China to Me (54 page)

I am trying to be detached as I tell this story, but even as I write it down, thousands of miles away from the scene and two years later, I remember how sick I was with terror. I remember how we all looked, too. Terror seems to make people very, very sad. We were indistinct in the candlelight, but I could see the faces pretty well and everyone was hangdog, and kept his eyes fixed on the table. Actors registering fear in the movies don't do it right. I know that now. Alec had been tied painfully tightly and his face was twisted with the effort not to yelp. They didn't tie me up at all, nor the luscious Lena, nor Veronica, nor Susie, and that was terrifying too. In spite of all the airy things I had been saying about rape, now that I thought my time had come I was so afraid of it that I turned to jelly. Then Carola started to cry, upstairs, and I began to get up to go to her, and they roared at me to sit down. Then I fainted.

A nice, useful thing to do, you probably are saying scornfully. All I know is that I couldn't help it, and that probably I wouldn't again under similar circumstances. There was a noise like rushing water, and then I felt the silver on the table against my forehead and I heard a groaning, gasping, sobbing sort of noise, and soon I realized it was me. Nothing had happened. It hadn't been very long. The leader was still yelling at Mrs. Weill and she was still saying she didn't have any money in the house.

They untied her then and took her and Sophie and Veronica, with their keys, upstairs to open some safe that one of them had found. We were left with about six men to guard us. We heard them stamping around, and we heard their voices. We heard somebody being slapped — that was Mother Weill. Then we heard Sophie crying loudly, begging them not to slap her mother again. Then Veronica came down with Carola, and though the guards for some reason wouldn't let me take her, but forced Veronica to sit down with her, I naturally felt much better. I sat up and felt quite brisk. It began to look as if nobody would be raped, after all. Veronica told me afterward that as she came down the stairs with Carola her guard tried to hug her, and did bruise her pretty badly. But she said gently, “You'll hurt the baby,” and she got down without further mishap.

At last they brought the Weills back, tied them up again, and went foraging through the house on their own. They were at that for a long, long time. Altogether they were in the house two hours. Strangely enough, it didn't seem that long. They stamped back into the dining room and screamed at Mrs. Weill, and threatened to flog her, but at last they went away. They made a speech about how we mustn't move for ten minutes, but of course we were at work untying each other as soon as their footsteps stopped sounding in the darkness.

“Wasn't that leader an impairtinent little fellow?” said Mrs. Angus, as her daughter Chrissie wept and rubbed her arms back into circulation.

Susie's jewels and money had been taken. Everybody had been frisked, too, and lost things. Everyone had lost clothes, even my old amah, whose coat was gone. Only I came out even. My purse, in full sight of the public, had been left alone; my fur coat had somehow been missed in the rush. My jewels were still knocking around in their old cardboard box which nobody had bothered to open. They had missed my wrist watch again.

The menfolk went back and ate the chicken and rice, but I went to bed. I wanted very much to report the occurrence to somebody, but it was difficult to figure out how to do it. Besides, nobody would have been interested. In a few hours I decided it was better not to try to realize what had happened. We all seemed to come to the same conclusion. We joked about it. As for Ah King and the other servants, they really did laugh, uproariously.

Next day on our way back from hospital we found an iron box of papers and deeds and things that belonged to Mother Weill, none of them worth anything to anyone but her. The box had been left in good condition aside from the broken lock, and it was prominently displayed on the path where we couldn't miss it.

It was New Year's Day, so I brought the servants with me to greet Charles, and Carola, all dressed up. “Kung hay fat choy,” said Charles politely to them as they came in. “Well, well!” He hadn't seen Carola since Pearl Harbor. He submitted with good grace to having her plumped down on his whole arm, though Bill Wiseman looked on sardonically and made remarks.

“By the way,” I said, “we had rather an experience last night.” I told him about it briefly, while he said at intervals, “How unpleasant.” He was, naturally, quite upset, and we wondered if the Rev. Mr. Short wouldn't reconsider his refusal to allow us to live in the hospital. I actually went down and routed out the Reverend, and put it to him, as man to man. But he smiled in sickly fashion and said he couldn't see his way clear. I was getting awfully peeved at the Rev. Mr. Short. I then told Hilda the story, and asked her to relay it to Selwyn, hoping vaguely that he could persuade the authorities to do something or other. My arguing point was that the Japanese probably wouldn't want Formosans and coolies impersonating them. It is very difficult to realize, even when you know it, that you are living in a world from which law and order have disappeared. Perhaps it's just as well that one doesn't realize it at the time.

A few days later I found pandemonium at the Queen Mary. Word had reached the hospital that the Japanese had put up signs in town ordering all Dutch, American, Belgian, and British nationals to report immediately at Murray Parade Ground, the big open space in the middle of town, near the Supreme Court Building and just outside of the Murray barracks. The Japs didn't give any explanation of this order, and I think very few people realized what it meant, though they were also told to bring with them a blanket and a few clothes. At that time none of us had heard of mass internment. It hadn't been done, that we knew of, in Occupied France or Norway. Concentration camps, we assumed, were different; they were maintained for special classes, such as Jews, or for criminals. We were rather expecting an internment of Jews and Chungking patriots and such. The Weills and I were worried about that. But internment of all the Europeans? Impossible! There would be too many of them, for one thing.

Nobody could find out facts. That whole day the Rev. Mr. Short went around looking even more weary than usual. An important Jap medical officer called on Charles and Short came in too, and hung about hoping Charles could ask the officer what was up. But when he started to talk the Jap cut him off crisply and then rudely ignored him, and went on discussing the weather with Charles until the Reverend wandered out of the room. Neither Charles nor the Jap spoke of the order. I too was feeling an anguished interest, but I understood how Charles couldn't broach the subject.

We found out in the afternoon what was going on. A great crowd of people had reported at the parade ground, and it staggered the Japs that their sign had been taken literally. “British nationals,” they had said. Well, everyone born in Hong Kong was a British national. Any child born there, no matter what his race or color, was entitled to British citizenship and a passport. That was something the Japanese didn't know. They had assumed that only the haughty whites were British, and they had prepared to intern only whites. Naturally this crowd was far too big to handle, and besides, they didn't feel prepared to decide at just a moment's notice who was “Asiatic” and who wasn't. All day long they interned all comers, sending them off in batches to dingy Chinese hotels down along the water front, and all day long the people kept coming, and coming, and coming, until at last the Japs gave up. They sent the rest of the enemy nationals away, to await their future decision.

So it happened that a scratch lot of people were interned, and most of the whites were not — yet. Among the unfortunates were the Armstrongs, and Billie Lee with her baby, and Mavis Ming, and Alec Potts, and hosts of others. These early-goers had a hell of a time. For about twenty-four hours they were given nothing to eat or drink. Alec got letters out to Susie and we knew what was going on in his hotel, at any rate. Finally they were given raw rice and no means to cook it. They were crowded terribly in these filthy little brothels. You can read about it at firsthand in half a dozen books. Opinion is now divided as to just why the Japanese behaved so badly. Some people think it was revenge for the alleged treatment the British authorities had given the Japanese internees. But according to Charles, the Jap consul, Yano, said they were pretty well treated and he had no complaints to make. I think the Japs just are that way. Their prisons are nearly always unspeakable. They treat people like cattle at a stockyards, that's all; they always do.

Think of it. I don't know if you can, as vividly as I do, because you don't know Hong Kong and the way people had always lived there. But you can take my word for it that they had done themselves pretty well. They had lived as well as possible for years. Hong Kong was full of government servants who behaved like kings, sitting as they did on that heap of coolie labor. Remember that. And then, all of a sudden, this! This indignity, this swoop back through the generations to a level of existence which none of them could imagine. Why, for most of those people just going home to England called for a terrific readjustment. Yet now within the space of a few hours they had been shoved into the life of an oriental jail. They were being treated like coolie malefactors. I am amazed at the number of people who survived it. I am proud of human toughness.

After the first few days Selwyn began coming in with patients from these hotels, or Duggie Valentine did the escorting. Both doctors were grim and silent. It had been a battle to persuade the Japs to let the patients out. A woman with a miscarriage coming was put into our ward and we helped her all night for several nights, because the doctor was too busy to bother. She survived, but only just. One morning I heard that a friend of mine, Addie Zimmern, had been brought in. Addie's husband was missing. I went to find her; she was lying on a cot in a crowded ward with her four-year-old child Michael in bed with her.

“What is it, Addie?” I asked.

She smiled — she's a pretty girl — and said, “Miscarriage, I think. I was four months along. It's just as well.”

I said, “Has it happened yet?” and Addie said, like a child:

“I don't know. It was too dark at the hotel to see.”

She lay there trying to act normal and jolly. She has always been an outdoors type, winning cups at athletics.

I said: “They've found some of your brothers-in-law. Two of them are in camp and they're all right.”

“Good,” said Addie, and closed her eyes.

“I have to go back tomorrow,” said a gray-haired woman, “as soon as this tooth has been pulled. I do the cooking at the hotel.”

“I want to go back with you,” cried Addie.

The saving spirit, the team spirit or whatever you call it, had started up already in those communities, under those horrible conditions.

Charles was dazed, and refused to believe in the mess for a long time, though he didn't say so. I was in a tremor over Carola. I didn't know what to do. It was out of the question to walk right into it, to take my baby and go into town and throw ourselves in jail. I don't think my legs would have carried me.

“Wait,” said Charles, looking harassed and miserable. “Something is bound to turn up.”

But I couldn't wait. I knew that all the houses in town were already registered with their inhabitants numbered and I remembered how quickly the Japanese had appeared after the surrender. They did things suddenly, I knew. I ran to Margaret Watson and Hilda and I made a scene.

“The hospitals are still being left out of it,” I reminded them. “You two are still safe and snug. I insist that you let me in on this. I will not take Carola into one of those hotels until I know more about it. You let me into the hospital, somehow, or I'll — ”

Margaret for once didn't answer back. She telephoned the Rev. Mr. Short and talked to him pithily, and when she hung up the receiver I was accepted as a patient at the Queen Mary, suffering from aftereffect of Caesarean section, with my female offspring. I ran home to the Weills, told them what I had done, left breathless orders for Ah King and Ah Cheung to pack up our stuff, and ran back all the way, carrying the baby. The Weills approved. They weren't worrying about themselves because they had French passports, and French weren't being interned.

I came into Charles's ward triumphantly, and sat down to catch my breath. “I don't see why you should be in such a sweat,” he said disapprovingly. “There's no such mad hurry as that.”

But there was. Next day there were guards on the hospital, and we were interned within the grounds of the Queen Mary.

I was assigned to a ward of four, but there were two empty beds when I arrived. We dug out a hospital cot for Carola; it was just a little bit small for a baby three months old, but Carola was small too. The cot stood at the foot of my bed, and now I had the baby's care on my own hands, for although Ah Cheung went to live with Margaret's amah, the nurses didn't want her hanging about too much. For a time my neighbor was Susie, whose neuritis was giving her hell; she decided to take advantage of the hospital while she still could, and give herself a rest now that her husband was locked up. The other Weills managed to get into the hospital every day, just the same as always; they brought extra food to Susie, and her letters from Alec. Those letters were lifesavers. We kept up very well with current events, through Alec. I suppose smuggling was easy then. You just gave your letter to a Chinese servant through the bars of the gate. Things tightened up later.

Those were the days when most of the escapes were made. The historical escape, the famous one, was that of Admiral Chan Chak, for whom it was vitally necessary to avoid the Japanese. With him went Max Oxford and a whole lot of other British officials. They got away in a boat. One boat was sunk under them and Chan Chak, who has only one leg, almost drowned. But they pulled him out and got another boat and they reached Chungking, ultimately. That was a coup for the British.