My father's Shanghai

TO MANY Filipinos, Shanghai is rapidly becoming a new tourist destination, known for its good food and good shopping. To my parents and myself, it is a second home, a city whose sights and sounds we are more familiar with than those of Fujian, where my grandparents first emigrated.

How did this all happen?

My father was born and raised in Davao province, but at age 16, a maternal uncle, who had become a prosperous businessman in Shanghai, sent for him. My father had never been out of Davao until that trip, not even to Manila. He arrived in Shanghai on the eve of the Pacific war, and left in 1947, shortly after the war and before the communists took over.

Those years left their mark on my father, but it was during a recent trip when I realized, too, how his stay in Shanghai coincided with history, through World War II and into a new era where nations, including China, were to free themselves from the yoke of colonialism.

As we walked and drove through Shanghai's streets, often accompanied by his cousin, my Auntie Lily, their animated conversations in a mixture of Putonghua (Mandarin) and Shanghainese helped me to understand why the Chinese sometimes refer to history as "gu jin," "gu" meaning ancient and "jin" contemporary -- the past flowing into the present.

No dogs and Chinese

I'd be hard pressed to think of a more appropriate example of this "past-present" notion of history than Shanghai. Both in the past and in the present, Shanghai represents China's love-hate relationship with the West.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, China had been carved up by foreign powers, and Shanghai epitomized the country's butchering, the city divided into different "concessions": the French, the British, the American, and later, the Japanese. Residents enjoyed immunity from Chinese laws and in a park within the French concession, there was said to be a sign that read: "No dogs and Chinese allowed."

But the Chinese had a grudging respect as well for the West. The uncle who took care of my father in Shanghai had studied in the Philippines, in Jose Rizal College, and could speak English fairly well. His children all received English names first (for example, Lily) with the Chinese names selected to sound like the English (thus my Auntie Lily's Chinese name reads Li Li).

My father's memories of Shanghai include those of glitz and glamour, of high-rise department stores and hotels. It was a city that never slept, with its many nightclubs and bars. My father never forgot a Filipino musician named Pampi Villar and the way he played "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" at the Club Mandarin. (In the 1960s, my father again ran into Pampi Villar at the Camp John Hay's officers' club. Yes, Pampi was still playing the organ.)

My father does remember a darker side to all this glitter. There a street where he and his classmates would walk through with trepidation because it was lined with young girls waiting to pull men off the streets and into brothels. The girls were desperate because if they didn't get a customer for the night, they risked being beaten up by their mama-san.

Global capitalism brought in unimaginable wealth to Shanghai's foreign and Chinese businessmen, but there was also a dark underside of corruption, poverty and squalor. The term "shanghaied" came about from the way men were kidnapped from the countryside to add to Shanghai's armies of coolies, a term derived from the Chinese words "ku" (for bitter) and "li" (for labor). The "bitter labor" didn't go too far for survival. My father remembers seeing corpses in the streets on winter mornings, people who had literally frozen to death in the night.

20 million yuan

Because Shanghai was the center of imperialism, it also became a hothouse for radical nationalist politics. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai, and in my father's reunions with old classmates from St. John's University, he would sometimes whisper to me, "I never knew he was communist." It was dangerous to be a communist with the police routinely raiding homes and dragging out suspected party members, and executing them in the street.

Eventually, my father left Shanghai and joined the Chinese Army. He returned as a soldier, part of the contingents sent in to retake Shanghai from the Japanese. He stayed on after the war until 1947, only marginally aware of the continuing tumult as the communist underground expanded. The Chinese communists took over in 1949.

Shortly before my father left Shanghai, his uncle gave him 20 million yuan, which in those inflationary times was worth about $200. My father gave 15 million yuan to a fellow Chinese-Filipino from Sulu province, who had fallen on hard times. Four million went to buying things to bring back to Manila and the balance of one million he spent dancing the night away at the Club Mandarin, yes where Pampi Villar played. He returned to Manila with P2 in his pocket.

What was it worth then? My father explained that he could use the P2 to buy himself and a lieutenant named Eddie Ramos a hearty meal: 70 centavos for a bowl of noodles and 30 centavos for "siopao" [dumpling].

Kuang Chi

My father did not get to see Shanghai again until 1993. He has returned several times since and each visit brings about both nostalgia and awe.

It is still a city of great contrasts-and irony. The house in which the Chinese Communist Party was founded is now the center of Xintiandi, a complex of restaurants and bars that are favorite watering holes for Shanghai's expatriates and yuppie Chinese. It was in Xintiandi where my father spotted a young Filipina in a restaurant and asked her, "Kababayan?" Shanghai has many Filipino expatriates now, and they're no longer limited to being musicians. You find teachers, doctors, bankers, hotel managers, even journalists.

During his most recent visit, my father took time out to visit a park set up in the center of the city to honor Xu Guangqi (also spelled Hsu Kuang Chi, from which Xavier School in San Juan takes its Chinese name). Xu was from Shanghai and converted to Catholicism in 1603 after meeting the Italian Jesuit Mateo Ricci. Xu was a mathematician and astronomer fascinated by the West (he translated Euclid's Elements into Chinese), but who maintained his Chinese identity all through his life, which included holding several high ministerial positions.

I suspect the park is China's way of telling the world she's opened up again to the West, but without forgetting the past. In recounting stories of Shanghai's past, as my father does, there seems to be an obsession to emphasize that Shanghai's many scars, from colonial occupation, a world war and civil strife, are in fact China's scars as well. The Chinese have long memories and as they open up to the West, Shanghai again being the main showcase with its mag-lev trains and skyscrapers, they do so on their own terms, and in their own time.