Terror reigned in Shanghai. People scuttled around, going out only on necessary business. They were terrified of being rounded up for reprisal executions, terrified of being beheaded “for fun” by a Japanese soldier practicing his sword skills … Terrified.
– from Shanghai Scarlet by Margaret Blair.
When Harriston-area author Margaret Blair writes of the colourful world of old Shanghai, she knows of what she speaks.
Born in Shanghai, China, Blair’s family was part of a close expatriate subculture that lasted until she was almost 10, when the events of the Second World War resulted in her family being interned by the Japanese.
“The post-war permanent retreat from China created a lifelong feeling of having lost my roots, of being an outside observer of the people around me, and of the place I was in,” states an excerpt from Blair’s website biography.
Little surprise then, Blair returned to her roots for her first book Gudao, Lone Islet. Released in 2008, the book is a carefully-researched memoir which paints a detailed portrait of the lives of both Chinese and foreign inhabitants of Shanghai before, during and after the Second World War.
With the recent release of her second book, Shanghai Scarlet, Blair turns her talents to fiction, blending a story of love, loss and adventure, with her inside knowledge of the dangerous world of Shanghai from the 1920s to the 1940s.
In the novel, Blair writes of conflicting political regimes and the gangsters who flourished in that time period, as well as the journalists and authors they attempted to manipulate.
That imagery provides the backdrop for Shanghai Scarlet, which centres on the story of romance between Mu Shiying, an independent-minded young writer, and Qiu Peipei, a modern Chinese woman with a love of western culture and dancing.
Blair says her second book grew out of the first because she wanted to create something out of the colorful historical characters she discovered while researching Gudao, Lone Islet.
Blair’s early life in Shanghai was idyllic, in stark contrast to her wartime experience. Her Scottish-born father, Alexander Telfer, was a detective in Shanghai’s city police force, who met his British-born wife, Florence, while on vacation on the Isle of Wight.
Blair’s father’s position as an employee of the city, which was then a treaty port (open to foreign trade), allowed for a comfortable lifestyle, including a nurse Blair thought of as “my Chinese mother” and two servants to assist with physical chores.
After the war broke out, her father, who had considered leaving the country with his family, was taken into custody and sent to an internment camp with other foreign nationals.
“It was an awfully bad prison camp,” said Blair. Violent treatment and neglect of basic needs at the camp left her father in poor physical condition as the war drew to a conclusion. Yet he and other detainees were forced to walk hundreds of miles to a camp near Peking where allied forces finally liberated them. He then spent a month on a hospital ship recovering from the ordeal before being reunited with his family.
Blair says her family got word from her father through letters while he was on the hospital ship. By that point, Blair, her mother and brother, Gordon, had been released from their own internment facility, which she describes as less harsh.
“The guards weren’t violent,” she recalls. However, food was scarce and of poor quality. “It really was brutal. We were starving, I’m afraid to say.”
Blair credits the fact Swiss and Dutch consulates remained open during the war with helping moderate the conditions the Canadians and other foreign internees experienced.
“They checked in on us,” she notes.
As the war continued, conditions in the camps deteriorated as well, a situation she attributes to the upper levels of the occupying forces, not her immediate captors. Breakfast was “watery rice” and the evening meal was “watery stew.” Later they learned camp staff was being given two pounds of meat each day to feed a camp of 1,000 people.
“We really were starving and the Japanese guards came to us and said they had been cut off their funds – that they had nothing to give us,” she said, adding, “The Japanese don’t like to lose face that way.”
Only the intervention of the Red Cross, with food deliveries, saved the internees from starvation at that point, said Blair.
The last camp Blair’s family spent time in was guarded by Japanese military troops and located in a convent near a munitions factory.
“We literally were being used as human shields. We were being bombed all the time. It was terrible,” she said.
In a passage from her memoir, Blair describes one of the bombing raids:
We had no shelters and the camp leaders advised us to stay indoors. There was a constant din from the endless waves of planes flying low, the bombs shrieking their way down and the dull crash of explosions around the camp. The shock waves from the bombs shook our dilapidated buildings and plaster fell everywhere covering us, and the possessions we had just set out, with a fine dust that we cleared up once daylight came.
After they were reunited, Blair’s family left Shanghai for Scotland. She moved to Canada in 1960, where she studied history at the University of Toronto and met her husband, Ronald.
The couple raised three children, as she worked in various careers including teaching and marketing. While still working in Toronto, they bought a home outside Harriston about 30 years ago and moved to the area full-time after retiring in 1998.
Retirement gave Blair an opportunity to pursue her love of writing, both through her books and her involvement with the Ink and Cookies Writers, a group of Minto and Mount Forest area residents who meet regularly to share their stories and thoughts on writing.
It has also afforded Blair a chance to research the history of her homeland, a topic she shared at a book launch for Shanghai Scarlet at the Harriston library on Dec. 6.
At the launch, the author gave a presentation on true stories of “Gangsters, Billionaires and Two-gun Cohen – colourful characters of Treaty Port China,” as well as a reading from her latest book, an excerpt from which follows:
The Girl. Tonight I was at the Zengs’ salon and met the most wonderful, marvelous, sophisticated, modern young woman, and she was so sympathique, so young, speaking such perfect French. (I’m running out of adjectives.) At last! I had found the perfect modeng girl, embodying that quintessential modernity found only in Shanghai, expressed by modeng, the word we had invented to describe it. That’s what was missing from my research: the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. I was so bemused I didn’t go on as usual to dance the night away at Moon Palace. I had to go back to my room to savour the experience, to write about it, to think and think and think … about it … about her. Like a fool I didn’t remember to ask her where she lived, to ask her anything about herself.
After our meeting, I staggered out of the Zengs’, shrugged on my padded jacket and entered Rue Massenet, crossing through Rue Molière, past Number 29 where Sun Yat-sen had lived, to Rue Père Robert. On this part of the walk home, I was still in my French “bubble”. However, turning left on Avenue Joffre, I entered Russia: saw and waved to my friend the doorman of the Renaissance Café, a huge Cossack in full regalia with medals.
He was standing outside the café, opening the door. On a wave of the warm aroma of cabbage soup and beef stroganoff, the doorman let out a blast of plink plink balalaika music with loud, lingual Russian conversation and hearty singing fuelled by vodka and kvass. My Cossack waved back and gave me a big smile.
“No girls tonight?” he said. “No, thank goodness. But I’ve just met the one,” and I did my famous foxtrot on the road, pretending I was holding her.
Shanghai Scarlet, published by Trafford Publishing, is available online through www.margaretblair.com.
