China to Me (37 page)

Chapter 29

I'm coming now to a difficult part of this egotistical history. How can I explain the sudden change that took place in my plans? I don't want to write too much about Charles because it will sound sappy. Once in print, fond reminiscences have a way of changing horribly. That is why love letters sound the way they do in a courtroom. It would be especially unfair to Charles to take advantage of his absence. He is in a place where he can't control my writing just now. And he is exceedingly British; he hates publicity about his own feelings or mine. He doesn't even like me showing my poems around; he thinks that poems are personal, private things, nobody's business but our own. It is obvious that I'm not like that at all. I print my poetry whenever I get the chance, because once a thing is written it ceases to mean anything personal to me. Anyway, if I have a deep conviction it is that a good story must be told. I can't understand Charles's attitude, and he can't understand mine. When he writes, he writes safe, impersonal histories. I shall try to hit what I think is a fair compromise; I will talk about myself and make no attempt to explain him or his emotions. That's a difficult thing to do and in places I will fall short of my intentions. But I'll try.

I went out to dinner with Charles and Max the evening after I arrived in Hong Kong. I was feeling on top of the world. The book was finished and sent off, I had bought two new dresses, I had a private bathroom at the Gloucester with really hot water, there would be no more air raids, and my hair was cut and permanented. Everything was perfect, if a trifle unsettled. Yes, that was still there, sticking like a burr in my head: I was unsettled. Now that I think back over my years, that feeling has always been responsible for my more outlandish decisions; it was as if I had to plunge into things, take steps which I couldn't retrace, just to get myself settled. As an experienced observer of myself, I should have realized that evening that I was set for mischief. Perhaps I did. Perhaps that is why I chattered so happily, and ate and drank so earnestly, and looked at Charles with such pleasure.

I did like him a lot. There was a good deal to tell him. I was surprised that I hadn't written to him from Chungking, telling him all those things throughout the summer. We drifted about that evening, dining late and wandering further afield until we ended up where Charles always did fetch up after an evening's drinking, in the Tokyo Hotel down on Connaught Road. It was not my idea of relaxation to sit on a Japanese mat and talk to geisha, but Charles liked it and there was no arguing with him. He called in the old woman who ran the restaurant and solemnly introduced us: “This okusan (lady) has come from Chungking.”

“So des nei!” exclaimed the madame, opening her slit eyes wide.

“Yes, so des,” I said, glowering at her.

“And were there many Japanese airplanes coming?” asked Madame. “Many,” I said cheerily, “every day. Every day I hid in a cave.” Max heaved a deep sigh and lay down on the mat and went to sleep. “What I like about you, Mickey,” said Charles, who always gets earnest in his cups, “is that you have guts. Yes, you have guts.” He always gets repetitive too. The more he said it the more I liked it.

I don't know why I have always had so little conscience about married men. It can't be Mother's fault; she brought us up very carefully. Of course if I were put into a corner and forced to defend myself in debate I could do it. I am full of all those tag lines we learned when I was a girl, such as: Marriage should not mean possession. When a man wishes to be unfaithful to his wife the mischief is already done. A woman who can't hold a man doesn't deserve to keep him, et cetera, et cetera. There are other unarguable facts, however, which also have something to do with the case, and in my younger days I failed to take them into consideration. In general (of course all these generalizations aren't of much practical value) it is unwise to go poaching among married people, because then society doesn't like you. It doesn't seem fair, either. Men are so easy that it's not quite sporting to wade in and grab off a married one; what married woman wants to spend all her leisure watching her man? Oh, I've been careless and unsporting in my time, but I have one defense to offer: I didn't know any better. Little by little I learned. There were faults in my philosophy and it took time and experience to show them up.

And besides, there was one very good reason for me to spend my time with married men. It was a selfish reason, I grant you, but we savage youths of that generation were selfish, and from my point of view I couldn't have done better. I didn't at all want to be married. We won't go into the why of it, but I didn't. Therefore it was wise of me to avoid taking risks. I couldn't marry a married man, and that was that.

All of which doesn't serve to explain why my conscience let me down in regard to Charles. To begin with, I didn't feel particularly aware of his marriage. He said that it was over. He had decided that it was over months before, which was why his wife had gone off to Australia. She hadn't been willing to wind it up without a trial separation, but he decided for himself, just the same. They were arguing it out by letter. If Charles had been ordinarily married and contented, if he had only wanted to indulge in an extramarital affair because his wife wasn't around, I would have run away. I wouldn't have been satisfied. I was serious about Charles from the beginning, from before the beginning, and that was a completely new departure for me. I told him so. We never talked seriously, but I told him so just the same when I had fortified myself with whisky.

None of this fitted in at all with my plans. We hadn't yet come to a decision, and it was time for me to go off to Shanghai if I wanted to have a decent visit before my boat left for the States. Charles didn't like to talk about my going away, but he stirred himself at last.

“Why go to Shanghai at all?” he demanded. “Why not take the last month here?”

“But the gibbons. I'll have to arrange about the gibbons.”

Then Charles astonished me for the first time, though not the last: “Bring them down here,” he said.

“You mean — you don't mind gibbons?” I was incredulous. “People always hate them,” I explained. “It's only fair to warn you. Only a few crackpots like myself and Peter, that Russian girl, can bear them.”

“I don't suppose I'll love them,” he admitted, “but I won't be living with them. You can put them up in the Dogs' Home, I should think. And then you'll have no ties left in Shanghai.” He spoke with satisfaction. I dashed off to the telegraph offices and started to make arrangements. It developed that if I waited for the gibbons that would put off my departure for the States too. Their keeper wrote to me rather crossly that he couldn't simply dump them onto a southbound steamer. No captain would consent to such a cargo. The gibbons would have to wait about for a proper chaperon, and people willing to chaperon gibbons for a week on the high seas are few and far between. He was looking around, but I would have to be patient.

I was. More cheerfully than I would have expected to do it, back in Chungking, I changed my ticket again. I was now booked to sail in November instead of October, and Charles was awfully pleased. “I can still get home for Christmas,” I explained.

One evening we set out for a party that promised to be out of the ordinary run of Hong Kong parties. It usually did seem to be that way when I went out with Charles, but this was stranger than ever. There was a man working for his office who had a queer history. He was Chinese but had been born in Mexico and brought up in Japan, and when he came back to his native land he didn't marry an ordinary Chinese girl, but a Eurasian.

“It's the old lady, his mother-in-law, that I want to meet,” said Charles. “She's English. She married some Chinese out in Australia and went to a little town with him, somewhere near Canton, and they had about twenty children. This chap says she's never gone back to England in forty years. I thought you'd be interested.”

I fell for Mrs. Lee right away. She may not have been back to England in forty years, but you wouldn't have known it to look at her. She was British from top to toe. She dressed like a cockney and she talked like a cockney.

“Forty years over here, my dear,” she said to me. “I wouldn't know the old town now, they tell me. Oh, I've had a life, I have. Helping my husband's family thresh the wheat, just like any farmer woman, and me six months gone with my first. … Oh, I've had a life.”

The conversation was bewilderingly polyglot. Charles and the son-in-law chattered in Japanese, Mother-in-law and Mickey chattered in English, Mickey and Daughter chattered in Mandarin, and the young couple talked to each other in some other language, probably Shanghai dialect, while now and then Mrs. Lee said something to her offspring in Cantonese.

“I'll have just a little of that wine,” said Mrs. Lee. “My daughter can tell you that I never drink, nor smoke either. But tonight's rather an occasion, meeting the major and all. And you, my dear, how does it happen they didn't ship you off for the evacuation? Did your husband the major put his foot down?”

“I was in the interior,” I said evasively, “and got a visa to come back after the evacuation ship had left.”

“Aren't you the cunning one,” said Mrs. Lee.

I realize that it is time to explain the evacuation, before we go any further. We are in Hong Kong now to stay, and we must understand the situation clearly. In May, while I was still up in the Szechuan hills, the political developments between Britain and Japan must have taken a turn for the worse, though the public didn't know about it. Charles and a few other experts recommended to the colonial government that the service women and children be sent away. This is always done in British colonies when things get ticklish. The Hong Kong government accepted the suggestion with alacrity, but they went further than any such government had ever gone before. In a way, they repeated the behavior of the British diplomats in Shanghai, back in 1937. They ordered the evacuation of all women and children.

A lot of confusion ensued. To begin with, the order wasn't clear. Just what women and children, asked the public, were meant? The reply was ill considered: “Pure British,” said the government. This implied that the thousands of Eurasians and Portuguese who held British passports were not considered worth saving from danger, though the non-Asiatic women and children were. These Asiatics, always sensitive and considering themselves badly treated (which they were), blew up. The officials who answered their charges got in deeper and deeper. “You natives,” they said in effect, “are at home here. In a pinch you can go into Free China. Our women from England are in a different category.”

Now of course this wasn't true. Most Eurasians born in Hong Kong have been brought up like English people. They wear foreign-style clothes, speak English, can't write or read Chinese, and consider that they are as British as anyone. After all, that is what they have been taught all their lives, though they are snubbed too. They took the decision hard. They were very much insulted.

The Portuguese had a beef too. Although they come from Macau, they hold British passports and feel entitled to all the privileges pertaining thereto. And they are as sensitive as the other Eurasians.

“We can't help it,” said the harried authorities. “We are giving free transportation to these women and children, all the way to Australia. We can't send every woman and child in town down under. Australia couldn't cope with them. It would cost far too much. And we would have to take the millions of Chinese too, if we start accepting Eurasians. It's out of the question.”

It was a bad mess. On top of all that there was trouble with the “pures,” as the other Hong Kong citizens began bitterly calling the English-born people. Most of those women didn't want to go. They didn't want to leave their peaceful, luxurious houses. They didn't want to leave their husbands. It would be for an indefinite period, they knew. Hong Kong was not in danger, they said, and anyway, what if she was? Weren't they perfectly capable of seeing it through? Why must they be sent away like useless appendages? They were furious and disturbed and unconvinced and stubborn. Not the service women of course — they are used to being shipped around — but the ordinary women of Hong Kong.

“Go to Australia?” they cried. “Do you know how difficult it is to get maids in Australia, or cooks? Who's going to help me with Baby? Why do I have to go if those Eurasian women can stay? Why must I go and leave my husband free to play around with Chinese tarts? What about my house? Why, this is my home. If I were living in England would you make me go away, just because there's danger of an invasion from the Germans? And who says we are in danger here, anyway? Didn't you say you could manage those silly little Japs?”

The husbands shouted, “Who's going to pay the expenses of double households for me? Can you guarantee that my wife will behave herself? There's a law, and I stand by the law.”

There began a great spectacle of shuffling and evasion. Although one of the officials threatened and stormed and said he would load the women on the evacuation ships forcibly, carrying them aboard kicking and screaming if necessary, he never gave the order. Some women went away quietly enough. Many who didn't want to go managed not to go. They signed up as “essential war workers,” as nurses, or as some other sort of helper. Other women simply wouldn't go, and when bullying and cajoling and threatening failed they were left undisturbed. Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, the wife of the director of medical services, caused a scandal by slipping out of town and taking her four-year-old daughter to Canton, where she remained quietly until the registration of the women was completed, and then she came back equally unobtrusively. On that wangle she was bound to get away with it.

Other confusion lay in the fact that women like myself, who were not British, were allowed to stay as we liked. The government didn't consider itself responsible for us. If the American Government should order me out, that would be a different matter, but the American Government, according to our law, couldn't do any such thing even if it wanted to. I was all right in Hong Kong. Nobody cared at all. On a Saturday night at the Grips you could see all of us, the Americans and the French and the Dutch and the Eurasians and the Chinese, not to mention quite a few Englishwomen who had got out of going. We were popular because we were becoming rare. It was a fine time for the girls.