Pat Carney is seen with her mother and twin brother in a Shanghai park.Courtesy the Carney family
Pat Carney is a Shanghai-born author and retired federal minister and senator who has returned to China several times. She now lives on Saturna Island, B.C.
Once again we are witnessing mass flights of humanity, this time from Ukraine. We look at the faces of the tired, tearful toddlers on our televisions, trudging away from their homes, hanging on to their exhausted mothers’ hands, as they flee their homeland and the horror of war.
Do not think that they are too young to retain the memory of their journey. While they may not remember every detail, they will never forget their harrowing escape to anywhere but home.
We all remember the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, and the image of the body of four-year-old Alan Kurdi face down in the water at the edge of the sea. Or the stories of the refugee mothers bathing their babies in the fabled fountains of Budapest.
My memories go deeper. As the Russian assault on Ukraine has unfolded, the sour fumes of fear have once again welled up from the catacombs of my mind where they had been firmly interred for decades, back to strangle my breath and drain strength from my limbs.
It was 1937, amid yet another Sino-Japanese War. Japanese forces were threatening to invade Shanghai, where our family lived and where we three children were born. My twin brother and I were not yet three; our sister was only a few months old.
Which countries are taking in Ukraine’s 2.1 million refugees?
Very young children don’t have any sense of context – about wars, or orders to foreigners to leave the country. We only remember what we see.
The Carney twins, Pat and Jim, look upon newborn baby sister Norah in her crib in June, 1937, in Shanghai. About two months later, the children and their mother Dora Sanders Carney evacuated China amid a Japanese invasion.Courtesy the Carney family
On the day we were evacuated, I remember seeing our nanny, Amah, crying. I saw my Mummy, the journalist Dora Sanders Carney, talking on the phone to Daddy, a member of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, who stayed behind to help defend the International Settlement from the invaders. I saw Mummy packing diapers and baby bottles into a bag, after filing her story to The Globe and Mail in Toronto.
I remember being buttoned into my coat and hurried out of our home to a big brown truck. Each twin hung on to a finger of Mummy’s right hand; she held our baby sister in the crook of her left arm. Her typewriter and baby bag followed; I don’t remember who carried them.
Then, I remember being on a small boat jammed with other bodies, moving swiftly over the murky brown Huangpu River to what looked like a grey wall with a large hole cut into it. I didn’t know the grey wall was a British ship assigned to evacuate women and children to Hong Kong, then a British colony. I saw splashes in the water; I didn’t know that they were shells hitting the river. The booming guns and palls of smoke that hung over the city are not recorded in my memory.
Fires rage in Shanghai during Japan's 1937 invasion of the city.Reuters
Our boat, lurching up and down on the fast-flowing waters of the Huangpu, stopped next to the hole in the wall, where a big man with a beard appeared, lit from behind. Then, as the boat rose and fell, my blond twin was taken from Mummy’s arms and swung over the swirling waters into the arms of the bearded man. I remember my twin’s chubby legs dangling out of his blue-and-white checked rompers. Suddenly, the man and my twin disappeared.
I still remember my terror. Until then, we had never been separated. We slept in side-by-side cots, bathed in the same tin tub in the screened sun porch, shared a double-seated stroller. Where had JJ gone? Even now, my breath stops at the memory.
I don’t remember my own transit from the boat to the British ship. But in her memoir of Shanghai, Foreign Devils Had Light Eyes, my mother recorded these moments. “As the unsteady craft heaved and rolled a gap of ugly water widened between them, closed again and then widened. The little boy was the first to be handed over,” she wrote. Then it was my turn: “The child was looking down at the water and her small face was terrified.”
To this day, I need to be coaxed onto ship gangways. Once, decades later, I even fought a sudden urge to open the door of a Cessna floatplane flying high above the sea and jump. These issues, and others too, have taken a lifetime to unravel.
I don’t remember the trip to Hong Kong, along with more than 3,000 other refugees on a ship designed for half that number of passengers. Two adults and five children shared our tiny cabin: a woman and her two children sleeping in the single bunk, we twins feet to feet on a couch, and Mummy on the floor, too exhausted to worry about the ship’s ubiquitous cockroaches crawling next to the baby gurgling in her basket.
But I do remember the stone steps we climbed when we arrived in Hong Kong. In my memory, those seemingly endless, steep steps led to a room in a boarding house in a city where 10,000 British residents shared whatever they had with us refugees.
We sailed from Hong Kong to Canada, where we had family. And eventually, when the shooting in Shanghai stopped, we returned home to Daddy and our home on Yu Yuen Road, where Amah was smiling in the doorway, having heard through the bamboo telegraph in her mountain village that Missy and the children were coming back.
In a photograph taken after the family's return to China, a Japanese sentry stands watch near a school for the blind just outside Shanghai in 1938.Courtesy the Carney family
But Shanghai wasn’t the same under Japanese occupation. We kids climbed the barbed-wire gate at the entrance to our lane, where Japanese soldiers smoked their cigarettes, their rifles slung over their shoulders. They trained their machine guns on us from the roof of the mansion next door when we played in our small garden. Food was scarce. Our family’s safety was at risk.
By the time the Second World War was declared in Europe on Sept. 3, 1939, our parents had already booked our return to Canada. Mummy was pregnant with our younger brother, and our new life awaited in an unknown homeland. I remember seeing the traffic lights beading Lions Gate Bridge as the ship sailed into Vancouver Harbour.
But that’s another story.
Now, as I watch the televised evacuation from Ukraine, those memories rush back, releasing ancient anxieties.
When the exodus from Ukraine started, I e-mailed my twin. “Are you okay?” I wrote. He answered: “All fine here.” Only then could I push the panic back into the cellars of my mind.
So do not say that the children fleeing Ukraine or Syria or Afghanistan are too young to remember their flight from their homeland to an unknown future. Many will never forget these memories, and they will carry them for the rest of their lives.
Right now, they are simply hanging onto Mummy’s hand or cuddling in the comfort of her arms, hungry, tired and tearful.
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