Return to Shanghai
For weeks, more than 500 Global Studies students prepared for the Semester at Sea arrival in Shanghai, China. Elizabeth Inman is a Life Long Learner on the Spring 2010 voyage. Like the other students, she listened to the lectures, read the materials and watched the movies. But unlike the others, Liz lived in the French Concession of Shanghai until she was 12 years old.
A British citizen who now lives in Canada, she recently held the students in Christopher Hill’s Modern World History class spellbound as she shared her experiences with them. Born in Hong Kong in 1931, Liz moved to Shanghai at the age of 3 months when her father, a journalist, became the editor of the Shanghai Times. The newspaper was housed in one of the stately old building in the Bund overlooking the Huangpu River.
She talked about the oddity of having lived a typically British life in Shanghai without ever having any meaningful contact with real Chinese people. She went to a British girls school, had British friends, and ate British cuisine. Not even the
family’s domestic help were not allowed to speak Chinese to the children. She noted that she did not know a single Chinese person of her own age. As a result, other than being able to count to ten, she can speak no Chinese.
She remembers living in Shanghai in 1937 when the Japanese came marching through China into Shanghai. Not convinced that the Japanese would respect the foreign presence in the concessions, her family was evacuated to Hong Kong (then a British Crown Colony). Liz told about being down at the pier on the Bund and being transported to a British gunboat while air battles raged overhead. They were allowed to return a time later as the Japanese did respect the international presence in the city.
She recounted the time in 1939 when the family was sailing back from a holiday outside Hong Kong. “I was in the lounge of the ship, as an eight-year old when we learned that Britain had entered the WW II against Germany.” Even then, their lives in Shanghai remained largely the same because the war was considered to be a European war and didn’t involve them.
That all changed dramatically in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Japanese troops just walked in to Shanghai effectively making them prisoners of war. By that time her father had left the newspaper as a result of a disagreement with the publisher about favorable news treatment of the Japanese, and was working as a British diplomatic employee putting out an English language newspaper from the embassy.
“We were allowed to remain in our houses but the problem was food. Shanghai was a huge port and much of the food was imported. There was a shortage of food in our house and you can imagine what it must have been like in other, less
fortunate households. People were dying throughout Hong Kong.”
She told of other memories - of food rationing lines, people suffering from hunger and one day when the Japanese drove all the confiscated foreign cars out of the streets of Shanghai in a sort of bizarre parade.
Her family was lucky because as embassy employees they had diplomatic immunity. They were taken on a Japanese ship to Portuguese East Africa where they were exchanged for a group of Japanese diplomats who were being brought from Australia.
When leaving Shanghai, Liz remembers her father and a friend wondering if they would ever see Shanghai again. “I was outraged - well of course we will see this place again. We are only leaving because the Japanese are here and we will be
coming back.”
True to her word, she did come back -- 68 years later as a member of the Semester at Sea 2010 Spring Voyage. And her fellow travelers, who have benefited from her personal recollections of this important time in history, are glad she did.