Having arrived in winter, they saw in the streets what it looked like to freeze to death. Dead children—babies—lay in alleyways, where they were thrown onto a garbage truck the next morning like day-old bread. The children who were alive were so emaciated, they looked as if they could crumble into ash.
“I would like to see a plump child,” said Leo, looking down at a sickly little boy in short pants during their first week in the city. “Children shouldn’t be so thin,” he told Hani.
“I wish I could save them all,” she replied. They both watched as the boy found his mother, also in rags. A newborn baby was tied to her back, the only member of the little family who looked warm. “It’s amazing to me that women have given birth during the war,” said Hani, looking at the bundled baby. “That there is enough optimism to bring children into the world.”
The Hartmanns were to learn that it wasn’t optimism that kept Shanghai turning, so much as a gritty will to survive. With the help of the established Jews, they, too, soon became cogs, rather than onlookers, in the city’s churning life.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee helped the elder Hartmanns find jobs, with Max hired as an accountant in a grocery store in the French Concession and Hani finding work playing the piano in a place she thought was a restaurant but that turned out to be an opium den. After she had come home for weeks with reddened eyes and her mind “feeling like a cloud,” the family pressed her to quit, for her health’s sake, and she took a job teaching piano to the children of a wealthy Chinese family, whose father had worked for Sassoon.
But as time went on, the poverty started to bite at their ankles—even for the resolutely happy Leo.
Three months after they had arrived, as they walked to their synagogue with other families living in their small apartment building, Hani had looked at her son and said, “Froschi, why do you keep touching your hair?”
Leo took his hand from his scalp, which he had been rubbing as they walked, and said, “I’m itchy. I think I need a bath.”
Hani grabbed his hand before he could touch his head again and quickly examined a few strands of his curly hair.
“You have lice,” she declared. “Turn around and go back to the apartment. You can’t bring that into temple. We will find someone who will shave it off.”
From that day, Leo never let his hair grow back, deciding that even if he could keep the lice at bay, his hair would never feel clean, so it wasn’t worth having. Hani kept one of his brown curls in a bag. She wrote “Froschi’s lice” on the bag and tucked it under a pile of dresses that she planned to sell when they fell on even harder times.
As the months went on, Leo thought he had grown used to the city, its sounds and strangers, but his body could not seem to adapt. Besides the lice, he had dysentery four times, which caused him to have accidents and wake his mother, who slept just a few feet from him.
“What’s wrong?” Hani asked the first time.
“I missed the bucket,” Leo said, looking at the soiled floor. “I’m sorry,” he added, staring at the ground in shock.
“It’s all right. We’ll clean it up.”
“I’ll do it, Mother, you go back to bed.”
Hani reluctantly crossed the room back to her bed and he used an old newspaper and the last of their boiled water in a tin thermos to clean it up. He placed it all in the bucket on their landing.
The next day an elderly Chinese woman took the night soil, as it was called, away. She did this every day, carrying the buckets through the hallways, their contents sloshing over the rims, to the street, where she dumped her foul load into the open sewers or onto a cart that came around to collect it.
Given the smell in their one-room apartment the entire next week, Leo had vowed to never have a mishap again, but the dysentery made that impossible. He guessed that it was from the consommé, the gelatinous rice porridge, which was always littered with vermin. Sometimes gray worms, other times hundreds of tiny flies. But it was never without pests.
In time, they discovered their problems were manageable. Hani and Max were able to keep working, and the family became accustomed to living on top of each other and without hot water or flush toilets. They learned how to sift their rice to remove some of the insects. They picked out rusty nails and dirt from the stolen noodles they bought from roadside vendors. And Leo finally enrolled in school, nearly a year after they arrived. He started at the Shanghai Jewish School, which was housed in a beautiful building paid for by Victor Sassoon. The students were served kosher lunches and they all worshiped in a large Sephardic synagogue. But then, to help make room for a wave of children who arrived in Shanghai from Lithuania, he transferred to the Catholic school, St. Francis Xavier’s.
It was at his new school that he met Jin. As soon as Jin showed him kindness, Leo stuck to him like the lice he once had on his head, realizing how much he needed an ally in the city, particularly one who could navigate it far better than he could. Jin also got Leo a job as a janitor and drink runner in his father’s club.
Liwei’s was not the most expensive nightclub in the city, nor was it the most squalid. It was large and well decorated with just enough beautiful, disreputable women to always attract a crowd. The most upscale club in Shanghai was the Del Monte. The Park, Arcadia, and Farren’s weren’t far behind. Leo had never been inside those, but he’d seen the clientele they attracted and they did not live in Hongkew. There were such clubs in Hongkew, but they veered closer to whorehouses than nightclubs. The Little Barcelona was not far from his apartment, and he’d seen the women in high-cut dresses tending to the men outside, so drunk that they’d sleep draped across café tables like coats, lit cigarettes still between their teeth, burning their chins. But Liwei was Chinese, and with the club’s Chinese name, they attracted the rich Chinese men who were afraid to socialize with Japanese military officers at the other establishments.
Like most of the nightclubs in the city that pulled their weight, Liwei’s club was filled with taxi dancers, most of them White Russians who had seen better days. The women, all dressed as elegantly as they could with what little means they had, weren’t paid by the club outright, but had a mutual understanding with the proprietors of how they would conduct their business. The patrons bought dance tickets in advance and presented them to the girl of their choice. She would then dance with them and if things proceeded from there, the club staff, especially Liwei, ignored it.