China to Me (2 page)

There was also a lot of talk among the brokers about a city called Nanking, where lived the Generalissimo and his wife. I think I must have heard of them before, but I'm not sure where it was. Mme. Chiang, said the brokers — some of them, anyway — had a sister who was married to the Minister of Finance, and the whole family was simply coining money by various illegal means. The brokers were angry about this as they felt that any money which was made thus should be made by foreign brokers. They paused in their work long enough to declare with virtuous horror that the Soong family was sending this money abroad, to be placed in foreign banks where it would be waiting for them when their evil practices had caught up with them and forced them to flee. (None of the brokers bought Chinese dollars to keep, of course. They bought and sold, and when they had made as much money as possible they sent it home.)

Even then, however, I didn't swallow all this whole. It was too awful, I heard it too often in too many versions, and it was also beginning to be obvious that Shanghai gossip was fuller, richer, and less truthful than any I had ever before encountered. I had begun to meet and to chat with Chinese ladies. Now a good Chinese gossip, man or woman, can dream up better stories and bigger lies than anybody in the world except maybe an Arab. Once you catch on and learn that you are not expected to take it without a whole salt mine, it is lots of fun. But the habit had spread to Shanghailanders, to use their own unpleasant name for themselves, and to a newcomer it was a little misleading.

There was one factor of Shanghai life which filled our days as much as we wanted and a little more. Mrs. Fritz — Bernardine — had thought of and set into motion a sort of club known as the International Arts Theatre or, anticipating governmental habits, the IAT. She rounded up all the women in town to help, and some did and some didn't. In her apartment she walked around all day talking into a telephone which had the longest extension cord I have ever seen in my life, and she lavished on this club, her extremely creditable brain child, enough thought and management to win a minor war all by herself. In effect the working committee of the club was predominantly American, because it's the sort of thing American ladies would like better than would their European sisters, but she had corralled a lot of modern Chinese girls too, and an occasional Frenchwoman or a Hollander or one of the more accepted Russians. The IAT did concerts and lectures and debates and now and then a play. What made it good was that the concerts were Russian or German or whatever; the debates took into account such extremely controversial subjects as “Birth Control in China” (three Catholic priests attended, with skyrocket results), and the plays were damn good, especially Lady Precious Stream with an all-Chinese cast. I can't say quite as much for the lectures, which in any city are just lectures, after all. Later, at the genteel Amateur Dramatic Association plays in Hong Kong, which were indescribably awful, I sighed for a touch of Bernardine Fritz. At least I did at first, and then I just stopped going.

It all sounds trivial, doesn't it? It was. I was still thinking of Shanghai as a stopping place between boats, and my first-planned two weeks as a long-drawn-out week end. Then one day I realized that I had taken a job and thus committed myself as a resident, at least for a while. The local morning paper, the North-China Daily News, was a British-owned journal. They wanted a woman to do feature stories, interviews, and the like, as their own girl was going away to be married, and I said I was willing. I was pleased about it, too, without reflecting at all. Helen went off to Peking to get a quick look at it before she returned to America; her plane was forced down in a paddy field on the way back and she had adventures. By the time she arrived again in Shanghai I had found a flat downtown in Kiangse Road and had dug in for a season. A little later she sailed away to the States; I waved good-by and went back to Kiangse Road.

It is now the moment to say, “Little did I think,” et cetera, et cetera, but I cannot tell a lie. I didn't think a little, I thought a lot. I pondered. The subject of these thoughts was a recently remembered party in New York at which a lot of young leftists had been discussing China and the publicized revolt of her Communists.

“Oh, shut up about China,” I had grumbled. “You bore me to death about China. China doesn't interest me.”

Pondering like anything, I was almost run down by a ricksha in the Bund.

Chapter 2

The flat in Kiangse Road had nothing in the world to recommend it to anybody but me. It was in a Chinese bank building, down on the ground floor, so that the windows looked out on the crowded, screaming street and were always grimy. The furniture belonged to a special genre, to understand which you must know that “Kiangse Road” in Shanghai is a synonym for “red-light district.” Whenever I told people where I lived there was a roar of laughter, and dirty old men would whisper hoarsely, “How are all the girls?”

The biggest room wasn't very big, but it was all that counted: the other apartment was just a dingy hole with a dining table in it and a sort of dark brown china cabinet. The big room was painted in green: green walls and ceiling. Over three of the walls was a metallic sort of grillwork constructed to look like bamboo trees and silvered, if that is the proper participle. I can't say “gilded” because it wasn't gold, except in spots where the silver had tarnished. These metal bamboos were uncomfortable to lean against, so the box couch which I used to sit on in the daytime and to sleep on by night was in an unstrategic position, pushed as it was into a bamboo-beautified corner. To protect hair and back from the jagged edges of the bamboo leaves the former tenant had piled on the bed about sixty cushions, covered in brilliant-dyed satin of all colors.

Along the head of the bed was a bookcase completely filled with books. These volumes had obviously been bought by the pound and were chosen because they were of uniform height and thickness. Each one wore a dust wrapper made of paper that had been bought at Woolworth's or somewhere similar: green or silver or gold or peacock blue. Some of this paper was spotted with stars. I forgot to say that the ceiling, too, was covered with stars and had a crescent moon in one corner. The rest of the furniture, wooden lamp stands, chairs, and small tables, was all painted green and silver, and the color came off in flakes or puffed up in blisters.

My sister Helen saw the place only once and she didn't say much. She just stood and looked around. Then she said, “It's cheap, did you say?” and when I assented, rather defiantly, she said no more and soon sailed for San Francisco, staying on in her hotel until the last. Even before she left, my days had assumed a certain pattern. The first program of luncheons with ladies and race meetings with gentlemen had changed. Not that the job was especially demanding. Work with the English has always been more restful than it would be on the same job with Americans, and my routine soon boiled down to one lone interview almost every day with some old-timer of China. It began to be difficult to make the thing sound fresh, as they all said the same things and remembered the old days in the same way — “There used not to be any tramlines in the city at all,” et cetera, et cetera. I love working for the English, chiefly because there is no gnawing worry at the back of my mind that if I don't watch my step, or even if I do, ultimately I will get the sack. The English are like me: they really don't enjoy firing people and they try not to.

If I had left it to the newspaper, however, I would scarcely have known that Chinese existed save for faraway-sounding names in news stories of battles and engagements upriver with bandits. The American Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury gave a better actual picture of conditions as they were, simply because the Americans were aware of the Chinese as people and most of the British weren't. Oh, I don't mean the Britons didn't see the Chinese. They did. They mentioned them often as peasants, dwellers in the picturesque villages we saw when we went houseboating or shooting. They spoke of them as servants, quaint and lovable. Sometimes, even, they thought of them as descendants of those emperors who had made Peking what it was. They were well aware that Chinese kept the shops in Yates Road and the Thieves' Market. The British community, however, reserved its social life for itself and those of the Caucasian groups who could be considered sufficiently upper-class. In short, it was my Hollywood hairdresser all over again.

There, though, I can't generalize. There were some outstanding exceptions. Besides, there was always a small faction of people from Peking, and Peking dwellers were civilized. The whole situation was changing in 1935 when I arrived; it was already getting much, much better everywhere, save, perhaps, in the stately columns of my newspaper. I don't wish to carp too much at the North-China. I liked the whole atmosphere of the paper very much indeed, because it made me feel that I was near the more colorful parts of the British Empire: Hong Kong and Singapore and Ceylon and all that.

My letters home show a sudden change after Helen went away. No longer did I bubble for pages about seeing the races from Sir Victor's (Sir Victor Sassoon was our local millionaire) box at the club. My preoccupation with clothes vanished. Now I seemed to spend more time doing things that sounded austere, although they weren't really. I visited Chinese schools and gave courtesy lectures; I inspected new little factories so that I could write them up; I looked at Russian painters' pictures, which were mostly pretty bad in my opinion. The reason for all of this was Sinmay, my Chinese friend. I have written about him already so many times, in so many guises — for Sinmay is inexhaustible and has a phase for any occasion — that I shan't attempt to describe him here. I saw him almost every day, sooner or later, mostly later. Time meant nothing whatever to him.

Sinmay and his immediate family lived down in Yangtzepoo, across the Soochow Creek and some miles farther along the river near the Japanese shipping wharves. In selecting this district he had gone against custom, as most of the well-to-do Shanghai Chinese preferred the newer houses or smart “modern” apartments out near the city limits of the International Settlement. He said himself that he had moved out there so that he would stay at home and work instead of being tempted to go out too much, but the result was merely that he used more time and gasoline driving his long brown Nash up to the middle of town where the tempting bookshops were. I have often envied him his knowledge of the city. I know it pretty well myself by this time, but every brick in every shop front seemed to have its history for Sinmay. Part of the reason for this was that he had been born in Shanghai and had grown up happily there, running as wild as he liked. The real reason, I think, was that he was overwhelmingly curious. He had a mind like a child's, or a puppy's, or an old-fashioned novelist's, prying into everything and weaving stories around whatever caught his attention.

I never knew what he was going to talk about. He had a wide acquaintance in the town and spent a good deal of time meeting his friends in restaurants and caring with them. In China you can always eat; there is some appropriate sort of food for any time of the day. Besides breakfast and lunch and dinner — the Shanghai Chinese eat those meals as we do, though the Cantonese have only two large ones, at eleven and four — you can have your elevenses at any hour of the morning: boiled or fried noodles with ham or tiny shrimps or shreds of chicken. Or you can eat sweet almond broth. For afternoon snacks there are endless sorts of sweet or salty cakes stuffed with ground beans or minced pork or chopped greens. Sinmay always said that he liked “coolie food” best, plain dishes of bean sprouts and salt fish and ordinary cabbage and that sort of thing, but he loved knowing all there is to know about food. He would tell long stories about this dish or that, talking first in Chinese to his friends, who liked listening as much as I did, and then remembering suddenly that I didn't understand him and doing a quick interpretation.

I was bored, often, during these restaurant parties, until I began later to understand a little of the language. Nothing can be more tiresome than sitting for a long time while other people talk in a strange tongue. When, to add to the boredom of it, you are really uncomfortable, the procedure calls for un-American patience, and those restaurants were painfully uncomfortable. Any Chinese restaurant is, I firmly believe.

Why have the Chinese never learned how to make good chairs to sit in? They can boast all they like about their centuries of civilization, and Dr. Ferguson and his cohorts can tell me as much as they wish of Chinese paintings and bronzes, and I myself grow lyrical over their food, but how, how, how can they have gone all these thousands of years sitting on stiff, slippery, shallow, spindly chairs? When I look at loving drawings of the ancient gardens of Soochow my bottom recalls the cold, inadequate comfort of those keglike porcelain stools where the sages sit while they regale their souls with the deliberate symmetry of tamed nature. Even when the Chinese try to make decent chairs they can't do it. I have been in many a foreign-style Chinese house with knives and forks at dinner, and framed oil paintings, and Axminster carpets. In vain: there is always something wrong with the chairs. The overstuffed ones are imitation and are too short, so that when you lean back there is nowhere for your head and neck.

There were compensations, or I could never have gone on as long as I did. In the end I was used to it and forgot to grumble. Sinmay always had another story, and if I waited long enough he would remember to talk English, and then for a time it was the other guests who were bored because they could not understand. Little by little, because of all the Chinese people I met, and all their histories which I heard, I was able to see through new windows. It was not so much that I found a new world with Sinmay and his family, but I went with them around to the back of the scenes and peered out at the same old world through a glow of strange-colored footlights. It was fresh and wonderful that way.