMORIES, REVOLUTION AND REFUGEES

To Shanghai, considered a haven of safety, foreign refugees came streaming from up-country, taking every available hotel room and apartment throughout the International Settlement and the French Concession, which we always called Frenchtown.

When we arrived, Dad couldn’t find a place for us to stay. I suppose that Frank Raven must have used his influence and contacts to help because somehow Cliff Pettit, the Secretary of the Foreign Y. M. C. A., and his wife took us into their home in the French Concession. We stayed six months with them in their Western style house in a compound. In the center of the compound was a lovely green lawn, and all around gray brick two-story homes like the Pettits’.

Here you see the Pettits’ house in the Foreign YMCA compound in Frenchtown.

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Below are their servants in front of their house Next to the tall Chinese man is Jing Mei, my amah, and her daughter, next to me.

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ROUTE DUPLEIX AND THE KINGSBURY APARTMENTS

We moved after six months to the Kingsbury Apartments on Route Dupleix, also in the French Concession,

It was the first apartment house built in Shanghai, a walk-up of about four stories. We occupied an apartment on the second floor, except that in Shanghai everyone counted the European way, so we called the lowest floor the ground floor and the next one up where we had our apartment, the first floor. We stayed there about two years, from 1927 to around early 1929, when I was four years old.

We had a small kitchen with a table where the servants ate. They were a cook-boy and an amah. After breakfast was finished, Dad had left for work, and Mom had gone out shopping, the servants would eat their breakfast, simple, delicious Chinese food. They would invite me to join them, which I did, using chopsticks.

Offices closed for two hours at noon, so Dad came home for tiffin (lunch), which he, Mom and I would eat together. Then Dad would leave for the office, and sometimes Mom would go out. I suppose I took a nap, but it seems to me that I often ate in early afternoon with the servants again, and then a foreign supper in the evening. So I was getting five meals a day, three foreign and two Chinese.

My folks knew nothing of the Chinese meals. But Mom apparently noticed a lessening of my appetite. One day after she left in the morning, she realized that she had forgotten something, so came home. Approaching the Kingsbury Apartments, she saw through the kitchen window three heads bobbing up and down over the table, those of the cook-boy and amah and mine. When I heard the front door open, I quickly left the kitchen and the servants cleared away the incriminating third bowl. Mom entered the kitchen for a moment, glanced at the servants’ food, and then, back in the other room, she asked me what I’d been eating. I said Nothing. She asked me to open my mouth, which I did, and peering in, she said, I can see right down to your stomach, and there’s Chinese food in there. So I ran back to the cook and said, No can eat Chinese chow any more. Missy can see inside my stomach. This delighted and amused Mom for years afterward."

It was at the Kingsbury Apartments that the only attempt to burglarize us was made in our fourteen years in China.

On the roof of the apartment building was a water tank, from which a pipe ran down externally to a faucet at ground level. There the chauffeurs of the cars belonging to the apartment dwellers would wash their cars in the morning.

One morning, unusually early, about five o’clock, Dad woke up and saw a shaven Chinese head rise above the sill of the bedroom window. Forgetting about the revolver which he always kept under his pillow, Dad sat up in bed and in confused belligerence shouted, By Devil, you get out of here! The head disappeared but a piercing scream was heard.

It appeared that a would-be burglar had climbed up to the apartment level (first story, by British count), using the water pipe. Dad’s shout had startled him, we think, so that he lost his grip and slid down out of control. But at the bottom was the faucet. Perhaps he struck it on the way down, causing him grievous and painful harm.

Sometimes Mom would take me the home of her friend Cornelia Mills in the YMCA compound. There I would play on the sunny green compound lawn with Angie Mills, a little girl my age, and with their chow dog with the blue tongue. Angie had an older sister, Harriet. Their father was Plummer Mills, who became known for the refuge he provided in his Nanking mission to Chinese seeking safety from the Japanese Rape of Nanking.

In good weather, the amah would take me to a small park nearby. It was fenced, had lots of trees and wygelia bushes, shaded and dusty walks, some benches, but not much in the way of grass. It must have been boring for the amah, although I think she found other amahs to talk to.

In the summer there were cicadas in the trees growing in the park and along the sidewalks of the residential districts. All day long they shrilled loud and ceaselessly, an unremitting wall of sound beating upon one’s ears. The Chinese boys would catch them using long bamboo poles with a sticky substance on the end; touch a cicada with it and you could bring him down off a tree branch, provided you could see the cicada in the first place, not so easy to do.

All foreigners wore hats when they went outdoors in the summer, in order not to get sunstroke. It was never clear to me why Chinese could go bareheaded in the summer sun without suffering sunstroke, but I knew that I certainly didn’t dare. Dad wore either a smart straw hat or a pith helmet, and I had a pith helmet too. Pith helmets, also known as solar topis (toe-pees), were made of cork, I suppose, and covered with white or khaki cloth. Dad’s white topi had the thick and adventuresome look of that of an explorer or lion tamer. Mine were of the more rounded common city-dweller’s style, and I had them successively in white or khaki. The trouble with mine was common to that of most boys, when you wrestled or fought with someone, it would drop off, and sooner or later someone, perhaps yourself, would fall upon it, breaking in the top. The cloth would hold the top in, but the topi always had a broken, sunken look thereafter. And a soaking rain would turn it into mush. The British soldiers had a dashing military version that you can see in movies of the British in India.

Saturdays were work days like any others, at least in the morning, but on Sundays Dad was home, and in the summer he would walk us all to another park some distance away where a British Army band used to play. The band leader fascinated me. Afterwards I would find a long twig, climb onto a stump, and lead an imaginary band with the twig until Dad felt that it was time to go home. Then we would walk home. We used to pass a vacant lot where a stone merchant kept an inventory of rough-cut stone slabs. These were of various sizes, some perhaps six inches thick, a foot or two wide, and four to six feet long. They lay flat, a bright gray-white amongst the green grass under the summer sun. I would walk and jump from one to another. A few would even rock, which was fun.

On weekends Dad often took me riding on his bicycle, tying a pillow onto the frame between the handle bars and seat, and placing me astride the pillowed frame, where I rode with his arms protectively on either side of me. But the pillow was totally inadequate and before long I felt that I was being split in two, most uncomfortable. I was never good for a very long ride.

On the Fourth of July Dad would take me to a firecracker shop where we would load up for our celebration. Chinese fireworks consisted of small firecrackers braided in strings of various lengths, often with larger crackers at intervals; these strings went off like prolonged machine-gun fire. We also bought marvelous red eight-inch firecrackers with a double fuse in the middle. The Chinese grasped one near the bottom in the hand and lit the two fuses taped together that emerged from the middle. One fuse would first detonate the bottom half, blasting the top half high into the air where it would then explode in a shower of paper. These firecrackers were made to break in the middle above the holder’s hand and I never heard of the upper half bursting prematurely. But Dad was safety conscious so we never held them when exploding them but set them on the unyielding sidewalk from which they would blast much higher. Often we put a tin can on top to watch it fly way above us.

Here I am on the steps of the Kingsbury Apartments, with a full supply of those wonderful Chinese firecrackers, ready to celebrate the Fourth of July. I was about three years old and you see on the left the lower legs of Dad, there to look after me.

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FURTHER EVENTS

I think it was in my fourth year that the accident occurred at the Navy Y. M. C. A. located downtown near the Bund and Soochow Creek, convenient for sailors. In those early years Dad and Mom used to go to the Navy Y for its periodical sukiyaki dinner, and they would take me. I expect that they attended partly for the purpose of meeting people, although I certainly don’t recall any friendships they formed from those sukiyaki dinners The affair was held in the gymnasium, a big bare dark room somewhat inadequately decorated with paper streamers to make it look festive. There was a long line of charcoal braziers forming an ellipse on the floor. Every family or party cooked its own sukiyaki on its own brazier. I suppose the adults sat on the floor but I think some rustled up a few metal chairs. I tended to run around the gym during the cooking.

On one occasion, when I was standing next to our brazier, someone, I think it was Mom, upset the brazier, a top-heavy little thing with the pot on top, and spilled the boiling sukiyaki on my bare legs. I howled. They found a room upstairs with a bed where they laid me down. I’m sure they put something on my legs which, however, didn’t seem to help at all, because I simply never stopped crying. So they informed me that ice cream might cool off the burn. You could get chocolate-covered Neapolitan ice cream bars at the Navy Y, a combination of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, and my parents brought me a ceaseless stream of these. I felt no obligation to stop crying, after all, my legs hurt, but I certainly didn’t cry while eating the ice cream bars, which were delicious. As fast as I finished one, Dad brought me another. Eventually I stopped crying, the flow of ice cream bars ceased, and we went home.

Some time that year Mom took me with her on a trip to Peking, with our amah. We took a small coastwise steamer north from Shanghai. It stopped at Chefoo, anchoring in the harbor. We went ashore in a launch through harbor waters swarming with jellyfish.

Chefoo is a small town on steep hills, so each rickshaw had two coolies, one to pull and the other to push when going up hill. We went up at dusk to what I suppose was the summer home, Western-style, of a Shanghai friend. There we had dinner and I recall the cozy yellow light of the parchment lampshades in the living room of our friend’s house.

Next day we continued by ship to Tientsin, and thence by train to Peking where we stayed a few days in the dormitory of the Language School.

We saw caravans of two-humped Mongolian camels walking along the streets. There I saw my first fire, a house or store with part of the roof fallen in, flames leaping out, and smoke in the air. Passers-by hurried along the street in their normal pursuits; nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the fire nor doing anything about it, which seemed strange.

Mom went one day to see the Great Wall, an all day excursion, leaving me at the Language School in the care of our amah. I wandered in the enclosed garden with its gravel paths, sparse trees and small, worn patches of grass. A young foreigner was writing a book in the garden. He sat in the sunlight on a chair at a small table where he was typing his manuscript. He smiled and talked with me, asked my name, and typed it on a slip of paper for me.

We returned to Shanghai by another small steamer and ran into a tremendous typhoon. I became seasick and Mom tried to take care of me but soon became seasick herself. I clearly recall lying on my bunk looking across the cabin at Mom lying in hers and the extraordinary and inexplicable phenomenon of her bunk rising above the level of mine, then falling below it with the violent motion of the ship.

Whiled in Peking she bought two beautiful lanterns the size of watermelons. They were made of translucent horn with Chinese scenes painted on them. When we went ashore in Shanghai, she took a taxi to go home and gave me the lanterns to hold. Shortly she happened to see Dad walking on the sidewalk and tried to wave and call to him. She told the taxi driver to stop, which he did with great suddenness, so that I pitched forward and put my knees through both lanterns. She was sorry about the lanterns but glad to see Dad again.

Shanghai traffic had many cars and trucks. Many of the trucks had solid rubber tires, not the air-filled ones of today. There were many black model T Fords, and other cars of similar appearance. There were still a few tall black electric cars that moved silently along the streets. I could identify almost every make of car on the road by its hubcaps, which were only a little below my eye level and therefore very noticeable.

The streets of Shanghai were noisy and full of life. I was fascinated by the horns on the various cars. Most had horns operated by rubber bulbs. These were mounted outside the front window on the driver’s side; the driver would reach out and give a couple of squeezes, wonk, wonk. Others, including all the Ford Hire Taxi Company cars, had klaxons; little boxes also mounted outside the driver’s window. A flat-topped piston protruded from the top; the driver reached out and pressed it down, producing a satisfying ga-GOO-ga, which I much preferred. The really modern cars had an electric horn operated by a button centered in the steering wheel, with a disagreeable stee-deet, rather like the horns of today. Much of the traffic was of bicycles whose bells sounded ting-a-ling. Rickshaws coolies contributed their share, shouting wei, wei to cyclists and pedestrians to get out of their way. Coolies struggling with heavy loads suspended from the ends of bamboo poles on their shoulders shouted hei-ho, hei-ho to ease the effort. Downtown where a building might be under construction, teams of coolies working high on rickety platforms drove piles, jerking back on ropes to lift the heavy pile driver, then letting it fall on the pile, shouting hey-EI-ey, hey-EI-ey, their cries punctuated by the thump of the falling weight.

It was while at the Kingsbury Apartments that Dad bought his first car, a new 1929 Model A Ford, milk chocolate brown, with a black fiber top, and, needless to say, an electric horn. Then he would drive to work or be driven by Mom instead of bicycling. Dad bought the car from Freddie Bills, of Bills Motors, whom Mary and I met by chance over twenty-five years later at a lakeside motel in Skookumchuk, British Columbia.

Here is Mom at the wheel of our new Model A Ford, with me seated on the hood, in front of the Kingsbury Apartments.

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I suppose it was the enthusiasm and freedom of owning our own car that motivated Mom and Dad to make the excursion to Liu Ho. This was a little village on the Yangtze, a few hours away, to which we drove in the hot summer over a dirt road, with very little traffic.

Liu Ho had the narrow dirt and cobble-stoned street, lined with shops, of a typical Chinese village. You could see chicks scratching for food in the dirt of the street; they were identified as to ownership by red, blue or green color painted on their fuzzy yellow back feathers.

In Liu Ho (pronounced Lee Oo in the local dialect) was a mission, headed by Rosa Palmborg, a delightful, steady, strong-jawed older woman, who was a doctor of homeopathy. She was assisted by Dr. Crandall, a large, smiling, red-faced woman, and Miss West, younger and shy.

The mission was clean and poor. We could see the efforts and pride of the missionaries in building it up and making a new church, all very sparsely furnished. We visited with them and I think brought our own lunch since we dropped in on them unexpectedly, nor could we expect them to casually incur the expense of feeding us

Once we drove with somebody to guide us to Minghong up-river on the Whangpoo. There we saw the ancient Lung Hwa pagoda which loomed above our car where we stopped in a wide place in the narrow dirt village street. Nearby, drawn up on the muddy shore, we saw two or three silvery amphibian aircraft of the China National Aviation Company.

But we didn’t make full use of the opportunities to drive to scenic places outside of Shanghai. Today as I scan the 1937 handbook of the China Automobile Association, I regret that we didn’t. Its descriptions of the routes one would take are intriguing. The roads were mostly dirt and without signs, finding gasoline, perhaps at a private bus depot, was chancy, and if the route took you through a village, the main street might be barely wide enough for one car. The trips would have been fascinating but difficulties would have been awkward to deal with. Nor did we speak the language.

Some of the foreign businessmen in those days used to go house boating along the creeks of the Shanghai delta. The fields of the countryside would be green and tranquil, the occasional towns interesting and picturesque. One could hunt snipe and wild duck (fly-fly duck, as opposed to domestic walk-walk duck.). But house boating was not necessarily so active; I believe there was a certain amount of drinking and poker and it was a good way for businessmen to entertain clients whose accounts they sought. From remarks dropped I gathered that young foreign bachelors sometimes rented a houseboat and invited Russian girls to share the weekend.

I was too young to know that my parents must have been short of money, although I knew that Mom worked for a short while as a hostess at a restaurant downtown called The Yellow Jacket. A yellow jacket could be worn only by a member of the imperial family in the days of the former empire so I suppose the name sounded well. But the attitudes of the European clientele towards employees, especially female, differed from those of egalitarian, homespun America, so she quit before long because they didn’t respect her.

Meanwhile Dad’s job wasn’t working out. The fighting in China had obliged the American Oriental Banking Corporation to abandon its plans for expansion which were the major reason why it employed him. He told me that no sooner had he got to China than he became a white elephant.

He then found a job with a young entrepreneur from California, Cornelius Vander Starr, who had an office on the second floor of a modest office building on Kiangsi or Nanking Road (stories differ), a street of downtown Shanghai. Neil Starr had founded several small companies, American Asiatic Underwriters (today grown into American International Group, Inc. in New York), the Asia Life Insurance Company, Inc. (today the American Life Insurance Company in Wilmington, Delaware), the Underwriters Bank, the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury and its Chinese language counterpart, Ta Mei Wan Pao (Big American Evening Paper), Reliance Motors (the Buick and Studebaker dealerships) and the Metropolitan Land Company. So Dad resigned from the American Oriental Banking Corporation and began the career which occupied the rest of his working life.

Here he is, Neil Starr, a business genius of outstandingly good character,

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VERDUN TERRACE

In 1929 when I was still four, we moved to Verdun Terrace. It was what I suppose you would call today a development of town houses obviously built for lower income tenants. Incomes and living standards were lower then than they are today, but Verdun Terrace was clean and perfectly decent. It was inhabited by normal, lower middle-class people, most or all of them foreigners. It consisted of ten rows of identical adjoining yellow stucco two-story houses with red tile roofs. The houses were ten to a row. We were in number eighty-seven. Verdun Terrace was located on Avenue du Roi Albert near its intersection with Avenue Joffre, a major street. You will perceive from the names that Verdun Terrace was in Frenchtown and that the names had been given after the Great War, which was what we called what is now referred to as World War I.

The two photos below show Dad, Mom and me in front of 87 Verdun Terrace.

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I realize now that the house and its rooms were small but they seemed just fine to me then. Downstairs was a small living room and dining room, also the kitchen which gave onto a small courtyard in back. The courtyard was enclosed by red brick walls with a green-painted iron door.

In front of the house was a tiny grass lawn—a word we never used, in Shanghai it was always a garden, British usage. The garden was perhaps fourteen feet square, enclosed by a low wire fence. My parents always referred to it as their postage-stamp garden. Two small palmettos grew near the front and a narrow flower bed with a few flowers bordered the house and fence. All gardens in Shanghai were fenced lest beggars and the general public intrude.

Upstairs was my parents’ bedroom in front, extending the width of the house. My smaller room was in back, also the bathroom.

The bathroom had a bathtub in which Mom did our dry-cleaning for a while. Her purpose must have been to save money. She would pour a couple of inches of aviation gasoline into the tub and rinse our woolens in it but gave it up after a while. It must have been terribly hard on her hands and the savings probably were small.

The view from the front rooms was of the tiny garden, a narrow sidewalk and the gravel driveway upon which I was forever running, falling and skinning my knees. Across the driveway was the back of the row of houses numbered from ninety-one to one hundred, with their red brick courtyard walls, green iron doors, and the yellow stucco of their second floors rising behind. At the inner end of the drive you could turn to the next rows. At the turn there was a parking area covered by a bamboo matshed, a rough roof of coarse woven bamboo strips.

Looking down the drive towards and across Avenue du Roi Albert—we really violated the French pronunciation; I never heard it pronounced as other than Avenue Doo Royal Bear,—we saw a brick wall with the legend Defense D’Afficher, meaning Post No Bills, and on the gable end of a building was a jai alai advertisement showing Basque names of the players just like those I saw twenty years later in Havana. Above all was the blue onion dome with the gold cross on top, of a Russian Greek Orthodox church. Many Russians lived in the area and Avenue Joffre had many small businesses with signs in the Cyrillic alphabet. Occasionally we might see walking along the sidewalk an older Russian with a white beard, white blouse with medals pinned on it, and baggy pants tucked into high black boots.

It was in those years that I had the usual childhood illnesses, whooping cough, chicken pox, whose itching drove me to ask Dad to put me out with a punch to the jaw—he wouldn’t—and paratyphoid, which kept me in bed a long time.

For some reason it was thought necessary around then to remove my adenoids, and I was taken to the small and basic Paulun Hospital (pow loon) where a slim, dark-haired young English-speaking German, Doctor Kastein, did the operation. I was in the hospital for a few days with a very sore throat and trouble eating. I remember the vanilla ice cream, and kindly Dr. Kastein leaning over me and smiling. His face was seamed with the countless fine white lines of scars from dueling with sabers that Germans often acquired during their university days.

It was at Verdun Terrace that we bought our first radio, a table model, and a wind-up gramophone. We acquired a dining table of lighter color with straight modern lines, which we would consider ugly today.

We had a cook-boy and a boy, Da Sze Foo and Whang Sze Foo. A cook-boy both cooked and served, a boy merely served and cleaned house; both were adults, boys as servants were never boys in the sense of male children. We also had a private rickshaw coolie, Ah Doo. Dad had apparently come up in the world, bringing us up with him.

I think I was seven when I figured out that Santa Claus had to be a myth. It was clearly impossible for him to visit all the children in the world in one night, Christmas Eve, and there was no way he could drop down a chimney, we had none, to deliver to me the presents bearing the little card that read To Freddie from Santa Claus. I gravely explained this to Mom and Dad, who had always told me there was a Santa Claus although I saw now that they were clearly mistaken. But I was not smart enough to figure out who did give me those presents and fill out those cards with handwriting so much like Mom’s.

It was a great pleasure for me to take Mary to see Verdun Terrace fifty years later (1980), although it had changed almost unrecognizably, with brick huts jammed in where the gardens and driveways had been. And then again in 2002, where it had become upscale, a designated former French Concession heritage location, the huts removed, the driveways paved.

I turned five at Verdun Terrace, and enjoyed playing with other children there, none of whom I can remember today. I had a red tricycle and a little yellow car that I could pedal. I ran on the gravel drive and the paved sidewalk and forever tripped over my feet on both, repeatedly skinning my knees which were always red with mercurochrome. Mom always soothed my tears and washed gravel out of my knees.

Backing up against Verdun Terrace were the large grounds of the French Club, the Cercle Sportif Français. My parents joined and Mom would take me swimming there during the hot Shanghai summers. It had the best pool in Shanghai, large, light and airy, with enormous glass skylights above, and interesting little bays with steps at intervals along the sides, also a thrilling slide at the deep end.

Being French, it did not know of malted milks nor ice cream sodas so Mom would buy me instead a milk with grenadine, the latter an alcoholic strawberry liqueur which imparted a delicious flavor and pink color to the milk.

My parents would tell me of the marvelous Bastille Day parties at the French Club on July Fourteenth, with free champagne, much music, lights and happy noise from the grounds. They always attended and I could hear the festive hullabaloo through my open bedroom window at night.

One summer night an event occurred which made a vivid impression upon my parents. I slept through it all so my knowledge comes from their telling. In number ninety-two of the row ahead, the coolie, who was jealous of the cook over an amah, took a cleaver to him and hacked him to death. All the windows were open, so the cook’s screams were heard by everyone who was awake, until the screams eventually stopped. Number ninety-two was occupied by two older unmarried ladies who were too terrified to call the police or otherwise do anything to stop the attack.

We became friends and neighbored back and forth with Irv and Oki Rogers, whom