China to Me (63 page)

Chick would telephone each morning and tell us how many people were coming to lunch or dinner. Then we would get our orders of the day. Maybe he and Yoshida were going to take us to a newsreel, showing how strong Japan was and how weak were the other nations of the world. Or perhaps we were to hurry straight downtown to his flat (presided over by one of his many mistresses, a sultry-looking Eurasian girl with a bosom) and be introduced to “an important newspaperman.” Or we were to lunch with him in the Parisian Grill, with some other Chinese wards of his. Chick's interests were wide and varied. Chief of these was his ambition to make lots and lots of money in business, quick. He wanted to open a shop, two shops, three; he wanted to own a newspaper and put me at the head of it; he wanted to start a night club. He also did a lot of gentle squeezing, extorting from anybody with money whom he happened to encounter.

Chick was a mixture, as you can see. He was passionately sincere in his belief in Japan. He must have been nurtured in that belief since he lay in his cradle. He spoke fluent German and was well up in all the Gestapo methods. I am sure he was pretty good at torture and questioning. But that patriotic passion didn't prevent him from indulging in petty graft, or even in the pleasures of generosity now and then; he had a delicate way of giving us things, or helping us out of fixes, that nobody in the civilized world could have surpassed. It was damned useful, having a gendarme around, though it certainly had its disadvantages. He was in the house with Yoshida the day that long-dreaded search party finally arrived; and he sent them off without ceremony.

I wish he had been about when May left us. May had taken to stealing on a really unpleasant scale, and at last we got rid of her. She had a way of going crazy now and then, which was one reason I put off this operation until the last moment, and she went crazy when the blow fell. She screamed, and tried to loot the house more thoroughly than she had already done, and then she called in the local gendarmerie and turned us in for looting! That was in the period before Chick had turned up and it could have been nasty; the local police, mostly Chinese, just went through the house, however, and took whatever they wanted, calling it “enemy property.” There wasn't much left to take. Ah King soon found me another amah, a pretty young woman named Ah Yuk.

Chick could have prevented all this, though I suppose he would have thrown May into prison, and I wouldn't have liked that. He did relieve me of another lot of incumbents, a group of petty gendarme spies, Millie Chun and her three young men, who had been hanging around me like rats ever since I came home. The minute Chick turned up they melted away like summer snow and they never bothered us again. From that time, even after Chick himself melted away, I was not bothered often by such people. I'll explain more about them while I'm on the subject. Millie and Agnes and Gloria and Margaret and so on were all Chinese girls who had been favorites of young Englishmen and Americans before Pearl Harbor. Many of the British cadets, studying Cantonese for the required three years of training, fell in love with these girls as a kind of ritual. It meant that they could practice their language under pleasant conditions, and it also gave them the comfortable feeling that they were really Mixing with the Natives, Understanding the Chinese. … Well, of course most of these girls have been drawing pay from the Japanese on the side, probably for years and years. After the surrender they came out of hiding all bright and cheery, and all with cushy jobs in the gendarmeries (the smaller military police stations) around town. Some of them succeeded in capturing quite important Japanese protectors, and a few, like Millie, promptly settled down and started having Japanese babies.

Naturally I didn't like them very much. And they were suspicious of me and treated me as a favorite subject for aspiring young spies who wanted to get along in the world. After Chick appeared they all let up. Millie did try to push in on the party, because she thought it was just an ordinary affaire and that I had caught a prize, but Chick soon called her off.

That was one good turn he did me, and there were others. I am grateful to the gendarmerie for assigning me to Chick. I might have drawn an ordinary policeman, and that would have been bad. I'm sure it was Charles's reputation that helped me. When the authorities finally decided to take over Tregunter Mansions for their own uses it was Yoshida and Chick who moved us to another house down in Kennedy Road. Moving was a tremendous affair, and we couldn't possibly have paid the hire of coolies, let alone trucks. Yoshida paid them, in rice, and provided a lorry — and then after we moved in, all innocent and thinking it was all right, the Army came along and told us to move right out again. That was an awful business; an angry man in boots stamped in at ten in the evening and told us to get right out. Well, we yelled for Chick, and Chick phoned Noma, and Noma fixed it, though he did say sourly that if I had been in Stanley this need never have happened.

Unfortunately, after a month Chick decided that I was really harmless, and even rather a nice girl, and so he dropped me, and we got no more food from the gendarme kitchen. Soon after that he was edged out of Hong Kong altogether. The expulsion was due to some matter of his selling government oil for his own purposes; Chick said Yoshida had connived at his downfall, and Yoshida had been triumphant. Yoshida, he said, had always been jealous of his, Chick's, influence with Noma.

When I next heard of Chick he was in Canton, trying to get a monopoly on the city's cabaret business, and also he owned two department stores. He was a smoothie all right, and not the sort of man I would like to see my daughter too chummy with, but for a gendarme, you must admit, he was not so bad. I should like, someday, to be able to give him food, when he's starving in prison. I told him so.

Chapter 50

Concurrently with this gendarme-geisha existence, we were becoming acquainted with a few civilians. After the hospital doors were closed to me I put into action an idea I had been holding for some time, and I went downtown to call on the chief of the Domei office. (Domei, you may remember, is the official Jap news agency, and my friend Matsumoto in Shanghai had been the chief there.) Nowadays it was getting safe to walk alone, though accidents still happened sometimes. Hilda had been held up and searched by a young hoodlum one day, near our house, but she wasn't carrying any money.

“Of all the impertinence,” she said when she told me about it. I can't help loving the British.

So I went to see Mr. Ogura alone. I found a small curly-headed man who laughed nervously in lieu of words when he couldn't think of the correct English, but who, when he did talk, usually said something worth hearing. He was a civilized chap. He had a sense of humor and a sense of shame; he didn't like the war, though he never said so. We discovered a bond between us immediately. Before Pearl Harbor he and his wife had often gone to see my gibbons in their cage and had fed them. (My last gibbon, by the way, died during the hostilities, of starvation. The coolie ran away and left him locked up in his own room.) Now Ogura's wife was home in Japan; she had had a girl baby the day before Carola was born, and Ogura had never seen his child. So he liked Carola. Also Ogura knew Charles by reputation and admired his books. He tried hard to help me. He said that be would cable Matsumoto and ask if there was any way in which I could do some non-political work.

He lied. It was the first time I knew a Japanese to tell a tactful and well-meaning lie. He told me he had cabled Shigei Matsumoto, but he hadn't really. He told me next day that he had received a reply and that he would do his best to find me a job, and in the meantime did I need anything? He put his hand in his pocket tentatively.

No, I said, I didn't need anything, thanks. Except — it's the first and only time I did beg from a Japanese — could he give me some sugar or tell me where to get some? I had none for Carola's milk, and there was none to be had in the market. Reeny, Phyllis, and I pooled all our resources, but I didn't tell him that. He might have boggled at the idea of feeding three babies. Ogura immediately gave me the office tea-hour supply of sugar, a pound box which still had about half a pound in it.

He did get me a job, teaching English to another newspaperman. It didn't pay much, but it helped. Anything helped.

We come now to another crisis. Before Pearl Harbor the Japanese I knew best through Charles (he had dined with us three times) was the young consul, Oda. Like most men in the consular service he had been to America as a student for at least a year, spoke English fluently, and looked less uncouth to us than did most of his compatriots. Oda had been transferred from the Hong Kong office long before the war. Now, we read in the paper, he was back in a new capacity; he was chief of the Foreign Affairs Department.

It was just after the Nakazawa period that Ogura told me Mr. Oda wanted to see me. I was startled and dismayed, and resolved to do nothing about it until I had to. Maybe, I reasoned, he would forget about me. I was afraid of more investigations.

One day, however, he telephoned me. (We had not yet moved.) “Miss Hahn? I think you will remember me. I met you with Boxer. This is Oda.”

“Oh yes. How are you?”

“Oh, fine.”

“I heard you were back in town,” I said idiotically, trying to stave off whatever was coming.

“I heard you were too,” he said dryly. “Miss Hahn, what is your nationality?”

There it was. Still, if I had passed muster with the all-powerful gendarmes …

“Chinese — now,” I said.

“What do you mean by Chinese now?” he inquired sternly.

I said in desperation, “Well, Mr. Oda, you know what I mean. I'm American, but after the war I — well, there was that marriage, and — “

“Never mind then. I am calling you because there is on foot a plan to repatriate some of the Americans,” said Oda.

“Oh?”

“Yes. People to be included in this exchange are diplomats, members of the consular department, and newspapermen. Your name has been included. I did not know you were a newspaperwoman.”

“Oh yes, I am.”

“Well, you are to be repatriated, Miss Hahn: congratulations. But if you have not been in Stanley first, like the other Americans, there is likely to be a question raised as to your nationality. So I suggest you enter Stanley now, and in a few weeks you will be on your way to America.” He sounded pleased.

“You mean I must go to Stanley?”

“It you wish to be repatriated, yes.”

“But if I don't wish to be repatriated I can stay out of Stanley?”

“Why — uh — yes, I suppose so.” Mr. Oda sounded surprised.

“Then I don't want to be repatriated,” I said flatly.

“What?”

“Mr. Oda, do you know what Stanley is like? Can you promise me there will ever be a repatriation, honestly? I might be caught out there for life. Unless you insist. I'll never do it, never. I have a baby.”

There was a long silence. At last he said, “Don't make up your mind yet.”

“But — “

“Come and talk it over,” said Oda. “Our offices are in the Peninsula Hotel — the Toa, as it is called now. Are you afraid to come to Kowloon?”

“Oh no. I'll bring my girl friend.”

“Then I'll see you tomorrow. Think it over.”

I wouldn't think it over. My mind had made itself up on the second. I was trembling as I hung up the receiver.

The faithful Irene came along, though she hated going to Kowloon. Everything she saw there reminded her of her lost home. Even the people she met made the experience painful — the Indian at whose shop they had always bought cloth, and the barber who always cut the Gittins hair. Today we didn't have to go far, however; the Toa Hotel (Peninsula to you) is near the ferry station. When we came in to the lobby we found that it had been fitted up like a fortress rather than a hotel. There were guards everywhere with bayonets, and we were questioned a lot before being given little tags of green cloth to pin on our chests. Decked with these tags, we were allowed upstairs, to the sacred office of the Foreign Affairs Department.

Oda, at the end of a long emergency desk full of busy workers, was looking plump but older, dressed in khaki uniform. He stood up and shook hands quite as if I were still somebody respectable instead of being just a woman. Most officials did not, because this was Japanese territory now.

We went over the same ground we had covered on the phone. Oda seemed to feel that it made no difference to his side whether I departed or not. It didn't even matter if I went to Stanley or not. He wasn't at all au courant with what had happened to me; he knew only what Kimura must have written down in his records about my legal standing as a Chinese. When I told him again that I didn't want to take my baby into camp he sat up.

“A baby? You said so, but I — “

“Why, yes. Didn't you know? Boxer's baby.”

Oda sat back in his chair and opened his eyes wide. He looked frightened. When he spoke his voice was hushed yet stern.

“Do the gendarmes know about this?” he demanded.

I giggled. I couldn't help it. Irene and I eagerly told him about Chick, and the interview with Noma, and all the rest of it. Gradually Mr. Oda caught his breath again. If the dreaded gendarmes already had me under observation his responsibility was much lightened. He would inquire on his own, naturally, to make sure, but the whole thing was easier now, and he didn't care so much; he could relax.

At last he sighed and said, “Well, if that's what you think about it there is no more to say.”

“After all,” I said, “you can't promise that this repatriation is going to take place definitely, anyway.”

“No, I can't,” he admitted. “By the way, Miss Hahn, do you know why you are on the list?”

“Well, no. I suppose, though, that if all newspaper people — “

He shook his head. “No. You were put on the list later, specially, by cable.” He seemed impressed. “They have cabled from Tokyo. Do you know anybody important in Tokyo?”