China to Me (19 page)

She laughed. “You are too conscientious. There is nothing about Chungking to see but the caves for air raids.”

“The government is there. The government, which is still resisting the Japanese after fleeing so many hundreds of miles. I ought to see the place just for that reason.”

Mme. Kung was not convinced. I couldn't see the government, she reminded me. It wasn't a visible thing; it didn't convene all together except during the plenary sessions, and no lady would want to attend one of those. My eagerness to go tearing off into the muddy hills of Szechuan was incomprehensible to that gentlewoman. A writer, she had always thought, was a civilized stay-at-home sort of person; especially for a lady writer it should be unnecessary to behave like a traveling salesman. Why did I not seize the opportunity to stay in Hong Kong among friends, writing my book at my leisure? That was the way the other writers of her acquaintance behaved. Wen Yuan-ning and his poetry books, John Wu and his recent discovery of the Roman Catholic Church — they were writers. She had been led to believe that I was of the same kidney. She was growing more and more puzzled.

But she kept her word and went on working on my behalf. The result of her endeavors was evident after I returned to Shanghai. I had a telegram from Hollington Tong which arrived by roundabout ways so that it need not pass under the interested eyes of the Jap censors, over across Soochow Creek. In guarded terms Holly told me that if I should present myself at Mme. Chiang's door sometime in the following season of early winter, up there in Chungking, I would not be turned away. Not that they were in any particular hurry for me to arrive, you understand; the whole thing seemed to bore Holly and his department, as well it might. But anyway, I could see Madame. That was a tremendous step forward. You could almost call it a leap.

Mme. Sun would not make a similar gesture of hospitality. She has a small coterie of foreign friends among whom is Randall Gould, editor of the Shanghai Evening Post, who in his long career as a newspaperman for various journals, especially the Christian Science Monitor, has met her officially and socially more times than most people can claim. Her friendly attitude toward Randall is perhaps based on the color of his writings. He has written for the New Republic and the Nation, besides doing his own daily grind, and always in favor of the Chinese Communists. Ching-ling will not name herself a Communist. (I have never met anyone except an American, for that matter, who would.) But Randall, as a friend, was worth having and he could always get an audience with her. On one of his 1939 trips to Hong Kong he found her sitting with another old friend, an American missionary. Mme. Sun keeps up perhaps more than any other Soong with her foreign acquaintances. She is more in favor of internationalism than are the others. It surprised Randall at first that she should be so wrapped up in missionaries, because that is not the accepted idea of a Communist sympathizer. But, he recalled, Mme. Sun is much influenced still by her early days at a Methodist school in America.

“Haven't you had a letter from my friend Mickey Hahn?” he asked her.

Mme. Sun indicated that she had and that the matter was still under advisement. The missionary was galvanized into life at my name, and exclaimed in shocked horror that I had dared address myself to Madame. Were not the Soongs aware, she demanded, of my immoral record? Ching-ling requested — and got — highly colored details of the said record. She was suitably distressed. According to her intimate friends she is very squeamish about such matters: Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, who worked as her secretary for years, told me that she has never been able to make Mme. Sun say a word in favor of the birth-control clinic that Hilda founded in Hong Kong. “She looks pained and changes the subject,” said Hilda. “I'm getting so that I dare not talk about anything remotely connected with sex when I'm with her. It's almost pathological.”

Nobody can accuse Randall of being easily frightened by squeamishness. He promptly spoke up in opposition to the missionary and had the satisfaction at last of getting as a reply from Ching-ling the sort of silence (she converses in silences) that showed her mind was not closed, at any rate. I owe it to Mme. Kung that her sister's mind remained the slightest bit open, during the rest of the book's writing.

Getting ready in Shanghai, I decided to prepare for cold weather in Chungking. Perhaps I would have enough of it after a week end, but I doubted it. Things never move that swiftly. It would be bitterly cold there, especially in the houses. I duly bought long pants, and sweaters, and a padded Chinese gown which made me look absolutely cubic, if you can imagine a cube with bulges here and there. Zoa made that gown her special care, selecting deep plum color for the outside and a lighter purple for the lining. She said that I should really go the whole hog and order another one, padded only half as thick and done in a pastel color, for underneath. Chinese ladies did that, she said, when they were going into the interior, but it took up a lot of room in packing and we decided against it.

The most important purchase to my way of thinking was the boots. I have suffered from chilblains in cold weather ever since I spent a winter in sunny Italy, in an ancient stone palace without rugs on the floor. Therefore I ordered those boots which were to make me a laughingstock, but at least a comfortable laughingstock, in China's wartime capital. They were high boots like waders and they were lined with sheepskin. I've seen something like them since I came back to America, something that goes by the name of “stadium boots.” But stadium boots are tiny, dainty things compared with the waders I took to Chungking.

The days were filled with noise and activity. Chin Lien had already left my employ, having saved up enough in years of slow, patient squeeze to invest in a little glass factory where he wouldn't have to work so hard. He called on me once in a while, bringing peculiar glassware objects as presents. It would not be so much of a wrench, now, to leave the house.

Looking over my letters home during this period, I am impressed by the way I seem to have stretched the silver cord almost to breaking point. It is true that I seem to have talked now and then, vaguely, of coming home for a visit. I discover an indignant outburst directed against my agent, who evidently had dared to suggest that I return for a while just to get in touch with the market again, to learn what America was like, and perhaps to furbish up my English. Obviously my feeble gestures toward America were not sincere. There is more sincerity in a plan I made to persuade my mother to come out and visit me. We almost put it over. She was to buy a ticket, round trip to Manila, on one of those cruises, which few people were taking now that the Japanese had moved in so close. The idea was that she should get off in Shanghai and pick up the boat on its way back; thus she would have a fairly long visit without being in danger of forgetting to return, as her daughter had done for the past six years. Something I said had worried Mother and I suspect that is why she was girding up her loins to make the trip.

One of your recent letters, Mother [I wrote], sounds very agitated about my idea of having a baby. Calm yourself; I hereby promise not to, until I can Give It A Name. All right? All right. I wasn't really serious, you know. Where would I put a baby? If you could only see how serious I am, and hardworking, and wholesome, and the old ladies' favorite, you wouldn't worry about me.

I'm not so sure Mother swallowed that. If my daughter ever writes a letter like that to me I'll probably pack up straightaway and come running to see what it is all about. Mother couldn't, though; there were too many other branches of the family needing her attention. In the meantime I couldn't have been thinking very hard about that hypothetical baby. Mr. Mills in the past year had given me a good deal of trouble, just worrying about his happiness. He slept indoors, in a movable cage, but during the day he swung around in his outside cage, and when it was cold he wore a fur coat. It was made up of bits taken out of my Chinese sable coat and the tailor never charged me for the gibbon's garments, but the fact that my pet wore sables made rather a scandal. People seemed to resent something else about him too — his diapers. I couldn't understand why it annoyed them so much. To me it seemed the obvious way to keep him clean and comfortable. A gibbon is almost as easily housebroken as a dog. This was fortunate, because Mr. Mills lived a strangely civilized life. Sometimes he went downtown with me for lunch, and he attended so many cocktail parties that I received one nervous little invitation from an Englishwoman with a penciled note on the back: “Sorry we cannot extend invitation to Mr. Mills.” I was unreasonably angry and didn't go to the party at all. The diaper idea, whatever could be urged against it, made him a much more acceptable caller. I suppose they didn't like it because to a lot of people the very appearance of an anthropoid ape is insulting. Putting such human-style clothes as diapers on the animal just points the insult.

I bought a female gibbon at an outrageous price, considering that she was old and tired and evidently ill. Once I saw the animal I couldn't leave her in the pet shop. She was chained by the neck to her basket, with only a foot-length of chain, and she was miserable. I bought her.

As soon as she came to the house I let her go and she climbed to the highest beam or curtain pole that she could find to sit on. After that we had to keep all the windows and doors closed, unless they were screened, for Mrs. Mills out in the open would just run away from everybody until she was shot or starved. She was a disappointment; her interest in Mr. Mills was that of a bored grandmother, and he wasn't interested in her at all, once he had discovered that she didn't feel playful. Little by little, though, she unbent. At first while I was romping and wrestling with Mills on the floor or the bed I would feel an iron grip on my sleeve, a sort of snatch, and I would look up to see Mrs. Mills retiring to her eyrie, making a threatening face at me. When she realized I wasn't torturing another gibbon her patriotic spirit was soothed. It began to look as if she were jealous of our games. She looked down on them wistfully. But never, never could she bring herself to join in.

I did tame her to some extent. Nobody else could groom her, but I could. She climbed down and leaned on my lap when she saw me. Once when Peter, the enthusiastic Russian lady, dashed in and kissed me, Mrs. Mills bit her savagely, sinking her tusks in up to the gums. I was scared to death, but Peter as a gibbon lover refused to complain. Mrs. Mills lived in the house as a strange gray wraith, drifting about and picking up her food whenever it pleased her to do so. Unlike Mills, she had black markings, an apron effect down her front that made her seem indecently naked. She would float like that supernatural man in Dr. Caligari over the table when we were eating, swiping bread or bananas. She much preferred the food she stole to anything we gave her. But soon she sickened with pneumonia. Sinmay and I put on gloves and grappled with her successfully, putting a warm coat over her naked-looking body, and once she was dressed she liked it. But the poor old lady sniffled and coughed and weakened for about eight days, and then one night, after having rallied and eaten too much, she died.

Sinmay and Zoa were surprisingly sympathetic. They had been cross with me for buying her, but when she was dead they were kind, and offered me a room in their house until her ghost should have left my room. Still, they began to look worried when a pet dealer called me up and said that Singapore was sending him two young gibbons, a male and a female, on which he would give me first refusal.

“Thank goodness you are going away,” said Sinmay.

“But you can buy them for me,” I said sweetly. “Can't you? I'll leave the money here, and my people can take care of them. All winter they had better stay indoors. They won't be used to this climate. I have ordered suits of clothes from the tailor already.”

He moaned in anguish.

There was a round of parties in farewell. Sir Victor had come back. He was in time to see me off and to read the first tentative chapters of my book. I had collected enough already, in fact, to write all of the childhood history of Charlie Soong, and I was getting well into Shanghai and the birth of the girls when I handed the manuscript over to Victor. It was then that he did me an enormous favor.

I am not an introverted type of writer. On the contrary, I feel much better if I can have an audience near at hand. As soon as I have written more than five thousand words I want to rush off and show them to somebody, and talk about them, and get opinions, and defend myself. Up until then I had used my old friends from the Monday Night Club as victims, trying the book out on them chapter by chapter. They listened, appreciated, made a few gentle suggestions, asked a few questions, but kept telling me that it was too soon to judge. Victor was not so polite. He sent me my precious chapters with a blunt note: “This is dull,” he said flatly. “It bored me to death. If I hadn't been in bed already, I would have fallen asleep in my chair, reading it.”

Startled out of my conceit, I set to work on the book all over again. The Soong Sisters is still pretty dull, in my estimation. Thanks to Sir Victor it isn't even worse. I tore it all up and started again, in livelier vein, and before I left Shanghai he confessed that the second version kept him awake until one o'clock, anyway.

Then something happened that threw the whole pattern of my life, book and imminent trip and Mr. Mill's love life and all, into the shadows. The war began, over in Europe.

We were startled. We were distressed. We began remembering the other war, the one we had always thought would free us from any more in our generation. Probably in the back of our heads was the thought, “The really grim things, the big bombings and battles, never come out as far as the East. We fought the war at long distance last time and we'll fight it like that again. Our English boys will join up and sail away, and it is all very distressing, but it isn't happening here, not out in China. We will get off with our own tiny, slightly comic oriental war; that is our contribution.”