China to Me (28 page)

Chapter 23

The girls had a host of friends. They knew all the Eurasian and Chinese and Portuguese secretaries and stenographers in town. Billie kept in touch through her friends with all the downtown firms and all their private business, including the private business of the employees and employers. There were no secrets from me in Hong Kong, no facts or rumors kept from the keen eyes of those little girls, who recounted them all at home. They were also in touch, through Mavis' job at the Co-op office, with the leftist element among the Europeans, and through Billie's job at Wen Yuan-ning's with all the visiting journalists. For girls with their limited background they managed to develop an unusual sense of what was going on in the world outside the tight little colony. They were well ahead of the other stenographers; instead of merely grousing vaguely, as the others did, about the unfair system that kept them underpaid and underfoot, they investigated the whys and wherefores of this state of theirs and saw a future when these injustices might possibly be wiped out. Mavis was fiery and resentful, but Billie was gentle and her feelings were easily hurt. Both of them really discussed the problem; they didn't just blow off steam and then forget about it.

“Write us a book,” urged Mavis. “I'm sick of all the nonsense they print about Eurasians. Write us a good book.”

“It might help,” said Billie hopefully. “I'm thinking about my baby. Paddy says he'll be all right in England, but I don't know.”

Every day I listened to them giggling and chattering and talking on the phone to their friends, and I felt very old and motherly. When breakfast was over and they had rushed off to catch their bus, and the amah had cleared off the table, I would bring out my typewriter and the manuscript and get down to work grimly, for I was at that stage all writers know when I was near the end but just couldn't seem to get there. A whole lot of things stood in the way, chief among them this visit Mme. Chiang was making to her sister. Mme. Sun had joined in the reunion, moving outright to Sassoon Road, and the three of them were having a great time, acting like schoolgirls and sinking all their political differences and even refusing to quarrel — for the time being. It was a nice sight, but it was bad for my book, because even the faithful Mme. Kung was too busy to help me out and answer questions.

Bored and worried and feeling stale, I turned for comfort to society. I didn't know many people in Hong Kong; the young couple who had contributed to Sinmay's distress were back in England on a visit, and Ian had gone to Indo-China. I missed Sinmay acutely but, remembering what had happened before, I dared not press him to come down to Hong Kong, and I didn't want to go back to Shanghai too soon, not before I had wound up the Soong reunion. If it had been possible to telephone Shanghai by long distance this book would have a very different plot from now on. As it was, my only news of Sinmay was a long letter remarkable in content. For five closely typed pages he accused himself of having been a son of a bitch and worse. He went into details and lashed himself into a perfect sweat. He was more than honest in his analysis; he admitted having been lazy, selfish, neglectful, and even spitefully jealous of my capacity for work. As I read it my heart grew more and more light and gooey, like a slowly baking meringue, until I came to the last page. In the final paragraph he asked me for five hundred dollars, quite simply, and then in a postscript added:

“If you want to know why this letter is as it is, it is because I have been reading, How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

Damn the Japanese, who wouldn't let me bring any of my old letters from China. The missive was a perfect description of Sinmay from his exasperating best to his charming worst. I groaned when I finished the last page, because there was no one there who would appreciate it with me, and because I couldn't reform Sinmay, and because I knew that I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't go on with the Zaus. It was beyond my power; we stood on opposite sides of a suddenly swollen river. I felt it, as clearly as I saw myself in the mirror. But still …

“I'll have to go back,” I resolved, “and talk it out face to face. There are things to be arranged; we have to get all disentangled on that printing press and everything. And I owe Sinmay a personal explanation. He won't really care; he doesn't mind anything in the end. It's my loss, not his.” Now that I had made the decision I was unhappy. It was tempting to hope that I could be persuaded to change my mind, back in Shanghai. Sinmay had always persuaded me before. But Chungking had made a difference in all that.

Oh, why couldn't I relax, I wondered, and let things just drift along? Five years earlier I had made up my mind and chosen my place and selected a life and a burial plot in China. Why should I now feel that I must undo everything, smash the edifice I had built, throw myself out onto the road again? I didn't exactly know. I had never before stayed in one place so long, and the familiar routine of starting out fresh did not seem so familiar any more. Nor was it attractive, after all this time.

“Am I going to go on doing this forever?” I demanded, growing frightened. Again I didn't know, but I did know one thing. If I had a child I would stay put, somewhere, somehow. The idea was there, a certainty standing all alone in the middle of my mind, and how was I to guess that it was just as big a mistake as my other ideas?

The only people I knew who were still in town were the Boxers. I telephoned Ursula.

“We must have you to dinner,” she said, planning aloud. “Wait a minute while I look at my book. …”

I felt a little thrill of displeasure at those words. People should not need books to tell them what their dates were, I said to myself severely, fresh as I was from the sparse social atmosphere of Szechuan.

“Here we are,” came her voice again, high and shrill and English. “Can you come alone — that is, are you — er — with anybody this trip?”

I recalled her frightened glances at Sinmay's brown robe whenever he wasn't looking at her. “All alone this time,” I said blithely. There was a definite note of relief in her reply.

“Oh, splendid. Would Thursday suit you?”

Yes, Thursday would suit me fine.

I met Alf Bennett at the Boxers'. Alf was an RAF officer, at once deliberately comic and knowingly glamorous. He had an incredible mustache, curled at the ends like Father's in the Clarence Day play. He had high blood pressure and a growling voice; he roared, and drank, and knew poetry, and fancied himself a picturesque figure, as he was. Picturesque and privileged. Everybody knew Alf, and women were wistful about him, but a little afraid.

He was comparatively new to Hong Kong and to Charles Boxer, but Charles was delighted with his absurd appearance and his capacity for liquor. “Isn't he good?” he kept demanding of me, as in the course of the evening Alf became more and more an ultracivilized buffoon. We all drank heavily: cocktails, wine with the elaborate dinner, and what we wanted afterward.

Well, so there I was launched all over again in Hong Kong, and now I had things to do of an evening. One afternoon Charles decided that I must go to a cocktail party to which “the office” had been invited. An ex-civilian flier who had joined the RAF and given up his job as Moss's assistant was the host, and when I suggested tentatively that he might like to know I was coming Charles scoffed at me.

“Old Max won't care. He invited everybody in town, anyway, and Alf's boss; Max won't dare object even if he wants to,” he said. “Alf will bring you. So long, Emily Hahn.”

Max Oxford had a precise drawl that sounded just like his name. His house in Kowloon was one of the new Spanish-style white stucco cottages that were growing up near the Kai Tak airfield; the Japs loved them later on, and squabbled bitterly over their shining newness, for each officer wanted a cute cottage all to himself. But this was back in 1940 when nobody dreamed of such a situation. The Empire stood solid and firm at Max's cocktail party. There were naval officers there, and willowy young girls, and Moss with his wife, and Ursula, smart and expensive in black, and the two Canavals, doctors, man and wife, that everyone was swearing by. There was Alf getting drunk in one corner, and Charles getting drunk in another. I looked at young Major Boxer, whose graying hair was even more disorderly than usual as he chattered and drank gin. He drank earnestly these days, and whenever he was a little drunk he talked of the end of the Empire.

“Don't you agree, Emily Hahn, that the day of the white man is done out here? Russia or no Russia, we're finished and we don't know it. All this is exactly like the merriment of Rome before the great fall. We are assisting in the death throes of capitalism. It's a very nice party too. Have another, Emily Hahn. Nonsense, you don't have to go yet.”

But he had to go, Ursula insisted; there was a dinner party across the bay and they were late. Alf and I suddenly found ourselves the last of the party. We adjourned to the Peninsula for dinner, drunk and giggling, and in the stately dining room of that dismally expensive hotel we drank sparkling burgundy and waltzed wildly, round and round and round, under the crystal chandeliers.

At last the silence of the Soongs was broken. Mme. Kung sent for me one afternoon to give me a hot tip.

“My sisters have persuaded me to come out to dinner,” she said excitedly. “We are going to dine at the Hongkong Hotel tonight, and I thought that it would be worth seeing us all together. It would be interesting, don't you think? Would you consider it interesting enough for the book? Then get somebody to bring you to the main dining room at eight o'clock, or earlier than that if you want a good table.”

I asked Alf to escort me to the Hongkong Hotel for my scoop. We took the little table next to the pillar just in the middle of the inside room, well in view of the Soongs. They were there, sure enough, with Moss and his wife, Donald, and one of the younger brothers who are always fated to be compared, disparagingly, with T.V.

“So now you have seen them,” said Alf. “Is this all there is to it? We may now feel ourselves free to pollute ourselves and enjoy it, if so.”

Once again we waltzed, round and round and round. Alf was a good dancer. I kicked up my heels: my long skirt flew out in a bell as I whirled.

Over at the Soong table Mme. Sun, sober in black, looked at us appraisingly and said to Mme. Kung, “There's Mickey Hahn. I suppose that's Mickey Mouse she's with?”

The ladies were so tremendously busy with their shopping and their family affairs that I suddenly gave up the whole thing. I didn't fancy the position. I felt increasingly self-conscious, hanging around in a British colony when there didn't seem to be any more material forthcoming from my models. I didn't blame them; they had been admirably patient all along. It must have been irritating to have a person trotting after them everywhere, snapping up crumbs of information, studying their characters as well as their histories. And I wasn't too happy, myself, in Hong Kong; I felt out of things. My place was in Chungking; failing that, in my beloved Shanghai. I would go back there. There wouldn't be much more to be gleaned from the ladies, and we could do it by mail.

I made arrangements speedily, all unaware that Fate, with her eye balefully fixed on me, was lying in wait just around the corner. The ticket was bought for a ship sailing next day. The bags were packed. I didn't wire Sinmay, on purpose. I said good-by to Wen Yuan-ning and the office. I should have called up Mme. Kung to say good-by; it was the natural thing to do, but I was just a mite peeved with Mme. Kung. I was probably a little jealous too. She had deserted me for her sisters. I wrote her a good-by letter and gave it to Alice Chow.

Probably in the back of my mind was the thought that Wen Yuan-ning would report my departure to her anyway. I failed to take note of his manner when I went in to pay my respects to the staff: Wen was sulky with me, resenting my growing friendship with Mme. Kung, with Charles, and “the office.” He felt that the British as well as the Kungs were his own property, and he also had a very conservative, ultra-British feeling against the crude Yankee. He tried to express it one day to the Alexanders, soon after it became evident that Charles preferred my company to his: “Mickey's so pushing,” he complained. So he said good-by to me with secret relief and pleasure, and did not go out of his way to mention my name to the Boxers or to Madame.

Billie and Mavis saw me off. We weren't told just when the ship was sailing, because this was war and such things were better kept secret. That accounts for my error in timing. I had expected to be out on the high seas by three at the latest; Alice, with my letter in her purse, would not arrive at Madame's house for her afternoon work until the same hour. But Madame read the letter and flew to the telephone in an attempt to call me back, for reasons which were evident later on. Nobody answered, and she bundled Alice into a car and sent her direct to the dock. The ship was still there and looked likely to be there for some hours to come. Alice ran up the gangplank, discovered my cabin easily, for there were only two or three other passengers aboard, and landed in my presence all breathless and panting. Mavis and Billie were still there, saying good-by. We all turned around and stared at her in amazement.

“Mme. Kung — says — come immediately,” panted Alice. “Never mind your things. Come right away, to her house.”

Wonderingly, I dropped a dress half draped on its hanger and obediently started out. “What is it?” I asked meekly as we climbed into the car.

“I don't know.” Alice had caught her breath and now began to put her hair in order. “I don't know a thing. The house out there is a lunatic asylum; they're having their pictures taken this afternoon and the place is full of reporters. But Madame didn't mean for you to meet the reporters. We're to go in the back way.”

“I can't help worrying,” I said thoughtfully, “about my boat. And my clothes. I'm not used to this sort of thing.”