Return of the Shanghai Kid

"When that flag was going up over the American embassy today, I couldn't help but think back on a scared 21-year-old kid waiting for hours to get into the U.S. consulate in Shanghai in 1947 just so he could talk to a Third Secretary about a visa for America. Someone would have had to be crazy to think that I'd be here now." So said Treasury Secretary W. (for Werner) Michael Blumenthal just after the U.S. embassy opened in Peking last week amid the popping of Chinese firecrackers and the fizz of Coca-Cola.

The return to China, as head of a U.S. economic mission, was a sentimental journey for Blumenthal. He lived in Shanghai as a refugee from Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1947, much of the time inside the European ghetto, twelve blocks long by five blocks wide, where his father was unable to find work and his mother sold cloth to dressmakers. "It was like the wild West, except that it was East. There were dog races, horse races, gangsters, pimps and whores. Americans were all but immune from the law. It was a cosmopolitan place, where you could buy and sell anything if you had the money." Blumenthal lived from starvation job to starvation job. He dragged bodies off the streets after the U.S. air raids during the war. He peddled huge sausages door to door. "You were always hungry. Carrying those bags full of sausages. The smell! It was all you could do to keep from grabbing one, but one bite was a day's pay."

Those years taught Blumenthal a technique that he used whenever he had to face powerful people after he arrived in San Francisco in 1947 with $60 in his pocket. Said he: "I'd look at them and wonder how they'd survive in Shanghai if you took away their fancy offices and chauffeurs and the trappings of power." The tactic never failed, and Blumenthal never lacked self-confidence.

Two weeks before President Carter's announcement in December of normalization of relations, the Chinese invited Blumenthal to visit the People's Republic to discuss improving economic ties with the U.S. From the time he arrived in Peking, Blumenthal, who is sometimes a moody and distant man, was buoyant and lighthearted. Riding back from a meeting with Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, whom he addressed by his name and title in Chinese, Teng Hsiao-p'ing Fu-tsung-li, Blumenthal giddily burst into a Chinese children's song. While his aides looked on uncomprehending, the Chinese security man and driver burst out laughing.

For the Chinese, a high point of Blumenthal's trip was his speech at the opening banquet in Peking's Great Hall of the People. To their surprise, the Treasury Secretary began with seven sentences of Chinese before saying, also in Chinese: "Now allow me please to continue in English." At the end he offered a six-sentence toast in Chinese, concluding with the traditional Chinese equivalent of bottoms up, kan-pei. Chinese officials were clearly honored. It was, they said, the first time in memory that a foreign dignitary had used their language in a speech.

Later Blumenthal flew to Shanghai and strolled through the ghetto to see the two mean rooms in the three-story house at 59 Chusan Road where his family lived and which his staff irreverently calls his log cabin. With street scenes triggering memory, he recalled how his mother would send him out every morning to buy jugs of hot water, and how there was never enough food. He pointed out theater after theater where he used to watch movies and dream. "If you could survive wartime Shanghai," he murmured, "you could survive anything."

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