Free Eve of a Hundred Midnights by Bill Lascher

living.
    Mel’s first stop in China was a place rife with misunderstanding: China’s great international metropolis, Shanghai.
    After his crash course in Chinese with George Ching, Mel left for China in the third week of October 1939. Crossing the Pacific aboard the SS President Coolidge, he stopped in Hawaii, switched ships in Kobe, Japan, and even encountered friends from Lingnan during the journey. On the boat from Japan, Mel also made a crucial contact: Randall Gould, the charismatic editor of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury and one of Shanghai’s most influential journalists. Gould offered to introduce Mel around Shanghai and help him get acclimated in the city.
    After arriving in Shanghai on November 7, Mel rented a room at the swanky $2-a-night Park Hotel (complete with three meals), which was next to a horse-racing track in the heart of Shanghai. This was far too expensive for Mel, and the guttural shouting of German guests in the hotel ordering around bellhops only increased his unease. Unfortunately for Mel, more affordable rooms were booked, so he needed to find either paying work or other lodging. In fact, he needed both if he was going to stay. Shanghai was not only a far more expensive place to live than elsewhere in China, it felt culturally isolated from the rest of the country. Recent events were also making it a decidedly less comfortable place to live.
    Shanghai had long been a hub for expatriates, in part because foreign governments had enjoyed extraterritorial powers in the city for decades. Not only did these powers leave Shanghai under the control of a council made up of foreign officials, but foreign residents were subject to their own countries’ laws, not China’s.
    â€œBut if you aren’t British or French or American or if your country hasn’t got enough gunboats it isn’t so international,” Mel wrote, referring to the many foreigners who came to Shanghai but were not nationals of countries that enjoyed extraterritorial powers. Paradoxically, among the most disenfranchised populations in Shanghai were Chinese nationals. And though Shanghai maintained much of its international identity when Mel arrived in 1939, in the two years since the Battle of Shanghai, Japan had consolidated power there and grown increasingly belligerent toward both the Chinese and Westerners.
    â€œThe Western world is being squeezed out of China,” Mel wrote. “Their last opening wedges—the foreign concessions—are fastly becoming subject to Japanese pressure.”
    Even as the Japanese took over, Mel found Shanghai society distastefully out of touch. When he went to exchange money at the American Express office, the bright blue travel pamphlets inside always seemed disconcerting to him, especially when a stretch of cold nights hit Shanghai and he saw humanitarian workers piling the bodies of Chinese laborers who had frozen to death into their trucks. Shanghai, the people in it, and the way the local Chinese were treated strained Mel’s patience to the point of anger. He said as much in one form or another in most of his letters.
    â€œI hate to see the beggars (I’ll see millions more),” he wrote. “I hate to see the rich kids in the cabarets, I hate to see the refugees, I hate to see the lousy foreigners in Packards and minks. Lots of money is being made now on the market and in business—but the Chinese peasant is taking it on the proverbial chin.”
    Shanghai wasn’t the only place where Japan had increased its influence in China. At the end of 1937, Japan had attackedNanking, then China’s capital, opening an unimaginably dark chapter in world history. For three weeks, Japanese forces committed acts as horrific as any others in the twentieth century’s grim gallery of atrocities. Between 20,000 and 300,000 civilians were killed in Nanking, while thousands of women, perhaps even tens of thousands, were raped. *
    Many