Leo looked at Jin and they both moved their faces out of the dirt and listened. The city was eerily still. Leo finally heard someone crying softly and turned to see that they were not alone in the restaurant. A Chinese family had come in, too, and they all looked at each other, the young men under the table staring at the parents and children.
“Is it over?” Jin asked Leo. “Are we alive?”
Leo crept out and leaned against the table. “I don’t know if it’s over,” he said, “but we are definitely alive.”
Jin spoke to the family in Chinese, his voice snapping them out of their terror, and all three of the children—shoeless and covered in dust—started to wail. That was the end of their quiet. At the same moment, they became aware of ambulance sirens and screams outside.
Jin and Leo climbed out the window they had come in through. Jin was out first and he stopped short. The stalls, the people in the open-air market, they saw, had been decimated. The air was full of dust, as the chaos of the downed buildings hadn’t settled yet. The people who were running around were covered in layers of debris, looking like they’d rolled in a fireplace.
Leo grabbed Jin’s arm and they both ran toward what was left of the market, battling their way through piles of rubble. They tried to heave aside the pieces of broken concrete, but they were too heavy. Jin called out to the swarm of men gathering on the street to come help them. With their aid, they were able to shift several jagged slabs from atop the mound. As the largest slab fell to the side, they saw two crumpled bodies. Chinese bodies. Leo climbed up to another section, moved heavy rubble with the help of more men, and saw another dead face.
“No one here has survived this!” he cried. He shoved aside another piece of concrete and the sight of a severed arm knocked the breath out of him. As the work proceeded, they uncovered more bodies, piled on top of others.
“How do you know they’re all dead?” Jin said. “We have to lift every piece. What if there is someone alive at the bottom?”
“But the person on the top is dead!” Leo yelled. “How can the others underneath be alive?”
“Go inside and get more help. I’m not leaving!” Jin screamed, desperately trying to move the heavy rubble with his bleeding hands.
Fire trucks and ambulances approached, their sirens blaring, and men were already starting to haul the dust-covered bodies of the dead out of the market in rickshaws. A team of medics arrived and ran inside, and Jin called out to them to help. Two broke off and came to dig through the rubble with them, but as Leo had thought, every body they found had had the life knocked out of them by the American bombs.
“I can’t see one more dead child,” said Jin as the Chinese medics took more bodies away. There had been only two foreigners in the rubble; every other one, more than a hundred so far, were Chinese.
“We can’t help anymore,” Jin said after four hours had passed. “I can barely hold my hands open.”
Leo wiped the dust from his eyes and said, “We can’t leave now,” even though he was desperate to go find Agatha and his family.
“Of course we can,” said Jin. “The dead are dead and neither of us knows how to save the ones who are barely still alive. I’m going to check on my father. You go home and make sure your parents are alive. Make sure Agatha is alive. I know that’s all you’re thinking about anyway.”
Leo nodded and said, “Then I’ll come to work. Because if they are alive, we’ll need the money.”
As he moved through the torn-apart city, he barely looked at the bodies in the street, the devastation. Like Jin said, all he could think about was his family and the girl who was becoming family.
Back on Yuhang Road, he ran up the flights of stairs to the apartment, which was unharmed, but also empty. He sprinted back down, taking two steps at a time, and flew into the street. Noticing a commotion the next block over, he moved toward it, but before he reached the crowd, he heard someone scream out his name. He turned around to see his mother, who was crying from the sight of her son. Leo ran to her and threw his arms around her, as he had done so many times in childhood.
“Froschi,” Hani said through her tears. “You survived. You’re alive.”
“Of course I am,” he said, still holding his mother. “I already escaped death once. Why not twice?”
“And Jin is alive?” she said, crying. “You were together?”
“He is alive,” said Leo, wiping his mother’s face with his shirtsleeve. “Where is father?” asked Leo, looking around them. He saw that the commotion at the end of the street was people trying to move a dead body out of the road. He could hear a woman wailing as the crowd started to dissipate.
“Your father is with Agatha, in Chongan’s shop,” she said pointing. “When we heard the planes we all ran down to the store, to hide under his tables.” The dumpling shop had long wooden tables inside and out, and though the dumplings were mostly a sticky starch coating with no filling, if someone in Hongkew had money, they ate at Chongan’s.
Hand in hand, they rushed over, pushing through a crowd, calling Max’s name, but it wasn’t Max who came out of the store first, it was Agatha. She looked at Leo, burst into tears, too, and waited for him to reach her before she collapsed in his arms.
Leo held her tightly, before letting go and examining her to make sure she wasn’t harmed. It was the first time he noticed that she looked pregnant, visibly pregnant, with his child. He put his hand on her stomach. The month before, she had stopped working at Liwei’s, as a pregnant taxi dancer was not part of the customers’ fantasy. Instead, she spent her nights with Hani and Max, who, after realizing that their son had offered to do the honorable thing and marry Agatha, had taken her in. She wasn’t Jewish, she wasn’t Emi Kato, but as Max had said to Hani many times, their son was alive, and happy, and in 1945, that was what mattered.
“I knew you were alive,” said Hani, sniffing back tears. “We made it. Somehow, we all made it.”
Leo reached out for Agatha and kissed her long and hard. “I can’t wait to be your one-eyed husband,” he whispered.
“You have two eyes,” said Agatha. “One is just decoration.”
*
Three weeks after the American assault on Shanghai, the family read about the enormous bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, one day in August, when the sun was low in the sky and the ghetto was as loud and chaotic as ever, they walked out into the street and the Japanese military presence was gone. Ghoya was not there acting out his dream role as king of the Jews; there was no one to check if they had a pass to leave the restricted area. It was just the Jews and the Chinese. For forty-eight hours, no one knew what to make of it, but Liwei brought out his best liquor anyway, and the only Japanese man there to share in it was Hiroyoshi.
Liwei poured all his workers a drink and said, “If the Japanese military are gone, it means the war is over.” They all got very drunk, and the next day they learned Liwei was right. Japan had surrendered.
The Americans arrived, and with them came food. A few weeks later, on September 3, the ghetto was liberated.