Shelter from the Storm

If

old Shanghai were not just a city, but a collection of extraordinary stories, few could match those of the desperately needy refugees who flocked to its open port. Some came by boat, some by train; a group of several hundred White Russians even completed the 3,000-kilometer journey across Xinjiang on foot. But what they all had in common was that they had nowhere else to go.

Marcia Reynders Ristaino's aptly named book, Port of Last Resort (Stanford University Press; 380 pages) traces the story of two of the communities—the White Russians and Jews—that gave the city its reputation. The decadence of old Shanghai has attracted many writers, but Ristaino's argument is that most have concentrated on the Western élites, or the Chinese communities they ruled, overlooking the rich contribution made by the waves of refugees who pitched up on its hostile shores. No visa or passport was required to enter Shanghai and that fact above all others gave the city its character.

The White Russians arrived first. The disintegration of their homeland forced many to flee to Harbin, in northern China, and then on to Shanghai. Some, such as Admiral Stark and his sailors, took their battle fleets, sailed south and parked themselves opposite the Bund, commanding attention by their numbers and the size of their guns.

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By the 1930s, Shanghai's Russian community had swelled to more than 10,000 and was the second biggest in the city after the Japanese. Its members staged operas, ballets and plays—one former ballerina even taught a young Margot Fonteyn to dance—and their restaurants, millineries and fur shops helped give the French Concession its cosmopolitan character. Every self-respecting Chinese gangster had a bevy of White Russian bodyguards riding on the running boards of his Chevrolet.

But none of this did much to give the community back its sense of pride and Ristaino paints a moving and, on the whole, sad picture of their lives. Many never got over the loss of social status and the trauma of exile and eventually succumbed to alcoholism, drug addiction and debt. Wives and daughters of once secure professionals and army officers drifted into the twilight world of the city's nightlife as tea dancers and hostesses. The situation was so bad it even attracted the attention of the League of Nations. A report compiled by its officials estimated that one in four White Russian women had drifted into prostitution.

Ristaino's portrait of the city's Jewish diaspora is less bleak. The first refugees from Germany arrived on the S.S. Conte Verge in late 1933. Facing terrible persecution back home, the Jews of Central Europe were prepared to look to any port in a storm and Shanghai was one of the very few available. What must have gone through their minds as they arrived on the Bund and confronted Shanghai's sweaty summers and teeming waterfront can only be guessed at, but they did have one central advantage; Jewish émigrés had been trickling in for years and there were many hands of friendship.

The Japanese, by now in control of the city, proved strange masters. They never appeared to quite work out how to treat the Jews, so they herded them into an area called Shitei Chiku and told them it was good for them (in the words of a senior Japanese officer, the confine was "neither a ghetto nor jail, but an area which is full of hope"), but shunned any worse forms of persecution.

In the end, these two large refugee communities didn't have a great deal in common and Ristaino doesn't pretend they did. Her point is that there is something uniquely awful about the experience of having to begin all over again and the way in which the various individuals and communities coped with the challenge played a key part in shaping Shanghai's foreign enclaves. For all its faults, the city's polyglot culture created a kind of tolerance; Germans of all political persuasions, she says, liked to spend an afternoon in the war years wandering through the Jewish ghetto, because its cafés and bakeries reminded them of the fatherland.

This is an academic book and possesses scholarly strengths and weaknesses—a few more individual stories and a little more narrative panache would have enlivened the text—but it's a thoroughly researched, impressive and sometimes fascinating piece of work, interwoven with themes that resonate to this day. All those who think large-scale immigration is the end of the world should take a look at what it did for Shanghai. It didn't make a bad city better, but it did make it a whole lot more interesting.