Re-write of Shanghai Express (Final Draft)

I

It is the 15th of December 1931, 10:30am – twenty minutes before the scheduled departure of the Shanghai Express. This is the East Station in Peiping[1].

The train station is packed with passengers pouring in and out. Yet the din raised by the hustle and bustle doesn’t lessen the overwhelming feeling of cold that hangs in the air.

It snowed the previous night and most of the snow has been swept away from the rail tracks in the early hours of the morning. It is a drab and dreary winter’s day. A whoosh of cold wind blew against the faces of the passengers and their friends or families who have come to see them off. Their noses are red as turnips and their hot breath steams from their mouths into the frigid air. People in short jackets slip their hands underneath them to keep their fingers warm. They pull the flaps of their rabbit-fur caps down to cover their ears, but their unprotected faces turn blue in the cold.

Hui Fei hides her neck in the high collar of her fur overcoat and wraps the collar tighter as she walks towards the boarding platform for first class section. In the midst of the high collar there is a pretty face. The pair of sapphire earrings dangling from her lobes swings continuously back and forth with the movements of her body. Her flashing deep black eyes, glossily rouged rosebud-shaped lips, and thick lustrous black hair are enough to captivate any man. The sound of her high heels clicking against the station platform tempts people to peer over their shoulders at the fashionable young lady behind them.

Hui Fei carries a small and exquisite handbag in the crook of her elbow. The porter carrying her two suitcases walks closely behind her.

While it is cold out there on the platform, on the train itself, the first-class compartments are almost overheated: some male passengers wear only a shirt.

Hui Fei finds Compartment 10, which she will share with her travel companion Magdalen, who earned herself the nickname Shanghai Lily. Magdalen hasn’t boarded the train yet. Hui Fei tipped the porter and sent him away after he put her suitcases on the overhead luggage rack. She takes off her overcoat and hangs it on a hook next to the compartment door. She is now wearing a satin cheongsam in electric blue. The slinky and skintight cheongsam with a high slit elegantly displays the slim and charming figure of Hui Fei, showing off her bust, waist, hips, and also legs to advantage. Hui Fei’s outfit is typical of the leading Shanghai fashion at the time, suggesting to people that she is returning to the fashion centre of China after perhaps a short visit to Peiping.

After sitting down at the tea stand in front of the window, Hui Fei takes out the powder compact from her handbag and dabs at her face. As she raises her right hand to smooth her long hair, one can see a diamond ring as large as a good-sized bean on her middle finger. Putting her powder compact back in the handbag, she takes out a small bottle of perfume and touches the stopper behind her ears. An instant later she catches the scent of Cape Jasmine.

Just a few minutes after Hui Fei settles in the compartment, she hears a familiar female voice talking in English in the carriage corridor. Seconds later, Magdalen appears at the door: “hello, my dear Hui Fei! I made it. I was in such a rush.” She walks up to Hui Fei, who has now stood up, and kisses her on the cheek.

An electric bell starts to ding-ding-ding: the train is about to depart. In a flurry of activity, those who have come to see people off get down from the train, while the passengers remaining aboard go to the windows to wave their good-byes.

Neither Hui Fei nor Magdalen has anybody to wave good-bye to. Soon after the train gets under way, Magdalen leaves the compartment to catch up with some of her old acquaintances. Looking outside the window, Hui Fei enjoys the passing scenery.

As soon as the train gets past the Yungting City Gate and into the countryside, everywhere Hui Fei looks she sees the accumulation of several days of snowfall. Against all that white, peasant homes with a few bare trees around them seem to have shrunk in size. There is no one in the fields. Hui Fei likes the panorama of white that she would not be able to enjoy within the confines of the city.

As the train clicks and clacks over the rails, Hui Fei’s thoughts switch from sightseeing to her assignment. She starts feeling a bit nervous as soon as she focuses her thoughts on the special and important mission for which she has gone on this trip.

II

Hui Fei’s real name is Bingying.

Bingying’s father, Fulin, was born in 1889 in Shanghai. The city’s population mushroomed during the latter half of the 1800s due to the influx of migrants from surrounding provinces.

The Taiping Rebellion, which began in 1850, disrupted the Yangtze River Basin. When the Taipings came through looting and burning her village in Wuxi County of the Jiangsu Province, Fulin’s mother Yu, then 10 years old, fled south with her family to the international settlements in Shanghai that were guarded by foreign troops.

The Taiping Rebellion lasted for fourteen years and was eventually put down by Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang. The rebellion made much of the Yangtze River area depopulated and destroyed. Fulin’s father Liang, a son of a landowner, came to the outskirts of Shanghai from Wuxi to seek his fortune. After working as an apprentice to a blacksmith for several years, he opened his own shop and later a retail store that sold iron, steel, and coal on the northern side of the Suchow Creek, which connected the Huangpu River with the Grand Canal. His business flourished, benefiting from Shanghai and its surrounding areas’ boom in construction and light industries, such as silk-reeling, cotton- and wool-spinning, which were encouraged by Li Hongzhang, who had been made governor of Jiangsu Province in acknowledgement of his military achievements.

Both natives of Wuxi, Liang and Yu were married after being introduced to each other’s parents by relatives who acted as matchmakers. Fulin is their fifth child and the third son.

Fulin was brought up in Shanghai. As the financial and industrial centre of China, Shanghai was the country’s most modern, cosmopolitan city in the 1830s. Just over 19 kilometers upriver from the Yangtze estuary, Shanghai was a busy port serving both the region’s coastal and inland trade. Its wealth was partly due to the city’s proximity to the Grand Canal, which brought grain and textiles from the fertile southern areas to the capital at the time, Beijing, in the north. After the loss of the Opium War with Britain in 1842, China was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing, as a result of which China had to open Shanghai and four other coastal ports to the Western trade and settlement. The first railroad in China was built in Shanghai in 1867, linking the north bank of the Wusong River to where the Huangpu meets the Yangzi River. Trams and trolleys operated in the foreign settlements in 1908.

Fulin’ parents enrolled him in St. John’s College in 1903. He then continued his education at St. John’s University. Originally designed and opened as a secondary school, St. John’s College was founded in 1879 by Samuel Schereschewsky, Bishop of Shanghai. As more university courses were added over the years, it gained university status in 1905 and became registered in Washington State of the United States. Graduates of St John's could proceed directly to graduate schools in the United States. Regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in Shanghai and China, St. John’s was attended by some of the brightest and wealthiest young men in Shanghai at the time (tuition was extremely expensive at 8 dollars per month). In 1907, it became the first institution to confer bachelor's degrees in China.

Fulin was introduced to Western culture at St. John’s. He met Americans, whose blue eyes and red or golden hair made him wonder if they coloured it. At the end of the summer of 1909, Fulin and four of his classmates, who had completed their second year at St. John’s University, went to Beijing to take the first Boxer Indemnity Scholarship exam. Benefiting from St. John’s emphasis on both Western and Chinese studies, all five won places as part of the first group of indemnity students to study in the United States. Before going back home in Shanghai, Fulin and his classmates cut off one another’s queues - their “life-long followers” that had hung well below their knees.

In the autumn of 1909, Fulin and a group of Chinese students boarded the ship departing Shanghai for San Francisco. Fulin was to study Civil Engineering at Yale University. Their journey from Shanghai to New Haven took a total of thirty five days and covered a distance of over 15,000 miles.

During his time at Yale, Fulin got to know and started dating Annie, whose dad was Chinese and mom was German American. Comparing American and Chinese women, Fulin once chatted to his friends: “American women are the ideal of beauty and health. They make the most pleasant company. Chinese women make the most faithful wife for they are the expounder of patience and trust. American women are like the Panama Canal, the wonder of the modern ingenuity; Chinese women are like the Great Wall of China, the fruit of untiring perseverance.”

Fulin was lucky enough to find both in Annie, who was studying at Hunter’s College in New York for a Bachelor of Science degree. Soon after Annie graduated in 1913, the pair got married. Their first child was born in the winter of 1914. They gave her a pretty Chinese name – Bingying, which means crystal clear ice in Chinese.

Fulin continued his education in the United States, earning his Master's degree from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1919. Filled with American ideas, Fulin returned to Shanghai with his wife and kids in the following year to serve as a professor at Nan Yang College of Chiao Tung, which was known as the “Eastern MIT” due to its reputation of nurturing top engineers. By that time, Fulin and Annie had had two more children – first son Robert and second daughter Bingru.

III

Bingying was her dad’s favourite child. When she was a baby, he had her crib placed next to his bed so that he could attend to her at night. He took her to a photographer to have the first birthday photograph taken as a reminder of her start in life. Plump and serene, she was wearing a lacy white dress in the photograph. Her soft-soled shoes had not a speck of dust on them. She would hardly walk then, so nothing could soil her shoes.

Before the family left Pittsburgh, where they accompanied Fulin during his studies for the doctorate degree, they took a family photo in front of the main entrance to their old fashioned 2-story house. A healthy and beautiful 5-year-old girl with porcelain-like forehead, Bingying stood next to her dad, who was holding her right hand and had Robert in his right arm. Her mom was holding her little baby sister Bingru in both her arms. No one, looking at the photograph, would doubt that Bingying will grow into an attractive and lively young woman blessed with a bright future. Before leaving Pittsburgh, she told her playmates at the kindergarten: “Dad is taking the whole family to his hometown called Shanghai.”

Shanghai had by that time gained its reputation as "the Paris of the East, the New York of the West”. It was home to nearly 3 million inhabitants, of whom over 30,000 were foreigners. Merchants were in control of the city, while the rest of China was divided among warlords.

Bingying was sent to the elite McTyeire Girls’ School on Edinburgh Road soon after the family settled down in Shanghai. Founded by the American Southern Methodist Mission in 1890, the school was attended by the daughters of Shanghai’s official as well as parvenu families. The tuition was mainly in English and the majority of the girls finishing schooling at McTyeire went abroad to carry on their education, partly because female students being admitted to Chinese universities was still not the norm in China at the time.

Bingying’s world outlook was formed at McTyeire. Being taught both Western and Chinese cultures, she longed to establish her own independent career. She also took piano, dancing, and swimming lessons while she was at McTyeire.

Bingying’s uncle Fuchen, the eldest of Liang’s three sons, succeeded the family business after Liang passed away in 1927. The business continued to flourish thanks to the construction of grand scale buildings and large residential areas in Shanghai.

Fuchen was a dandy playboy, who loved expensive stylish imported items. He bought a Ford car, which was considered very luxurious in those days. Fuchen spent more time attending banquets and tea parties at courtesan houses than running his business.

One day Fuchen took his own twin boys, Bingying and her brother out to the countryside in his car. On their way, he suggested Bingying should learn to drive a car because it was considered fashionable pursuits for girls belonging to Shanghai’s social elite. Bingying was enthusiastic about the idea and asked her uncle to teach her driving without letting her parents know. Fuchen not only taught Bingying how to drive, he was also her first golf tutor.

Under strong influence of the Western lifestyle, Shanghai's wealthy families typically followed and enjoyed the fashionable and luxurious Western leisures such as swimming, promenades, dance and golf. An intelligent girl, it was easy for Bingying to grasp the skills for all these stylish elite activities before long. She was also introduced to western operas by her parents. She attended La Traviata, one of the first western operas staged in China, with her parents.

Bingying remained very close to her dad, who nearly spoiled her. A family man, Fulin bought presents for his wife and kids every time he travelled to other cities for conferences, lectures, or other matters. More often than not, Bingying got the largest parcel, which sometimes made her siblings jealous. Whenever Fulin went on a trip, all his kids looked forward to his return, anxious about what presents their dad was going to bring back for them. They rushed to the door to meet Fulin as soon as they heard the noise of his car engine.

IV

It was a week before Bingying’s 16th birthday. She was in her final year at McTyeire and the plan to send her to America for university education was already underway.

Fulin was due to return home on that day from a meeting in Tangshan, a city 180 kilometers east of Peiping. Bingying was reading for her upcoming exams in her room. A light drizzle was falling outside.

She heard the car stopping outside the house and her brother and sister running to the door for their dad. She came out of her room and walked to the door as well. Instead of Fulin, standing in front of them was a man with thin face, small moustache and a pair of gold-rim glasses. He was wearing a camel-hair gown lined with fine blue silk. Poking his spectacles higher with his fingers, he asked to see Mrs. Liang.

The man turned out to be a government official, who came to deliver devastating news to the family. Bingying found out on that day that her dad would never come back home with presents in his suitcases again – he had been killed by a bomb planted underneath the rail tracks on the outskirts of Tangshan. Fulin was on his way back to Shanghai and shared the same railroad car with a third-rate figure in Chiang Kaishek’s Central Government, who was the target of the assassination. The Central Government believed that the assassination was plotted by the powerful northern rebel warlord Henry Chang, who had troops scattered in the Yanshan Mountain.

Before the thin-faced man left Bingying’s home, he put his card on the tea table in Fulin’s library, where he informed Annie of her husband’s death and offered his condolences. A week later, grieving for her loving dad, Bingying phoned the man and asked for more details about his killing because her mom was too distressed to even talk about the subject.

The man offered to meet with Bingying in a café on Xiafei Road. After a few subsequent meetings, he talked Bingying into joining the government’s secret agency. One of the priority agendas of the agency at the time was to sabotage and ultimately eradicate the Chang rebels. Taking advantage of Bingying’s hatred for her father’s killer, the man believed that he had found a perfect recruit who had the potential to set a beauty trap to assassinate the half-European-half-Chinese rebel leader Henry Chang.

Bingying was sent to an agent training camp some 20 kilometers outside the capital city Nanjing[2]. The city Nanjing itself is 300 kilometers west of Shanghai. At the beginning of her first training session, the American instructor told the only two female trainees that they should be determined to make a sacrifice of themselves, be it their virginity or their lives. Hearing this, Bingying was a bit scared and was sure her dad would never have wanted her to do this. Yet, it was too late for her to pull out.

At the camp Bingying received military-style training in martial arts, shooting, code breaking, undercover manoeuvre, secret shadowing, and a lot of other techniques. She was one of the top graduates, not because she was passionate about the profession, but because she wanted to make sure she learnt as many skills as possible to protect herself in real life assignments. She knew that her dad would have wanted her to do the same. Her American university dream was still very much alive. She just wanted to take revenge on his father’s murderer before she leaves for the States.

Within four weeks after Bingying graduated from the secret agent camp, the agency received intelligence that Henry Chang might make a trip from Peiping to Shanghai on the Shanghai Express. Bingying was subsequently sent on her maiden mission.

[1] Also known as Beijing or Peking, meaning “northern capital” in Chinese.

[2] Nanjing literally means “southern capital”. After the Republican Revolution of 1911 in China, the government was established at Nanjing and then moved to Beijing the next year. Beijing (also Peking or Peiping) was China’s capital from 1912 until 1927. Chiang Kai-shek moved the capital back to Nanjing in 1927. The Nationalist government, under Chiang Kai-shek, had its capital at Nanjing from 1927 until the Japanese invasion of 1937.