China to Me (7 page)

“We have been told by a little bird,” said Ken, “that the Evening Post people are helping you out on the financial end. Now everyone on that paper has to make money outside, one way or another. Look at the editor, Randall Gould: how can he run that new car of his on his salary? He can't.”

“Randall has other connections, you know,” I said. “He writes for papers at home.”

Ken shrugged and the colonel snorted. “I don't say he is not honest,” he said doubtfully. “But about your paper. Have you tried to get Japanese advertising?”

I said that I had not thought of it. Ken said, “I think I could get you so much advertising that it would amount to a subsidy of — let's see — about five hundred a month. How does that sound?”

“Generous,” I said.

“We would want a lot of copies, too, for our troops in China,” said Ken. “It is an unusually good paper for a Chinese publication. I wonder if you really know, sometimes, what you are printing. You don't read Chinese, do you?”

“No, not enough for that, anyway.”

“Well, sometimes your articles are very strong. … You must have a good editor. Who is he?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You don't know?”

I shook my head. “I haven't any one editor. These articles come in the mail and if there is a Chinese around my office I ask him to read them, and if he seems to like them, and if it's a Chinese whose judgment I respect, why, I pop it into the paper.”

I gave out this nonsense carelessly, but I had a reason. In theory I was not answerable for my paper to the Japanese, not at that time, but in actuality they surrounded us and did fairly well what they liked. Assassinations were becoming common. Naming people would have been asking for trouble.

If Ken was angry with me he gave no sign of it. He was a smoothie.

“Then no doubt you are being used as an innocent tool,” he said. “Some of your articles, you obviously don't realize, are anti-Japanese. I might even call them violent. Now I'm sure you don't really feel that way. This girl, Colonel, is a real friend to Japan,” he added to the bald man. “She may not know it but she has the same aim and ideal that we have — a free Asia. Now, Miss Hahn, we can promise you increased circulation and plenty of advertising: that is settled. If only you can change your policy, I mean your unconscious policy, and be more friendly to Japan — ”

“But there is one reason I hesitate to be friendly,” I said in my most stupid voice. “I feel that you Japanese are not friendly to us foreigners.”

Ken was amazed. “What? Why ever should you feel that?”

“But, Mr. Ken, isn't it true that the Japanese want to kick all foreigners out of Asia?”

Speechless with surprise, he turned again to the colonel with his eyebrows upraised. At last he gasped, “Did you hear what she said, Colonel?”

The colonel had heard. Together they assured me earnestly that I was all, all wrong. I said I was awfully glad to hear it. We had apple pie à la mode for dessert and I never saw Ken or the colonel again. They didn't seem to think I was worth following up.

Chapter 6

Those were still the days when people who came into money spent it on travel, and the slick magazines were full of stories about flower-scented Hawaiian air and people kissing in it, temples with wind bells in old China and people kissing in front of them, the wide African veldts, the lavender-shadowed Southwest deserts, and beautiful young men and women kissing each other all over the landscape. The literature of barber-shop magazines and the blurbs of travel agencies had a strong effect on all of us. I don't suppose it was an inborn Sense of Adventure, as they used to call it, or even the maps I studied in my geology classes that first sent me wandering off. Let's blame it on Conrad primarily, and then on all the cheaper-press influences of an American environment. I have reflected with mild surprise lately on the fact that I used to be wanderer. Because that was way back in my unregenerate days, and you could hardly call me a wanderer now. It would be unfair. I was shocked and resentful a few weeks ago when I looked at an apartment that was to let, and the landlady said, “Oh, I don't think I can sublet to you. That's just what I don't want to happen — to sublet to a tenant who will go wandering off again as soon as she's settled in. You're the sort of person who might wake up tomorrow morning in Alaska or somewhere.”

I replied in astonishment: “But not at all. I've been in one place for years, in China!”

She was not convinced. Being in China at all, she implied, was a rackety, unbalanced state, and very drifting. Just so do the Chinese think of us in America, as crazy will-of-the-wisps dashing about romantic places like Arkansas and Rhode Island and Iowa, never settling down sensibly like solid Chinese citizens in dull Szechuan and prosy Shantung.

Wanderers from New York and Chicago and St. Louis used to drop in on Shanghai when their ships stopped there en route to Manila or India. Sometimes they came in organized tours and sometimes they just came on their own, tourist class; once in a while they came in the guise of awfully rich people who didn't travel just for the fun of it, but to carry out a carefully laid plan in regard to training race horses for the next Hong Kong meet, or being there when the jewel dealers held the annual jade auctions in Burma. However they came and whoever they were, I used to claim that they always had letters of introduction to me. I exaggerated. Three times as many people brought letters to Bernardine, for example, as came to me. And there were many more Americans in Shanghai who had their work cut out for them when the ships came in. We were gay enough between ships, but during those periods when the tourists were in port Shanghai just about blew the top off. Such crowds at the night clubs! Such cocktail parties given! Such wine consumed, and curios bought, and promises made of future hospitality in other ports! We, the residents, sat there in our Eastern city and watched the world bring us amusing books and news and people, week after week: there are, as I have often said before, much worse existences.

I still feel that Shanghai, as far away as it is, was the best center I have ever found for European and American developments. Back in Chicago when the Abyssinian fever first took hold of Italy, how much did you know about it? Only what you saw in the papers and heard on the radio. Now in America you can listen in to European radio, of course — I mean, when there isn't a world war going on. You aren't exactly isolated, I admit. But out in Shanghai we were better off than that: we were in neutral territory and we had small bits of all the governments in the world right there, where we could talk to them. I dined with Italians while all this was going on. I could talk to them — ships' captains and consuls. I could turn around at the same dinner and talk to British diplomats. It happened often, because Shanghai hostesses couldn't be expected to remember all the strains and stresses of European politics when they planned their dinners. I don't wish to claim that I knew any more about Italy's actions in Africa just because I met some idiotic little Italian officer at a cocktail party, but certainly I knew more about why Italy did what she did.

The same thing was true of the British and their policy in Asia. Shanghai was full of baby diplomats and consuls from England. Because they studied language in Peking they tended to an aesthetic rather than a practical appreciation of China's qualities, and I made fun of them for it. I said that they were lost in a dream of the Ming Dynasty, and used all their expensively acquired proficiency in Mandarin only to chaffer for porcelain in the market place, but I was wrong. England's diplomats were working away like beavers, trying to come out ahead in the struggle between Japan and China. Some of these youngsters learned quickly what was going on, and many of them were intelligent and rebellious and they didn't like it. Close-mouthed as they were trained to be, that much was evident. I doubt if any diplomat now in office in England would deny that his nation played her cards foolishly then. England backed the wrong horse. He kicked his backer in the backside.

These horsey similes must be recurring to me because I am lost in the mists of the 1936 weeks, caught up in the old atmosphere of the stables. It was early in the spring of that year that I went down to Hong Kong to attend a race meeting, along with a girl named Babs Hutchins and Nunky Sassoon, a sweet old man who was Sir Victor's uncle. Nunky was an ardent racer and he chaperoned us on the trip, so it was a merry one, full of champagne and gaiety. It wasn't, however, particularly worth remembering except for Wang Ching-wei.

You know now who he is. In those days, even, you might have heard of him over in America, if you watched what went on in China. Just at that time he was being awfully quiet, following his attempted assassination in Nanking when a man dressed as a newspaper photographer fired at Wang out of his phony camera. Afterward Wang still carried a bullet in his back, and because he is a diabetic this grave condition was the more grave. It was all elaborately explained to the press, because Wang was now sailing for Germany to have a specialist examine the bullet with an eye to removing it. Nobody was to be given a chance to say Wang was going away for any other reason — fear of another attempt, or something like that. He was just a private citizen on leave of absence from his governmental duties. We didn't know he was aboard until we had left port. Then we encountered one Tang Leang-li, a stocky man with a nose so flat that it seemed to consist of two holes directly into his head. He spoke English with a heavily Teutonic accent. Dutch, he explained — he came from Java and spoke only one Chinese dialect, and that haltingly. In spite of the accent he spoke amusingly, and he kept his eye on me. He always kept his eye on women. He interested me. He interested Babs too: she said while Tang was out of the room, “You know who he is, of course? He's Wang Ching-wei's most faithful follower; writes his English books and all that.”

I didn't see the rest of the political party until the Gneisenau sailed into evening. Then, attended by Tang Leang-li and his five bodyguards, the man with a bullet in his spine came up on deck for an airing. He swung around the deck in a businesslike manner, keeping step with his companions. His eyes were fixed on the deck, but he listened carefully to what Tang was saying. After going around about five times he passed word along the bodyguard and they disappeared into the lower regions. We were five days on the way to Hong Kong and Wang came up every evening, once, after dark. In Hong Kong he hid himself and wouldn't come ashore; it was said that the British asked him not to try, for fear of more phony photographers and their attempts on his life. The bodyguard came out, though, and that is how it happened that my first view of the city which was going to mean so much to me was in the company of Tang Leang-li, future traitor to his country. On second thought I suppose Tang was a traitor already. But he didn't think of himself as one. He was busy and reasonably contented; on his way to his beloved Europe, pleasantly whiling away part of his tour with a lady who listened to him talk.

Tang was what the Cantonese call “wet salt,” a slang term for “amorous.” He concealed this chronic state pretty well by chattering along about Far Eastern politics, and he did his best to educate me on points in these matters about which I knew nothing. He hired a car to take us for the drive up the Peak and around the island, that drive which you must take as soon as you disembark in Hong Kong. He told me the interesting fact that if we had come along some years earlier he would not have been permitted to go past a certain point on the Peak Road as a tourist. Only Chinese who were servants of white residents were given passes to enter the holy land on the mountaintop in the old days. Even now, he said, no Chinese could live as a resident up in those rare regions; it was not an openly published law but an agreement between landowners and landlords, and everyone was faithful to it. Only one Chinese, an old fellow named Sir Robert Ho-tung, Tang told me, was permitted past these magic if imaginary portals. Sir Robert was too rich to ignore, so the British allowed him to build his house on his own Peak land, and to live there when he wanted to.

It all sounded ridiculous to me. Shanghai had none of that kind of discrimination by the time I came along. There was discrimination in Shanghai, but not in real estate. Our own American country club, the Columbia, wouldn't take Chinese as members or guests. Some businessman created a scandal by bringing Anna May Wong, American citizen, to bowl in the Columbia bowling alley. They wouldn't let her do it. “You have to be careful,” the committee would say vaguely when they were asked what it was all about. Shanghai wasn't perfect on that score, not by any means; it was thanks to Tang Leang-li, however, that I learned all about Hong Kong and how stupid a British colonial crowd can be when it tries.

We had tea on the veranda of the Repulse Bay Hotel; the Lido hadn't been built yet. I can smell the flowers now if I close my eyes. I see wisteria all over the front of the hotel, and the red flame-in-the-forest that hung in the trees. There is no scent of flowers now at Repulse Bay Hotel, which is a convalescent hospital for Japs. Friends of Tang Leang-li, they are.

“The British,” he told me on the hotel veranda, back in the spring of 1936, “are in for a rude awakening.”

And he told me how wonderful was his boss, Wang Ching-wei. He had to hurry back to the ship, as Wang was inclined to be nervous while the Gneisenau was still in port. Tang sent me a post card from Singapore with a photo of a baby gorilla. The ape had a nose so flat that all you could see of it was two holes leading directly into his brain. “Does this remind you of anybody?” he had written across the picture. Tang was likable enough. I gave him the address of my family in Chicago, because he said he would come across the States on his way home, and he had a long visit with them a few months later. He had, he told them, a wonderful time in Europe, because he shook hands with Hitler (who had a flabby grip), and enjoyed himself thoroughly in Rome with Mussolini.