China to Me (15 page)

I knew a lot of refugees who were now Shanghai citizens of fairly long standing. One of them was Horst Reihmer. In Shanghai he was one of the first to open a little boîte of the sort which later flooded our night-life districts. The walls were decorated by Schiff, another refugee. It was a good little place, the Maskee bar. Then they came thick and fast, as fast as the boats brought in refugees who had a little money and business sense.

Ultimately there was such a huge flood of Germans that the Shanghai Council, our administrative body, became alarmed. The rush of people was due to Hitler's last all-over drive before the Polish debacle and we saw immediately that this crowd was of different kidney to the preceding arrivals. They were poorer, more broken down, of a different type of education. Sir Victor, who with Speelman, a local Dutch financier, was working at the head of the relief committee, explained it to me by saying that most of this lot were “the sweepings of the country. They didn't have the guts or the brains to get out when they should have,” he said. “They hung on as long as possible. Naturally they're not as likable as the others. This doesn't go for the old people or their very young relatives, but if you look at the young men in this crowd you'll see what I mean.”

An emergency camp was fitted out, down near the city limits on the Hongkew side, and all around this camp there sprang up a number of little bakeshops and bars. There were bazaars to drum up money for the camp, and dozens of schemes to help put people into shops, and adjustment bureaus to find jobs for them — all the paraphernalia that can be found in any big town now that has received refugees in large number. We have learned the pattern. But in those days it was new to us and I found it hard to get used to the peddlers who came to the door all day with things to sell. I interviewed every one of them until I found that it was taking ninety per cent of my time. They sold everything from handbags and rugs and porcelain to shoelaces. All the moneyed residents of Shanghai went mad for Austrian glassware and china. Two or three exchange shops were set up downtown to accommodate the articles the refugees had brought with them out of Europe for sale: the Nazis had permitted them to carry with them household goods, and so the Jews had bought as much of the furniture and china and bedding as they could carry.

We reveled in good European cookery, cakes and preserves and goose. We had the best tailors in the world, I think — Leschiner and Jellinek. We all had Rosenthal dinner sets and elegant crystal. I spent too much on old-fashioned watches (but they came in handy later, when I myself needed money). The Jews, in spite of their appalling numbers, did so well that the Russians who had fled to Shanghai under similar circumstances back in 1917 became bitter and spiteful and frightened. Rumors began flying about; it was said that Sassoon and Hayim were sacking all their Russian doormen and bill collectors to give the jobs to the newcome Jews. These stories were indignantly repudiated by the financiers, and a newspaper editorial reminded the Russians sharply that there should be room in Shanghai for everybody. The Russians still muttered, though.

We had German entertainment in the night clubs; Germans trying to organize concerts and shows, German dancers, languishing mink-coated ladies looking for new sugar daddies. I knew an enterprising young couple who set up a gymnasium school, but they were perfectly willing to teach languages too, or higher mathematics or anything.

The Russo-Czech lady who had first called on me when Charles brought his card to the house kept up our acquaintance. Her name — at least the only one of her many names which I can spell — was Regina Petersen, and I called her Peter. Don't ask me why a Russo-Czech should have a Swedish name. Peter explained it once, but I have forgotten. She was an eccentric person, fond of refugees, Yogi, India and Indian dances — any number of disassociated interests. She took on an Indian name which she used when she gave concerts: Indra Devi. I don't know anything about India but I thought she danced awfully well, and her different saris were fascinating. Peter was in and out of the house all day, playing with the gibbons, trying in vain to make me take Yogi seriously, or indulging in one of her “days of silence,” which days were dreaded by me because they made Peter such uncomfortable company. Instead of staying at home on these occasions she went out and did her usual business, shaking her head and placing her finger to her lips mysteriously if some uninitiated person spoke to her. Sinmay adored her in his own way; she appealed to his love of the bizarre. He could sit and watch her for hours, smiling to himself, now and then asking a question guaranteed to send her pelting off in pursuit of one of her hobbies. It was when Peter threw herself heart and soul into the cause of the refugees that I really lost patience with her.

I was spending ninety per cent of my time on them anyway. Peter added the missing ten per cent to my program, though I was not willing to be shoved into doling out more of the phony kindness that was all she could elicit from me those days.

“I'm a testy, selfish old maid,” I would argue. “Please, oh, please let me alone. I can't help anybody more, not any more. There are too many of them.”

But Peter only laughed and patted my cheek for being impatient, and brought the refugee. He was probably a very bright boy, but he irritated me so much that I could not be fair and study him impartially. It was all too evident that he had not insisted upon this introduction in order to be criticized, though he had brought with him a couple of manuscripts. He wanted me to admire him wholeheartedly.

It was a trifling encounter. I certainly never saw this Mr. Levin again: I was careful to avoid him, and to be adamant with Peter on the subject. But the fact that I have remembered him even to this day shows that he made an impression out of proportion to his weight, and I recall that my exasperation had an effect on my life. I took stock of it.

That afternoon, I told myself sternly, I had wasted more than two hours not just in being bored but in being acutely bored. It was happening more and more often these days. Either I was losing my zest for life, or the world was definitely too much with me. I saw too many people at the best of times, and at the worst they were mostly people I would rather do without. I went over a list in my mind of the individuals who had taken up my time that week: Don Chisolm for one. He was editor of a little advertising paper. I didn't like or approve of Don, or admire him, but he had begun to drop in on me with his Russian popsies and I was too lackadaisical to resist. Indeed, he was practically an intimate of the house. That was all wrong. Then there was Mr. Chen from Fukien. He was always taking me out to meet singsong girls of his acquaintance, hoping I would write them up and make them rich and famous through notoriety. I didn't particularly enjoy his company, but he enjoyed mine, I suppose — anyway, he had a lot of it. I had been too lazy to say no. And the women I knew, who dropped in to talk the precious afternoons away! It wasn't only Peter, by any means. There were dozens more. There were so many, and yet I can't remember their names. There was a blonde nurse who was subnormal mentally, but who just knew she could write a wonderful book if only she had the time. That woman victimized me, week after week.

What had become of me? Why was I such a patient slut? My foolish, insincere kindliness had let me in for all of this waste. It was certainly time to call a halt. To like everyone and to be happy with anyone was a virtue and its own reward, but I realized now that for weeks I had been feeling livery, impatient, restless. I didn't like everyone: I didn't like anyone, except perhaps Sinmay. It was time for a change. In the happy prewar days I would have settled the matter by purchasing a ticket for somewhere; now, surrounded by Japs, I could not run away. No, but I would do something.

Mr. Levin's image pursued me; I could not shake it off my mind. His silly, self-eager face, his boyish prattle, summed up for me all of demanding humanity. It seemed to me suddenly that all the clocks in Shanghai were ticking fast and faster, and my heart beat slow and slower.

Perhaps every woman who lives alone pays for her independence with these moods. I don't know. After a week of stewing around in mine I came to a decision. I would turn over a new leaf. Chin Lien would have to learn how to say, “Not at home.” No more floundering about, letting things happen to me instead of directing the course of events that made up my life. No more petty tyranny on the part of all these no-accounts. The Marines, for one example: lots of them dropped in almost every day to play my radio, to sit around and tease the gibbon, to drink my whisky. Chin Lien must deal with them. That sad-eyed Pole who was always starving and always about to kill himself for love of a Chinese girl: I would beg Sir Victor to give him a job and then he would not have to come in at tea time. The other Pole who had a title and a bad case of kleptomania. That little tobacconist whose wife stayed the year round in Tientsin chasing Frenchmen. The whole cockeyed lot of them — out of my house, out of my mind, out of my life! I would keep only the ones I really wanted. And I would develop a sense of privacy. I would have a lock that worked on my bedroom door. I would stop lending money.

The result of all these cogitations was that I acquired shortly after that not one house guest, which had always been my quota, but two. Yet I did keep my vow to some extent: I learned to ignore the intrusive world when it all grew too bad. I became anti-social. Josie Stanton, wife of one of our nicer consuls, made a significant remark one day when I invited her and Ed, her husband, to dinner.

“Why, we'd love to, Mickey,” she said cordially. Then, after a slight pause, she added, “Er — will you be there?”

Chapter 14

It was a letter from America that settled the unrest in my household. The idea of a book on the Soong sisters grew out of John Gunther's book Inside Asia in two ways: first because it was John who named me as a likely person to do the job when he went home after visiting China, and second because a passage in his book so infuriated the Soongs that they made an important decision directly affecting me. I will explain.

The suggestion coming from the publishers attracted and frightened me at the same time. I knew no more about the Soongs at that period than I have already set down here. I had seen Mme. Chiang once at a distance, and Bernardine had taken me to a huge reception at the Kungs' house in Shanghai, where I shook hands with Dr. H. H. Kung and his wife and then passed on to the lawn and duly drank my cup of tea. In those days I didn't even know who the Kungs were. The nearest I had ever come to Mme. Sun, the middle one of the three, was in being introduced to Agnes Smedley at a time when the picturesque Agnes was rumored to be Mme. Sun's private secretary.

I would have to get their permission, I decided, before attempting such a book. The publishers' spokesman warned my agent that there had been so many frustrated attempts to write this thing that he had little hope of my success. Almost everybody who had ever published anything about the Far East had tried to do Mme. Chiang's life, and Madame had always replied with perfect logic to such overtures that she wanted to write it herself, someday when she had time.

It was Sinmay who made all the difference. “Don't concentrate on Soong Mayling,” he counseled me, using, according to Chinese custom, Madame's maiden name. “Ai-ling is the one you should consult.”

“Ai-ling?”

“Mme. Kung,” he explained. “I know a good deal about her; many people do. My aunt is a very old friend of hers. They were girls together and they have kept up the friendship. I will ask her how to go about it. It is a really good idea, you know. You must do it, and become famous, and we will all live happy ever after. You are getting too lazy these days.”

The last remark was too true for me to resent it. Instead I poked and prodded the lazy Sinmay until he actually did call on his aunt. She was out of town at the time — “In Hong Kong,” he explained when he came home. “She is probably seeing Soong Ai-ling this very moment. We must wait.”

That was China, so I waited patiently. When Aunt came home Sinmay took me to call on her and we had a long talk. She was a beautiful smiling lady — “My favorite aunt,” Sinmay said as he introduced her. She wasn't at all sure that Mme. Kung would like such a book, but one could always try, she said. I spent some weeks asking around, getting a background through Sinmay's acquaintances, before I even wrote to the sisters.

I wrote a different letter to each of them. It would never do, I decided, to send a form letter like a mimeograph all around the family. Each sister lived in her own house, in her own individual milieu, and each milieu was as different as possible from the other two. My letters were individual too. I had no reply from Mme. Sun. I had a delayed reply from Mme. Chiang up in Chungking; she just said that although she liked the tone of my letter she was really too busy to bother about such things. But Mme. Kung was attracted by one phrase in my epistle to her: I had said that I wanted to write a truthful book. She suggested that I come down to Hong Kong and see her.

“Well, why not?” I said lightly. “I haven't been to Hong Kong for years. We'll both go and look the land over.”

“It will be difficult,” Sinmay assured me. “You have an impatient nature and this is going to take patience.”

“I?” I was honestly amazed. “Why, I'm much more patient than anyone I know. I'm much better than I used to be. I'm so patient that I'm afraid to go home to America now. I won't be able to keep up with everyone else: I move too slowly.”

Sinmay laughed at me without replying.

“We could go next week if there's a boat,” I said thoughtfully. “Wait a minute while I find out. …”

“Why not tomorrow? It is almost time for the office to be closed.”

“Oh no. I'm sure I can get somebody.” I started to twirl the dial and Sinmay laughed harder than ever.