China to Me (40 page)

There were plenty of respectable Chinese about. Charles liked them and I took him to their houses, and they liked him, I suppose, though I found a strong anti-British feeling among the upper classes. Still I was homesick for the China I knew.

I missed the pleasant, lazy disorderliness of Sinmay's house. My servants were Hong Kong servants. May Road style, respectful and distant. Ah King didn't exactly disapprove of me — later he was to like me a good deal — but several things about me were already startling him a lot. My Chinese guests, for example. Before me I don't think he had ever entertained Chinese for his masters except at large, stiff, formal receptions when oriental diplomats would not be out of place. Then one afternoon a Sikh policeman from Shanghai dropped by for tea, and both Ah King and Gunga Singh were embarrassed. In the Indian's case it was that damned Hong Kong atmosphere, which had had such a bad effect on Sinmay.

“I don't know what's the matter with this town,” he said fretfully. “I'm staying with a cousin down in Happy Valley, and I mentioned that I was coming up to tea with you and I asked him if he knew you. He said, ‘You're going up to May Road? Why, that's on the Peak. They won't let you go up the Peak. You'll be turned back.' What's the idea, Mickey?”

I shrugged it off and we talked about other things. But Ah King, perfect servant though he was, peered fearfully at the turbaned Gunga Singh when he brought in the tea tray.

A Chinese boy who worked in one of the news agencies in Chungking took me one evening to an “escort bureau,” where he had a girl friend. You may not be aware that prostitution doesn't exist in Hong Kong. It has been abolished by order of Parliament or something. Once upon a time there used to be prostitutes there, as there usually are in seaports, and a government doctor examined them every week, and the venereal disease problem was fairly well under control. But along came an idealistic lady writer named Stella Benson, and she was horrified to discover that such things existed in a crown colony. (Actually what she took exception to especially was the slave-girl setup, but she went the wrong way about abolishing it.) A lot of other idealistic English ladies turned to with Stella Benson, terrifying their menfolk into legislation, and prostitution was abolished. So afterward no government doctor went around inspecting the women, and the venereal disease problem, though it had no official existence, was really very bad. And instead of prostitutes, Hong Kong had “escort girls.” They lived in crowded places upstairs in the houses along the harbor front, and these places were known as “clubs.” The place young Chang took me to was an athletic club. Like other houses of its kind it had a catalogue, a printed leaflet with photographs of the girls who lived there or who dropped in now and then as they made their rounds. If you had just come in from out of town, as many Chinese countrymen did, you telephoned this club and explained that you wanted a guide, or escort, to show you around. You made your choice from the photograph and the girl came to call on you, or if you were an intimate of the place you dropped in and played mah-jongg there, and kidded with the madame. But it wasn't prostitution, no indeed. The police visited the clubs periodically for their tips, but even when the managers paid squeeze regularly the government occasionally made trouble. My athletic club, for example, when Chang first introduced me there, was a dark hovel, long and narrow and built something like an old-fashioned Pullman, with cubicles up and down the hall and an open space in the back for mah-jongg. Each cubicle had a wooden bed in it and not much else. One of the periodical purity drives came along soon afterward, and when I called in again there were no cubicles; they had been abolished by order of the police. All the partitions had been taken out, and now when anyone wanted privacy they just put movable screens up around the chosen spot.

Chang's girl, Ying Ping, could speak good Mandarin and I needed practice. Not many people in Hong Kong did speak it well enough to be good for my vocabulary. When you are talking with someone who is not a teacher you get along better, for a teacher, whether he wants to or not, usually confines his talk to certain dull subjects and talks down to you, in a stilted fashion beyond which you seldom progress. The people at the athletic club, Madame and the man who made the dates at the telephone, and the girls, and Ying Ping herself, all thought me slightly mad for calling on them at all, but I didn't care. Ying Ping didn't either. I took up time that she couldn't have used more profitably with male clients because I always came early, in the afternoon, after one unfortunate experience which I'll describe in a minute. I paid her the regular rates for “entertainment” and we just sat there in the crowded, noisy, cheerful room, talking Mandarin. After a few visits I got to know all the girls by sight, and a few who could speak English would hail me cheerfully when we met in the street.

That unfortunate experience was all my own fault. It happened that one evening after dinner, while I was still living in the hotel, I had nothing to do, and I thought I'd walk down to the escort bureau to see Ying Ping. When I arrived I realized, even before I went upstairs, that I might be making a mistake. Before when I had called, by daylight, it was all dull and quiet. I would go along Queen's Road, past the big market, until I came to an open-front shop that sold toothbrushes and such odds and ends. Next to this shop was a dark, narrow staircase up which I went, past a sinister-looking dentist's office and on to the top floor, which was the club. In the afternoon it was somnolent there. Old amahs shuffled around with buckets, for there wasn't a drop of running water in the building, nor any toilet. That condition was not unusual in Hong Kong. Girls slept soundly on the beds and couches scattered about the long room. They slept as they had fallen in the early morning, dressed in their tinsel finery, their faces smudged with enamel. They slept in crowds, piled on top of each other, anywhere, like kittens. About three or four they would begin to wake, yawning and stretching. I watched with amusement as they dressed over again for the evening, for the wardrobe was communal and they pulled dresses out of drawers any old place, wearing anyone's that pleased them or happened to fit.

That night Queen's Road was jammed, though, with a different sort of crowd, not a shopping crowd but a lot of young men looking for pleasure or mischief. When I had climbed the staircase next to the toothbrush shop and entered the club I knew I had made a mistake in coming. Lights blazed over the room and a lot of men were crowded around the mah-jongg table with some of the girls, playing. Chinese playing mah-jongg make a terrific noise. It's not at all like the quiet ladylike games we used to have in the States. They try to be noisy. They slam the tiles on the bare table and shout their signals, and everyone screams with laughter. A girl was playing the “pip'a” and singing. I was blinded and deafened. Unfortunately my entrance caused a lot of commotion and Ying Ping spotted me and rushed over and made me sit down.

She was all dressed up, thick with paint and looking like a different woman. In the afternoon she was a spotty sort of slut, amiable-looking but not alluring. Now she was ready for action and none of the spots showed, and her hair had been greased and carefully arranged. The girls went to the beauty parlor every evening to be combed afresh on contract, ten cents a time.

We sat halfway down the corridor from the mah-jongg game, near the door, while I tried to think of a graceful way to get out. Suddenly the door blew open and two husky young men staggered in and started down the hall toward the mah-jongg table. One of them glanced at me, paused, went on, and then turned around and came back. He tossed an apple in my lap.

“Hello,” he said in pleased surprise. Then he spoke in Cantonese, and when I blinked at him uncomprehendingly he turned back to English. He reached out and grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet, saying, “Come on and have a drink.”

There was great consternation among the little girls. They fluttered around us like butterflies, explaining to him that I was not part of the club, but a client like himself. He didn't quite understand, naturally, but after a bit he apologized, sat down, and made polite conversation. I got out soon, though, without any more protest from Ying Ping, and hurried home to the Gloucester. I never again went back after dinner to the club.

Agnes Smedley was in Hong Kong. After some years of wandering about with the
guerrillas, working in a semiofficial capacity with Dr. Robert Lim for the Chinese Red Cross,
her health forced her to come back into civilization. Here and there I had run into Agnes
quite often in the course of Eve years. When I first met her it was in Shanghai. She was
living then in a self-chosen prison, occupying a miserable little cell high up in a Chinese
house near Mme. Sun, for whom she was doing a sort of secretarial job. She lived in seclusion
partly because she had her own reasons, considering the affiliations she then had, and partly
because Mme. Sun has even more than her share of the Soong passion for mysterious privacy,
alternating with a passion for publicity for her “causes.” I think of Agnes
necessarily in terms of phases, because our acquaintance has always been interrupted by long
periods during which she changed greatly. That first time I was introduced to her I think she
was in an unhappy phase; she looked like a tortured person and her face was heavily lined. I
know, too, that she must have been pitifully poor, for she was thin and very shabby. The woman
who introduced us was actually surprised that Agnes had any capacity for merriment.

“One day,” she said, “Agnes turned up for a newspaperman's cocktail party and she was actually dressed up, making jokes with one of the men. I was never so surprised in all my life. She's usually so tragic and sour.”

When I think of that remark now I laugh very hard, because Agnes is anything but sour, and when she is tragic I always suspect it's because she is enjoying herself in that role. But at that time it was true. I didn't see Agnes again for three or four years, and then I met her in Chungking fairly often. Then she was feeling vigorous again, and happy. She was working as she wanted to work, and for Bobby Lim, whom she adores. Until now Agnes has always come to blows with the organizations with which she was temporarily connected, usually on a point of principle. A devil of discord drives her. In the case of the Red Cross, though she has found plenty to disapprove of, she has so far swallowed her first impulses to go and smash somebody in the nose unless that somebody has happened to be opposed to the Red Cross, when, of course, she goes to town, with a whoop of relief. Agnes likes a vigorous life.

She was laid up in hospital when I went to see her, looking most in congruous in a peach-colored satin nightgown that Hilda Selwyn-Clarke had hastily bought for her. Agnes' head is a noble one, but it goes better with a Roman toga or a bishop's surplice than it does with hand-embroidered lingerie. (The toga is my own idea, but Agnes has been seen and even photographed in the bishop's outfit. That, however, is a story that happened much later.) I found her entertaining her friend Dr. Eva Ho, whose full name is Ho-tung and who is an M.D. and the daughter of old Sir Robert Ho-tung. A lot of women are daughters of Sir Robert, but nobody else is an M.D. or much like Eva in any respect. She was wearing navy slacks that afternoon and talking about her coming trip to Kweiyang. Agnes was trying to keep her mind on the subject, but she broke off to chuckle.

“I've met an amusing man,” she announced. “The government doctor who examined me. He tells me that I have a simply fascinating gall bladder.”

There was prevalent in government circles an uneasy feeling that Hong Kong should not be too hospitable to Agnes Smedley. The Peakites felt that she was a dangerous woman. They weren't sure in what way, but all those Reds and anarchists, they agreed, were best left alone. The police had been on the case, and only the fact that Agnes was a close friend of Mrs. Selwyn-Clarke, wife of the director of medical services, saved her from being requested to leave before her gall bladder could be attended to. Agnes had promised not to make any public speeches or otherwise disturb the peace of the Colony, and now she was being left more or less alone.

Her patron, Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, was another source of uneasiness to the old guard. I had heard of her for years from Freda Utley and from other people who had encountered her in Hankow, and I had not forgotten her name. One doesn't forget anybody who stands out so remarkably in her community as Hilda did. I have already spoken of how the rank and file of my acquaintances remained peacefully unaware that China existed. Hilda was completely different. She worked hard for several Chinese organizations and was secretary even then for Mme. Sun, in the China Defense League. Corin hated her.

“I've been introduced to her three times and she still doesn't recognize me,” said Corin. I kept this in mind the third time I was introduced to Hilda, and gave her back a walleyed, oblivious stare to match her own. Also I gravely accepted the introduction as though it had never before taken place. Hilda looked startled. Months later she explained: “Mme. Sun had told me never to get intimate with you,” she said. “She was suspicious of your politics and thought you might spy on the League. Which is ridiculous. But at the time, of course, I tried to obey her. It was Agnes who laughed me out of it.”

They called Hilda, inevitably, “Red Hilda.” She had red hair and was a member of the Socialist Party, which in Hong Kong was understood to be dangerously radical. She mixed into politics, too, and with her husband tried to reform things. Dr. Selwyn-Clarke was a man who was feared and usually disliked in the Colony. I heard of him a lot before I met him. I was always seeing his name in the paper, and hearing of him. The Peak called him “Septic.” The British are always giving nicknames, as you know. I wonder why they didn't nickname the Selwyn-Clarke child while they were at it — but then she wasn't in the papers as much as her parents. Selwyn in those days meant nothing to me but the man who was all mixed up in a local battle about night soil. That is an interesting bit of history which I had better describe.