China to Me (68 page)

“Why, anybody.”

“But who? There was no money to leave for that. Things were still awfully tight. Oh, I know it's easier now, but that was four months ago; it would have been impossible to make arrangements.”

“I see. Yes, that is different. Yes, naturally you would want to remain even now. But these two girls can go without hesitation.”

Maya and Irene decided to join forces. At Kwangchowwan they would have to join a larger party anyway; that was the method by which most of the refugees got through without being molested by bandits en route. For some weeks Irene collected things to take in, until I was moved to secret laughter. Irene had vowed ever since I met her that never again would she collect things. She had seen her house and everything in it lost. She wanted to travel light for the rest of her life. She was cured of the desire, inherited from her Chinese ancestors, to own things and more things. She said this often.

But now, as every day brought her nearer to the great adventure, she forgot her pious resolutions. She had never gone into rural China and she thought of it as a desert to which she must bring all the amenities of civilization. She didn't have much, but with the earnest help of her mother and sisters she managed to collect a truly awe-inspiring heap of clothes and tins and things. “With a baby you have to take a lot,” she explained at intervals.

“But, Reeny, have you thought what a lot of trouble and expense you'll have, carrying all this stuff through no man's land?”

“I won't be able to get a thing inside,” she argued. “Not a thing. And look what happened to us before. I didn't regret anything I brought over from Kowloon, not anything; I was only sorry I hadn't brought more.”

She picked up another giant duffel bag and started to pack it.

Everyone knew that the last hurdle, and the highest of all, was the dock of embarkation. It was there that the authorities, the ubiquitous gendarmes, scanned your papers for the last time and picked up your rice ticket, that document which meant so much to the inhabitants of Hong Kong. It was there that your luggage and perhaps you yourself were searched thoroughly for articles that must not be taken out of town, and for papers of any sort. We had heard from many sources that the searching was terrible, because it was left to the far from tender mercies of the coolies who carried your bags. The thing to do, said our advisers, was to slip the chief coolie a good tip as you walked onto the dock; then it would be all right.

I was there, and so was Paul de Roux in Maya's honor, and so were about a dozen Gittins relatives.

Irene, wearing slacks and a broad-brimmed straw coolie hat, carried the heavy baby slung on her back. She looked very small and young to be going off into the blue with such a responsibility. The searching, in spite of a large wad of yen duly slipped to the chief coolie, was really an outrage. With loud cries to each other, coolies fell on the luggage and tore it to pieces, pouring everything out on the filthy boards of the dock. There was no pretense at searching; it was sheer malicious vandalism. When they had turned everything out and had picked up odd bits that they liked the looks of, they abandoned the whole matter and left Reeny to pack up again as best she could. It was a hopeless job, for the giant knapsacks had been impossible to pack properly to begin with. Odd shoes of the baby's and clean underwear, dress hangers and cooking pots, tinned milk and wadded gowns lay spread out where passers-by stepped on them. We gathered it together as well as we could, and Reeny, prey to the tearing claws of nostalgia, rage, shame, and fear, put it all away doggedly, tears dropping into the bags before she tied them up again. During the entire proceedings an elegant gendarme, his white-gloved hands resting on his knees, questioned an Indian peddler a few feet away from us, not deigning to drop a word to the coolies.

“But really, it is a shame, you know. A shame,” muttered Paul.

A little fellow named Eddie Elias, who had helped Maya get ready, hung about waiting to wave good-by to her. Eddie had a strong sense of drama. After the girls had walked on board where we could not follow them, and had gone into the saloon, so that the door smothered even Frances' howls, Eddie walked up close to the boat, closer than we dared go, and stared into the saloon porthole fixedly. He seemed to be watching something that alarmed him. The rest of us were in a mood to be alarmed, for it was always a tense moment, that embarkation. Now was the time the gendarmes often swooped down on a suspect and put him into jail. Many of their arrests were made at that moment, just when a malefactor thought he was safe at last and on his way to freedom. Paul and I stared at each other when we saw Eddie's face. Then, as he turned and hurried back to us, we were more alarmed than ever.

“Something's wrong,” gasped Eddie. “A party of gendarmes just went on board. One of them spoke to Maya. They're looking at papers of some sort. They've taken the girls into another cabin. …”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I wonder if I could reach Yoshida on the phone.”

“Wait, I'll see what else is going on.” Eddie hurried back to his lookout point and stood there again, craning his neck. Just then, in time to cut short his hysterics, the gendarme party walked down the gangplank without any prisoners, looking calm and peaceful. A moment later the little ship sailed. We saw Maya on deck, waving to us; Reeny was probably below, mingling her tears with Frances'. The whole story had been a characteristic fable of Eddie's; he loved to stir people up.

“So!” sighed Paul as we walked back to the bank. “They are well out of it. My poor Mickey, you are not cheerful. I too, I will miss Maya. But that was a moment, hein? That Eddie!”

I went home. Auntie and Phyllis, much subdued, were rearranging the bedroom furniture. There was a lot more room now in the house, but we took no comfort in that.

“She said she'd send for you if it was all right,” I reminded Phyllis.

“But what about me?” said Auntie. “I don't want to leave Hong Kong.”

“You don't have to. Auntie. That kind of trip is only for young people. You're like me; your husband's still here in camp. That makes it different. Cheer up; things look much better in North Africa. The Allies have taken a lot of prisoners.”

“Oh dear,” wailed Auntie Law. “Now we'll have to feed them all!”

As if they had at last decided to throw us a grain of comfort, the Americans suddenly bestowed upon us the first sign of life we had seen since the beginning of the occupation. I was playing with Carola on the floor when the air-raid siren began to sound. Ah Yuk scampered in, calling me.

“Tai-tai! Planes are coming!”

“Nope,” I said, putting one brick on top of another brick. “It's false, Ah Yuk, it's a practice alarm.”

“Boom, boom,” sounded the horizon; “karump, karump.”

“Rat-tat-tat,” went the ack-ack guns.

“Practice?” scoffed Ah Yuk. She grabbed Carola and raced for the stairs. “This is real. Come on, Tai-tai.”

The first air raid from our own planes! Somewhere inside of me a flower burst open. It was amazing, the happiness of it. Only a child is capable o£ that pure ecstasy, in the ordinary way, but this was no ordinary occasion. Those of us who were home — the servants and Carola and I — gathered in the basement, from the front door of which we could see through trees to the Kowloon side. We saw a few puffs of smoke, we heard more explosions, and that was all.

Viewed as more than a token raid, it was disappointing. The raiders actually accomplished nothing, except to light up our lives again and to blow the cinders of hope to roaring flames. That was enough for the time being, but there were two bad aftereffects. The first one to come to our attention was the boastful reports that came through immediately from Allied broadcasting stations. Chinese and American pilots claimed to have destroyed the Hong Kong power station and to have left the military parts of the city in flames. This wasn't true. Whatever the planes did accomplish, we didn't see any signs of it. And so these broadcasts were bad for us in the end, because they devaluated all the other reports we had been getting of Allied victories elsewhere in the world. We heard the Japanese laugh at the Allies for their lies, and we knew the laughter was justified, and we were ashamed. Until then we had thought that only Axis people lied and boasted.

In my mind I held long indignant conversations with the people who had spread these false reports, back in Chungking. It is seldom vouchsafed a mortal to carry out his dreams in practice, but this time I made that record. Twenty months later I did have such a conversation, sate and snug in my New York apartment, with Teddy White.

“How did it look from the ground, Mickey?” he asked. “I was in one of those bombers, you know. I waved to you; did you see me?”

“It looked lousy,” I said emphatically. “You didn't hit a damn thing except some civilians. I can't tell you how awful it was, listening to those crazy reports afterward.”

Jack Belden, still limping from a wound he got at Salerno, leaned back and roared with laughter at Teddy's face. “But honest, Mickey,” Teddy pleaded, “it looked as if we hit everything in the world. It looked fine, it looked swell!”

“Well, it wasn't,” I growled. “I was safe as houses. Phooey! Now the raids that came next year — oh, those were something.”

The other bad result was manifested up at Bowen Road. When the siren went off all the wounded and sick who could walk rushed to the veranda on the east side of the hospital. This veranda was just outside a ward full of diphtheria patients who were all seriously ill, and some were dying. The able men crowded there at the railing and cheered. I can't tell you how I know this story, but I do. Next day arrived one Lieutenant Saito, in a passion of rage, to “investigate this incident.” His investigation did not take long. The men were guilty of a grave crime in having made such a demonstration, he decided, and those directly responsible were Charles Boxer, highest-ranking officer among the patients, and Colonel Bowie, surgeon in charge. Saito made all the walking sick stand in line and he paraded Bowie and Charles, whose arm still hung helpless at his side, up and down in front of them. Then he slapped Charles and Bowie. Then he stormed into the diphtheria ward and slapped all the men in bed there, the sick and the dying.

For a few days it was better not to go out if you could manage to stay at home. The Japanese were sullen and all too alert. We had had two more raids within thirty-six hours, one at midnight. For several nights we were blacked out, but then the Japs decided, very sensibly, that blackouts would do no good, and they relaxed their rules. As it turned out, we were not to have another visit from the Americans, anyway, for nine or ten months.

I have forgotten to mention one of the crudest of the occupation nuisances, which now increased to a point almost unbearable. This was the institution of the “curfew,” as we called it for some strange reason. Anyone who has lived in Japan during the few years preceding Pearl Harbor knows what it is anyway. I don't know what you call it in Japanese; it has nothing to do with nighttime. What happens is this: for their own reasons the Japanese will suddenly call a halt to all traffic in a certain part of the city. You run into a policeman who tells you to stop in your tracks, and you do. There you stand until he tells you to move again. Or perhaps, if it is that kind of a day, you don't stand: you squat. Or maybe you have to kneel. At any rate, you stay where you are told to stay, in whatever position you are ordered to hold, until the order goes around to release you. Sometimes this state of affairs lasts for two hours, sometimes for eight. In Kowloon, where it happened more often than in Hong Kong, it was sometimes held for the entire day. There were various reasons. Sometimes the public was held up like that because of troop movements which were to be kept secret; sometimes the Governor was traveling around town and the Japs wanted to prevent his assassination, or an illustrious visitor was going on a sight-seeing tour and the Japanese felt he would be safer without any spectators. There was a violently uncomfortable period when a Prince of the imperial family was in town. Every time that Prince moved from his hotel Kowloon and Hong Kong were thus frozen into immobility. I happened to be in Kowloon that day, fortunately without Carola, for she would have had sunstroke under such conditions of heat and glare. I was stopped four times, an hour each time. I didn't get home until six that night, for of course the ferry was stopped too. I was dehydrated and exceedingly anti-Emperor by that time.

After the first American raid the authorities went mad on these stoppages: we had a curfew every day. They also stepped up the rate of searchings in the street. They also put Selwyn into custody — not into prison, not yet. They just kept him under guard at his office and allowed nobody to talk to him on the phone or bring him food or anything. They seemed to hold him directly responsible for the raids, whereas in actuality he was livid with rage against his own side for attempting to destroy the powerhouse.

“Can't they realize what that would do to Stanley?” he demanded of me when he was set free again. “The entire population out there depends on electricity for cooking, heat, and everything else. How would it help the war effort, anyway, to destroy Hong Kong's electric system?”

I couldn't answer because all of this kind of thing is beyond me anyway. It was an interesting side light on the eternal struggle that goes on between the military mind and the civilian point of view.

“Anyway, Selwyn, they didn't. The bomb that fell on the powerhouse was a dud.”

“Fortunately,” he said in bitter tones.

It's a mixed-up business, is war.

Chapter 55

Carola was one year old. The sergeant who was in charge of parcels at Bowen Road was an old friend of ours by this time and we took little liberties with him now and then, especially the old-timers who had been coming there from the beginning — Hilda, Sophie Odell, one of the Weill girls, and me. He liked children, especially Hilda's Mary and my Carola, and so when I asked him if I could send in something special to Charles because of the baby's birthday he looked sideways at me and grinned in an encouraging way. Emboldened by this, I brought my offering the next week — a bottle of sparkling Burgundy, contributed by De Roux. Charles got it in spite of the rule against sending liquor, and shared it with his ward: Harry Odell, Tony, and a Canadian Major MacAulay. With Sophie's even more than usually lavish parcel, they had quite a day of it. I think back on that bottle of wine as a major triumph against fascism. All their desires and attention were focused on food. The men in hospital were now permitted to write their orders on special slips which were read to us women and duly filled, as well as our means allowed. The Red Cross had at last prevailed upon the commandant, Colonel Tokunaga, in charge of all the camps, to allow the prisoners to write cards to the outside world once a month. These cards took at least six weeks to get to me, though I lived only a few hundred yards from the hospital; the Japanese interpreters who acted as censors were slow and cautious in passing them.