China to Me (24 page)

“They aren't forced to do it,” Madame countered quickly.

“Is any child going to refuse under such public pressure?” he asked.

“No, perhaps not. But no child is told he must swear; no child is penalized for refusing. The question doesn't come up, anyway. They all want to take the oath.” Madame spoke sharply, but without surprise. She seemed to be used to this man's abrupt methods.

“It's like fascism,” said Endicott. “There's no value in it. There's no individual thought.”

The argument tailed off, interrupted by the demands of the ceremony, but my curiosity and admiration were whetted. Endicott, he explained to me now as we walked toward the road, was one of the many “advisers,” their desire for which makes the government of China so peculiarly wistful. He had been asked to take the place of a man named Shepherd who had been the original “missionary adviser” to Mme. Chiang. “Think of the opportunities!” said everybody. But he wasn't the man for it, Endicott admitted. He wasn't tactful. He often irritated Madame; he couldn't help it. When he saw things going wrong he had to argue, and as a man with leftist tendencies be was always seeing things go wrong.

You can tell from as much of my book as I have already written that I belong to that class which is instinctively and traditionally inimical to missionaries. The chief reason can be expressed in a simple phrase that always creeps into discussions on the subject: “Why don't they stay home and keep their noses out of other people's beliefs?” Actually that's a shallow and foolish question, and any wide-awake opponent could answer it a dozen ways, all satisfactory. Just the same I do feel that way about missionaries, that way and much more than that. Jim Endicott was the first one I met who was likable. I was to meet many more of the species, medical and teaching missionaries, and my liking of them has certainly removed the hysterical and unreasonable part of my objection to missions, whatever may remain of my more rational misgivings. Nowadays I don't feel called on to act the missionary whenever I meet a missionary. I don't agree with him, usually, but I don't want to kill him, or convert him. I live and let live, and the beginning of this broad-mindedness in my make-up, the wedge that opened the door, was the Endicott couple.

I remember how they startled me, Jim and Mary, the first day I accepted a kind invitation from them and settled down to work in their attic. They lived an intensely domestic life, with four children just growing up, following a regular routine which Mary supplied pretty much by herself because of Jim's extracurricular duties over on the other side, as Madame's adviser.

Before they administered that shock they had already, quite unconsciously, given my convictions a pretty good shaking up. “If these people weren't missionaries,” I kept telling myself, “I would put them down for any married couple in a university town. I've spent hundreds of hours of my life with people just like this.

“Their personalities should have nothing to do with your judgment of their usefulness,” I told myself severely on the first evening, after I had gone up to bed. “Yes, so you feel at home with them. Yes, so they are intelligent in just the fashion you like, and they discuss matters in just the manner you prefer your discussions. Yes, so this is a charming room and their children are charming children, and the house is a nice shabby homelike honest house. You have seen nothing of the things that sickened you in the African missionary's house that one time you had to accept mission hospitality, where half a dozen underpaid Negroes were forced to work and make luxury for a spoiled, lowbred family of whites. No one but a bigot could accuse the Endicotts of exploiting the Chinese, personally at least. But what of the mission they represent? The actual, factual fallacy of missions still exists, regardless of the charm of the Endicotts.” With that I went to sleep, pathetically grateful for a change from my hostel cot. It was the next morning that they shocked me so.

We were sitting in the attic, their workroom and mine. There was a stove there, an office typewriter, and unlimited copy paper. That morning, though, we didn't do much work. We talked for several hours instead. It was while they were telling me of the university crowd in Chengtu, an hour away by plane, that they began talking, I told them accusingly, in a narrow-minded way.

“You don't think we should disapprove of such behavior?” asked Jim. They had been condemning a man and a woman of the faculty for having an extramarital love affair.

“No, I don't,” I said. “I think it's their own business.”

“But morality,” cried Mary, “surely it's the business of the community!”

“Conventions, if they are true conventions,” urged Jim, “have grown up as they are needed. There is a reason for them.”

“I can't agree,” I said. “Often they are the result of unpleasant jealousies, and are built up in spite and frustration. I feel deeply that we should leave people alone when it comes to sex. And also in regard to God, for a man's god is his own business, just as much as his sex life is his own business. …”

“But it's the same thing,” said Jim and Mary together, in great eagerness. “It's exactly the same thing!”

I was severely shocked. “Really,” I said when I had caught my breath, “do you think that is the sort of thing your sort of person ought to say to my sort?”

I should like, just as a proof to myself that I can write, to give you some idea of Chungking. You must have your own ideas of it, because for a time, for a long time, it was a name headlined in the papers and mentioned in the magazines on almost every page. I stumble over it now in the books I have tried to read all at once now that I am home where I can get books.

The country is soft and green around Chungking. Somewhere I have asserted that China is an ugly, blank, treeless hunk of the world's area. I was talking through my hat. There are many lovely places in China that I hadn't seen when I sounded off like that, and Szechuan is one of them. Szechuan, at least the part I knew, is full of small fierce hills that make you smile and admire them as you do when you are confronted by a brave Pekingese dog. In everything but scale these hills are like the Rockies or the Andes: rugged in shape and running along in lines like ranges. They are thickly covered with trees. I am no botanist, but I was startled when I saw pines and banana palms growing together on a hillside. It is an ordinary sight in Chungking countryside. Szechuan is such a lush, moist, green kind of place that it is exceedingly fertile and has as many as four crops in one year.

But for all this greenery there is no joyful dancing of light and shadow, because of the fog which keeps the Japanese away, year after year, except for two or three midsummer months. And the city itself, built on a slice of land shaped like a flatiron or a piece of pie, is nothing to rejoice over. I used to hear about it before the Incident when I lived in Shanghai like all the other tenderfeet. Chungking was that town up at the other end of the Yangtze where the gunboats landed after they had gone through the Gorges. Chungking was a Godforsaken hole with a club in it and nothing whatever to do there but drink, ride funny little ponies up and down the hills, and play tennis wherever you could find a piece of ground level enough for a court.

Well, the war changed all that. Suddenly Chungking was much too big for itself. First came the august Chinese Government, and they filled the houses and populated the streets with strange, alarming people and wickedly beautiful women. Then came everyone else from all over the world. The native Szechuanese is undersized and pale and lacking in vitamins, and he looked with grave suspicion at all this beauty and fashion. Also, he is not a keen businessman. The business methods of the newcomers annoyed him, and jostled him, and fed him up. The rest of China is full of smiling people, but in Szechuan they pause in their work to look at you sourly, or they don't pause at all when you come by. The native costume includes a kind of towel twisted around the head, and I used to feel that I was in a hospital ward of convalescents, none of whom was happy.

Chungking. What does the name evoke in my mind? Air raids. Oranges. Szechuan food, good, full of strong pepper, probably to warm up the blood on the cold, wet, muddy days that come so often. Air always so moist as almost to drip. Houses either newly built of cards or old ramshackle palaces, damp and chilly. I can remember outings in the country when we rode pony-back and went swimming in a cold pool and came back merry and actually sunburnt, but they were exceptional. Yet Chungking is a place of flowers. You can have roses in your garden all the year round. I am not kind in my description of the rocky city, but I liked it. I was notorious in the foreign community for liking it. I suppose I liked it in spite of everything, because it was full of Chinese.

Chapter 20

It was not included in my plans that I experience an air raid during my visit to the capital. (And incidentally, it is high time that I get off my chest the inevitable expression we all use about Chungking: “the city built on rock.” Something about the air-raid tunnels brings that out, sooner or later, with every visitor.) As I figured it, the Japanese stayed away from the place every year from September until late April or May. Only in the summer months did the milky, subdued radiance we knew as Chungking daylight become strong enough to show up the earth to Japanese bombardiers. That, as no doubt you know already, is why Chungking was chosen as the capital for refugees in the first place. In the second place, it is the ideal spot of the world's surface for air-raid tunnels. It's all solid rock, with enough steep hillsides to cut down the necessary engineering to a minimum. When I arrived the Chungking Hostel was just beginning to appreciate its newest possession, a private dugout with two entrances, according to all the latest rules for such hidey-holes. We discovered much later that it wasn't a good dugout at all. It was too shallow and the roof was not thick enough to sustain a direct hit. In the late months of 1939, though, we weren't yet tunnel experts, and we were very proud of our private one.

It wasn't quite finished. I was taken on a tour of inspection by Su-lin Young, the glamorous hostel hostess, and she showed me a pile of wooden struts which were destined to be put in place later on, to help hold up the roof. We crept down a long staircase chopped out of rock, and at the dark dank bottom our electric torches showed us an impressive cavern with benches and folding chairs waiting in rows for the hostel public, and several black puddles of wicked-looking water which had seeped through the walls. Su-lin told me what the whole affair cost; I have forgotten it, but it was an impressive figure, and somehow that bit of information made me feel even safer while I was below ground level.

Well, the very next day we had occasion to use the place officially. I was idling around in the lounge. I had put my portable typewriter on a desk, intending to write up a few notes, and the room at ten o'clock in the morning was filling up with hostel guests in search of warmth and company, when all of a sudden a loud, rude noise filled the air. We all know now what it sounds like, but it was my first air-raid alarm, for we hadn't run to such modern appliances during the Shanghai Incident.

“Wooooooo, wooooooo, wooooooo,” sang the siren.

I swallowed hard and looked inquiringly at a man near by. “That's it,” he said. “Maybe practice, maybe not. It's an unusually bright day for the season.”

And it was; it was definitely possible, that day, to see ahead of you for as much as fifty paces. We asked the clerk, though, just to make sure. “No practice scheduled for today that I know of,” he admitted. “It must be them.”

Corin Bernfelt suddenly appeared, at least an hour earlier than she usually woke up. Corin slept an awful lot in order to save money which she would otherwise spend on breakfast, and which she couldn't spare out of her Co-op salary. Salaries in these organizations are always inadequate. She was an old hand at air raids. “Collect whatever papers you are especially fond of,” she directed me, “and bring your typewriter.”

We were led in a giggling, chattering procession down the stone steps and into the cavern. Maya Rodeivitch was already there with Choux, her Alsatian, saying “Tais-toi” to him without the slightest effect, for he had a fine baritone voice and he liked to use it. I could see her pretty well, as we were now lit up with electricity. Whenever Chungking's power station wasn't out of commission they were lavish with their use of it, I will say that for the hostel.

Peggy Durdin sat next to me, expressing disgust and annoyance because her work had been interrupted. She meant more than she said, though; her voice trembled as she talked lightly, and she smoked incessantly until we were told not to use up the air that way. She and Till had twice been bombed out of their flat the first week after they arrived, the bad month of May 1939, when Chungking took such a terrible beating. She hadn't been well since, had lost forty pounds, suffered in the climate, but steadfastly refused to go down to the comparative comfort of Indo-China and wait for her husband on week ends. A lot of people who have had histories like Peg's feel the same way. She was a missionary's child, which didn't stop her wholehearted attacks on the mission system. She was born in China and spoke fluent Mandarin. She had taught school in Shanghai, and naturally her patriotism was divided between America and China. Although there is no logical explanation for the feeling, Peg had a sense of duty toward Chungking. Even I, after a much shorter experience, acquired that sentiment ultimately. I was already slipping under its spell.

We waited down in the cave for about two hours that first time. The planes never flew over at all, but went to the military airfield. I've sat in so many caves so many times since that my memory is a bit clouded about my first raid, but I haven't forgotten P. C. Kuo, or, as I insist upon calling him, Kuo Ping-chia. I hate that way of dubbing Chinese by initials, as it they were so many Rotarians or bank clerks. Ping-chia would make a good bank clerk at that, to look at him. He was introduced to me by Corin, and he started talking eagerly about America, which he knows pretty well because he took a degree at Harvard. Ping-chia always talks eagerly to ladies anyway. He has a romantic nature and freely admits it. But that nature, and his romantic appearance to go with it, has not prevented him from developing his very good brain by a first-rate training in history. I consider him one of the best specimens of young China, as compared with Sinmay and tradition.