China to Me (25 page)

I forget just who detailed him to keep an eye on me, to help me when I was stumped for information or paper or typewriter supplies. I am very grateful, whoever thought of it. Without Ping-chia's help I should have taken a much longer time with my manuscript. Although he is ambitious and a hard worker, he was at loose ends just then and he found time to call on me at the hostel every day. He was paying his first call that day of the raid, and as we sat wearily through the long, long hours underground he and I began to discuss Chinese music. Now and then our discussion was punctuated by a bomb, far off on the airfield.

Ping-chia looks more like a Latin American than a Chinese. He is tall and broad-shouldered and he wears his Western clothes carefully. But this exterior is deceptive, for in his heart he dislikes the West and loves the classic arts of China. Not all those years at Cambridge could spoil his passion for the music and opera of his native land. When he was living in Hankow, teaching history at the university, he knew every little place in town where singsong girls gave selections from the old plays. He couldn't tell, himself, if it was the girls that attracted him or the songs. When he found out that I was interested in the custom, so strange to our Western minds, that educates and encourages prostitutes and singsong girls to learn classic opera, he poured out his heart.

“I do a little singing myself,” he admitted. “In Nanking we gave many shows, and even in Hankow while the government paused there we put on one play, though I believe the authorities consider it frivolous and wrong to pay attention to music while we are fighting this war.”

That was another interesting difference between our civilizations. Imagine Parliament or the Senate condemning grand opera because there is a war on! But in China the stage, being a pleasure, is naturally looked on as a frivolity as well. Those productions you used to hear so much about, those presentations of Met Lan-fang, are considered by the dour authorities of the New Life Movement to be bathed in the same light we would shed on the latest Cole Porter show.

“Can you sing?” demanded Ping-chia eagerly. “Can you sing Chinese opera?”

“No,” I admitted. “I haven't even seen many of the plays. Back in Shanghai Sinmay wouldn't go to the theater unless there was something extra-special. And of course in Shanghai we didn't have the best Peking players very often.”

“But you did,” said Ping-chia. “Shanghai is a wonderful city for the theater. I have heard some of the best plays produced in Shanghai. Have you heard any of the famous girl performers? Have you heard Lily Lee? She is really good.”

Lily Lee! I remembered suddenly a girl Sinmay had brought to my house one afternoon, with a story of squandered fortunes. I had seen Lily again in Hong Kong. I told Ping-chia about it.

“We had dinner at Lily's house,” I explained. “She's improved wonderfully in her English, hasn't she?”

He looked mysterious. “There was a reason for that,” he said.

“Oh, I know.” It was a romantic story that Lily had told me at the dinner table that night, while Sinmay drank rice wine and chattered with friends. She had fallen in love with an American she met in Hankow. After the latest exodus she had gone up to Chungking to see him. Followed a few weeks of loving bliss, and then she started back to Hong Kong, her plane ticket in her pocket, going in a sedan chair down to the riverbank, as befitted a great lady and famous artiste. But Lily Lee had never reached the plane. Chinese plain-clothes men took command of her chair coolies before she entered the airfield, and Lily was whisked off to prison for “questioning.” She stayed in jail for five months without trial, while the young American made frantic endeavors to get her out. The government was very suspicious of Lily, and accused her outright of being a spy. As to what sort of spy, they were rather vague. I suppose they thought she had been planted by the Japs, and then her fondness for the foreigner was not so good, either.

“I was not uncomfortable,” Lily admitted. “But one bad old official, he pretended to set me free, and when I realized what it was all about I was living in his house. He wanted me to live with him, to be his concubine, and when I would not they put me back into the jail. I was never tried at all. My boy friend was very good about it. After I got out of jail, after I came to Hong Kong, he lost his job. I am going to America to marry him.”

I thought of all this while I talked to Ping-chia, and he nodded excitedly several times.

“That is it. Yes, it is that Lily,” he said. “I was very much in love with her in Hankow at just the same time, before she was arrested. It began one evening when there was a moon. We had met during rehearsals of a play, and that night Lily came to my garden and serenaded me. Out there, under the moon, she sang to me. …”

“You must have been much distressed, then, when she was put into prison after the government moved up here?”

Ping-chia sighed. “She wrote to me from the prison,” he admitted. “She sent me a Christmas card. But of course I dared not answer.”

“Whyever not?”

His big brown eyes looked startled. “Why, they would have put me in jail!” he cried. “I would have been implicated! … She was a beautiful girl, Lily was. I loved her very much.”

In the course of the air raid he decided to teach me a Chinese song. When he spoke of songs he did not, of course, mean the amusing little jingles that Sinmay taught me when we were playing with his children in his Shanghai house. Those songs, like Japanese songs, were not unlike our own; they had a familiar rhythm and they rhymed after their own fashion. So too did the poems that my teacher taught me to chant, like little children learning their first characters at school. We had made translations of English nursery rhymes, and often when we went to the movies I would see how our simple American popular melodies caught on with the Chinese. “Oh, Susanna” was such a success in China that Sinmay insisted it was originally Chinese. Sometimes our songs puzzle them, especially the ones in two or three parts. They don't understand harmony until they grow familiar with it through us. Ping-chia's songs, however, were completely different. They were dramatic monologues or dialogues; the music of the song depended completely on the words. Each word had to be sung in a certain way, following a pattern of music that has been set down rigidly for centuries. You cannot fit other words to the music. Words and music are the same thing, inalterably tied together. Each artist has his own interpretation of the song and there are many subtle changes from one performance to another. All this Ping-chia tried to tell me, down in the dugout.

“I will teach you a sympathetic one,” he decided enthusiastically. “We will now sing ‘Ma Tso' — ‘Scolding in the Palace.' It is a very popular song. I will tell you first what the words mean. The speaker is a queen, very angry with her stepson because he has poisoned her husband, the king. …” He went on and on, telling one of the familiar old stories of blood and intrigue. Then he began singing.

At first, though I tried politely to follow him and to sing the same notes, I confess I felt very silly. It meant nothing to me. It sounded like caterwauling. Ping-chia's face looked simply funny in the dim light of the cave, and it was hard to believe that anyone could get aesthetic pleasure from those discordant, thin sounds. Then, after I had gone through it with him two or three times, the miracle happened, the miracle that has made such a difference to me, ever since. I don't know what it was. There was a sort of click in my mind; my ears opened. I liked it. It made sense. It had melody. I remembered it. After that, whenever I heard Chinese music it made sense and I liked it. And belatedly I recalled a scene in the Congo, on the broad veranda of the African house, when we played records on the little gramophone of an evening. We had a collection of songs from all over the world, and I used to marvel at the Negroes because they actually liked the Chinese records best. Those black men with their wonderful voices, and their songs that are the forerunners of our own melodies, those black men loved Chinese opera. They would crowd around the machine and listen raptly, and when the record came to an end they would beg for repetitions. Now I understood. I opened my mouth and sang lustily. The time hastened as we sang over and over, Ping-chia and I, “Scolding in the Palace.” …

“Mickey, for God's sake!” It was Peggy Durdin speaking. She had obviously failed to follow me into the new realms I was discovering.

“I say so too,” grumbled Maya.

“Do you mind changing the record?” demanded Ed Pawley, the usually genial plane manufacturer from Loiwing.

“We wouldn't mind,” they all chimed in, “if it were real music you people were singing, but this stuff — a joke's a joke.”

Astonished, I glanced at Ping-chia. “Never mind,” he said. “We know. We can practice some more after the raid.”

The All Clear sounded and we hurried up the steps into the fresh air.

Mail came very irregularly from the outside world, especially mine. Because of the time lag everywhere in mail delivery my family in America continued for a long time to write me in Shanghai, and the letters I did receive came in sudden quantities, after long silences, from the Shanghai house, with a covering note, usually, from Sinmay. I had been so long in the rigorous, comfortless atmosphere of Szechuan that these letters came as rather a shock. Sinmay was indulging in one of his bad moods, and it went on and on, lasting from one mail delivery to the next, until I found myself growing very irritable with him.

To begin with, he had somehow forgotten, from the sound of the correspondence, why I had gone to Chungking at all. In Shanghai he had been eagerly co-operative. Without him I could never have gotten into contact with the Soongs. Later he had been eager to dig up local color for me, and to find people who could give me those trifling remembrances of the Soong family that make all the difference in a biography. Even when I packed to come away on this, the most important trip of all, he had been charmingly helpful. It was a disappointment to me that he refused to come along.

“It will cost too much,” he had argued, “and you won't be gone such a long time as all that. If I stay here you won't be tempted to stay so long.”

“It will be worth the money,” I insisted with sincerity. “How can I get along without an interpreter? I always thought you meant to come with me. I'm afraid to go without you. China isn't like Europe.”

“No, no, don't be afraid. You are all right now. I couldn't leave my press for such a long period of time, and really, it is too expensive,” he said with finality. “I cannot do it. It I were to go to Chungking, besides, the Japanese would know it and they would make trouble for Zoa.”

The last argument convinced me. Still, with the memory of that conversation fresh in my ears, I thought it unfair of Sinmay to take the attitude he now maintained, which was that I was far away in one of the gayer of the nation's capitals, dancing and drinking and whiling my life away generally, while he kept the home fires burning in faithful loneliness. Never did he mention the book. His letters seemed to have been written with an eye to posterity, and they drew a stark, simple, unlovely picture of a sort of forsaken merman. Sinmay was cuddling a broken heart. Why, he wanted to know, wasn't I hurrying back? What was the attraction in the hills of Szechuan? He had had a dreadful dream, he said, on Christmas Eve. He was sure I had found my true love at last. There could be no doubt about it; plunged again into the world which I forswore for his sake, I had forgotten all about Shanghai and my Chinese family.

“I have been hearing things,” he said darkly. It was an old one and I recognized it, but just the same I was a little hurt. I had been looking on myself in quite a different and much more heroic light. I had thought of myself as quite a he-woman, carving out a career against tremendous odds.

Then too, Sinmay wasn't getting on very well with the German refugee, who for a year had been living unobtrusively in my house. “Your housekeeper,” as he called him, was stirring up trouble with the servants and had vowed a vow to get rid of my inoffensive old amah. Wolf wasn't co-operating in the liaison which had always flourished between the two households. They were squabbling over my car, and they were squabbling over my money. I had left a certain amount, calculated to cover housekeeping expenses and something more for Sinmay, because Sinmay was always needing money unexpectedly; now there wasn't enough. And on top of all these little pinpricks, they weren't following my directions about those new gibbons. You remember the gibbons? The pet shop had promised me a pair of young ones, but they hadn't arrived when I left. Now, evidently, they were there and Sinmay had followed my instructions by going to inspect them, but he was disobeying me. I had agreed on a price. Well, Sinmay thought I had agreed on too large a price and he was trying to beat the pet-shop man down.

I was obsessed during those days with the notion, no doubt erroneous, that the whole world wanted my gibbons. I had horrid visions of a host of people creeping up behind Sinmay and snatching those gibbons out from under his nose. I need not have worried, and I know it now, having had a certain amount of experience in trying to dispose of gibbons, but in those days I was not so wise. I talked all over the hostel about my gibbons. I cursed Sinmay. I sent telegrams, once every day:

buy gibbons immediately.

do not haggle comma buy gibbons.

buy apes do it now.

have you bought gibbons?

received letter dated fourteenth no mention gibbons have you bought?

And then at last came the answer, fiendishly worded:

gibbons bought.

Could anything be more maddening? What did the man mean? Had he bought the gibbons at last, or had somebody else done what I so greatly feared, and sneaked in and bought them before Sinmay got there? It took some weeks to get the proper answer, and I was furious long before that. All was well and the gibbons were even then making a happy mess of my back bedroom, but I didn't know it. All I knew was that Sinmay kept on asking for more money. It was not a request calculated to soothe my angry breast.