Romy stood with her parents at the window of their apartment watching a handful of Annamese troops from Indochina, along with their French commanding officers, move in formation on Rue Bourgeat.

It was sleeting. Mud coated their black boots and clung to the legs of their khakis. The little canvas caps they usually wore had been replaced with gleaming helmets. Romy leaned out the window to see a convoy of jeeps and a camouflage tank forging through the traffic, using both lanes and causing the rickshaws and cars coming in the other direction to swerve into the gutter to allow them to pass.

‘What are they doing, Oskar?’ asked Mutti, her voice low.

‘I don’t know,’ said Papa.

Romy clenched her fists and dug her nails into her palms.

Bombs had struck the far side of Shanghai in the dark last night, like a heavy drumbeat. Romy had crept up the marble staircase and lain on the end of her parents’ bed, rubbing her cheek on the silk and wrapping herself in her mother’s cashmere throw until she drifted back to sleep. As the morning light streamed through the windows, they braced themselves for more thuds. Still wrapped in Mutti’s shawl, Romy had trailed her Mutti and Papa downstairs to make sure Amah didn’t go out to the markets at dawn.

The porcelain tea set rattled as trucks rumbled along the street below.

‘What’s happening? They—it’s supposed to be safe here. What should we do, Oskar?’ asked Mutti.

Papa rushed over to the radio and started twisting the dials as he listened for a signal.

The windowpanes rattled with the wind, echoing Romy’s heartbeat.

‘Look!’ Romy pointed.

‘That’s Mrs Kapov,’ her mother said. ‘I wonder why she’s outside? It’s not safe.’

Romy’s pulse quickened. A familiar figure—slim and dark—had stepped out from behind the newspaper stand and was gesturing for Mrs Kapov to stop. There was nodding, the lifting of a camera and a flash so quick it could be mistaken for the flick of a watch.

Another flash. A thud and a whistle on the far side of Shanghai—near the Whangpoo River.

Romy held her breath, praying the photographer stayed safe and the light from his flash did not attract the attention of the French police.

Mrs Kapov waved down a rickshaw using a giant white feather. The oversized angel wings pinned to the front of her hat were starting to droop. She gestured for her husband to join her.

The Kapovs climbed into the rickshaw, pausing for just one more flash before she shooed the photographer away and urged the rickshaw driver on.

The photographer tucked his camera underneath his traditional cotton shirt and started to slip behind the newspaper stand, picking up a bouquet of pale yellow chrysanthemums to cover his face. Just before he slipped into the shadows, Jian looked up at Romy’s window. Years later, she’d wonder if she’d imagined the slightest nod, a curl of the corner of his lips. As if he knew she was there, watching him, all along.

The room filled with abrasive static and then a radio announcement from a Russian-controlled radio station came on:

…We repeat, USS Wake has surrendered command to the Imperial Japanese Army. British gunboat HMS Peterel has been overtaken and sunk under fire by the Imperial Navy ships Izumo and Toba. The majority of the crew are not expected to have survived evacuating the boat, and it is estimated twelve British nationals have been taken prisoner.

Mutti and Papa stared at one another in silence as Papa started fiddling with the dial again.

More crackles of the radio.

The Imperial Japanese Army have taken control of the International Settlement and negotiations are underway with the Vichy government, who have promised to cooperate in the French Concession.

‘Surely the Japanese are not going to take over all of Shanghai? They won’t be allowed in here, will they?’ asked Mutti.

‘I don’t know. The British and the US are the enemy. That’s why the Japanese have crossed the Garden Bridge into the rest of the International Settlement, it seems. They’ve seized enemy territory,’ replied Papa.

Romy looked out the window at the cluster of soldiers moving slowly and deliberately through the street with their tank, as if they were merely out for a training exercise.

The hunched old woman on the opposite corner was dressed in a garbage bag to keep off the sleet while she unloaded silver buckets of white calla lilies from her wheelbarrow.

In minutes, the soldiers had disappeared and people poured into the streets.

Normal activities resumed on the footpaths, as men stepped out of the coffee houses with their collars pulled up and hats pulled down. The sky was dark and low. Menacing. The street felt frozen, as if people were supposed to get on with their business for the day but weren’t quite sure what to do.

Papa raised the volume on the wireless to listen to the announcer saying with a thick Russian accent:

And now we cross live to the President of the United States—

‘What?’ said Mutti.

‘Shhh.’ Papa signalled for silence as he leaned closer and fiddled with the dials some more.

The booming voice of Franklin D. Roosevelt came over the radio:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The three of them sat on the sofa as a different voice cut in, speaking urgently. The reporter estimated that eighteen American navy ships had been sunk, perhaps as many as two thousand killed. America had joined the war and would ally itself with Britain against Germany and Japan.

Overnight, Shanghai had become the centre of a war they had tried to avoid. China and Japan were already at war. Now America and her allies, like Britain and Australia, were at war with Japan too.

Romy slipped her hand into her mother’s as her father switched between stations.

What would happen to her family now? They had nowhere else to go.