China to Me (18 page)

But what was this? I asked myself the same question that has been asked of me so many times since I published the Soong book. How could Mme. Kung speak so confidently on behalf of Mme. Sun? Weren't they bitter enemies? Mme. Sun's cohorts all said they were. Mme. Sun, they said, had shaken the sticky capitalistic gold dust of the Soong Dynasty off her tiny feet long since, when she first fled to Moscow, and wasn't Mme. Kung, even more than Mme. Chiang, the leader of the banking faction? Everybody in the Red group that I encountered in either port, Shanghai or Hong Kong, assured me that Mme. Sun was such a stranger to the family that she probably wouldn't know a Soong if it walked up and greeted her in the street.

I can only say that I found out very early in my biographer's career that this particular rumor has no basis in fact. None whatever. I have said it before in my book, but evidently not loud enough to pierce the ears of certain book reviewers. It just isn't true. The two ladies, Mmes. Kung and Sun — or, if you like it better, Soong Ching-ling and Soong Ai-ling — are good friends. They see each other often. They saw each other often before they were forced by the war's exigencies to live together too. I missed Mme. Sun by about two minutes at least twice when I went to the Kung house. I didn't always miss her; one day she was still there when I dropped in. Now, after some months, this statement of mine has been proved elsewhere, and there are so many photographs in support of it in the newspaper files that the most stubborn leftists can't argue them away, but you will find a lot of people still trying. When I first made the statement I didn't have public proof, and my way was made hard and stony. I was never allowed to enjoy my triumph either; as soon as Mme. Sun did admit that she was accepting Kung hospitality in Chungking the leftists began whispering, “She was forced to do it. … Not a free agent, you know. … Terribly difficult for her, poor sweet. Why, I tried to get into That House to see her the other day and I was turned away. It's like a prison.”

Again I am anticipating. This time you will note that I speak with acerbity. It is the first chance I have had to blow my top in a good personal, untrammeled way. I wish to say good-naturedly that I have suffered a lot, and I often wonder in what cause. I believe it is just in the cause of plain scientific truth, because I have not sworn my lifeblood away to any political party. Without intending to do so, I ran slam-bang into the leftists and one of their legends by writing a book on the Soongs. This legend has been built up around Mme. Sun. If you want to know more about it, don't bother to ask me; look up Mme. Sun in almost any book on China written by an American writer with leftist sympathies. (You won't find the same thing in the Chinese books. Chinese writers don't bemuse as easy as we do.) At the same time exactly I ran slam-bang into the rightists and one of their legends. This legend has been built up around Mme. Kung. To know more about it you need only to turn to any of the cocktail groups of Shanghai, or Hong Kong, or Chungking, or Tientsin; you won't find much of it in books because of the law of scandal or libel. I can never remember which. Mme. Kung's legend is more diffuse than is the one about her young sister Ching-ling, because her husband shares in it, and so do her four children. John Gunther gathered his material from both parties when he prepared for his book, Inside Asia.

Part of my earliest work in preparation for The Soong Sisters was the gathering of all the vast amount of nebulous scandal that exists about the Soongs, sifting it out, classifying it, and then trying to trace it to a foundation in fact. I could write a big heavy book on that subject alone. I won't, though. If you, reader, know nothing about the Far East except what you read in books like this, it will mean nothing to you anyway. If you are an old hand from the Coast you probably already know most of the rumors I am talking about. Now you who know China, please do me a favor, because that research job is one which I hated to leave in order to write my book. Sit down and search your memory. Take your favorite bit of Soong scandal and look at it again, and trace out where it came from, and try to prove it to your satisfaction, and then if you have proof, send it on to me, care of the publishers. There are the stories about financial wanglings, and the stories about the vast sums which the Chiangs and the Soongs have piled up in American and South American banks, and the stories about Dr. Kung's private life, and the stories, never-ending, about squeeze. The only ones I ever proved were some of the squeeze ones, and they did not trace back to the sources the public expected. … I'll talk about squeeze in a moment. First I want to finish up the general subject of gossip in China.

If you ever go out there, be on your guard against certain types of stories which recur again and again and again. For some reason these tales have a special fascination for Chinese chatterers. Cheating in high places is the first. Espionage is the second. (You find the most elaborate allegations against the Generalissimo himself, for example: that he is in constant secret communication with Wang Ching-wei is a favorite. There are also people who will swear themselves orange in the face that Dr. Kung is a buddy of Hirohito.) The third is the good old execution story. Hardly a day went by in Shanghai that Sinmay didn't tell me of some acquaintance of ours whose head had been chopped off. The fact that these people invariably made personal appearances later on never discouraged him. He went on telling me about heads being chopped off, and he went on believing his own stories.

I think that this type of Chinese mentality is what led directly to the long period we had in Shanghai, after the retreat of the Chinese Army, when terrorism was king. I didn't realize until I found myself relaxing in the peace of Hong Kong how strongly that element was influencing our lives up in Shanghai. People were shot in broad daylight, out in the streets or in restaurants, for almost any suspected action, against the Chungking government, against the Japanese Army, or even in settlement for some private feud. The Japanese do not permit a similar lawlessness in their own country, but they were glad to use Chinese, accustomed to the idea of quick and violent revenge, to stir up their local type of excitement whenever it seemed expedient to remove patriots from their path. About half of the Shanghai assassinations of 1937 and 1938 were probably inspired by the Japs.

Now as to this word “squeeze”; it has become such an integral part of my vocabulary that I am apt to forget that I never heard it before I went to China. In private life it means the money taken out of the housekeeping funds for the houseboy's private use. Theoretically the house owner doesn't know his boy is squeezing, i.e., charging more for the meat, for example, than the butcher does. Actually the houseowner knows and condones, unless the squeeze becomes unreasonably high. There are other methods of domestic squeeze. Suppose I go out and buy a coat. When the tailor brings it to the house my boy exacts a certain sum from him in the kitchen. The sum is fixed, a certain percentage of the coat's cost. The ramifications of this custom are endless.

In public life an official is squeezing when he takes a commission for some action committed in his public capacity. Suppose a Mr. Wan is buying airplanes for the Chinese Government; the companies offering him planes, if it is known that Mr. Wan is not averse to persuasion, will bid against each other on the bribe. The bribe is called the “squeeze.” I thought of airplanes because of a story Dr. Kung told me. On his trip to England to attend the Coronation of the present King he made a side trip to the Continent, and in the course of this journey he visited Daladier. All through Dr. Kung's travels he was followed by a little shoal of munitions salesmen, and it may be that one of these astute gentlemen steered the conversations which the doctor had with Daladier into familiar paths. At any rate, Dr. Kung and M. Daladier did, ultimately, get around to the subject of airplanes. China wanted to buy planes and France wanted to sell them.

“But there was a woman in the deal,” Dr. Kung said, “Daladier's secretary. She wanted a large sum of money from us for releasing these planes. She was greedy; she wanted much too much. I became disgusted and went away, and we bought no planes from France. It was not good.”

I was impressed by his calm acceptance of the situation. The peculiar system by which France was governed just then, before the war, didn't seem peculiar to him at all. He was shocked not by the fact of corruption in high places but by the degree of it. That is the Chinese attitude. They face facts. They do not pretend on certain subjects as we do. We accept some things they do not; they accept some things we do not. That is why there is so much scandal, I think, in treaty ports where the two races mingle.

I was impressed also by something else in that story. I learned from it that the custom of government squeeze, even though we may not know the word for it, is not exactly new to Occidentals.

Chapter 16

Sinmay and I came back to Shanghai in August, under the most delightfully melodramatic circumstances. He suddenly took it into his head to disguise himself, because he thought there might be trouble at landing. This was, as a matter of fact, quite possible. The Japs hadn't penetrated our daily lives as long as we stayed where they thought we belonged, which was within the limits of the International Settlement or the French Concession, but they hated us going outside that circle in any direction, and they had a chance to pounce on any arriving travelers who steamed up the Whangpoo past their occupied territory, even during the time such travelers should land at the wharf. Sinmay's record had become sufficiently irritating to the Sons of Heaven to make them take the chance of grabbing him if it presented itself. Therefore he blithely assumed another name.

On the Maréchal Joffre, which carried us back to our home town, he was known as Mr. Tsu. He wore European clothes for the first and only time of our acquaintance, and he looked perfectly terrible. I had never noticed before that his legs were too short, and his little beard looked so incongruous above the tweeds that he shaved it off. He used dark spectacles too. He speedily discovered about ten old cronies, and they spent all day sitting on deck, all wearing dark spectacles and all talking about how they were going to outwit the Japanese when the ship docked.

They were in an excited flurry when we arrived, and Sinmay was frankly disappointed that nothing at all happened to us. He walked ashore without being molested by anybody. The chauffeur was waiting with my car, and once we had passed the magic border around the customs jetty it felt as if we had never been away. Not quite, however, since these arrivals and departures always call forth comparisons with other journeys. I returned to my Shanghai with the eagerness of a lover, and that reminded me of the first time I arrived, bored and sulky and frowning, counting the days before I could sail away again. Now I recognized every street corner, and the very beggars in the downtown area were familiar to me. I looked eagerly at shopwindows while the chauffeur gave us the news, harmless domestic tittle-tattle and messages from Zoa that couldn't wait until we got home.

Yet it was a very different city now. It stood alone and beleaguered, surrounded on all sides by a greedy, watchful enemy. That cordon of uniformed spies at the jetty — it had had its effect on our spirits. “Someday soon,” I said aloud, “we'll have to fight this out, you know. It isn't going to go on just like this indefinitely.”

“It might,” said Sinmay. “Things last a long time in China.”

We went over and over the same old sayings: how it was to the Japs' advantage to leave our city the way she was, and how America was busy watching developments on the other side of the world and couldn't be expected, et cetera, et cetera. Sinmay never had much to say about Europe and Hitler. I depended on other friends for European-politico conversation. Sir Victor was always full of it, but he was over in the States just then, taking a series of massage for his bad hip. A lot of rich refugees, friends of his, kept me informed pretty well. I discovered soon after I came back that my life was becoming more and more full of European refugees. Failing the Chinese and Bernardine, that was all we had left. (Bernardine had gone to America and was busy building up a salon in Hollywood.)

It had been decided before we left Hong Kong that I would be coming back in the late autumn. I would stay in Hong Kong for a while, talking to Mme. Kung and making abstracts of such documents as the family was willing to let me see. They were generous with that information; Mme. Kung's help was hampered only by the vexing fact that some of her most interesting papers and all the old family photographs had been lost when the Japs moved in on the Kung estate up in Shansi, some months before. The pictures that were available I had copied quickly, before anyone could change his mind. I had compiled a list of names, Shanghai people Mme. Kung suggested for interviews. I was to polish off this part of it, go through the Shanghai newspaper files for various records of milestones in the Soong history, and fix up my house in preparation for a fairly long absence.

“You can work at your ease in Hong Kong,” Mme. Kung had said. “Then later in the season, when my sister Mme. Chiang is not so busy as she is just now, organizing her girls' training schools, you will probably be permitted to see her in Chungking. There is just a chance, however, that she will come down to Hong Kong. I am trying to persuade her to do so. She ought to have her teeth seen to, and besides, she needs a general going over; she has never been the same, you know, since her accident in the motorcar that time she came down from Nanking with Donald. It would be nice for you to meet her here. It is a pity that you have to go to Chungking. It's an expensive trip and very uncomfortable, I believe, after you get there. I'm always so sorry for Dr. Kung, living there with never a break, working hard all the time, yet never complaining.” She sighed.

“But I ought to see Chungking, don't you see, madame?” I said gently. “Even if Mme. Chiang does come down to the dentist.”