China to Me (16 page)

We embarked a couple of weeks later, in a small boat that took a good long time to arrive. Shipping had undergone a tremendous change since the beginning of the war. Nowadays we took whatever boat we could get. Our course was so erratic, there were so many stoppings and startings and returnings to small ports I had never heard of before, that I asked the captain for an explanation. Quite simply he gave it — he was running ammunition to the Chinese guerrillas. They had agents waiting at these obscure ports and they simply unloaded the guns and steamed off again.

It was quite an experience, after two years of staying in one spot, to go to sea again. I still remember how nice the blue ocean looked after we left the muddy Whangpoo waters behind, and the lift I felt, that old familiar, half-forgotten lift, that I was actually on my way to somewhere else. Sinmay didn't share my feelings. It was years since he had left Shanghai for any purpose except our jaunt to the Yellow Mountains, or to visit the family graves in Chekiang. He grumbled at the lack of comfort this trip entailed, and didn't brighten up until he remembered the experiences of an ancestor of his who had sailed away in a P. and O. boat to become a diplomat in Russia.

“He kept a diary I must show you when we get back,” said Sinmay. “Oh, wonderful! He put everything down, and he was especially impressed by the way they kept changing plates at the table. He said, ‘They bring a new plate for each different dish, and make a great fuss about it; yet when the food comes it is never enough.'”

Hong Kong was brilliantly sunny, quite a different place from the memory I had of a foggy, damp town in early spring. We took rooms at the Hongkong Hotel, startling and horrifying the local population to a degree I could not appreciate until I became a resident myself, years later. Not that Chinese didn't often book rooms in that rambling hostelry, although most of them preferred the smarter, newer quarters of the Gloucester, next door: it was Sinmay's appearance. Hong Kong Chinese were mostly brisk, Westernized people. The old-fashioned Cantonese didn't stay at hotels. They lived in their own homes, enormous rabbit warrens built on the hillside. Sinmay in his brown gown, drifting through the lobby of the “Grips,” chatting amiably with me, arrested many a cocktail glass in mid-air.

The whole purpose of this trip was to interview Mme. Kung and, if possible, to get a start on the book. It had been an expensive journey, however, and we resolved to make the most of it; we planned to stay a month. Immediately we got in touch with T'ien Hsia; by a coincidence, we discovered, Mme. Kung had recently interested herself in that magazine to some extent. She and the original founder, Sun Fo (Sun Yat-sen's son), were friends. With the help of her brother T. V. they had managed to collect a lot of good solid advertisements from the big Chinese banks and firms. They were all on top of the world. A woman I had known slightly in Shanghai, Australian-born Alice Chow, was helping with the stenographic work of the office, mornings; in the afternoon she was Mme. Kung's secretary. So there we had a direct line straight to the Kung house out on Sassoon Road, in the Pokfulam District halfway around the island of Hong Kong.

We admired the offices very much. They were under the name, simply, of Wen Yuan-ning, who was doing other work for Chungking by taking care of all Hollington Tong's Hong Kong propaganda; not only T'ien Hsia but all sorts of printing jobs in English. (Holly Tong, if you don't know his name by this time, is the head of all Chungking “information” work, and a loyal slave to Mme. Chiang.) The offices were in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building, the newest and most nearly skyscraper type of office building that the colony possessed. It stood down on the harbor front just facing the town square, the one where all the horrible metal statues of British royalty were clustered around the nucleus of Queen Victoria, up on a high pedestal. I was to see that bank building many times later as the central figure of triumphant Japanese posters.

Sinmay had many friends in Hong Kong, old classmates who had trickled out of Shanghai little by little after the inauguration of the Incident. We were entertained every minute of the day, sitting first in this restaurant and then in that. Sinmay was charmed by the Cantonese custom of using pretty girls to wait on table, and I was equally delighted with Cantonese-style light lunch, where the waiter brings you tray after tray of small gadgets — fish cakes and sweet snacks and dumplings — from which you are expected to make your entire meal. Chuan and his sister Mei-mei gave a party out at Repulse Bay, hiring a cabana at the Lido, the new bathing pavilion.

“If you live like the Chinese,” I admitted, “Hong Kong is not so bad.”

“We are happy,” said Chuan Tsen-kuo. “It's expensive, that's all. If you can arrange for money it's nicer than Shanghai. After all, the best Chinese have escaped from Shanghai. Try to persuade Sinmay to come down here with the family.”

There were English people to look up. I was glad to run into Ian Morrison, a young man sometimes on the Times who had walked through on the Burma Road just before it was completed. Earlier, after teaching school for a while in Japan, Ian had taken a job as secretary to the British Ambassador to Tokyo. He came by his oriental interests naturally: his father was an old China hand and had had a street named after him in Peking. All this hodgepodge of his contacts, I decided, must add up to something: the usual something known among British as “Intelligence.” They would never let a man like him slip through their fingers. Besides, Ian was awfully mysterious and thrilled about his work. Whenever he was asked what he was doing he hesitated palpably before replying, and when he replied it was with a palpable lie. I teased him about it when I knew him better.

“You are hopelessly young,” I said accusingly.

“The Playboy of the Eastern World,” he admitted. He wasn't the only one: there were a lot of young men in the same department, dashing around Hong Kong. Charles Boxer, the captain who had called on Mr. Mills and me in Shanghai, was the chief of them; he had been a language student in Japan, Ian told me, and was supposed to be the best in his line.

“Boxer, oh yes,” I said. “I'd better give him a ring and meet his wife.”

It was a nervous strain, waiting until the necessary formalities of an interview with Mme. Kung were completed. To fill in the time, I discovered, the parties with Sinmay were not enough. There were still long spaces of time when the Chinese talked their own language and left me alone to brood. I was in a dither about the book, and really anxious to make it successful. Probably this was because I had been reading in preparation, and inquiring around among the oldsters in Shanghai, until I had a fairly good picture of the period. My love affair with Shanghai made me eager to carry on with such a piece of her history; I was charmed merely with the possibilities of the background. Until you have fallen victim to the temptations of history you cannot understand what it is like, the rewards of research and the excitement of tracing down life stories and anecdotes through old newspapers and memoirs. Once you are hooked, there is no end to it. I was hooked, and now I was going to discover, once and for all, if I was to carry on with the work or drop it forever. It all depended on Mme. Kung. I was really jittery. Sinmay, probably in an attempt to encourage me by indirection, laughed at me, so I decided to take a vacation from Sinmay.

There were a few very young English people around town who were discontented with the city because it was slow and peaceful. They played golf, they drank, they played bridge, and two or three times a year they put on amateur plays. I knew some of them, and in a deliberate attempt to change my luck I called them up. I was a change for them too. I was a symbol of that delightfully attractive and wicked metropolis of Shanghai. They grabbed at me eagerly. I spent one or two evenings of sheer social boredom and I loved all of it, the rapid, gay, empty chatter, the drinks, the slow-slipping hours above the harbor, looking down at that beautiful stage setting of lights and mountains. This was the other side of Hong Kong which the Chinese didn't know. I wouldn't be able to stand it much of the time, I said to myself, but for a change how nice it was! And yet the British were foolish to cut themselves off completely from the native Chinese. Since their tastes were so different anyway, why couldn't they take the risk of being friendly? No Chinese, even if he belonged to their clubs, would spend such a completely vacuous evening, given his choice.

“You know a lot of Chinese people, don't you, Mickey?” inquired my host suddenly. It was almost as if he had read my mind.

“Why, yes. Quite a few.”

“I'm wondering,” he said, “if I oughtn't to try to meet some of them.”

“It mightn't be a bad idea.”

“But you don't know,” he said eagerly, “how difficult it is here in Hong Kong. Nobody knows Chinese. I think I'll wait until I've been transferred to Shanghai. That would be better, don't you think?”

“The Chinese would probably be willing to wait,” I assured him.

I was startled and alarmed to discover that Sinmay had gone into a bad fit of the sulks. It was my defection that had annoyed him.

“But why?” I asked. “I suppose you could have come along on these parties, but it never occurred to me to take you. You would have been bored to death.”

“I didn't want to go,” he said angrily. “It is just that they make me angry, these British. Look at this Morrison. He invited you to go out for a walk in the country on Sunday.”

“But — you won't walk. You have always refused to walk. You say you have a bad foot.”

“I don't want to go for that walk. I only want him to think of inviting me. If he were a visitor to Shanghai with a friend I would invite him just as I invite his friend.”

“You never used to notice such things,” I said helplessly. “What difference can it possibly make — ”

“I hate these British,” said Sinmay. He had never spoken like that before. I had always been amused by his loyalty to Cambridge, where he spent two years: it was Sinmay who insisted, whenever he went to Hangchow, on calling on his ancient friend Mr. Moule, the Englishman who lived there. It was Sinmay who mocked me whenever he had a chance because American literature was inferior to English.

“Hong Kong,” I said suddenly.

“What are you saying?”

“I said, Hong Kong. It is this place that makes you so defensive all of a sudden. You never feel like this in Shanghai. It's the way they act about Chinese down here. That's why you are so angry. I've deserted you by going off with these English people and leaving you with the Chinese. I've stepped over the border. That's it, isn't it?”

“I believe it is,” said Sinmay.

“We had better get back to Shanghai.”

“Not so fast,” he said. His good humor had come back as swiftly as it had vanished. “We have two dates. One is to see Mme. Kung on Thursday afternoon at three — ”

“Oh no!” I cried.

“Yes, it is true. That Mrs. Chow telephoned while you were away. And the other is a luncheon which Captain Boxer is giving tomorrow at the Café de Chine. He is inviting all of us, you and Tsen-kuo and Yuan-ning and myself, and some officers from his department, and his new wife. Now there is a gentleman. He knows his manners.”

Captain Boxer had invited a lot of people, enough for two big tables at the newest restaurant to capture Chinese fancy. He had already drunk two gimlets before we arrived, and was in a merry mood. (A gimlet is made of gin and bottled lime juice. It is the tipple of Hong Kong, as a gin sling is of Singapore.) In a maze of taipans and army uniforms and Chinese gowns I was introduced to Mrs. Boxer, a pretty, slender girl. “My husband makes me read all your articles,” she said immediately. It is all I remember her saying until the end of the luncheon, when she told Charles firmly, “I am driving the car home.”

That, it seemed to me even in my advanced state of intoxication, was a sound idea. Charles had spent the entire luncheon going back and forth from table to table making us kanpei our wine cups with him. “Kanpei” is Chinese for “bottoms up,” and the host is supposed to drink cup for cup with each guest, all the way around. He had been careful to carry on with the local tradition. I retained a memory of him as a brilliant, amusing, mad man, who had insisted on talking to me about the latest Chungking politics, of which I knew nothing, and harping on the approaching dissolution of the British Empire. When I offered congratulations on his marriage he said, “It always happens when one lives in Hong Kong, you know, more than four years. One either becomes a hopeless drunkard or one marries. I did both.”

I was pleased when his wife phoned to invite Sinmay and me to cocktails later on in the week.

“You see? Now there is a real gentleman,” said Sinmay again. “They say he has wonderful books.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Tell me some more about Mme. Kung. What shall I say if she — ”

We went on talking like that until three o'clock on Thursday afternoon.

Chapter 15

Sinmay came into my room to call for me at a quarter to three and found me sitting on my bed, shaking and clenching my teeth.

“What's the matter?” I demanded of him. “I've never been like this before. In another minute I'll start to cry.”

“But she is not so terrible! I keep telling you. My aunt will probably be there; yes, she is back in Hong Kong. Why are you afraid?”

“It isn't exactly her I'm afraid of.” Without talking any more about it, I picked up my bag and started out with him. I know now what it was. I realized that the interview marked the beginning of something important. I was going to have to stop playing and begin to work. My other work, writing and teaching and everything else, had been make-believe; this was the first job I had to get my teeth into. I was just about to dive into China, into the war and into real life. It was enough to frighten anyone.