China to Me (22 page)

She was working for Indusco, she told me. In those days we hadn't learned to call it Indusco, which was a name thought up as part of an advertising drive when its sponsors began canvassing for funds outside of China. We called it the “Co-ops.” Corin was a “secretary” for the organization, and I never figured out just what she really did for them; she had a lot of little duties, really, that were bewilderingly varied. While we sat in my bare room and talked the rest of the regular inmates of the hotel came to meet me and to have a look.

Maya Rodeivitch was one of these, a girl who had come to Chungking along with the Chinese, from Hankow, retreating with them before the Japanese step by step all the way from Nanking to begin with. That was a real record, and I looked at Maya with respect when I heard it. I hadn't paid much attention to her at first because she had what I thought was a Russian accent, and I was used to Russians in China. Maya was Polish, though, and she wasn't just another outport girl. She had a job with the Chinese Government; she was another secretary. The place was lousy with secretaries.

In the course of the lunch hour I got a pretty good picture of Chungking society. Many of the Chinese personages and all of the diplomats rated houses of their own, and ran their lives in a fairly normal way with servants and kitchens, but the rest of the visiting population just did whatever they could, finding rooms with families and eating around at restaurants. The Chungking Hostel was a valuable part of life there, for you could eat foreign-style food in its dining room, and a lot of the Chinese had acquired a taste for foreign food. It wasn't good food but it wasn't half bad. I made the acquaintance of Chungking chicken right away. It is probably fundamentally like other chicken, but there is one disconcerting thing about it and that is its skin, which is coal-black. Until you have been reassured, it is startling to find black or navy-blue chicken meat on your plate.

Besides the Chinese who wanted to eat boiled black chicken I saw the other Westerners of Chungking, men from two rival plane-manufacturing companies, newspapermen who were taking a vacation from the dreadful cuisine of the Press Hostel, and an odd traveling salesman here and there. Also Fenn Lynch, who was adviser to Kung and the Financial Ministry. I had known him in Shanghai, where he had given a totally false impression of sober dignity. In Shanghai he dressed exactly like a banker and he looked like a banker, with his white hair and his clipped mustache. He sounded like a New York banker, too, because he had a slightly phony accent that was a little bit English and a little bit something else hard to describe, although a lot of people out East get it. We call it “bamboo American.” I am tainted with it myself, I suppose. Anyway, some people have mentioned it now that I'm back here in America. It comes of talking a lot with foreigners and trying to enunciate clearly so they'll understand. Fenn had been brought up in foreign parts and so he had more reason than most of us for a special manner of talking, but it was fun to watch for his Irish accent. When Fenn started to talk Irish it meant that he was very drunk indeed. I hadn't known about that in Shanghai, but I learned it in Chungking. I scarcely recognized him when I first saw him there. He was wearing the shortest shorts I have ever seen in my life, although it was midwinter, and his face had a ruddy tinge and he was shouting Irish.

Little by little I got the community sorted out. Some of the luckier people were living in missionary houses. They were lucky because the missionaries, having lived in Chungking for years, were settled in and had spacious places, and kitchens, and comfortable beds, and cooks. Tilman Durdin and his newly wedded wife Peggy, charming people both, lived in a mission. Till was on the New York Times, and his office was in the hostel so I saw the Durdins a lot. I learned right away that distances counted for everything in Chungking, where the gasoline shortage had done away with all but the most necessary government motorcars. People walked everywhere, uphill and down through the valley.

Maya Rodeivitch did a fantastic sort of work: she broadcast in French at four in the morning and as far as I could see she did nothing else except on week ends, when she crossed the river to the South Bank and visited at one of the oil-company houses. Officially her secretarial work was for one of the Ministers, Chiu Chia-hwa, who had been trained in Germany, but I never saw her doing any secretarial work. I began to realize what her job really was, though, when she came to see me in my room alone. She talked, and she asked questions. She asked me what I thought of the Soongs, and she hinted that she didn't think much of them, and waited to see it I would bite.

“Now I wonder,” I said to myself, “who she is working for. This is so clumsy and obvious that it must be that she reports to someone in the saddle. It must be the Kuomintang.” Maya was quite harmless. Nobody ever said anything to the contrary, although a lot of people thought her much too noisy playing poker late at night, or coming up the stairs bursting with Polish energy and clumping her boots, or coughing. She coughed constantly and the foggy Chungking air was very bad for her.

There was a “hostess” for the hostel: Adelaide Yang, wife of Jack Yang — I mean Jack Young, the explorer. Adelaide's Chinese name was Su-lin (the Panda was named after her) and we all tried to make her use it, but it didn't come natural to her because she was an American-born girl. She was very pretty and always bemused people right away.

My first evening I was taken out to the Shanghai Restaurant around the corner by some of Holly Tong's office workers. Teddy White came with us. Teddy was new to China but had learned a lot of Chinese at Harvard and had been sent out by Time as a correspondent. He was very young and cocky, and knew simply everything about everything. Corin was with us, and so was an old Shanghai friend, Ma Ping-ho, an Irishman turned Chinese, who had struck up a friendship with Teddy on the basis of Chinese calligraphy, and who in my honor consented that night to speak English.

It was a queer little party. We sat in the upper-floor room of the restaurant, a cardboard room in a cardboard house where we scarcely dared stamp our feet. We shivered in the clammy air and drank a lot of hot rice wine until we were laughing very loud, even the saturnine Ma Ping-ho. The proprietors of the restaurant, exiles from home like so many of the Chungking residents, came up to peek at us through the cardboard doorway. Afterward we ran home through the mud, arm in arm under a moon that did a fairly good job of lighting us up, considering that it was not bombing season. It was hectic and merry, but I felt sad. I was homesick, and not for my house in Avenue Joffre with Sinmay and the gibbons, for Shanghai was part of China, and all of a sudden I didn't want to be living in China. I didn't want to be living in a war at all. These boys and girls were nice people, but they were living grimly. They had been grim for a long time and would have to go on just like that for a long time more. Corin's long lank hair depressed me. She was cut off from a hairdresser by hundreds of miles, I told myself, and she hadn't the money to get out of it all. (I was wrong about the hairdresser. In a few months there was one giving permanents right there in Chungking, in a cardboard beauty parlor.) Then there was Ma Ping-ho, formerly of Cork and Oxford and now growing dank and mossy in Szechuan. I dreamed about him that night in my damp room and I was still depressed in the morning. Definitely, it was time to do my work and forget about all these fancies.

A couple of young men in spectacles, young men I had known in Shanghai, called to tell me that they were now secretaries of Dr. Kung. He has always had a lot of secretaries and I suspect it is because he must find work for many old friends' sons. Mme. Kung had sent word that I would probably want to look at Dr. Kung, and that this should be arranged when I was ready to ask for an interview. Then Corin dropped in on her way to the Co-op office, and we huddled over the charcoal burner that would have heated the room if there had been fewer cracks in the walls, and exchanged the stories of our lives. I collected a lot of life stories while I was in Chungking, but none seemed less congruous than Corin's. She had lived in London and for a while she was an editor for Vogue, being especially hot on knitting patterns. She was really, she admitted modestly, queen of the knitters of London. We had a few friends in common; I had been sound in identifying her manner of speaking with my memories of that charming town. An unhappy love affair sent her wandering and, like practically ninety per cent of our young ladies who carried torches in the 1930s, Corin came to China. (I once drew a vivid picture of the docks of Shanghai. An ocean liner lay at the dock with gangplank down, offering the freedom of the town to a procession of young ladies. They tripped down the gangplank in endless procession, tall girls and short girls, fat girls and thin girls, blonde and chestnut. Each girl carried in one hand a portable typewriter and in the other, held aloft, a burning torch.)

Well, Corin came to China to visit friends, and there she stayed. She got a job on a news agency, and she fell in love, and she stayed on, and on, and on. The war came. Corin was in Peking and, like Bob Winter, she mixed in as much as she could, carrying messages back and forth for Chinese friends and having a wonderful time. But she got in too deep, or thought she did, and began to get that illusion of a Japanese Black List, with her name at the head of it, which haunts people who have been too long in the Orient. So when she was offered a job with the Co-ops she took it, and here she was, with her hair growing longer and straighter every month and nothing else happening at all. She wasn't even getting letters, she admitted, from her boy friend, who had gone home to America to visit his family. She was wondering if he hadn't forgotten all about her, and the idea made her unhappy, because Corin at thirty-two felt old and tired, and she wanted to keep house and have babies.

“Write and find out,” I said immediately. No, Corin said, she couldn't do that. If he wanted to write her he would. If there was somebody else, no doubt he wanted to be sure before he wrote to her and broke their engagement. She would not hurry him.

It wasn't her way of doing things. She was not pretty, Corin wasn't; she had a long nose that she hated, and in spite of her quick mind and her training she couldn't manage her own emotions very well because that nose kept her uncertain. Sometimes because I was fond of her I wanted to give her a good shaking. Sometimes now I wish I had done it.

That afternoon I had a letter from the famous W. H. Donald, known to unoriginal journalists as the Power behind the Throne. My own pet name for him is Warwick II. All of us in giving Donald these names have played into his hands, because we are accepting the impression he is anxious to give. He would see me that afternoon, he said; he would send a car. Did I have time? Was I ready?

I was ready. I put on my padded gown and my sheepskin boots and my hat and trotted along out to the car. Under the heavy tread of my boots the cardboard room shuddered and all the furniture rocked on its legs as the door slammed behind me. …

Donald was waiting in the car with Jimmy McHugh. Jimmy gave me a bow and a secret, mysterious, sidelong look that meant nothing at all, as a matter of fact, except that Jimmy was in the Intelligence. He didn't mean to do it. He didn't do it consciously. Those boys just get into the habit. Later on in Hong Kong I acquired a new black gibbon that did all his talking out of the corner of his mouth in a confidential manner, and I called him Jimmy McHugh. That was because I was a patriotic American. There were lots of good British names I could have given him too.

Donald took us for a motorcar ride to look at his new house, half built at that time on the side of a steep hill just under Chialing House. Chialing House was a new, superelegant sort of hotel which was intended for extra-special government functions. It was way out on the only real road that led from town, overlooking the Chialing River, near Sun Fo's house; the fact that it was so far away from everywhere made it awful to get to but saved its existence later on when the bombing started. While my host bustled about from roofless room to veranda and back again I took a good look at him. I was still groggy and sleepy as newcomers always are in Chungking for the first few days, but he woke me up. He was more than sixty at the time and looked older because of his pure white hair, but though he looked old and had an old man's trick of repeating himself he still had vitality to spare. Some of it vibrated through the air and worked on me.

We went back to Donald's house, next door to the Chiangs' residence, for tea. It was not a cardboard edifice. Chungking in the old days had been the home of many retired generals and war lords who built themselves solid houses after foreign designs. Between the mushroom cottages that were being put up everywhere you came across these buildings, reassuringly firm and well built. There was a fireplace in Don's study and he gave a few orders to a Chinese girl in slacks who seemed to be running the place and then we had a fire. Don's study was full of maps and papers and here and there a book about China, but no modern books, just histories and geographies. While we waited for tea he talked, putting himself on the stage as he always did, showing me his best side, which I believe is also his only side. He is certainly a strange creature. He could only have come from Australia. He is hearty, honest, and completely without shyness. If he is wrong, and he sometimes is, he is totally unaware of it. Trying to sum him up, I find one phrase coming into my mind: Donald is a true democrat. It has never occurred to him to talk down to anybody, because he doesn't think of people in terms of intelligence. He talks straight, to coolies or statesmen, to Orientals or Occidentals, because he thinks that one language is enough for everyone. People in his estimation differ in only one way: they live on separate planes of honesty. He doesn't approve of dishonesty. He has a simple code and a very moral one. Perhaps that is why Mme. Chiang has kept him around so long; they are alike in that respect.