Shanghai, the economic hub that is China’s most populous metropolis, has radically changed since Communists took control of the port city in 1949.

Bay Area author Helen Zia documents the early days of that dramatic transition in her new book, “Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution” (Ballantine; 499 pages; $28). Zia puts a personal face on events, telling the stories of four people caught up in the drama.

Below is an excerpt from the book’s prologue.

PROLOGUE

Shanghai, May 4, 1949

Bing sat straight up in the pedicab, gripping the hard seat as the driver cursed and spat. She watched with alarm as his feet, clad in sandals cut from old tires, seemed to slow to a snail’s pace just when she most needed speed. This stylish-looking young woman had imagined that her last hours in Shanghai would be spent waving farewell from a ship’s deck to envious onlookers below as a river breeze gently lifted her dark hair, just as she’d seen in the movies. After all, she was about to leave China’s biggest, most glamorous, and most notorious city. Shanghai had been Bing’s home since she had arrived following the Japanese invasion nearly twelve years earlier, as a frightened girl of nine. But now, with the imminent threat of a violent Communist revolution, she was running away again, along with half the city’s population, it seemed. And instead of standing at the rail, exchanging smiles with the ship’s other passengers, she was stuck in traffic, terrified that she wouldn’t reach the Shanghai Hongkou Wharf in time. That would spell disaster.

Read the review

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/the-great-escape-last-boat-out-of-shanghai-by-helen-zia

She lurched forward as the pedicab driver stood on the pedals of his three-wheeled cycle and came to a stop. Around her was a sea of other pedicabs, rickshaws, cars, buses, carts, and trucks — all screeching and honking, their drivers yelling every manner of obscenity. The cacophony reverberated against the walls of the stone-and-concrete canyon of Nanjing Road. Bing was no stranger to Shanghai’s mayhem, but she had never seen anything quite like this. Of all times to be stuck in such bedlam — on the very day she had to get to the riverfront, the date set for her departure from this desperate city.

She’d sewn her floral-print qipao for this special occasion. Each careful stitch had captured her growing anticipation. With her oval face, big eyes, and full, red lips, all crowned by a tiara of black permanent waves, the twenty-year-old might have been mistaken for a coy Shanghai poster girl but for the panic in her eyes. Like her, everyone in Shanghai seemed to be in a frenzy to escape, to use any means to get away from the impending arrival of the Communists. But unlike those who were still clamoring for a seat to anywhere, Bing was one of the lucky ones: She possessed a precious one-way ticket out. On a ship. To America.

Finally, the driver managed to break through the crush. He harangued everyone in his path, shouting, “Move along, you worthless mule scrotum, smellier than pig farts!” She didn’t blink at his choice of words, which came as naturally as breathing on Shanghai’s streets. She didn’t care as long as he got her to the wharf. The ship’s smoke- stacks came into view just past the stately Astor House Hotel and the towering nineteen-story Broadway Mansions apartments, where the Suzhou Creek meets the bend in the wide Huangpu River, the last major tributary of the mighty Yangtze River before it joins the East China Sea. Massive granite buildings, all in European style, lined the signature waterfront boulevard and docks.

To the foreigners, this prime section of riverfront was known as the Bund, from a Hindustani word meaning embankment. The Chinese called it Waitan, meaning outside or foreign shore — a reference to the foreigners who had once ruled this proud imperialist showcase of Shanghai. British and American businessmen had wrested away the best sections of the port city with the full support of their governments. Land and sovereignty had been ripped from China, spoils of the Opium Wars that had forced the narcotic onto China one hundred years before. Everything about these monuments to international cap- italists and pale “big noses” seemed foreign, including the British Big Ben chime of the giant clock tower over the Custom House. Soon it would be up to the Communists to decide what would happen to these grand stone edifices.

Shanghai was China’s most modern, populous, and cosmopolitan city. One of the leading metropolises of the world, the “Paris of the Orient” was also home to tens of thousands of foreigners, who were despised as imperialists by the Communist Party and its leader, Mao Zedong. The city was the launching point for major inland routes and international traffic, whether by boat, plane, train, or wooden cart — making it the epicenter for the massive exodus of the late 1940s. Stoked by the anticipated Communist victory over the Nationalist government headed by Chiang Kai-shek, panic and terror had first infected the wealthiest, most educated, and most privileged classes — and sent them running in what they fully expected to be a brief exile. It was assumed that the Communists would target the rich and the pampered in the same way that the Bolsheviks had gone after the czarist White Russians, many of whom had come to Shanghai as refugees from that 1917 revolution.

No one knows precisely how many people fled Shanghai during the early years of the Communist revolution. Scholars and journalists have estimated that more than a million people set off from or through that port city. Many of those who ran for the exits belonged to the city’s capitalist and middle classes, who presumably had the most to lose under the Communists. These two groups comprised about 5 per- cent and 20 percent, respectively, of the city’s 6 million residents, or about 1.5 million people. On the other hand, the remaining 4.5 million who made up Shanghai’s majority saw no need to escape — they included Shanghai’s industrial workers, coolies, and drivers, the destitute. But it was not only members of the upper classes who fled. They were joined by old-regime loyalists, from high Nationalist government officials to lowly foot soldiers, as well as those who simply got caught up in the frenzy or were especially fearful. Unfortunately, there are no records of the exodus since the retreating Nationalists destroyed as many documents as they could, while the incoming Communists inherited a country in such disarray that no accounting of the departures is known to have taken place.

Unlike the stories of other such mass migrations from revolutions and human crises, the exodus of Chinese from Shanghai in this era has yet to be told. There are no books or dissertations in English that track their saga through the geopolitical tectonics of modern China. In the Chinese language, only a handful of accounts have been published — in Taiwan. Even today, the People’s Republic of China fails to acknowledge that any exodus took place.

This book opens a missing chapter of modern history by tracing the lives of four real people — Benny Pan, Ho Chow, Bing Woo, and Annuo (pronounced ann-wah) Liu — starting from their childhoods at the time of Japan’s attack on Shanghai in 1937, the defining battle that marked the start of the Pacific War and altered the course of global politics. These four main characters and their families didn’t know one another, but they were selected from more than a hundred other remarkable individuals for the combined depth and range of their collective journeys. The interwoven stories of their lives before, during, and after the Communist victory in Shanghai present a view of this historic exodus that no single family story could capture. Adding to the rich complexity and color of that era are accounts drawn from the many others interviewed who also bore witness to this time of war and revolution, sacrifice and betrayal, courage and resilience, when every move could spell doom as modern China erupted.

In today’s millennium, when more-recent conflicts and disasters have forced millions of people around the globe to weigh the same desperate choices of staying or fleeing, the experiences of these Shanghai migrants offer a window into the current human condition.