China to Me (27 page)

“Why isn't Zau here,” he demanded abruptly, “taking care of you?”

“He didn't know I would have to stay so long,” I said.

“But he should be living here,” said Ma Ping-ho. “The time for Shanghai is past.”

It was very much what I felt myself. “You know the Chinese,” I argued. “They don't give up their homes as easily as we do.”

“I am Chinese,” snapped Ma, and I was silent. Then he went on talking in an incoherent way. He said that we were destined for each other. He didn't talk at all about love in the ordinary way; I should have begun screaming, I think, if he had; but the burden of his argument was that he, Ma Ping-ho, by virtue of his own emotional history, was obviously my mate. We were both pilgrims to the shrine of China, as it were, forerunners of mankind's new caravansary. Exalted, his cheeks bright red, he talked on and on, and I forgot to be detached and wise and all-understanding. I was tired and nonplussed and a little frightened.

“Now,” I said as he paused, “I'm going back.”

Oh no, said Ma. I was not going back. I was never going back. What was the sense of that? We were going on, and on, and on. We were going straight along that road into the future, and it was time to be starting. He held out his hand to help me up so that we could continue the journey. I was wearing woven sandals and my feet hurt. Vexed and hungry, I argued with Ma more emphatically than was wise. His mood changed and he became ugly, but after a bit, when I insisted on calling a ricksha coolie, he capitulated. It was miraculous luck that I should have sighted a coolie at all, out there in the country, and Ma admitted that Providence seemed to be in favor of my return to town. I rode back at a good clip, and he ran alongside the ricksha, his long bony body enveloped in a cloud of dust. How he did it I don't know, but he kept up with us all the way to the corner of the street where the hostel was.

I got rid of him at the door and went to my own room in a bad state of nerves. I had missed out on lunch.

After that I managed to avoid seeing Ma any more. Unfortunately he retained an acute awareness of me. One evening at the Press Hostel Teddy happened to speak of me. I don't know what he said, and whatever it was, he assured me later, was trivial, something like “Mickey says she hasn't had any mail for a month.” Anyway, much to the public alarm and amazement, Ma leaped to his feet and slapped Teddy lightly on the cheek.

“You have insulted the woman I love,” he said, shaking with passion. “You have spoken her name. I challenge you to a duel,” or words to that effect. Teddy was really his closest friend among the foreigners, and his champion to boot. It was an awkward and painful situation. Holly smoothed it over for the time being, and gave Ma some work out of town so that he might calm down at leisure. Holly was worried, though, and displeased with me, which was natural but unfair. He didn't know what I had been up to with his difficult protégé, but he suspected the worst.

Teddy hurried over to make his report to me and to find out what had been going on. “Did you correspond with Ma?” he demanded.

“Certainly I did,” I said. “So what?”

He moaned. “Oh, you shouldn't. … He might show those letters around,” he said. “He isn't responsible.”

“But there's nothing to show,” I said. “Let him show them if he likes. What's the matter with you, Teddy?”

Teddy, an innocent boy in spite of all his ambitions, had the hot and easily fired imagination of all innocent boys. He stared at me with moist bright eyes. “Did you make love with him?” he persisted.

“Either get out of here, Teddy,” I said, “or talk about something that makes sense. Have you ever looked at his teeth?”

Teddy is very difficult to convince away from something he hopes is true. We settled down to a half hour of poetry. I always enjoyed those sessions because Teddy let me read aloud as much as I liked, and what is more, he listened. But I still felt ruffled. I was getting just a bit fed up with Chungking.

One day toward the end of March I found myself being jolted out of the routine forever. At least I thought so then. Donald telephoned me and told me he was leaving town. I had to coax and tease him a bit before he would go any further, but at last I elicited the information that Mme. Chiang, too, was leaving town. Anybody else would have put it the other way around — Madame was going and so, therefore, was Donald — but that wasn't his way. For some months she had been hinting that she would give in to Sister Ai-ling's pleading and go down to Hong Kong for a visit, but she had put it off again and again. When it wasn't a group of her girls graduating and needing her to make a speech it was a misgiving that she had no right to take time off from the rigors of war, when all the soldiers were suffering so. It was the state of her teeth that settled matters. Other doctors could be brought up to Chungking to do their stuff, like Dr. Harry Talbot — Harry had so impressed Madame by his treatment of her sinus that she made him operate on practically everybody in the family before he went back to Hong Kong. There wasn't a Soong sinus infection left in Chungking. But dentists were different. They need their gadgets and their offices. Mme. Chiang couldn't put it off any longer, unless she was willing to cast herself on the mercies of a Chungking dentist, and she wasn't. She was particular about her teeth and very wisely didn't trust British dentists either, but imported an American from Shanghai to meet her halfway.

“That's disturbing news for me,” I said very crossly. “Here I am and she goes and runs out on me. What am I supposed to do now?”

“There is nothing to prevent you copying me,” said Donald blithely. “I have been given to understand that an ordinary passenger plane, leaving at about the same time as Madame's, has one place still available for a passenger.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” he said. “I didn't forget you, as you can see. But don't talk about this to anybody. There's always a good deal of unofficial interest when Madame takes a trip by plane.”

“Is it possible that she's going to America?” I demanded. That was a hardy perennial rumor, and it had many guises whenever it appeared. “If so, will I be permitted to go along? If so —— ”

“She's going to Hong Kong, so far as I know,” said Donald, “and that's all. Now you'd better go and pack.”

You don't do much packing when you leave Chungking. There is an unwritten law which has never been broken by anyone, to my knowledge, except Wen Yuan-ning, and that is never to take anything away from the capital which can be used by anybody remaining there. It is almost impossible to get clothes and toilet articles up to Chungking for the market, because airplane transportation is the only method they have for getting supplies, and the available airplane space is needed for much more important things. A dress which means very little to a woman in Hong Kong or India makes all the difference in the world to a woman in Chungking. The same goes for men's clothes, shirts and ties and braces and shoes, all those things. Departing journalists and oil men hold “potlatches” in their rooms when they go, and I did the same.

There were rules already laid down for my clothes. Most of them had been bespoken long since. I put aside those for Corin and those for Maya. I made as fair a division as possible of my few drops of perfume. I handed out the toothpaste, the stockings, the hats. Nobody seemed interested in my padded gown and I kept that, but even my Chinese mink coat was eagerly snapped up by Corin, though it was so old and badly tanned that the fur kept splitting.

I had left, when this was finished, my typewriter, the clothes I was wearing, my toothbrush, and my hairbrush and comb. I had still another toothbrush, but Kuo Ping-chia kept that. He said he could boil it and use it for a long time. Foreign-made toothbrushes were hard to get. I even left my empty luggage except for one faithful square hatbox which has been with me for twelve years and has never yet carried a hat. Fenn Lynch was invaluable on occasions like this because he had a car and government petrol. He always took people down to the plane. We got there in ample time, with Corin and Ping-chia, my faithful allies, accompanying me as far as they could. The airfield, that famous battered strip of sandspit, was Fenn's own stamping ground and he careered happily around it, introducing me to Woody, the pilot, and talking to everybody. Ping-chia shook hands vigorously. Corin cried. Fenn, as the plane roared off, saluted dramatically. It was all quite poignant, because I thought that I would never be back again.

“And I'm sorry about that, too,” I said to myself, flattening my nose against the window to look my last at the roofless fire-whitened houses of the old city, and the rapids where the rivers ran together at the point of the flatiron. “It's quite a place, Chungking is. How I hate to leave Corin! She didn't cry because I was leaving; she cried because she is staying behind. Can't I dig her out of there before she melts into the fog entirely? Get her a job or a man or something? Can anyone make up for someone else's deficient vitality? Oh, stop it, Emily Hahn; you can't manage other people. Look what happened to you with Ma Ping-ho.”

The trip grew a little rough, and the Chinese were noisily sick. They often are, on planes, because they think it is expected of them. One thing led to another and finally I found myself, very much out of character because I am not mechanically minded, piloting the plane with Woody keeping a sharp eye on my technique. It couldn't have been flawless work, for the manager back in the passengers' compartment noticed the difference right away. He wrote us a note, commenting on the shakiness of the plane since I had taken over, but I sat up there feeling important and doing what Woody told me to do until we reached Hong Kong, after dark.

How lovely it looked! We had not gone in for blackouts in Chungking as yet, but in retrospect I seemed to have been living in darkness. Hong Kong's red and blue neon lights and the brilliant yellow illumination all along the face of the Peak grew more and more beautiful as we circled around, lower and lower. It had been a foggy day but as soon as we dropped lower than the clouds the air seemed crystal-clear.

“I've been breathing fog and mist for more than three months,” I said joyfully to Woody. “Now I can live again.”

“Going to stay here long?” he asked.

“No, just long enough to finish up the book,” I said. “Then back to Shanghai and my gibbons.”

“That'll be nice.”

Little Billie Lee, the faithful secretary of T'ien Hsia, had been clamoring for me to keep an old promise and stay in her flat for as long as I could spare the time. It was late in the evening when I got there. With a Eurasian girl named Mavis Ming Billie occupied a ground-floor flat of four rooms, out in Happy Valley.

Happy Valley, out where the racecourse is, strikes a pleasant sort of average for white-collar workers and bachelor girls like Billie. She could get in to work on the tram or the bus. She could afford one servant, an amah who did all the work of the house for seventeen dollars a month. She shared expenses with Mavis and with any third girl they happened to get to help out with the household; at the moment they were alone.

Billie did practically all of the real work that was done at T'ien Hsia, lived in a state of suspended exasperation with Alice Chow, and saved a little bit out of her ridiculous salary every month. Mavis, a stenographer for the Co-ops, had an absorbing and important hobby: she conducted a gymnasium class which had headquarters in England and was known as the “Women's League of Health and Beauty.” Theoretically Mavis should have been able to live on her profits from the League, but it hadn't worked out very well. The pure white ladies of the town didn't take her seriously because she was Eurasian, even though they were obsessed with reducing, and the Eurasian girls couldn't pay very well for their classes. So Mavis divided her labors, and she too put by a little money every month.

I sat down on my bed. “Now tell me about you,” I invited. “What is all this about getting married?”

“Yes,” said Billie, blushing. “Last December it was, soon after you went to Chungking. You met him last summer at the beach — remember? Paddy Gill. He's a soldier.”

I remembered him. He was an Irishman, prematurely baldish. A sergeant or something, I recalled.

“It's a good thing Mamma died last year,” said Billie. “It would have been an awful shock to her, me marrying a soldier. We don't think much of soldiers in our family. But after the war Paddy is going to get out of the Army, and he was going to be sent away soon, and he had been after me for more than a year, and I wouldn't have been happy marrying a Chinese. I'm too foreign in my ways. So we were married secretly. You were the very first one I told, honestly, Mickey.”

I yawned widely. “I don't mind soldiers myself,” I said. “How are the Boxers getting along, speaking of soldiers?”

“Oh, all right, I guess. Mrs. Boxer's been helping out at the Co-operative office, Mavis says. Mavis says she isn't much help though; she doesn't come in regularly. It's always that way with volunteer help, and these society ladies don't understand how to do regular work, I suppose.”

The girls showed me around the bathroom and left me to my accumulated letters. Vaguely I noticed that Billie was getting rather thick around the waist. Still, in wartime and with these sudden marriages, those things were likely to happen. I would wait until she talked about it herself. I yawned again and started to undress.

Billie poked her head in the door. “I forgot to tell you,” she said, “that this neighborhood is full of sneak thieves. Don't leave anything near the window where they can reach it through the bars. Mavis and I keep hockey sticks by our beds just in case anything happens: I lost a dress last week. Blue taffeta it was, and it cost eighty dollars: I was just sick. They use long poles with hooks on them. We haven't enough police in Hong Kong, you know, now that the town is so full of refugees. Well, good night.”