China to Me (23 page)

I read Ralf Sues's book and I liked it, but she irritated me when she said that Donald was Pygmalion and Mme. Chiang the statue, or words to that effect. I am sure Donald himself thinks so, down in his heart, but I am equally sure that Madame doesn't, and that the suggestion would irritate her profoundly, much more than it has irritated me. Donald is not as subtle as Mme. Chiang, nor as careful a student of human nature, nor does he know as much about Chinese family relationships as she does. A knowledge of family and a sympathy for it is very important if you're going to have a hand in Chinese government. Donald could not hold Mme. Chiang's job down. He could not have built up Mme. Chiang out of nothing. He could not bemuse the world.

I came home in an improved mood. I had forgotten to be homesick, and I was full of Australian pep, and Donald had promised that I would see Mme. Chiang in the morning.

Chapter 19

I approached my first interview with Mme. Chiang much less nervously than I had gone to Sassoon Road. A few Chinese had done their best to give me the fidgets, assuring me that I would find the First Lady of the land less “human” than her eldest sister, but I wasn't impressed with the threat. What do people mean when they say “human”? Everything or nothing. Sometimes it means that a public person is not without his little vices, but that isn't what the gossips meant about Mme. Chiang and Mme. Kung. I think it really means “warmhearted.” Certainly Mayling's heart is kept cool. She would like to be entirely steely and without emotion, I suspect, except in a large and patriotic way. She doesn't think that public personages should have any use for individualistic orgies of sentiment, either in love or anything else; she is as severe with her heart as a New Englander. That is what I thought after our first conversation, and I also thought that she was much fonder of her sister Ai-ling than she wanted to admit.

Partly because of Donald's careful training, every word Mme. Chiang gives to the press and every gesture she makes in front of a reporter is planned and weighed in advance. A few months after this, when the time seemed right for it, the Soong sisters made a public sign of family affection, and Mme. Chiang was free to promote her eldest sister as she really wanted to do. When I met her she was still careful of herself, still wondering what was best, but she was coming rapidly to a decision. That passage in John Gunther's book had done it. Her voice, like Mme. Kung's, shook with indignation as she talked to me about it.

Again I put in a word for John, and again found myself talking about Shanghai gossip and the cabal that was obviously in motion against the Kungs. “It's an indirect way of getting at my husband,” she summed it up. This shrewd remark started me probing after a bit of knowledge I was anxious to acquire. Was Mme. Chiang aware of her unpopularity among the older politicians in China? I wondered. I had my answer, prompt and clear: Mme. Chiang certainly was. She had been fighting ever since her marriage against the heavy, inevitable disapproval of old-fashioned China.

There have been about twenty descriptions of Mme. Chiang and the surroundings in which people interview her, so I won't bother about it. I have some of it already, anyway, in my book. She was used to writers and she put me at ease very quickly; we were chattering along like old friends when her husband suddenly entered the room. He hadn't been warned that she was not alone, and he was embarrassed at being in his slippers. I leaped to my feet. Even in his slippers the Generalissmo always had that effect on me; I found myself standing at attention whenever he appeared. His wife introduced us and he bowed and started to back out of the room.

“Hao hao,” he said, as she explained me rapidly in Chinese. “Hao, hao, hao.” The door closed on another bow. What he had said was just, “Good, good, good,” and it means anything polite that you like to put into it. Madame smiled and said, “He didn't have his teeth in. Sit down, Miss Hahn.”

I went back to the hostel feeling quite steamed up about the book. We had come to a clear understanding. Mme. Chiang — and by the way, although I don't know her well enough to do it in person, I'm going to call her “Mayling” in this book hereafter; I can't go on using titles indefinitely — Mayling was not opposed to the idea of the book. She admitted, though, that she wouldn't be ready or willing to help me if I were going to do only a long gush about herself. Why should she? She didn't need it and China didn't need it. If I emphasized Mme. Kung, however, and put her in the limelight, for a change and for a necessary balance against the malicious stories that were being spread over the Kung name, Mayling would give me all the information I wanted.

“You're fond of my sister, aren't you?” she asked.

I said that I was, and that such a book would be pleasant for me to write, as I could be sincere in concentrating on her sister. The question was how to go about the consultations. We decided that I should show the manuscript to the sisters as it was written or after a good part of it had been finished, and they would check it for facts.

“I won't do anything but that,” she warned me. “I haven't time. At any rate you wouldn't want us to touch the text.”

“Certainly not,” I said warmly. “I don't expect you to do anything about my opinions, either. Even if you might not agree.”

“That's arranged, then,” said Mayling. “If you make mistakes, my sister or I will tell you about them. We will not comment on anything else. It's the only possible way such a book can be written. Otherwise it's so much propaganda turned out here at Holly's office.”

She did not say, though, that I was to go straight back to Hong Kong. Instead she suggested several trips around the Szechuan countryside, to see her girls' school, to inspect a stock-improving center and so forth. I had been quite right to bring my boots and all those coats, I reflected. I would have Christmas in Chungking, and the same idea had hit other people, evidently, because I found a couple of invitations in my room when I came home. Would I help do the Christmas broadcast? Would I go to see the War Orphans' Home on the day Madame distributed presents? Would I join the hostel party on Christmas Eve? There was more holiday spirit up here in the Chinese mountains than we had floating about in the foreign settlement of Shanghai. China's government really worked at being Christian; I found that out. I worked with them that year.

It was a queer time for most of us, the winter of the phony war. Our life in Chungking was full of the British. Although the city was a makeshift capital, it really was the national capital, and the English were behaving accordingly. They had nipped in ahead of everyone and got hold of the best house in town for their embassy. It was halfway between the downtown district of the city where the banks were and the part we lived in, where the two hostels and the Generalissimo's residence formed a nucleus for the rest of the circle of government people. I found some old friends among the British. The Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, was to arrive soon, after one of his periodic visits to Shanghai. They were all excited because this time he would bring his wife, the “pocket Venus” whose exquisite miniature beauty had stirred up the diplomatic circles of the coast towns. Among all of the men I saw most of Morgan Crofton because he lived at the hostel. Morgan was one of the decoders, a young man who was always called “amusing” because he puzzled and bothered people, and they didn't know what else to do about him.

Like Charles, Morgan had written home and asked the authorities to take him out of China and let him get into the war, which as everyone knew was in Europe on the Continent, and not in the East, no matter what they said. He fretted his heart out in Chungking. He used to tell me about it when we walked over toward the embassy in the morning, his fat fox terrier running ahead of us and sniffing at the mud. Morgan had an abrupt manner and his sense of humor was violent and sudden, so that old codgers took a dislike to him, but he was really a Tory and his political beliefs were those of old codgers in clubs. He defended Chamberlain; we had a lot of hearty fights over that. He thought Churchill admirable in many ways, but dangerous. He had been in the Army in India, and bitterly regretted having resigned. If he hadn't resigned, he said, if he hadn't taken this footling job, he would be in the war where he belonged and no Foreign Office clerk could tell him nonsense about being needed more where he was. … All the young men from England were talking that way and feeling that way in the winter of 1939, out in the Orient. So many of them wrote letters home asking for transfer that the War Office lost patience and sent a mimeographed reply, reminding them acidly that Whitehall could not devote all its time to sending individual no's out to China and Malaya and Japan.

Except for the British, who had said flatly that they wanted to be in the town itself and never mind the bombing, the diplomats chose to live in the “safety zone” over across the Yangtze, on the South Bank. They found more room there and a neighborhood of more familiar quality. There was a very little town and most of the houses that amounted to anything had been built in the past, in the spacious days of peaceful trade. All the big foreign companies were represented there: Standard Oil, and Texaco, and Jardine's, and all the rest. One of the best was the APC, the Asiatic Petroleum Company, which was British. Some of these places were estates rather than houses. The APC House, which I was to know very well later on, had a large plot of mountainous ground enclosed by a wall and several wire fences, and there were two good-sized dwelling houses in the compound. Farther back in the hills, or upriver on what was known as the “Second Range,” there were more and more houses built by foreigners and lived in by foreigners, mostly missionaries of one faith or another. Houses were at such a premium that people went a long distance from town to find them. The British embassy had its own launch to call for its people on the South Bank every morning and take them back at night. Those who could do it, like the tall young American consul who lived on the Second Range, walked to work in the morning and back at night — he was lucky because his office was on the South Bank too, but it was an incredibly long and steep walk. A lot of people kept their private chairs for the journey. A few kept ponies, but riding a pony to work was just as complicated as you would expect. The groom had to come along too, on his pony, and he had to look after it while you were in your office, or take it home again for the day and bring it at night, and the whole thing was much too elaborate for anyone who had an impatient nature.

Even the journey between the North and South Banks was too much for me with my impatient nature to face very often. Maya Rodeivitch dashed across the river every week end, and less enthusiastic souls went on Sunday for lunch, but I went protestingly, once in a very long while. You could go by day in the ferry, a ramshackle motorboat whose destinations on the riverside varied with the level of the water. Sometimes when the river was low the journey was doubly dangerous because of rocks that were exposed, and because of the increased fury of the current. It was never a safe journey at the best of times. But when the ferries were too full, or when it was late at night and they weren't running, you could hire a small boat, and that was really perilous. The boatmen hauled and toiled and poled in the mud until they were well upstream on the jumping-off side, then they poled themselves out toward the middle and let go, and as the boat went dancing and bobbing downriver they aimed madly to get across before it was too late. Sometimes they did miss and you had a long time poling or walking back on the other bank. It is an exasperating and a fearsome thing, that river. I knew a few people who were capsized and who saved themselves. I know another man who didn't survive the spring floods when his boat turned over. Now that I think back on it I am afraid, but at the time we didn't think much about natural dangers. We saved up our emotions for air raids.

I made the journey that winter only when I intended to spend some days with the Endicotts, and they didn't live on what we knew as the South Bank at all; they were on the other side of the river, true enough, but a long way downstream, at a tiny village that was noted only for their own house and the school where Jim Endicott had taught for many years. I met them through Mme. Chiang. Just about Christmas time — I forget if it was before or after the holiday itself — Holly's office sent me out on a day's journey to a school.

Jim Endicott was one of the men who came along with Mme. Chiang after we were deposited in the first classroom, waiting for the festivities to start. He acted as a guide during the exercises, whispering translations to me and now and then writing some explanation on an old envelope.

I talked to him a little on the long drive back, but we didn't really get acquainted until a few days later, when I was beginning to grow weary of trotting after Madame to ceremony after ceremony. How do public figures stand it? I have never been able to understand what keeps them going, for surely all emotional reactions disappear after the first few hours of oratory that is all alike? As an onlooker I lost all interest after a week of it, and vowed to go on with this program only when it would seem violently rude to refuse. That wasn't the sort of book I wanted to write. All Holly's office was writing that sort of eulogistic thing every day, and maybe it helped China and maybe it didn't, but I didn't intend to add to the bulk of such literature. I was muttering to myself as I staggered off the campus of the university grounds where poor Madame had just made her nth speech to a graduating class of girls, and Jim caught up with me, taking enormous strides with his long legs, and said:

“Just what is it you're doing here? I haven't got it straight.”

It happened that that day I had overheard a passage between Madame and this Endicott which caught my attention. He was arguing with her. That was something worth eavesdropping on — a man, a European (to use our clumsy circumlocution for “white”) arguing with Madame, disagreeing with her! The subject was the new Youth Movement among the adolescent school children of Chungking, and Endicott maintained that they should not be called on to take an oath of allegiance en masse, or rather in the presence of all the government officials who had gathered to watch this planned ceremony. “You are not giving them a choice,” said Endicott.