The Interview: Researching Old Shanghai with Greg Leck

Greg Leck is the author of  Captives of Empire,  an exhaustive volume on the Japanese internment camps in Shanghai. Dr. Leck, a veterinarian who lives in Pennsylvania, answered a few of our questions about his books, his research and his inspiration.

Captives of Empire is the authoritative book on the Japanese internment camps in Shanghai. You’re not a historian by training – what inspired you to research and write this?

Greg Leck: Since the age of five, I had heard stories from my mother about her time growing up in Shanghai, along with her brothers and sisters – my aunts and uncles. Very early on I noticed a curious dichotomy – she would describe the big homes they lived in, along with a retinue of servants, private schools, riding lessons, and swimming at places like the Rowing Club. But I also heard stories of cramped rooms, leaking ceilings, grinding their own peanut butter, and bringing in black market rice in her toy wagon. It was not until I was in my thirties that I was able to reconcile these two disparate existences – I realized that my mother’s family was not rich, but simply living the good life of Treaty Port expatriates. The hard times she related were during the war – when the family was living under the Japanese occupation or interned in Lunghwa – and their privileged status was swept away.

While studying for my veterinary degree at Cornell, I would often roam the stacks of the fabulous East Asia collection there, when I should have been memorizing things like origins and insertions of muscles and pharmacological actions. In 1998, I attended an Old China Hands reunion in San Diego. I was struck by how many personal narratives and how much ephemera from this period was floating around out there – yet further searches did not turn up a good, comprehensive account of this period in history. That’s when I decided I should tackle it as a project. The result is Captives of Empire.

You did much of your research for “Captives” in the United States, and you’ve spoken to Historic Shanghai about your research process. In brief, what were the various sources that you consulted for this book?  

The first thing I did was to get my hands on every single first person account I could find. I amassed a collection of over fifty volumes. Then I began to read them.

I also tracked down and interviewed as many survivors as I could. Some didn’t want to talk about it all, others very patiently answered my questions and generously shared their photos and other ephemera. Thanks to email, I was able to contact people all over the world. One of my best sources, a Yangchow C internee, lives in Melbourne. The next step was to start digging in archives – in the UK, in the US, as well as Australia, Canada, and Japan. I became an “archive rat,” learning all the tricks and shortcuts to maximize my time in repositories to get the most out of my visits.

Did you find anything that surprised you, or changed a perception?

A couple of things. After reading and researching so much, I slowly became an expert on the subject. I realized this one day in the Imperial War Museum, when I was reading a first person account of internment, and the author stated something that was simply not true – the incident never happened, and could not have happened. Now, a casual reader, or even a historian who did not have extensive background knowledge, would not have questioned the validity of the account. But because I had amassed this, I instantly knew the account did not ring true.

The other realization, when interviewing former internees, was a rather well delineated difference existed between the viewpoints and memories of adult internees and child internees. Of my adult internee sources, one was a centenarian and two were in their late nineties. They could relate incidents in the broader context of what was happening at the time, replete with all the hardships, fears, and uncertainties that adults would be cognizant of. Many harbored bitterness, not necessarily against the Japanese, but about the time and opportunities lost from their lives. Children, on the other hand, seemed more resilient. They did recall hunger and anxiety, but many also viewed internment as a not unpleasant time – one told me, “I felt this was some sort of adventure. It never occurred to me that maybe I should be afraid.”   Their memories, though, were often fragmentary, and while they recalled specific episodes, they often asked me what exactly it was they were remembering, not having the benefit of understanding, at that age, the larger picture.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said that China’s archives are tightening, making it more difficult for researchers to gain access. Do you think this may affect the accuracy and completeness of historical accounts like yours?  

I’ve already experienced this. The Maritime Customs archive in Nanjing has been closed for a while, and on my last visit to Shanghai I was told the rules for admittance to the Municipal Archives had just changed and I was turned away. In the short term, it is certainly an impediment to obtaining the broadest picture possible. As for the long term, time will tell.

Tell us about what you’re working on now.

I am compiling a nonfiction account of a group of Americans in Shanghai, during the 1930-1945 time period. None is well known, and with one exception, all would have been considered ordinary Americans in 1930s Shanghai. Yet their experiences are anything but. They include a church mission treasurer who becomes enraptured by Shanghai’s nightlife, a two fisted, hardboiled newspaper reporter, a small time blackmailer with a Social Register background, an undercover spy for the Office of Naval Intelligence, and an American Nisei who turns his back on America and throws his lot in with the Japanese. After Pearl Harbor, each must face his own fate. All this against the turbulent, frenetic, background that was Shanghai, with a supporting cast of hundreds. I never understood why people are compelled to write historical fiction – the actual events are always more amazing.   As part of my research, I am reading every issue of Shanghai’s English language daily newspapers (there were four of them) for the period. It is fascinating, and the closest thing we have to a time machine. So much of human nature is immutable, that today’s concerns and stories, no matter how fantastic or dramatic, can be found in almost identical form in the newspapers of eighty or ninety years ago. I like to say that the only thing that changes are the cars and the music.