Chapter 24

24.
“Symphonie No. 1 In F Minor, Op 10, I. Allegretto. Allegro Non Troppo: Shostakovich”


It wasn’t until the winter of ’46 that Joshua was able to locate the Hong Kong residence of the Bai family. It was a flat less than half the size of their Shanghai home and the deed was in the name of Hong. It was only by chance that he thought to check, and by a miracle that he was able to locate the correct Hong, as one can imagine there were quite a few families by that name in the city of Hong Kong.
A miracle, he thought. But it was not a miracle. It was actually the very worst of luck. And he would have two years to think about it once the week was up, but on the balmy morning that brought him to the corner building with the gothic windows, he felt as if he had won the ring toss. He was moments away from finding out where LanLan was after almost a year of separation.

Joshua himself had been in Hong Kong for four months, which compared to Shanghai, was a virtual paradise; a beautiful coastal city, sub-tropical, with palm trees, pleasing architecture and a mountain range for a backdrop. With a recommendation from Dean Chen it wasn’t hard to get work, especially now that his Mandarin was passable.

It was well beneath him, but he took a job giving music lessons to wealthy housewives. Most of them weren’t even interested in playing, preferring to drink hard liquors mixed with exotic fruit juices and talk about how mundane their lives had become; it paid very well.

During his down time, he made it his job to troll the hall of records for clues, to garner what information he could from the business section of the papers and from the streets that he wandered aimlessly in hopes of getting lucky. Every week he sent out fifteen letters to families with the name Bai and when nothing came of it, he began working on name Hong.

As if by magic, he received a letter back after the very first mailing. It read, “Maestro Streng, How very nice to hear that you are alive and in good health. BaiLan will also be glad to hear this as she has much respect and admiration for you, her teacher. She is very busy at the moment planning her wedding so I am afraid she will not be able to receive you personally. If you would like to pay your respects to her parents, we are willing to receive you for tea this coming Saturday at 2pm. Signed, Mr. Bai.”

Joshua marked the date. Even if they wouldn’t let him see her, there was no way he intended to miss out on the chance to pay his respects. He wanted to hear their lies, from their mouths, in order to prove what he suspected all along, that she had not gone to Hong Kong of her own free will but had been taken there against it.

He brought flowers to the building with the pale yellow paint and marble stairs, and as he climbed them, he swore he heard the distant sounds of a cello being played beyond the walls in one of the apartments, probably hers. He had hardly considered that she would be there, locked away in a chamber, down a hall, the realization put a spring in his step, a spring where there should have been caution. Still, nobody expects an ambush.

“Maestro Streng, come in.”

Mr. Bai answered the door with a stern face and led Joshua into a bright cheerful living room with a European feel to it. Much of Hong Kong reminded him of Europe, what disturbed him, if only at first, then again after the boot dropped, was the familiar face of HongWei sitting in the corner wearing the uniform and mustache of General Chang Kai-Shek.

“Good day, Streng,” HongWei said without getting up. He spoke in a manner that seemed deliberately intimidating and Joshua knew immediately that he was the one who had taken BaiLan from Shanghai. “So, are you going to tell me where she is, or do I have to get it out of you myself?”

“I’m sorry?” Joshua was honestly confused by this remark. He sat down and met eyes with HongWei who placed his right hand lightly on his pistol releasing the snap that kept it safe in its holster.

“Please, Streng, do not try my patience.”

So Joshua didn’t, in his best Mandarin, he explained to HongWei that he had come to see BaiLan.

“If she were with me what business would I have here? What kind of fool would take her then come back just to say hello?”

HongWei though about this for a good long while before coming to a most absurd conclusion. “You are here to taunt me. You want me to know that it is you who took her as revenge for when I took her from you!”

He wanted to tell him how ridiculous this was, but the gun in his face convinced him otherwise.

“Go to my flat, I promise you won’t find her there,” Joshua said as steadily as possible.

“You have her hidden!”

“I don’t.”

“You have her hidden and you are keeping her from me! Where is she?” He was red in the face. This must have been a new wound. He wondered how long it had been since BaiLan had fled, it might even have been the previous night. He might have missed her by less than a day.

“I don’t have her, HongWei. She must have ran away.”

“Back to Shanghai?”

“She might have.”

“Nonsense! Tell me where you are hiding her!” His screams had all four parents hovering around the door but not one made a move to stop him.

“I’m not hiding her, you are out of your mind.”

HongWei aimed his pistol between Joshua’s eyes, “If you won’t tell me where she is, then to hell with both of you.” And with a deafening thud, the lights went out.


The term “Shanghaied” refers to being placed on a ship without ones knowledge or consent. And it was on a ship that Joshua awoke surrounded on all sides by confusion. He hadn’t been shot, which was a relief, merely knocked out, rushed to harbor, and thrown on a boat.

After regaining what was left of his senses, he deducted that the ship he was on was headed for Taiwan. It didn’t take him long to figure out two things, one being that it was all HongWei’s doing, and two, that his timing had been impeccably ill fated. If his letter had not reached the Hong-Bai household for say, another week, HongWei would have been long gone without his Shanghaied guest.

He also learned that he was not the only one on the boat there against their will. Chang Kai-Shek’s army was losing power rapidly with the Communists taking control of the country from the top down and it was only a matter of time before they pushed the Nationalists out completely. Enrollment in the army was low, after a twenty-two-year war, this was to be expected, and the Nationalists had been reduced to forced recruitment.

Most of the inhabitants of the hull were young boys, some barely through puberty, and others were old, grandfather types who were past their fighting prime. He wasn’t the only westerner either. A few of the men looked Arabic, there was a black, and one man was as blonde as Max, though he seemed off somehow, like he had been picked up from a madhouse, for he was talking to himself and the wall intermittently. Was the army so desperate that they were liberating prisons and asylums?

Joshua had been bested. He thought of his small room in Hong Kong and his appointment with Mrs. Wong set for that coming Monday. What would she do when he didn’t show up? Would she figure out what happened? Or would she assume that he had simply moved on? He was dumbstruck with a throbbing head. He could hardly process what was happening to him, the only flicker of hope was in the fact that he had left the Lion with her, both so she could practice, and because there had been a series of break-ins in his building and he was afraid it would be stolen while he was out roaming those ever pleasant streets looking for BaiLan.

When he didn’t return for it she would know something had happened. She liked him, maybe she could help. But as he looked around the rusty hull and felt the ship cutting quickly through the sea below, his hope began to fade. Joshua the warrior wasn’t really a warrior, he wasn’t a soldier; he was a romantic with a sensitive heart. He couldn’t fight, let alone kill a fly. He had to find HongWei, to reason with him. This could not be his fate.

The ship docked after what felt like an eternity, but the passengers were not to be disembarked for hours. None had eaten and the hull had begun to smell like a barn. It was night when they were finally let out at the port of Sanchung and informed that they were property of Chen Yi, (Chang Kai-Shek’s man in charge) until instructed otherwise. Then they were corralled onto military trucks and driven to Taipei, each truck with its own armed guard.

As the group was being split up, Joshua searched the perimeter for HongWei, but when he found him, couldn’t get close. Somehow, the vexed Romeo had managed to weasel his way to a position of power, one that allowed him to ride in the long black car that headed up their caravan.

The trip to Taipei only gave the now exhausted men more time for reflection. To Joshua, some of them seemed resigned to their fate. An older Chinese man who liked to talk, tried to reassure some of the youngsters that being forced to fight was better than giving in to the Communists. Joshua was inclined to agree. But what upset him was that this wasn’t his war. He had just survived his war. The last thing he needed was another one, one he hardly understood. He felt trapped in a nightmare and for the first time since he left its boarders, he longed for the familiar streets of Shanghai. This thought caused him to laugh out loud, which in turn, provoked a nasty thump from the skittish guard sitting to his right.

The trucks pulled into the city of Taipei at an ungodly hour of the morning. It was still dark. From what he could make out through the break in the flap, they had passed through a gate and come to rest in a large open space. When the trucks stopped, the men were hurried out and put into lines under massive floodlights. They stood silently for approximately thirty minutes before a new group of men approached.

One of them, highly decorated, with a weathered face, said, loudly to HongWei and his associates, “This is all you bring me? They look like a bunch of sick dogs!” Joshua would find out later that this man was Chen Yi. “Get them in,” he yelled and the soldiers directed the ramshackle group towards a compound of barracks.

As he turned to fall in with the group, Joshua heard his name.

“Streng,” it was HongWei.

Joshua approached the loan soldier.

“Walk with me.”

HongWei lead Joshua out of the glaring floodlights and into the shadows. They walked towards the gate to a deserted spot. The reality of what HongWei might be about to do was settling into Joshua’s gut like food poisoning. He watched as the young man’s hand flinched in the vicinity of his pistol.

“I don’t know where she is, HongWei,” he ventured. “What kind of man would I be to lie to you now? I’d be a fool. You have won. I don’t know--”

HongWei held up a twitching finger to silence him. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done, right? You say I have won, but she loves you, so, really…” He trailed off. Joshua almost pitied him.

“I’m no soldier, HongWei. Send me back.”

HongWei smiled. “A soldier? You? You would be a detriment to our cause. You are not like the rest of us. You don’t need to fight. You are something special. That’s why LanLan loves you. That is also why you must suffer.”

He didn’t go for his gun as Joshua expected, instead he took out a key and opened the gate leading out of the compound.

“Let’s see how you do in Taipei with no money, no papers and no violin. Get out of my sight.”


On that first backwards night in Taipei, Joshua couldn’t stop thinking of something Hanna had said on the night they first met. She was stunning and aloof and he was being flippant and self-deprecating, a foolproof seduction technique that wasn’t working on her. He had said something along the lines of, “I am inches away from the poor house, Hanna. I can hardly feed myself.” This was a lie, of course, Joshua was at the height of his early career. In fact they were at a party celebrating the Berlin premier of a work by a young Russian composer by the name of Dimitri Shostakovich. Joshua’s friend and mentor Bruno Walter had guest conducted his First Symphony to rave reviews. Joshua had played first violin and the after party was his first experience with copious amounts of vodka. Hanna wasn’t having any of it.

“As long as there are people in the world who feel things, a good musician will never go hungry,” she replied. Then, in a breeze of jasmine flower, she turned to converse with the shy, be speckled, Russian, for he knew how to hold his liquor.

It was to this statement that he hung as he negotiated his way through the colorful streets in search of an opportunity. He sought a small hole in the canvas, anything that would set things back to what he had trained himself to consider normal—and he was already stretched far past his breaking point.

The reception that awaited him on the busy streets of Taipei was remarkable. If Joshua was considered somewhat eye catching in Shanghai, here on the island he was a virtual enigma. Much of the local population hadn’t ever seen a westerner before, let alone one of Joshua’s size. This helped his plight—eventually--when a group of children, who had nicknamed him Ojisan, began bringing offerings to the alleyway where he had situated himself. But no momentum was gained.

Life in Taiwan was nonexistent for someone like Joshua. HongWei had picked exactly the right method of torture, for without music, he was almost totally impotent. If there was a violin on the island, he never came across it and after months of near starvation and nomadic wandering, odd jobs and begging, he decided that it was time to approach the ugly situation from a different angle.

The Erhu is a two-stringed instrument most commonly known as the Chinese violin. It is played sitting down, placed on top of the left thigh. Joshua first came in contact with them in the opera houses of Shanghai, but he didn’t give the erhu much credit. It only has two strings. What could be done with two strings—a bit, of course--but in comparison to the violin? He was someone who looked down on the ukulele--it was his snobbery that closed his ears back then and desperation that re-opened them now.
He caught sight of one on a street in Hsinchu and befriended the player, an elderly gentleman, whose name was Liu. Joshua would watch Liu play every morning till curiosity got the better of the man and he asked Joshua what it was about his playing that captivated him so.

“You may not know it, sir,” Joshua said, “but you are my first erhu teacher.” To prove this, Joshua convinced Liu to let him have a turn on the instrument and when he displayed a shocking amount of proficiency, “just from listening,” he said, the old man was impressed and invited Joshua for tea in his home, a humble, yet comfortable structure on the outskirts of town.

Not only was Liu a master of the erhu, he was also a craftsman of many forms of traditional Chinese string instruments. His house was his workshop and there was much to be done. So he worked, cross-legged on the floor before the fire, sanding the sound box of what would someday be a huquin, while Joshua told his story.

The old man, who was never big on words, listened and sanded, never taking his eyes off his work. When Joshua finished, he put down his sanding cloth and looked him long in the eyes. When he seemed satisfied, he got up and opened a cabinet beneath one of his workbenches.

“I bought this on the mainland. Many years ago. I could sell it to you, I suppose.”
It was wrapped in blue silk, the bow separately. A pretty little violin, smaller than the Lion--but what right did he have to be choosey? It reminded him of the one he played for General Kuboto, dainty, feminine, of Austrian make.

“May I?” He tuned while Liu went about his business, then played a melody, one by the Russian who he had been thinking about lately in the background of his memory. He was there with them all in that parlor drinking vodka, as the rain fell outside, as a goat trudged through the Taiwanese mud. He had lived too may lives, it was only a matter of time till they began to converge, till he no longer knew the past from the present, reality from dreams.

“You play it well, but I don’t know what you plan to do with it here. If you wish to buy your way back to the mainland, you will learn the erhu.”

Liu liked Joshua and offered him a sort of apprenticeship. He could live with him--there was a loft that didn’t get used. Liu’s hip was bad and he didn’t like the climb. Once he had worked off his first erhu, he could keep whatever money he made busking. The goal being to raise enough money to go back to the mainland and resume his search.

His days with Liu were monastic; routine like he had never know. Something about the beautiful island, named Formosa by the Portuguese, encouraged forgetting. It was his old image of China, the one he pictured on the Conte Camano--before he knew the realities of life in Shanghai--misty and otherworldly.

With every passing month he felt himself drifting further and further away. He played the erhu almost exclusively, the violin didn’t seem to make sense anymore. It was a European instrument, and had little effect on the gods that dwelled in the misty mountains of Taiwan. He managed to remain blissfully unaware of the changing political climate. The massacres in the Taipei, the corruption of the Chinese, it was all on the peripheral. He thought of BaiLan often, everyday, but he was loosing his urgency, as if island life had put him under a spell.

By 1949 he was practically mute, playing on the street in the morning and taking long constitutionals in the afternoons, listening to the wind, looking neither backwards or forwards. He had taken to meditating, to cooking for himself and Liu. He was studying the teachings of Buddha.

Then, in the spring, when the monsoons had died down, Liu came to him. He climbed the ladder into the loft, and sat beside Joshua early one morning and waited silently for him to wake. There was a beautiful sunrise that morning, they watched it together through the small window that faced the mountains. Liu told Joshua that he had saved more then enough money to get back to Hong Kong and though he would be sad to see him go, it was time for him to return to his life and his continue his journey. He gave him the erhu that Joshua had thoroughly mastered by that point, as well as the little violin--in case he was unable to locate his. Liu didn’t say much more than that. He didn’t make any detailed arguments, he simply said, “go,” and with this one word, broke Joshua’s two-year spell. He was released.

Once he shook of the Taiwan haze, he found himself reenergized and all he could think about was seeing BaiLan again. But how? His original plan was to go back to Hong Kong and resume his search there, but he questioned this. His gut told him he would find nothing.

He would go back to Hong Kong briefly, but only to retrieve his Lion. In a stroke of fortune, Mrs. Wong still had it and gladly accepted the trade for Liu’s violin. After that, he knew there was only one place left to go, and one person who would know the whereabouts of BaiLan. The person was Dean Chen and the place was Shanghai.