China to Me (29 page)

“The captain said you won't sail before dark. Don't worry.”

Mme. Kung didn't keep me waiting very long, though it seemed long to me, anxiously huddled in the small dining room. Through the closed double doors came familiar voices: Spencer Moosa of the AP, George Giffen of the Telegraph, and then the sputtering of a Russian photographer I had met. That bubbly voice was Mme. Chiang; the slower, deliberate accents of Mme. Sun were for a moment unfamiliar to me because she was actually giggling as someone made a joke. I didn't hear my own Madame. After a while she came in and joined me, looking reproachful.

“You were going,” she said immediately, “without saying good-by?”

“But you were so busy. I didn't want to be a bother.”

“I spent the morning,” she said, “with Mr. Zau's aunt. She has just come back from Shanghai.”

“How are they all?” I asked eagerly.

“Quite well.” I thought she hesitated, and I was right. “Have you notified them that you are coming?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact I haven't. It isn't much use these days; you can't put the name of the boat or the sailing date or anything, so why bother? I thought I'd just arrive, and then telephone.”

Mme. Kung asked a few idle questions about the boat and my cabin, while I wondered why she had brought me so far. A farewell note would have been easier for both of us, much easier for me. …

“Do you think they can do without you?” she asked me suddenly. It was so near to my own recent cogitations that I was very much startled. “I know,” she said. “I know you've been wondering the same thing. I'm not a mind reader, but from a few things you have said lately I knew what was in your mind. I talked it over today with his aunt, who is fond of you. This is what I thought: you are alone here in China, with no family to take care of you.” That was characteristically Chinese, I reflected: I could never have explained to her that I was alone in China because I had run away from my family.

“I don't want you to be exploited by China,” continued the amazing Mme. Kung. “If this happens, if Mr. Zau takes advantage of you — oh, it would be unconscious on his part, but I know that Chinese tendency — you will end by hating us all. Yes, I think you will. I know China and I know America. You will go away from China without complaining, but you will feel bitter. Isn't it true?”

I sat there without answering.

“I don't want this to happen,” said Mme. Kung. “It's not too late. Forgive me for interfering, but I'm sure it's for the best. Don't go back to Shanghai yet. Think it over first.” She smiled at me. “You have already been thinking it over,” she reminded me.

“Yes, I have,” I said when I began to catch my breath. “I have.”

She sat there, looking kindly on me. I sat there staring at her as if she had stepped out of The Arabian Nights. I was certainly for once in my life knocked off my feet. In the next room was a dead hush, then there came a flash of light through the cracks of the door and a sudden babble of voices as the photographer told his subjects to relax.

“Well then,” I said, suddenly lightheaded, “that is that. I won't go back to Shanghai. Oh dear.”

“It's for the best,” repeated Madame. “I know how you feel. I love that city. It's my home. But we have to wait until the end of the war, and if you're allied with us you shouldn't really be going back anyway. Should you?”

I sat there gloomily contemplating life in the Crown Colony. “I don't want to live in Hong Kong,” I said. “It might be better to go home to America, but I'd get stuck there.”

“Really? Why?” There spoke a lady accustomed to traveling easily, without fretting over passports or bank accounts. “Nowadays it is so easy to travel,” she said innocently. “But it wasn't my idea that you go home so soon — although no doubt your mother is getting anxious about you. No. You can write her a reassuring letter and explain to her that I too have many children traveling over all the world in these sad times. It can't be helped. I had thought you might go back to Chungking.”

I had thought so too.

“There's a secret I'm going to tell you,” she said, looking excited. “You mustn't tell anyone yet, but we're all going to Chungking!”

It was a day of surprises. “Mme. Sun too?” I asked.

“Mme. Sun too. My youngest sister has been begging us to come back for a visit. We've been talking about it ever since she arrived, and now she says that I made a definite promise to go and must keep it. You see, she can't stay any longer. There is always so much work for her up in Szechuan. But it seems a pity to cut our reunion short, and besides, I do owe it to my husband to go and see him, since he can't come here. Mme. Sun has consented to make it a real family party.”

“That's the part I don't understand,” I admitted. “Is that to show that the Reds are really reconciled at last?”

“It's a personal visit,” she said, “as far as I know. She's going to stay with us rather than at the Chiangs' house because we have more room.”

“Oh.”

“Now about you. I thought that this trip would be a good way to end your book.”

“Good? It's the perfect ending. You couldn't have arranged things better, madame, if you'd done it on purpose for me.”

There is a quality possessed by few people in the circles frequented by Mme. Kung, and it is usually called “consideration” or “thoughtfulness.” Neither of those words is really descriptive, is it, when you come down to examine it? We mean “considerate of other people,” or “thoughtful of other people”: we really mean, to take it further, that the person with that quality is not too full of himself to be aware of the outside world. I have sometimes wondered about the mentality of professional philanthropists. I am told that many of them are dried-up recluses, people who rather dislike to be impinged upon by other egos. Rockefeller was like that. You wouldn't call him “thoughtful.” Perhaps he was, but it wasn't his reputation. Mme. Kung's surprising quality was her warmth. When she did something for me like this, going out of her way to set me in what she considered the right path, I was aware of the personal effort that went into that action. She had expended genuine emotion on my case. There was sweetness in what she bad done. It was good. It was also more than that, because it was characteristic: I was no particular favorite. She would do as much for anyone she knew.

The argument her enemies advance is that she does these things only for the people she knows. A person in public life, they tell me, should deal in large numbers and think of his people in terms of thousands. Mme. Kung is nothing, officially speaking: she has no official position in the government. But as Mme. Chiang's sister, the head of the house of Soong, the wife of Dr. Kung, she is a force. If she fails to use her power for the best, say her hostile critics, she has failed in her duty.

I am not going to argue by saying that you can't hold her responsible for her position. China is called a democracy, but it is a far cry from that structure of society to the government we have set up in Washington. In many ways there is no basis for comparison. Nobody knows that better than I do. Mme. Kung is a power in China. But she does think in large numbers; she does try to work for the people, and I think that her interest in her friends is an asset rather than a liability. The impersonal approach to reform leads to all the evils of social service as we see it working out in our own organizations. We could use a few more brains with the feudal point of view when it comes to rearranging our world. In our high places we are a little short on human sympathy and understanding, and on the courage to admit human responsibility. Mme. Kung is not. She has greatness.

In case you ever have occasion to cancel a seagoing passage at the last minute, remember that the forfeit on your ticket is one third its value. I dragged my half-unpacked bags down the gangplank just in time and returned to Happy Valley to surprise the little girls and send the amah scuttling into the kitchen in dismay to cook more rice.

Next day I set about winding up things in Shanghai, and the job was made easy because I met an old friend from there in the lobby of the Hongkong Hotel.

“I'll take your house,” he said eagerly. “They're terribly hard to get, I hear, what with the town filling up with German refugees. I'll break the news to the refugee that he must find another place. I'll give the gibbons to Horst Reihmer for the summer; he can keep them out in Hung-jao Road in his new house and it will be grand for them. Later on when you decide what you want done with them, just let me know. Don't worry, I'll fix it all.” And he did.

The refugee, incidentally, was plunged into despair, and a lot of letters went back and forth between us. I could never figure out just why I felt so guilty toward him. After all, what had I done but take care of him for a year or so, and then withdraw my help? I'll admit that there is a sort of debt which attaches to that kind of relationship: you might say that I had pauperized him because I took him in in the first place; so now he was my responsibility. That's the way he seemed to figure, anyway. In the end he found a job through the Alexanders, broadcasting for the Allies in German, but I doubt if he has yet forgiven me for the wrong I did him, though he did come and stay with me for a bit, later on in Hong Kong. Old habit, I suppose.

Sinmay never wrote to me at all. Or perhaps he did, and forgot to mail the letter. He sent an indirect message one time, though, through a girl we both knew; he said that he wasn't angry with me, that he hoped I was happy, and that I possessed many of the qualities of a good Chinese woman. I think it was a compliment. I even think he meant it to be.

There were five or six days to get through before I went back to Chungking. I was fidgety and, following my usual pattern, I rushed about and saw people so that I wouldn't think too much. There was an amazing afternoon when everything happened by accident but nevertheless we made history of a sort. I don't know just how it all began. I was having a drink with Alf in the lobby of the Grips. That is what the English called the Hongkong Hotel, because they give nicknames to everything. Well, there we were, and we met someone else, and we drank a lot of “ox's blood,” which you make by mixing champagne with sparkling burgundy, and there is brandy in it, too, I believe, though I'm not sure. I was supposed to go to Mayor Wu Teh-chen's house for dinner and poker that evening, under the wing of General Cohen. The general was playing his role of Picturesque Old China Hand those days. He would sit in the lobby of the Grips day after day, slightly drunk, cheerfully ready to fasten on anyone who came by. He didn't have many troubles: Mme. Sun paid him a pension and he played a lot of poker, usually with Wu Teh-chen, and dabbled in various real-estate deals and so on just for the fun of it. It was a sort of hazard, getting through the Grips lobby around noon. If you didn't run into General Cohen you were apt to fall in with One-Arm Sutton.

I was to meet Morris Cohen on the Kowloon side at the ferry station at five o'clock. But I was still drinking at five o'clock, at Alf's flat, trying to talk sensibly with his French teacher. It was nearer seven when Alf drove me in his car over to the ferry. He was wearing his uniform cap, but no coat, and the general cocked a wise eye at him as I got out, full of apologies.

“Think nothing of it,” he said largely, hailing a taxi.

Wu Teh-chen, who had been Mayor of Canton before they drove him out, was waiting dinner for us. (“Ask him what happened to that blood he was going to shed the last drop of,” Charles had said unkindly when he heard where I was going.) It was a good dinner with a lot of whisky and also plenty of guests. I knew them all, pretty ladies and important gentlemen in Chinese society. I sobered up a bit. After dinner when the poker began, however, I wasn't sober enough to refuse to play, and I solemnly took my seat with the best sharks in the Far East. It was then that Morris Cohen won my everlasting gratitude. He let me play just one minute before he said, “Get out of that chair and go upstairs, Mickey.”

Meekly I obeyed him. Up in the ladies' room I found all the pretty ladies, doing up their faces and chatting about their children. I must have been quite drunk. I don't often get that drunk. One of the women, chatting politely with me, pointed to a young and handsome lady who was combing her hair and said, “How old do you think she is?”

“Oh,” I said, “about twenty-two.”

“Thirty-five,” said Elsie, “and she has nine children.”

At this I burst into tears. “What is it?” asked Elsie, alarmed. “Get some water, somebody. What is it?”

“She has nine children,” I sobbed, “and I haven't any.”

In an embarrassed but sympathetic silence the ladies allowed me to get out of the room and downstairs to a taxi.

“I'm so awfully sorry,” I said next day to the general. “Honestly, Morris, I'm terribly sorry. I called up the Mayor this morning.”

“That's all right,” said Cohen. “You was all right. You was cute. You was adorable.”

“Yesh, I can imagine.” I brooded sadly and held my head.

“Honest you was all right,” said the general. “Nobody would of known. But that boy friend of yours, that RAF, now he was polluted if you like. Boy, did he have a load on. In fact, the only reason I could tell you was drunk was that you was lettin' him drive.”

Charles and I were seated next to each other at a Chinese dinner, where Max was host. Charles was making life hideous for the unfortunate Max, who hoped to glean certain information from Ed Pawley, his guest of honor. He wanted to know just how much private aid was going into Chungking from Americans, in the form of planes and suchlike appurtenances of civilization. But every time he came near the ticklish subject, while Ed listened gravely and silently, Charles would call irreverently from our side of the table, “Got the old pump handle working, Max?”