Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  I flipped back and read the captions carefully, then the quarter page of opening text. I’d published three books and had a fourth coming out the next fall. I’d been a war correspondent for Collier’s in Spain, France, Czechoslovakia, and Finland. I was under contract to cover the Chinese army in action for them, an assignment that would take me to Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Still, Ernest was “the great American,” while you had to read the very fine print under the smallest of the photos for any suggestion that I was anything more than Ernest Hemingway’s bride who aimed her new double-barrel shotgun well enough to make him proud.

  PART IV

  Hong Kong

  FEBRUARY 1941

  Let’s just say we made it to Hong Kong. We’ll skip the stopping in Los Angeles on the way to talk with Gary Cooper again about playing the lead in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the lunch at Jack’s in San Francisco to meet Ingrid Bergman. We’ll skip the bit about the luxury cruise on the Matsona from San Francisco to Hawaii, all the way tossed about the ship like Ping-Pong balls in a spirited volley. We’ll skip all the draping of leis and the swarming of greeters and the hordes of photographers in Honolulu, and smiling until our faces hurt. Also the relative privacy of the Pan Am Clipper flying boat, the glorious night’s rest in Guam, and the second Clipper, which splashed down in an overcast Victoria Harbour, from which we were ferried across to Central Hong Kong with its colonial banks and expat mansions and the Hong Kong Hotel, complete with ceiling fans and antiques and squishy leather chairs straight out of Somerset Maugham. Ernest and I were there for the journalism, but all of wealthy Hong Kong gathered each Saturday night to dine and dance at the hotel, and I did love to dance.

  A second role had been added to our itinerary not long before we left: President Roosevelt asked us to observe closely the politics of China—in particular the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalists who controlled some of the south of the country, and Mao Zedong’s communists, who controlled the north. The great bulk of the country was already in the hands of the Japanese, and the two warring Chinese factions were meant to have set aside their civil war to cooperate against them, a condition of their US aid. The alliance, though—if it had ever existed—was going sour. Chiang Kai-shek was rumored to be talking about making peace with the Japanese in order to gain time to rid China of Mao and the communists.

  “So the president wants us to spy on our Chinese allies, that’s about the sum of it?” Ernest said.

  “‘Espionage,’ Bug,” I answered. “It’s so much lovelier a word than ‘spy.’”

  The president had had us briefed by the secretary of the Treasury and the general manager of the Rubber Company of the Far East.

  “If we don’t stop the Japanese in China,” the latter told us, “they’ll move into the Pacific, to take over the world’s rubber supplies.”

  “Bad for your business,” Ernest said glibly.

  “No rubber, no tires,” the man responded. “No tires, no trucks, and no airplanes, no way to defend ourselves.”

  Ernest said, “Which would be very bad for business all around.”

  Hong Kong, once we’d hoisted ourselves up from the squishy Somerset Maugham chairs at the hotel and wandered beyond Pedder Street and the mansions, turned out to be a dump of a place nailed together with odd lots of rotten wood, surrounded by the Japanese, and throbbing with Chinese refugees. Ernest, so good with languages, learned within a Hong Kong minute to order a rickshaw in the local slang so we could ride comfortably through the awful poverty. There were brothels and mahjong betting parlors and street sleepers. There were opium dens in which Chinese paid ten cents for three pills and a space in the tiers of hard bunks—cheaper than food, and it dulled the appetite. There was everywhere the vile odor of night soil, human excrement put out to be gathered by old women who tended, each time the air-raid sirens sounded for a blackout drill, to drop their collecting baskets and run. But the worst, always the worst, were the children. A twelve-year-old boy made the rounds to the bunks to see if users had overdosed. A girl who couldn’t have been nine, and with the side of her face burned in some way you didn’t want to imagine, carved balls within balls of ivory, three months to make one little trinket that would end up forgotten at the back of a desk drawer halfway across the world.

  The trouble with me and my bar of soap, Ernest insisted, was that I assumed the Chinese judged the world the way I did, that whatever made me glum must make them so too.

  “If it’s as bad as you think,” he said, “wouldn’t they be shooting themselves? They’re having kids, Mook. They’re lighting firecrackers every night.”

  He knew all about the firecrackers. He set them off in our hotel room until I put my foot down about it. He drank and swapped tall tales with a jolly entourage of British officers and pilots, Chinese generals and millionaires, and a crazy Australian in the Hong Kong Hotel lobby. He went pheasant hunting. He bet on the horses at Happy Valley with nothing to show for it but a tweed coat with a deep inside pocket and such complicated buttons that it was, he swore, pickpocket proof.

  Me, I flew to Lashio, Burma—the end of the Burma Road built by the British to get supplies to the Chinese army. I didn’t have papers to go to China yet, but I had a flight, and that seemed enough. We left at four in the morning, in little visibility to elude a Japanese army that was more than happy to point its guns at a little China National Aviation Corporation DC-2 with canvas seats and a cabin that wasn’t pressurized. We flew sixteen hours—fifteen hundred miles at seriously freezing altitudes and with no real navigation, with hail pummeling the wings so violently that it left passengers vomiting. The pilot, an Indiana boy who liked to make puns, opened his window to judge how fast he was going and, to pass the time, told me of a similar flight in October that had been brought down by the Japanese. The Japs had killed the pilot, nine of the fourteen passengers, and a twenty-five-year-old stewardess making her last flight before her wedding day.

  Indiana had to get a fix on the flare pots meant to mark the landing strip in Chungking to land us, in weather so soupy you might have served it at the White House and garnered praise for the brilliant new chef. We had a quick breakfast there, then set off for Lashio, the weather along the gorge of the Burma Road so bad that my arms began twitching. My head was so soft that I admitted to the pilot that I might burst into tears for no reason.

  “That’s on account of the lack of oxygen at this altitude,” he explained. “If I take us any lower, the downdrafts in the gorge will take us all the way down.”

  The next morning, we waited for the word that the Japanese had finished their morning bombing, then took off again, flying low along the Burma Road this time to land in Kunming on the China side of the border, a big walled city so thoroughly bombed that it was something to see even if you’d witnessed what the Russians did to Finland or the shelling of Madrid. The townspeople, when we arrived, had formed a mile-long bucket brigade, passing water from hand to hand to put out the fires, while women hobbled on bound feet after their children or dug through the rubble that had been their homes.

  By the time I returned to Hong Kong and Bug three days later, the press were reporting that Ernest Hemingway and his new wife were in town to research a novel. We went about the city as if we really might be setting a novel there, happy to avoid stirring up interest in the intelligence we were meant to collect.

  “Who would ever set a novel in a place where they spit so much?” I asked Ernest. There were slimy blobs of mucus everywhere you went, and always people adding to it.

  “That’s the tuberculosis,” he answered.

  When I looked appalled, he said, “I thought you knew. Honestly, Mook. I thought you were handling it awfully well.”

  “No rubber, no tires,” I muttered to myself.

  We moved to the Repulse Bay Hotel, a quiet place outside the bustle of the city, which was even more English than the Hong Kong Hotel, if you overlooked the barbed wire stretchin
g across the sand between the veranda and the South China Sea and the pillboxes and barricades meant to guard against Japanese invasion. Tuxedoed waiters poured tea and served pink gins to all the beautiful people who languished in wicker chairs, and no one spit—although on a walk to Aberdeen to have a look at a sampan village, we did pass a woman vomiting blood.

  “The cholera,” Bug explained as he took my arm and hurried us off. “This is what you meant for our honeymoon, isn’t it?”

  He began to oversee the boiling of our water and arranged extra vaccine shots, while I husbanded my shrinking bar of jammy French soap. I filed a story with Collier’s about Hong Kong, which my editor cabled was beautifully written but not quite exciting enough—a problem he would remedy in the opening paragraphs. I filed another about the heroic CNAC pilots like the punny one from Indiana. Ernest gathered a new gang of friends with which to drink, including a redheaded Virginian on his way back to Washington, DC, from China, where he’d been laying out flight routes. When he left Hong Kong, he took with him an envelope from us to deliver to the US Treasury secretary, setting out the little bit of intelligence we’d gathered in our first five weeks in Hong Kong, as we waited for our permissions to tour China itself to clear.

  We were pretty thrilled the night we were called, finally, to report for our flight from Hong Kong to Namyung. With some luck, we would make the short flight over the Japanese and the mountains to join the Chinese army in the Seventh War Zone. War was harder than you might have imagined to find, the Japanese having overrun the best three-quarters of China and not, apparently, in need or want of the rest. We waited in the cold at the airfield, armed with flea powder, mosquito nets, and bedrolls, and what Ernest deemed to be enough whiskey to last us, and quinine too. After a good long while, the flight was canceled, as the weather would make landing impossible.

  We did manage the flight the next day, though, the weather having cleared enough for us to land but not so much that our little plane couldn’t use the cloud cover to hide from the Japanese. We arrived in the pouring rain to meet our political escort, our transport department escort, our interpreter, our driver, and a tubercular mechanic. The seven of us squeezed into a Chevy, which would turn out to have exploding tires, and we set off down a long slug of boulder-studded mud. We were not to worry, Mr. Ma (the political escort) assured us: deluxe accommodations awaited us in Shaokwan.

  The Chinese version of “deluxe,” it turned out, included two wooden benches for sleeping, a single brass bowl filled with murky water, two kerosene lamps, a hole-in-the-floor toilet, and mosquitos enough for Ernest and me both, with some to spare, despite the cold.

  “‘The Light of Shaokwan,’ indeed!” Ernest said.

  “Are we to wash our faces and brush our teeth together in the same bit of water?” I asked him.

  “Mrs. Bongie,” Ernest said, “if you even dream of brushing your teeth in this, you are a bigger nutcase than I give you credit for.”

  I took my soap from my pack, held it to my nose, and inhaled. “No rubber, no tires.”

  “Cheer up!” he said. “It’s a fine honeymoon you’ve arranged for us!”

  We were, at least, only one hundred miles from Japanese-occupied Canton, and perhaps fifty from the front.

  He opened one of the whiskey bottles, took a long pull, and handed it to me. “Ganbei!” he said.

  “Ganbei?”

  “Bottoms up, Mrs. Bongie-China-Saver-Heminghorn.”

  “Gellingway,” I insisted.

  “Mrs. Bongie-China-Saver-Gellingway.”

  I rushed about Shaokwan collecting the political information I needed for Collier’s while Ernest made rousing speeches and traded flowery toasts made with a yellow “rice wine” kerosene. Three days in, we pushed off with Mr. Ma and the gang for a closer look at the war, traveling in an ancient truck through limestone mountains and grassy valleys to the North River, a wide, muddy thing so like the Mississippi River that I was reminded of that dreary hat I’d tossed out the train window, to land not in the water but on the homebound track.

  We boarded a rusty Chris-Craft motorboat driven by a bearded old fool who sat cross-legged at the helm, smoking a bamboo pipe and spitting out the window. It was the only motorized boat on the river, we were told, and, no, we shouldn’t worry about the rope pulling a sampan behind us, dragging right beside the motor, or the boy bailing the Chris-Craft hourly to keep us from sinking. A contingent of teenaged soldiers had boarded the sampan, already crowded with the driver’s family and a screaming baby, leaving us only the sloping roof of the Chris-Craft itself on which to sleep. We poured some whiskey into a thermos of boiled water, and we wedged ourselves securely between boat hooks and coiled ropes, and we settled in to the view: temples built improbably high on the cliffs, egrets and ducks, and men on the bamboo-edged shore pulling junks upriver by rope, singing as they worked. Despite the abundance of sun and the flies and gnats, which gave way to mosquitos as evening colored the sky, we were better off than we would have been in the dank, damp sampan, where we would have had no choice but to share our whiskey.

  The boy, between bailings, routinely tested the water depth with a pole, but still we ran aground several times in the dark. Mercifully, we tied up to a sampan village, charming boats gathered together in a friendly little cluster.

  Ernest called out as welcome, “You folks have any cholera we haven’t found already?” sending the poor Chinese scampering inside their little boats lest this crazy American brute do them harm.

  “Bug!” I scolded.

  “Didn’t you see the black flag?” he demanded.

  “Don’t be silly. Our good hawking captain has better sense than to tie us up with a cholera quarantine.”

  Ernest slept while I lay awake listening to the talking and the laughing and the sucking, the nauseating spitting, until finally it was something close to quiet for perhaps three hours.

  By the light of dawn, Ernest pointed out the black flag. “A dose of cholera included in the honeymoon suite at no extra charge!”

  Farther down the river, we went ashore in a downpour to join a platoon of soldiers awaiting us with horses so small that Ernest could touch his toes to the ground from his mount—a convenience, he claimed, as he weighed as much as the horse. The soldiers took us to their division headquarters, where soggy paper banners greeted us with “Welcome to the Representatives of Righteousness and Peace” and “Democracy only Survives Civilization,” whatever that was supposed to mean. A white-gloved general saluted us, and his shoeless orphan soldiers schooled us in the weaponry and activity of the Twelfth Army Group holding this front. It was cold and wet and miserable, with no actual fighting. The most noteworthy thing that happened was that Ernest refrained from strangling me in the middle of the night.

  The next day, we rode up through rolling hills to dirty little villages with peasants struggling to work their plows in the gray mud, each village separated from the next by a vast emptiness that made getting anywhere impossible. We found generals happy to drink our whiskey, but not a drop of war. The Japanese had better sense than to want this bit of land where the peasants had already burned their own crops twice rather than leave them to the enemy.

  “Just shoot me now and put me out of this misery, Bug,” I said one night after we’d finished our single bowls of inedible rice and settled into our hard wooden-plank beds, my stomach no better than it had been all the long trip.

  He said, “But it’s a terrific honeymoon, Mrs. Pig. They threw in the tuberculosis and the cholera both—such generosity.”

  “Oh, go suck an egg, Mr. Pig,” I said.

  He laughed and he said, “Ah, what I wouldn’t do for a decent egg.”

  “No rubber, no tires,” I reminded myself.

  He said, “Good night, Mrs. Representative of Righteousness and Peace.”

  I said, “Good night, Mr. Representative.”

  He said, “I do love you, Mookie.”

  I said, “I take you on the grandest adventures to the m
ost romantic places. Who wouldn’t be wild for that?” And then after a moment, “I love you too, Bug.”

  “But not enough to share your soap with me?”

  “I promised to love and honor,” I said, “but I said nothing about obeying, and I certainly did not promise to share my soap.”

  I’d climbed a ladder to a bamboo tower that was the only place a woman could relieve herself in the thousand-year-old Chinese village in which we’d found ourselves—clay huts emptying into muddy streets, our bed a stone floor in the company of flies and mosquitos, and our whiskey gone—and I was setting about my business (which would be conveniently collected in a not-particularly-sweet-smelling five-foot Ali Baba jar beneath me, for fertilizing crops) when a hammering on the nose cap of an unexploded Japanese bomb began. The air-raid signal.

  I looked down to see the peasants scattering out into the rice paddies. In the distance, someone plowed the mud with a scrawny buffalo.

  Ernest waited at the bottom of the ladder, grinning up at me. “You might have used the rice paddy.”

  “Can’t you see I’m busy here?” I demanded.

  “Best of Chinese luck!” he called up, and he disappeared into a doorway, leaving me to my fine view of a squadron of Japanese planes passing mercifully high overhead.

  “That would have been something,” Ernest said afterward, watching as I descended the ladder. “The intrepid war correspondent killed in the line of duty.”

  “I was in the middle of something, and anyway, you can’t expect me to duck for cover at the first suggestion of fighting we’ve seen, even if it was a mile overhead.”

  We set off not much later on our little horses, Mr. Ma giving us a broken-English tutorial on the Japanese air force. He took us up the Hill of Heroes, from which we watched through binoculars what purported to be a battlefield conveniently in full action for us, Chinese soldiers with rifles, machine guns, and mortars in khaki camouflage scattering toward a tree-lined Hill of the Unknowns, entrenched with Japanese. The general who stood observing with us was a real general, to be sure, even if he spent more time hosting drunken banquets than he did leading soldiers, or even visiting them. The soldiers were real Chinese soldiers as well, although they wore shoes, which ought to have made us suspect. What the real Chinese soldiers were so bravely marching toward, though, was not the Japanese army but rather a mock Japanese camp. The real Japanese were another ridge beyond, far enough away for the exercise to be all smoke and explosion without an ounce of threat to life.