“We were already overcrowded, my dear,” she said, apologetically. “We didn’t have a place for her to stay or enough food. I remember her. We suggested she ask the Red Cross.”

It took Lian an hour to walk from the Unity Mission camp to the Red Cross office on Ming Yuan Road, then another two hours to wait in line. She had to start somewhere, get something useful, to begin her search. She was not leaving without information.

But the young woman seated behind the desk looked up at Lian and closed her eyes for a moment, as if exhausted. Then she looked at the stack of papers on the table in front of her. Lists and lists of lists. The young staff member, surely not much older than Lian, was one of a dozen sitting behind tables arrayed along a ground-floor corridor of the Shanghai Red Cross office. If not for the guards at the door letting people in and out, the tables would’ve been stampeded by supplicants.

“I want you to understand the situation,” the Red Cross staffer said. She put her elbows on the table and looked up at Lian. “To find one woman, your mother, will be very difficult.”

“I’m prepared to go to every single camp to find her,” Lian said. “Please, what I need is a list of the camps’ names and addresses.”

“There are more than one hundred fifty camps in the Settlement,” she said. “But those are just the ones registered with the city. There are also camps run by small churches, commercial guilds, and native-place associations. They don’t bother registering with us.”

Lian’s heart shrank at the thought of searching through so many camps. What if her mother was at one of the unregistered shelters?

“You’ll have to make your own copy of the lists,” the young woman said, “I can’t spare the time.” She gave Lian a wry smile that showed she was sympathetic. “And here,” she said, handing over another list, this one typed in English, with Chinese notes in the margins, “these are the refugee camps run by foreign churches.”

Lian scanned the list. “My mother said she was looking for work at a camp typing up reports.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” the staffer said, taking back the first set of pages. “That narrows it down. Only the foreign camps use typewriters.”

THE NEXT DAY, Lian only managed to visit two camps. She didn’t want to spend money on rickshaws or buses. She had bought a map, but Shanghai was such a big place. And her list had grown longer. At the second camp she visited, the French nun at the desk spoke perfect Chinese and asked to see her list.

“Here are some other foreign refugee camps and reception centers,” the woman said, adding more names and addresses. “Some are privately funded and others are attached to mission schools and orphanages.”