Jack Citrin Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Jack, welcome to our program.
Thank you, Harry, flattered to be here.
Where were you born?
I was born in Shanghai, China, just before World War II, or just before Pearl Harbor, actually.
How did you happen to be born there?
My parents were both Russian originally, Russian refugees, and they fled from Russia to China, from Vladivostok, and then a trajectory of events led me to be born in Shanghai.
What year did they make their journey?
My father left in 1920 and my mother had a very dramatic escape in 1930.
She was escaping from where?
She was escaping from Vladivostok, walked across the border into Manchuria and then from there made her way to Shanghai.
So, both your parents' young adulthood was spent in China?
The young adulthood was spent in China, and they met in Hong Kong when they were students at the University of Hong Kong.
So, the experience of your family was driven by revolution in Russia but also revolutions to come, which we will talk about in a minute.
Yes. Their lives and derivatively mine were propelled by history.
They were Jewish and Russian, correct?
They were Russian Jews. They fled not because of anti-Semitism but because they were from the merchant and capitalist classes.
What was it like for them, in their earlier years, growing up in Shanghai? Were they living in the international settlements?
My father actually grew up in Harbin. There was a large Russian community there and he went to a Russian speaking school. My mother had a different experience. Her family went directly to China. They lived initially outside the international settlement and she went to a British school. And so, she actually learned English before my father.
Looking back, what did your parents provide in the sense of a world view? What did you get from them, after this experience and the experience you were to have later?
One of the lessons was that you had to make the best life for yourself and be a part of a community, wherever you happened to be. There was also a recognition that things were, in some sense, contingent, and that even though you were where you were for the moment, the possibility of being uprooted was there and you had to be, in some sense, ready to cope with that.
You were born in what year?
I was born in 1941.
So, your first years, which you may or may not remember, lead up, or are coincident with, the depiction in Steven Spielberg's "The Empire of the Sun," which is the story of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.
Yes. My parents had become naturalized British citizens, and as a result of that they were interned, as in the film, with other enemy nationals in a camp on the outskirts of Shanghai. There was a notice, which I still have actually, the official notice from the Japanese civil administration of Shanghai, to report at a particular location. Families went there and were interned in these different camps. There were a number of them outside Shanghai.
So, were you born in the camp?
No. I was about nine months old when we moved into the camp. [An] interesting point is that both my parents' families, both sets of grandparents and other relatives [who] did not have British citizenship, continued to live in Shanghai through the war.
Were they able to communicate with your parents?
[In a] very limited way.
Do you remember anything from that experience, and if you don't, what are your parents' recollections that they must have given to you?
I have two very small memories. One is a memory of being taken by my mother across a field to the daycare, because the prisoners essentially ran the camp but they were allowed to have a kind of daycare or preschool, or school for the children, so I actually started preschool at a pretty early age. The other memory I have is a memory that is in the movie, and that is at the end of the war, when American planes dropped care packages by parachute, and I remember we got to these care packages and the main attraction was the Hershey bar, the introduction to the Hershey bar.
American power was on the march during that period.
I also have a vague recollection of the living quarters, which were pretty cramped. For my parents, it was a very important experience in their lives, because they came out of it feeling self-reliant and self-confident. It was hard but it wasn't a concentration camp of the German variety and there was no real serious mistreatment of prisoners, and yet you had to survive in pretty difficult material circumstances.
Were provisions made, in terms of food, by the Japanese, or did people grow their own vegetables and fruits, and so on?
That I don't remember. The Japanese provided food, and I think the quality of the nutrition of the prisoners reflected the course of the war. As the Japanese themselves became more beleaguered and had less, the prisoners got less accordingly.
So, the international status of the people incarcerated with your parents and with you was different from that of the Japanese treatment of the Chinese, much different.
Yes, and also from the Japanese treatment, say, of Singapore and Malaya. I think part of the reason for that was there was no fighting really in Shanghai. They had already occupied all of the Shanghai in 1937, except the International Settlement. There was a brief, almost--hour conflict on the day of Pearl Harbor, when they invaded the International Settlement and took it over, but basically the civil administration, with some police support, ran these camps. It wasn't soldiers coming out of the heat of battle with whatever psychological impact that had. And the people interned there were interned because they were citizens of countries which with Japan was formally at war. So, our camp was mainly British, Canadian, Dutch, a few Australians. Most of the Americans were in the camp that is portrayed in the Spielberg film.
As a young child undergoing this experience, what languages were you hearing and learning?
Mainly English. That's why English really was my first language. I think that if we had not been in camp I would have spoken as much Russian as English, because both my parents' social circle and the grandparents spoke Russian as their first language.
So, when the war ended the prisoners were able to return to whatever they had in Shanghai. Were the properties still there and habitable?
Yes. We were fortunate in that we went back to the apartment where we lived before the war. My grandmother also had an apartment in the same building. They retained ownership of those properties during the war but were obligated to take in other people, refugees and so forth, but at the end of the war we went back to our own homes, which I do remember. My mother tells a story about how my younger brother was born in the camp, and now we had our own room away from our parents, and that apparently was not a pleasing situation to us, emotionally somewhat terrifying, "Where are our nurturing parents?" They liked it better, I'm sure!
So, your family remained in Shanghai until the Communists took over Shanghai. Did you experience the Chinese civil war, from this period to the end of the war to the Communist victory?
We experienced as consumers of news. There was no real fighting in Shanghai, but I do remember the day the Red Army marched into Shanghai. As a child you remember things for funny reasons. I remember it because it's the first day that I remember my father not going to the office. We stayed in and we watched the army come in. The very next day, on every street corner there was a Red Army soldier with a red star on the cap, and I do remember that. But my parents were specialists in staying too late, not anticipating the revolution. They stayed in the Soviet Union too late and therefore left with nothing, and they stayed in Shanghai longer than they had to, and therefore also left with nothing.
They left after the Communists took over?
We left China on December 24, 1950. We had waited ...
The Communists took over when?
1949. So, there was about a year's period that we stayed. We had to apply for an exit visa, had to have a place to go -- basically during that time your property was expropriated and you were left with your suitcases. You could take all the clothes you wanted, I guess. That was after the Korean War started, and I think that also slowed the exodus.
So, from the age, let's say, of 5 to 10 you were really ...
Yeah, 5 to 9.
... you were indirectly experiencing history and revolution and events. Or were you not, because you were a child?
I don't think I was aware of it very much. I went to Shanghai British school; we belonged to a community club, a center with a swimming pool, had a good life. And then it came to an end, but it came to an end for reasons -- I suppose by that time I was already able to consume historical facts and know sort of what was going on. The Communists had taken over, the Korean War had started, but you know, life was not hard.
Your parents then emigrated to ... ?
My parents moved to Hong Kong. We lived there for a few years, and then my father got a business opportunity in Japan, and so when I was 13 we moved to Tokyo, and that's where I went to high school.
So, in this period before you went off to college, and we'll talk about that and where you went, you really saw the world and the different peoples that make up that world.
Yes. I think the one thing that I did get from that experience -- two things, I suppose. One was we were expatriates always, and privileged expatriates, but nonetheless you interacted with people of different backgrounds and different religions. The schools that I went to always were -- if you want to use the word "diversity," they were super diverse. My high school senior class, 25 people, 12 different nationalities. So, that was something that I grew up experiencing and I think really benefited from. The other thing, as a child you don't know that your life is different from other people's very much, because most of the people you're around are living lives like yours. When we moved to Hong Kong I became more aware that some of the people, mostly the British kids, had homes elsewhere, that this was just a temporary spot for them. For people like myself this was home, you didn't have a home country to go to, and that was something that I think had an emotional and psychological impact on me. It was an awareness of difference.
You talk about socialization in your work when you look at America. You were socialized into a unique kind of cosmopolitanism.
Yes. I think that I grew up surrounded by rootless cosmopolitans, even if I were not one myself. My parents, over time, had a reasonably prominent place in the Jewish communities in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and also in the business community. As a result of that, many visitors from all around would come to our home, and that also had some kind of effect.
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