Tiger Tail Soup, a Novel of China at War
My late husband’s stories about his childhood in China were my inspiration for writing Tiger Tail Soup. Eugene was a good storyteller, and though his tales told of wartime danger and suffering, they were tinged with little boy awe and adventure and more than a whiff of nostalgia.
In 1949, Eugene’s family, like many Nationalists, escaped to Taiwan. A few years later, following his father’s work, Eugene lived in Japan and then in the Philippines. Eventually he moved to the United States. By then, China was nothing but a memory, locked away from the rest of the world by what was then known as the Bamboo Curtain. No wonder Eugene was nostalgic. The China he knew must have seemed like a fairy tale.
With Nixon’s visit in 1972, China finally began to open up. It was another decade, though, before outsiders came to Eugene’s hometown. When we visited in 1983, we were an oddity. In fact, Eugene had to spend 45 minutes convincing the desk clerks at the newly completed Hotel for Overseas Chinese to allow our daughters and me to stay there. (There was no hotel for foreigners.)
A word about the novel’s geography: Amoy (now known as Xiamen) is an island city in Fukien (Fujian) Province in southeastern China. It’s connected to the mainland by a causeway. Kulangsu (now known as Gulangyu) is a smaller island reached by an eight-minute ferry ride from Amoy. It’s still considered a pedestrian-only island.
During our weeklong stay in 1983, visiting Xiamen (Amoy) and Gulangyu (Kulangsu), it hadn’t occurred to me that I might someday write a novel set there. If it had, I would have taken more pictures. Those I did take, though, turned out to be useful. By 1983, China’s period of rapid industrialization and building hadn’t reached Xiamen. The city must have looked almost exactly as it did forty years earlier. Walking down Kulangsu’s lanes, it might have been 1943—minus the Japanese soldiers.
A little history:
Definition, definitions. The Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937 when the Imperial Japanese Army crossed the Marco Polo Bridge outside of Beiping (now Beijing). Unless you’re one of those historians who consider it as having started in 1931 with the Japanese invading Manchuria.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Sino-Japanese War merged with WWII. Or, as some scholars say, WWII began in 1937 with the Marco Polo Incident.
For my characters in Kulangsu, immediately after that “incident”, the war came marching down the coast toward them. Less than a year later the Japanese bombarded Amoy and landed 2000 troops. The case for Kulangsu was different and unusual.
After China lost the first Opium War in 1842, Amoy became a treaty port renowned for exporting tea. For foreigners living there, including Japanese, Kulangsu was the favorite bedroom community. They built their own Western-style houses, formed the Kulangsu Municipal Council and received extraterritorial privileges. The Japanese respected those privileges until December 8, 1941 (December 7, 1941 across the international dateline in Pearl Harbor).
Tigers are a theme that runs through my novel. They’re more than a symbol, though. The story I include about a pair of tigers swimming across to the island and being shot by the Japanese is based on fact. When Eugene was a child, there were thousands of wild tigers in Fujian Province. In fact, the subspecies of tiger from his province is believed to be the root or ancestral tiger of all the tigers in the world. Yet now, sadly, the Amoy tiger (also known as the South China tiger) is almost certainly extinct in the wild.
The Fall of the Bamboo Curtain
Resistance Fighters and Collaborators
Gulangyu, a Chinese Island with a Storied History
Pearl Harbor Wasn’t the Only Target on Dec. 7, 1941.
Where Have All the Tigers Gone?