Of umbrellas and Jewish refugees in Shanghai

Slowly, purposefully, I point my finger upwards at the dripping umbrella above my head while staring at the umbrella seller. She is young; her two black pigtails are tied with simple red cotton and she is trying to sell me an umbrella. It has not quite occurred to her that, although it is raining, I don’t need an umbrella: the one I am holding in my hand is, indeed, mine and doing a fine job. I watch the obvious slowly dawn on her.

Many young Han Chinese women have sweet, oval faces, eyes mysteriously slanted. When they are poor, like this one, young Han girls’ egg-like cheeks and upwardly chiselled eyelids accentuate their bashful, tame acceptance of their lot in life. Now a sheepish look steals across her face, as does an olive-textured blush. She still gives me one last imploring look and I shake my head, pointing again at my brolly.

She quickly turns her attention to another waiguoren, a foreigner, who is hurrying past. He is abrupt, irritably pointing to the brolly above him and snapping off some insult. These attempts to sell to foreigners brollies when they already have one I have observed many times in my years in China. Why do they?

The brolly-sellers literally do not see the umbrella: single-minded, they only see the foreigner. The thinking is: “If he is a foreigner — especially an American — he has lots of money and will buy an umbrella from me because they just throw money around and are so naive and foolish.” I have seen Americans purchasing at Huai Hua road markets in downtown Shanghai curious baubles and trinkets for 20 times their worth. Not this member of the MacKenzie clan where the Scots blood runs true.

On a wet day like this, rain pearling the leaves of the gnarled plane trees lining the streets, I step across Changyang Road without a brolly thinking of those desperate umbrella-sellers while I head for the Jewish Refugee Museum. I wish to learn more about a fact that’s not well-known: the Hankow district in Shanghai was home to some 30 000 Jewish refugees in World War II.

“Which country are you from?” asks Maggie, one of the ticket sellers who also becomes my personal tour guide.

I am regularly asked this and savour my answer, given in my impeccably pidgin Chinese. “I am a Shanghaiese. I have lived in Shanghai for about two years.”

All the guards and tour guides laugh. “So are you Chinese?” comes the standard rhetorical question.

“No, are you?” The laughter is more subdued, incredulous. Now he is being cheeky: of course we’re Chinese. They are not aware of other, more cosmopolitan cities outside China where there is every race and no one goes around perpetually asking which country you are from. Foreigners are still something of a phenomenon, even in Shanghai.

There is not a lot to see in the museum but the guest book arrests me: I see entries from Jewish people, coming here in memory of parents and grandparents:

28/08/08
Thank you for preserving this history — my history. Thank you for taking us in when no one else would. We are forever grateful.

The Chinese refused to abandon their Jewish friends. A ghetto was created for them in Hankow as the Japanese claimed Shanghai step by cruel step and strove to imitate their German counterparts by persecuting the children of David and Moses.

One candelabrum in the room above the synagogue has hues of jade, China’s symbolic stone, and the menorah is ensconced in a dragon. The Chinese character for “country” is 国. An outer square represents the Great Wall; the inner character means “jade”. The precious people protected by the strong wall: bitterly ironised throughout the 20th century. The candle stems writhe upward, their dementedness the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, the Chinese dragon preventing the candelabrum from ever falling or letting the flames gutter out. Even though the dragon is gutting itself, it is still helping others.

I stand before the image for a long time.

The vision moves me to remember another umbrella on another rainy day in Shanghai: one tossed to me from a man in a gleaming black Buick while I stood among dozens of Chinese, trying to hail a taxi. It was positive discrimination: he was Chinese, all the people around me were Chinese, but he was deliberately tossing a furled umbrella to me, looking at me in concern as he did so. The brolly thumped on the ground at my shoes and I gaped at it in astonishment. I don’t even know if he heard me holler thank you as he roared off.

I walk out the museum back on to Changyang Road where the gnarled plane trees would have been striplings in 1945. Their leaves and smaller branches now stoically nod in the rain. I look for a brolly lady; there are none. Probably they are in “smarter” areas like Jing’an Temple where I live, trying to sell them for twice the price to indignant waiguoren who are already well-equipped.