China to Me (9 page)

I had frivoled away another year in my superior Kiangse Road apartment, on top of the bank. Things had happened and were happening, but they were all of a level in intensity. One had the feeling that this was the way conditions went in China; they were exciting, and there was always a threat that they would become more so, but I began to assume they would never go too far. There was the kidnaping of the Generalissimo. That had been tense indeed. We acted like ostriches most of the time in the treaty ports, but this development was of such magnitude that even we, the half-wits of the world, paused and looked at each other, and stopped chattering for a little. Then he came back again, safe, and we laughed shrilly, and poured out more cocktails.

I wish I had had the sense to keep an eye, those days, on the few Japanese I knew. Only two really had much to do with my life and they were both newspapermen. One became more familar to me later, in Hong Kong, as Yoshinori Horiguchi: he has a by-line on the dispatches from Lisbon and there was some sage comment under his name almost every day in the Hong Kong News. Just before I left, for instance, he was making good use of the phrase “falling back in order to advance” when he described the Germans' new “elastic warfare.” It is hardly fair to blame him, though, for what he says: Domei tells him to say it. We used to know Yoshinori as Bob. He's fairly well known to all newspapermen who have ever been East. He is another example of hybrid vigor; a Belgian mother and a Japanese father contributed the genes that account for his height — about six feet, pretty good for a Japanese. Bob had a pretty American wife, Karen, who met him first in the classrooms of the Missouri School of Journalism. I don't know where she is now. We younger people used to whisper to each other, asking, “Do you think she Regrets it?”

I met Bob and his boss through an American friend, Ake Hartman, who spent his holidays in Japan and talked the language and kept up with Japanese people as much as he could. Bob's boss made up for the social deficiencies of Bob, in my opinion (Bob was an undependable drunk and could be nasty). Shigei Matsumoto, the Domei chief in Shanghai, had been in China twelve years and had an advantage over his compatriots; he was tall and he looked like a Chinese, by which I mean he was neither ugly nor toothy. He looked rather like Wang Ching-wei, and he liked to be told so, because he knew and admired Wang. Ake told me a lot about Shigei and his wife. They were truly modern, Ake said sympathetically, and for this reason had a hard role to play whenever they went back to the island of their ancestors. Mrs. Matsumoto was an accomplished pianist who had been trained in England. There were three children and the family lived out near Kiangwan in a thickly populated Japanese community. Shigei sent them home to Japan on some pretext early in the spring and was living alone when I asked him one day to help me in a dilemma. An old Japanese, Shindo, had crossed the Pacific in the Chichibu Maru with Helen and me when we came from America, and he and I had struck up a warm friendship although we could not speak one word in common. I suppose he was planning for the war all the time, but in my innocence I thought he was a pet, and perhaps he is now saying just the same things about me. At any rate we used to write a letter to each other every six months or so, with interpreters helping out on both ends.

“To think you have settled in Shanghai, and that your heart is no longer Japanese,” he wrote soon after I took my first job. “Behold me sunk in deepest desolation!” I thought it perfectly charming. Also I remembered with mixed feelings the speech his secretary had made to me, the last day on the boat: “Mr. Shindo admires you intensely. Unfortunately he has a wife in Japan, and since this is his third marriage he feels he should not make any more changes. But he would be delighted to meet you, any time, in London.”

Now he was passing through Shanghai and had invited me to call at his hotel. I asked Shigei to come with me, to act as interpreter.

Shigei knew the States pretty well so he wasn't shocked at my temerity. He is related to Prince Konoye and is extremely aristocratic, but he came along anyway and helped me out. I haven't thought much about Shindo since the beginning of this war, but now that I muse on that visit of his I think it was interesting. Shigei sat there smiling a little and doing the honors well, I think, because Shindo was flattered and happy. I arranged for the ordeal of taking him out alone to lunch, and then I took Shigei back to his office and thanked him.

“I didn't know you had friends in Japan,” he said. “I am pleased. You know, I was at Yale for a while and I am fond of America. I hope we meet again soon.” Yes, I thought he was a swell guy: the memory of my stay in Japan was still silvery and special, in spite of what had happened since in North China. I also felt affectionate toward Shindo when I called at his Japanese hotel later in my car.

As for the car, I had just acquired it, a shiny blue Chevrolet coupé. Sir Victor gave it to me, and let me pick out the kind of car, too. My friends and I had argued for a long time over what sort I should buy: a small Morris, which would cost more, or this Chevvy, which would use more gas? In the end we settled on the Chevvy because you could hold more people in it, and it would be comfortable for long trips in the interior. I never took it into the interior; I didn't have a chance. As for the editorial “we,” I use it deliberately. All my belongings belonged to the Zau family too, and in a lesser degree to the outer circle of friends. But I was talking about Shindo.

I was proud of the car but I didn't drive it very well. Sir Victor had had to insist that I learn to drive before he let me buy it. We were making our way toward the Garden Bridge when I nearly ran down a ricksha coolie. It was entirely my fault, but the smaller fellow always looks funny, and this coolie's indignation made Shindo laugh. I can still hear the tone of voice, contemptuously amused, in which he said, “Chinese!”

It was the last time, as it happens, that I saw Shindo. The war began a few weeks later, as we all know, at Marco Polo Bridge.

Chapter 8

According to people who had been in Shanghai during the war of 1932, things were moving according to schedule. We were bidden to obey the new curfew laws, and the local Volunteers went to live at their posts, and people who had uniforms started to wear them, and there was a shortage of tin helmets. Although we were not supposed to be involved in this war, strictly speaking, it was no time to split hairs. The Chinese on the outskirts of the city put up a braver and more effective defense than lots of us had expected, and week followed week without much change in the conditions under which we lived. That is, we were awakened early by the noise of bombing, and all day long there were evidences of the war in the distance; clouds of smoke and flame sometimes when a part of Chapei was fired, and loud explosions of guns and shells.

The municipal council was busy defining laws for our protection. The municipal police bore the brunt of the war; those who were on duty down in the dangerous area across the creek lived under shellfire most of the time. We were still so sure of ourselves, so used to thinking of ourselves as the privileged overlords of the East, that the danger was muted; it took on the aspect of a sort of constant threat of accident, like driving a car with faulty brakes. We worried about shells bouncing over the border, or irresponsible Japanese who overstepped their rights, but not many of us went further than that for the time being. It was like being too near the line of fire in a duel between two other people. That the survivor of the duel might then shoot at us was a possibility that did not occur to many. My favorite story was about the man who barely escaped death from that Black Saturday bomb that fell on the Bund. He landed in a pile of rubble, his clothes torn and blackened from the explosion, and he was a little dazed. As they helped him out of the debris he put his hand to his head and said:

“My God, this will set extrality back twenty years!”

What of Sinmay? It took me several days to find him, after the war began. He made no effort at first to report to me his change of address, because we had quarreled. The family had continued stubbornly to stay in the Yangtzepoo house, in spite of all my Cassandra acts, until the first noise of the war itself. The brown family car was out of commission with a flat tire. Sinmay hastily commandeered an ancient Ford belonging to his father, which had two gallons of gasoline in the tank. With whatever Zoa had time to pack, the entire household drove out of the dangerous area into the Settlement and from there to his father's house in Frenchtown. Before I found them again they had moved into a one-room apartment not far from the ancestral house, and they were in an awful mess.

I was still well out of the trouble, living in a Yuyuen Road house I had taken from friends. We were near the city limits at Jessfield Park, but the Japanese hadn't as yet worked their way around that far, although now and then a little shrapnel fell into the garden or on the roof.

Just about now the British decided to evacuate their women and children. It was a confused business. The general public thought that they had been ordered officially to evacuate, and few thought of arguing; ships were filled and sent off in a terrific hurry. But one consular official who didn't want his wife to go away pointed out that the order was not watertight. Until he was told in a legal way to separate himself from his family, he said stanchly, he would not do anything of the sort. His wife stayed, and other women followed her example. Not many, though. Hong Kong filled up with people who had packed and hurried away, and the overflow went on to Manila. In the course of time we heard loud complaints from the evacuated ladies, of how badly they were being treated in the refugee camps. One woman who was the first to listen to the call of duty and rush aboard ship turned around and managed to be the first to come back.

It has been a long time, but I can hear in my memory even now the mixture of complaints and accusations that followed close on the beginning of all that Shanghai trouble. We Americans only grumbled a bit about our diplomats neglecting our interests; it was the usual thing and we didn't take ourselves seriously. Our most severe punishment was that the banks moved away from the middle of town for a while, way out in Frenchtown, and it was a nuisance getting there. When the scare died down they came back.

But the British! They had, as usual, the best quarters in town for their consular staff. The British are that way; they take care of their officials and they are farseeing about such things as buildings and other external appearances in foreign countries. In Shanghai they had held onto the best site they could possibly have owned, a large tract of land fronting the Bund down at Soochow Creek, and running back a whole long block. There were houses there for the staff beside the large buildings that constituted the consulate. On the day the excitement started they all dropped their work on their respective desks, grabbed their families and their belongings, and rushed for safety. It was later alleged that they made no effort to save the government records, to do anything about the flag, even to lock the buildings or to put a guard on the grounds — they just ran. In excuse they said that they had been stampeded by their air attaché, who warned them of horrible happenings if Chinese bombs aimed at the flagship Idzumo should fall wide of the mark. In vain did they make excuses, for the Shanghai public enjoyed a chance to poke fun at them and the matter was a highly humorous scandal for some days. All was forgiven and forgotten in time, however, and the officials went back to work on the Bund and behaved as though nothing whatever had happened to disturb their dignity, though there was perhaps a touch of added severity in their deportment for a small while.

Personally, I was glad to give over teasing them. The English took much more of a helpful line with all of us than the Americans did. They tried to deal with the Japanese, to enforce some recognition of our rights south of the creek, whereas the Americans adopted a sort of wait-and-watch policy that was expensive after a time. It was at the British consulate that I found out they were organizing rescue fleets of trucks to go into Yangtzepoo and salvage foreigners' belongings: the Americans did nothing in this line. It was the British who finally arranged permission, through the municipal police, for people to visit their homes, under escort if necessary. I tried twice to get in to look at Sinmay's house, claiming that it was my dwelling place too. This was practically true, anyway. I saw the house and was able to report to Zoa and Sinmay that a lot of their heavy furniture was still there.

Before we could do any important salvaging, though, I had to go through several formalities. Sinmay's printing press would be confiscated by the Japs if he, a Chinese and an enemy, were known as the owner, so we drew up an agreement whereby I became the purchaser of that press as of a year or so in advance of the war. The deputy commissioner of police, Malcolm Smythe, helped me a lot. He sent a policeman down with me once or twice while I carried out loads of Sinmay's household goods; sadly battered and looted they were, too. It was my first view of the after effects of war and I was nauseated at the wicked cruel waste of it — the slashed family photographs, the smashed toys, the bureau drawers chopped to bits in disappointment. All the houses that I saw were the same. The Japs controlled the process of salvage thus: a guard on Garden Bridge inspected my permit and gave me a Japanese marine to come along and keep an eye on me. I was not allowed to bring in any Chinese coolies to help with the loading, but Russian workmen, being whites, were permitted to pass with me. I hired a truck and ten workmen, and all day we loaded furniture and carted it out, past the bridge, and came back for more. The ticklish part of it was that bridge, because the guards there were often nasty and temperamental. The affair went smoothly enough, just the same, until the all-important day when I loaded up with Sinmay's books. These had been saved by not being in his house. They were stacked up in a warehouse near by, and nobody had burst in, by good luck. There was an old Chinese watchman still in control and he made difficulties for us, even standing up to the English policeman who came with me. He wanted a good squeeze, but we beat him down at last and he let us empty the room.