China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  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.

  There is another reason why I should remember Hong Kong in that spring of 1936, because I spent a lot of the week with Needa, and years later I had occasion to remind him of it. Victor Vander Needa spells his name like that because his mother, who was Japanese, didn’t know how else to spell it. His father was Dutch, and probably the name was slightly more complicated than this version, but Victor wouldn’t know. He was born in Tsingtao and spent most of his childhood there, but he remembers that his mother took him to Japan for a little while, and he learned to speak Japanese in her home. Later he needed the language just as much in Tsingtao, a popular place with Japanese, but by that time his mother was dead and the little boy had been adopted informally by an American broker.

  “He was talking about sending me to the States to be educated, for a doctor or something,” said Needa, “but I was eighteen and I wanted to go out on my own. Besides, I had begun riding and was a sort of hero in Tsingtao. I thought I was hot stuff, and I owned that town, honest. So I went in for brokerage.”

  Although that may sound like a non sequitur to an innocent Westerner, any China hand will know what Needa meant. Racing in the East is based on the illusion that all the riders are amateurs, “gentlemen jockeys.” Actually they are just professional jockeys like any riders anywhere in the world, with the few exceptions of some rider-owners. The ordinary boys who can’t afford to ride for the fun of it always go in for something light and gentlemenly, usually brokerage, to earn their livings when they aren’t following the races, and enthusiasts give them orders to keep them comfortable between meetings. Needa was for years the best jockey they had on the Coast. He was a beautiful rider, but too big to make a go of racing anywhere but in China, where the largest jockeys in the world ride the smallest horses. He had a struggle to get down below a hundred and forty pounds, but the tough little Mongol ponies were used to that. He was a good-looking, big boy, a textbook example of “hybrid vigor.”

  He was famous for his good nature. Stable owners made a butt of him and never wondered if he didn’t sometimes resent it. That meeting he won the Derby, one of the biggest events, so we were wined and dined all over Hong Kong. I had long been a friend of his, and so he confided something to me. “I’m getting out of this if I can,” he said. “It’s no good for a regular income, fooling round with horses. I may want to be getting married one of these days; it’s time these fellows took me serious.”

  I knew what he was talking about. A few years later he kept the promise he made to himself, and slowed down on his racing, and stepped up in his brokerage, and married his girl. This was the difficulty: she was English. Her father, a wealthy shipping man with a passion for his stable, was furious that his daughter had married a Eurasian, and did not rest until he had separated them. He waited until the young people were having money troubles and then he pounced. By that time there was a baby, a little girl, and the whole thing — his wife did leave him — was a bad shock to Needa. It’s my theory that he didn’t really become anti-foreign until his marriage was spoiled, but maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the seeds of hate were sown back at the race meeting in Hong Kong when everyone thought it funny to make a butt of Victor Vander Needa, the best-natured man riding on the Coast. Remember his name, because it will occur again.

  The abdication of Edward, King of England, was more to me than just a delightfully exciting piece of gossip, owing to my current romance of that year. I was somewhat infatuated with an English naval officer. It was a strange choice for me: Robert was a saturnine young man who was disliked by his fellow officers because he was sarcastic and fiercely in love with his job. His zeal was unpopular. Most naval officers in the Far East, of any nationality, used to fall under the spell of that easy life and they did no more work than they had to, spending all their leisure playing games or going to parties. Not Robert. He thought all his waking moments of navigation, and I think he divided his dreaming time equally between the girl at home and the ship. I wasn’t the girl at home, but I let him talk about her. As a result I spent a good deal of time that year going up the river to whatever outport his little gunboat was honoring with her presence.

  I was fascinated by the trips, by the boat herself, and in a somber sort of way by Robert’s conversation, which was so technical that I could never understand a word of it. “Dear old thing,” he would write, “a rather funny thing happened yesterday. The skipper was — ” Then followed six closely written pages about navigation or something else nautical that I didn’t understand, and the letter ended with, “I did laugh! Good-by now; be good.”

  Well, that was the boy friend. In a boat the size of these river craft there were only three officers at most in the wardroom: the commanding officer, the mate (that was Robert’s job), and the doctor. Sometimes in small boats there was no doctor and then the other officers hated each other with a deadly poisonous intensity, the result of too much time together in a trying climate. When there were three men, though, it was a little better. Two could get together and hate the third one. Relief came fairly often when they were stationed at bigger outports where they could use the country club, dine out, and other
wise relax. Two or three times I took a rackety little plane up to one of these places and met them, and with the wardroom visited around the city, drinking with the representatives of oil companies and tobacco companies.

  Also whenever the boat went to Nanking I went up to see Robert. It was easy to go that far and it was always fun. Sinmay’s Nanking was one kind, Robert’s was the other. The young foreigners of the town were busy trying to make the place as pleasant to live in as their lamented Peking had been. This could not be done, but there were lots of the same people there, who had been moved with their legations, in spite of all their protests, from the northern capital, so we had the old gossip and the old traditions. They organized riding parties and drag hunts over the lovely low hills that surrounded Purple Mountain.

  Two Nanking week ends stand out in my mind. Both of them depend for their memorability on the royal family of Great Britain. I happened to come up for a visit just when the scandal of Mrs. Simpson broke on the world, and I found Robert and his brother officers in a state of collapse. As an American I didn’t quite understand the way they felt. To me it was an exciting and humorous incident, intensely interesting but not really near the heart. Of course I was secretly tickled, anyway, that it was an American woman who had so ruffled the dignity of our cousins across the Atlantic: it is the British themselves who have made us feel that way about them. I’m trying to explain my bad manners, not excuse them, for there was really no excuse for what I did. At dinner that night on board the gunboat I held up my glass of wine and said:

  “Gentlemen, I give you — ”

  Expectantly the officers held up their glasses. …

  “Mrs. Simpson,” I finished.

  The captain was the first to speak, as they lowered their goblets to the tablecloth untasted. “Please pass the potatoes,” he said stiffly.

  Later Robert gave me hell. “You don’t seem to see it,” he said, tears standing in his eyes. “Can’t you understand? If this horrible thing is true, all my life becomes meaningless. Everything the Navy means has disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t see it.”

  Well, it was true. My next Nanking week end was in celebration of the Coronation; the Navy seemed to have survived the shock bravely. Host of the Coronation Ball was the Ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. Soon he was to be wounded by a Jap machine gun. We spent a lot of time that evening lightheartedly wondering what the champagne had cost him.

  As I read over this typescript I am overtaken by nostalgia of a strange sort. Oh, yearns my heart, for those happy evenings spent with the British, because we danced so much! Americans beyond a certain age never dance at all, do they? I had forgotten. I am remembering now. Up until ten years ago when I spent an occasional year in the States, usually in New York, our social hours were passed in speakeasies. Night clubs were kept for visiting firemen, and on the rare occasions when we did visit such places they were too crowded for dancing. Englishmen are different; they dance, they dance well, they like to dance. Nor does it matter how old the lady may be: she is still permitted to dance. Women all like it, you know; all they need is a chance.

  Sinmay didn’t dance. He said, “I do only those things which I do well, and I am too short for dancing.” Besides, he had no use for the Chinese dancing crowd, the girls and boys who thronged to their favorite place, the Park Hotel, and aped the foreigners in giving parties out in the open instead of hiring private rooms at long-established restaurants. When cornered by his insistent young cousins he fell back on another reason.

  “A day of reckoning is coming,” he said severely. “I do not know how much longer that man Chiang Kai-shek will go on making brave speeches and doing nothing. Even he cannot go on like this forever. Japan is owning the country now. Yesterday they came and arrested two of my friends, editors, for printing anti-Japanese sentiments in their paper. These men will go to prison, for what? For saying what the Generalissimo says every day of his life.” He frowned at us and we were abashed into silence.

  “For you,” he added, addressing himself to me, “I have nothing to say, I cannot scold you. It is not your country’s problem. But these young Chinese, these children of compradors! They have money and no brains. At least their fathers have brains enough to make that money out of the foreigners.” It was later than we thought.

  Chapter 7

  I find that I am reluctant to come to grips with the Japanese, even in the harmless paper battles of this book. It was such a short time I had with China, when you count it up, just a little bit more than two years, and after that I was locked up in a Japanese concentration camp on a huge scale, that grew smaller and smaller with time. I cling to the harmless, happy memories of China before the engagement at Marco Polo Bridge.

  Among the photographs that I left in Hong Kong are a few that mean a lot to me. They are of outdoor scenes in the Yellow Mountain district of Anhwei, and they depict about twelve Chinese, girls and men, with Miss Hahn standing among them. We all wear walking clothes, even Sinmay having abandoned his long brown robe in the interests of comfort, and we carry stout sticks, and we look cold and damp. It was a famous and much-publicized jaunt, comprising as it did practically all the important Chinese editors and journalists in Shanghai, with the artist-photographer Long Chin-san coming along to immortalize us with his camera and brushes among the mountain peaks.

  On this trip I was amazed by my intellectual Chinese friends. I had always thought of them as effete creatures moving softly around their libraries or studies, now and then indulging in an hour of restrained alcoholic gaiety and poem-chanting in company, after the old tradition of the sages. I failed to remember how surprising the physiology of the Chinese can be. Those delicate willow wands of girls can eat a tremendous lot without half trying, and now I was to find out that they can all qualify without training for the Olympic track team. We climbed the mountain all day, every day, investigating different peaks famous for countless legends. We scrambled up and slid down stone steps which had been built by the order of a Ming emperor and had been kept in dubious repair since. At the beginning of our ten-day trip we put up at the China Travel Service Hotel, near a mineral hot spring, but as we wandered further afield we found it necessary and agreeable to stay in temples up on the mountaintops. The country was thickly wooded with pines up to a certain level and above this we walked through an austere world of bare rock and clouds that came down to swirl in the valleys beneath us. The thin cold air was intoxicating and made me strong, but I was always being humiliated by the prowess of the other women, including one old dame of sixty-odd who had bound feet but who left me behind every time. I am supposed to be a fairly good walker, but I discovered then that there is far too much of me. The thin little maidens and slender youths leaped lightly up the ancient stairs as I trudged weightily behind them, leaning on my pilgrim’s staff and puffing loudly.

  It was good, though, to be among trees again after the bare flat ugliness of Shanghai countryside. Even though I slipped in the mud and fell on my hands and sprained a wrist, I enjoyed all of it. In the evening after our meal of Buddhist vegetables we would sit around on those excruciatingly stiff chairs the Chinese use and tell ghost stories or let the monks tell us about other tourists. One day we ran into a friend, that Chang who was famous for his painted tigers. He was enjoying himself in an innocent way, dressed as a pilgrim in a huge straw hat lined with blue peasant cloth, walking through the aged rocks with a map in his hand. This map was in reality a long scroll painting of the Yellow Mountain. It had been executed three hundred years before, but I have never seen anything that so much resembled a modern geological cross-section drawing, faithful to scale and neatly done. We made a great fuss of Chang and his map. It was possible to trace a few places where erosion had made a difference to the land’s surface, but there were not many.

  Long made photographs which he touched up with a technique of his own invention. Wherever he thought the composition needed it he put in clouds,
or pine trees, or spaces. We wound up our expedition in Hangchow, acting in all propriety as Chinese poets have done for generations before us: we went on the lake in boats and wrote poems.

  That was the biggest trip I ever managed to make into the interior until much later, when I went to Chungking. The Zaus and I, however, often dashed off for little journeys. I accompanied a few of them to Wuhu more than once and saw the famous silk mills, idle by the time I came there, and I sat in Wuhu plum gardens. I went to Peking once, and only once: Sinmay and I had to go up in July when all the foreign residents were away in Peitaiho. It was just as I knew it would be. It is heaven and if I am good I shall be able to go there to die. Hangchow is a smaller heaven, so is Soochow, so is Yangchow. They tell me that the Japanese have made a concentration camp in Yangchow and put a lot of prisoners there. I can’t picture it. It is a very old, moss-grown city, dank and green and untouched, and cut off from the bustle of Chinkiang by a fiercely flowing river. The day we went across this river to see it a storm blew up and cut us off for three days from the other side, as no boats would cross. In the streets people were unfriendly and called me a Japanese, because I was a foreigner and they thought Japanese were foreign-looking. They know the difference now.

  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.