China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  Again I am anticipating. This time you will note that I speak with acerbity. It is the first chance I have had to blow my top in a good personal, untrammeled way. I wish to say good-naturedly that I have suffered a lot, and I often wonder in what cause. I believe it is just in the cause of plain scientific truth, because I have not sworn my lifeblood away to any political party. Without intending to do so, I ran slam-bang into the leftists and one of their legends by writing a book on the Soongs. This legend has been built up around Mme. Sun. If you want to know more about it, don’t bother to ask me; look up Mme. Sun in almost any book on China written by an American writer with leftist sympathies. (You won’t find the same thing in the Chinese books. Chinese writers don’t bemuse as easy as we do.) At the same time exactly I ran slam-bang into the rightists and one of their legends. This legend has been built up around Mme. Kung. To know more about it you need only to turn to any of the cocktail groups of Shanghai, or Hong Kong, or Chungking, or Tientsin; you won’t find much of it in books because of the law of scandal or libel. I can never remember which. Mme. Kung’s legend is more diffuse than is the one about her young sister Ching-ling, because her husband shares in it, and so do her four children. John Gunther gathered his material from both parties when he prepared for his book, Inside Asia.

  Part of my earliest work in preparation for The Soong Sisters was the gathering of all the vast amount of nebulous scandal that exists about the Soongs, sifting it out, classifying it, and then trying to trace it to a foundation in fact. I could write a big heavy book on that subject alone. I won’t, though. If you, reader, know nothing about the Far East except what you read in books like this, it will mean nothing to you anyway. If you are an old hand from the Coast you probably already know most of the rumors I am talking about. Now you who know China, please do me a favor, because that research job is one which I hated to leave in order to write my book. Sit down and search your memory. Take your favorite bit of Soong scandal and look at it again, and trace out where it came from, and try to prove it to your satisfaction, and then if you have proof, send it on to me, care of the publishers. There are the stories about financial wanglings, and the stories about the vast sums which the Chiangs and the Soongs have piled up in American and South American banks, and the stories about Dr. Kung’s private life, and the stories, never-ending, about squeeze. The only ones I ever proved were some of the squeeze ones, and they did not trace back to the sources the public expected. … I’ll talk about squeeze in a moment. First I want to finish up the general subject of gossip in China.

  If you ever go out there, be on your guard against certain types of stories which recur again and again and again. For some reason these tales have a special fascination for Chinese chatterers. Cheating in high places is the first. Espionage is the second. (You find the most elaborate allegations against the Generalissimo himself, for example: that he is in constant secret communication with Wang Ching-wei is a favorite. There are also people who will swear themselves orange in the face that Dr. Kung is a buddy of Hirohito.) The third is the good old execution story. Hardly a day went by in Shanghai that Sinmay didn’t tell me of some acquaintance of ours whose head had been chopped off. The fact that these people invariably made personal appearances later on never discouraged him. He went on telling me about heads being chopped off, and he went on believing his own stories.

  I think that this type of Chinese mentality is what led directly to the long period we had in Shanghai, after the retreat of the Chinese Army, when terrorism was king. I didn’t realize until I found myself relaxing in the peace of Hong Kong how strongly that element was influencing our lives up in Shanghai. People were shot in broad daylight, out in the streets or in restaurants, for almost any suspected action, against the Chungking government, against the Japanese Army, or even in settlement for some private feud. The Japanese do not permit a similar lawlessness in their own country, but they were glad to use Chinese, accustomed to the idea of quick and violent revenge, to stir up their local type of excitement whenever it seemed expedient to remove patriots from their path. About half of the Shanghai assassinations of 1937 and 1938 were probably inspired by the Japs.

  Now as to this word “squeeze”; it has become such an integral part of my vocabulary that I am apt to forget that I never heard it before I went to China. In private life it means the money taken out of the housekeeping funds for the houseboy’s private use. Theoretically the house owner doesn’t know his boy is squeezing, i.e., charging more for the meat, for example, than the butcher does. Actually the houseowner knows and condones, unless the squeeze becomes unreasonably high. There are other methods of domestic squeeze. Suppose I go out and buy a coat. When the tailor brings it to the house my boy exacts a certain sum from him in the kitchen. The sum is fixed, a certain percentage of the coat’s cost. The ramifications of this custom are endless.

  In public life an official is squeezing when he takes a commission for some action committed in his public capacity. Suppose a Mr. Wan is buying airplanes for the Chinese Government; the companies offering him planes, if it is known that Mr. Wan is not averse to persuasion, will bid against each other on the bribe. The bribe is called the “squeeze.” I thought of airplanes because of a story Dr. Kung told me. On his trip to England to attend the Coronation of the present King he made a side trip to the Continent, and in the course of this journey he visited Daladier. All through Dr. Kung’s travels he was followed by a little shoal of munitions salesmen, and it may be that one of these astute gentlemen steered the conversations which the doctor had with Daladier into familiar paths. At any rate, Dr. Kung and M. Daladier did, ultimately, get around to the subject of airplanes. China wanted to buy planes and France wanted to sell them.

  “But there was a woman in the deal,” Dr. Kung said, “Daladier’s secretary. She wanted a large sum of money from us for releasing these planes. She was greedy; she wanted much too much. I became disgusted and went away, and we bought no planes from France. It was not good.”

  I was impressed by his calm acceptance of the situation. The peculiar system by which France was governed just then, before the war, didn’t seem peculiar to him at all. He was shocked not by the fact of corruption in high places but by the degree of it. That is the Chinese attitude. They face facts. They do not pretend on certain subjects as we do. We accept some things they do not; they accept some things we do not. That is why there is so much scandal, I think, in treaty ports where the two races mingle.

  I was impressed also by something else in that story. I learned from it that the custom of government squeeze, even though we may not know the word for it, is not exactly new to Occidentals.

  Chapter 16

  Sinmay and I came back to Shanghai in August, under the most delightfully melodramatic circumstances. He suddenly took it into his head to disguise himself, because he thought there might be trouble at landing. This was, as a matter of fact, quite possible. The Japs hadn’t penetrated our daily lives as long as we stayed where they thought we belonged, which was within the limits of the International Settlement or the French Concession, but they hated us going outside that circle in any direction, and they had a chance to pounce on any arriving travelers who steamed up the Whangpoo past their occupied territory, even during the time such travelers should land at the wharf. Sinmay’s record had become sufficiently irritating to the Sons of Heaven to make them take the chance of grabbing him if it presented itself. Therefore he blithely assumed another name.

  On the Maréchal Joffre, which carried us back to our home town, he was known as Mr. Tsu. He wore European clothes for the first and only time of our acquaintance, and he looked perfectly terrible. I had never noticed before that his legs were too short, and his little beard looked so incongruous above the tweeds that he shaved it off. He used dark spectacles too. He speedily discovered about ten old cronies, and they spent all day sitting on deck, all wearing dark spectacles and all talking about how they were going to outwit the Japanese when the ship docked.
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  They were in an excited flurry when we arrived, and Sinmay was frankly disappointed that nothing at all happened to us. He walked ashore without being molested by anybody. The chauffeur was waiting with my car, and once we had passed the magic border around the customs jetty it felt as if we had never been away. Not quite, however, since these arrivals and departures always call forth comparisons with other journeys. I returned to my Shanghai with the eagerness of a lover, and that reminded me of the first time I arrived, bored and sulky and frowning, counting the days before I could sail away again. Now I recognized every street corner, and the very beggars in the downtown area were familiar to me. I looked eagerly at shopwindows while the chauffeur gave us the news, harmless domestic tittle-tattle and messages from Zoa that couldn’t wait until we got home.

  Yet it was a very different city now. It stood alone and beleaguered, surrounded on all sides by a greedy, watchful enemy. That cordon of uniformed spies at the jetty — it had had its effect on our spirits. “Someday soon,” I said aloud, “we’ll have to fight this out, you know. It isn’t going to go on just like this indefinitely.”

  “It might,” said Sinmay. “Things last a long time in China.”

  We went over and over the same old sayings: how it was to the Japs’ advantage to leave our city the way she was, and how America was busy watching developments on the other side of the world and couldn’t be expected, et cetera, et cetera. Sinmay never had much to say about Europe and Hitler. I depended on other friends for European-politico conversation. Sir Victor was always full of it, but he was over in the States just then, taking a series of massage for his bad hip. A lot of rich refugees, friends of his, kept me informed pretty well. I discovered soon after I came back that my life was becoming more and more full of European refugees. Failing the Chinese and Bernardine, that was all we had left. (Bernardine had gone to America and was busy building up a salon in Hollywood.)

  It had been decided before we left Hong Kong that I would be coming back in the late autumn. I would stay in Hong Kong for a while, talking to Mme. Kung and making abstracts of such documents as the family was willing to let me see. They were generous with that information; Mme. Kung’s help was hampered only by the vexing fact that some of her most interesting papers and all the old family photographs had been lost when the Japs moved in on the Kung estate up in Shansi, some months before. The pictures that were available I had copied quickly, before anyone could change his mind. I had compiled a list of names, Shanghai people Mme. Kung suggested for interviews. I was to polish off this part of it, go through the Shanghai newspaper files for various records of milestones in the Soong history, and fix up my house in preparation for a fairly long absence.

  “You can work at your ease in Hong Kong,” Mme. Kung had said. “Then later in the season, when my sister Mme. Chiang is not so busy as she is just now, organizing her girls’ training schools, you will probably be permitted to see her in Chungking. There is just a chance, however, that she will come down to Hong Kong. I am trying to persuade her to do so. She ought to have her teeth seen to, and besides, she needs a general going over; she has never been the same, you know, since her accident in the motorcar that time she came down from Nanking with Donald. It would be nice for you to meet her here. It is a pity that you have to go to Chungking. It’s an expensive trip and very uncomfortable, I believe, after you get there. I’m always so sorry for Dr. Kung, living there with never a break, working hard all the time, yet never complaining.” She sighed.

  “But I ought to see Chungking, don’t you see, madame?” I said gently. “Even if Mme. Chiang does come down to the dentist.”

  She laughed. “You are too conscientious. There is nothing about Chungking to see but the caves for air raids.”

  “The government is there. The government, which is still resisting the Japanese after fleeing so many hundreds of miles. I ought to see the place just for that reason.”

  Mme. Kung was not convinced. I couldn’t see the government, she reminded me. It wasn’t a visible thing; it didn’t convene all together except during the plenary sessions, and no lady would want to attend one of those. My eagerness to go tearing off into the muddy hills of Szechuan was incomprehensible to that gentlewoman. A writer, she had always thought, was a civilized stay-at-home sort of person; especially for a lady writer it should be unnecessary to behave like a traveling salesman. Why did I not seize the opportunity to stay in Hong Kong among friends, writing my book at my leisure? That was the way the other writers of her acquaintance behaved. Wen Yuan-ning and his poetry books, John Wu and his recent discovery of the Roman Catholic Church — they were writers. She had been led to believe that I was of the same kidney. She was growing more and more puzzled.

  But she kept her word and went on working on my behalf. The result of her endeavors was evident after I returned to Shanghai. I had a telegram from Hollington Tong which arrived by roundabout ways so that it need not pass under the interested eyes of the Jap censors, over across Soochow Creek. In guarded terms Holly told me that if I should present myself at Mme. Chiang’s door sometime in the following season of early winter, up there in Chungking, I would not be turned away. Not that they were in any particular hurry for me to arrive, you understand; the whole thing seemed to bore Holly and his department, as well it might. But anyway, I could see Madame. That was a tremendous step forward. You could almost call it a leap.

  Mme. Sun would not make a similar gesture of hospitality. She has a small coterie of foreign friends among whom is Randall Gould, editor of the Shanghai Evening Post, who in his long career as a newspaperman for various journals, especially the Christian Science Monitor, has met her officially and socially more times than most people can claim. Her friendly attitude toward Randall is perhaps based on the color of his writings. He has written for the New Republic and the Nation, besides doing his own daily grind, and always in favor of the Chinese Communists. Ching-ling will not name herself a Communist. (I have never met anyone except an American, for that matter, who would.) But Randall, as a friend, was worth having and he could always get an audience with her. On one of his 1939 trips to Hong Kong he found her sitting with another old friend, an American missionary. Mme. Sun keeps up perhaps more than any other Soong with her foreign acquaintances. She is more in favor of internationalism than are the others. It surprised Randall at first that she should be so wrapped up in missionaries, because that is not the accepted idea of a Communist sympathizer. But, he recalled, Mme. Sun is much influenced still by her early days at a Methodist school in America.

  “Haven’t you had a letter from my friend Mickey Hahn?” he asked her.

  Mme. Sun indicated that she had and that the matter was still under advisement. The missionary was galvanized into life at my name, and exclaimed in shocked horror that I had dared address myself to Madame. Were not the Soongs aware, she demanded, of my immoral record? Ching-ling requested — and got — highly colored details of the said record. She was suitably distressed. According to her intimate friends she is very squeamish about such matters: Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, who worked as her secretary for years, told me that she has never been able to make Mme. Sun say a word in favor of the birth-control clinic that Hilda founded in Hong Kong. “She looks pained and changes the subject,” said Hilda. “I’m getting so that I dare not talk about anything remotely connected with sex when I’m with her. It’s almost pathological.”

  Nobody can accuse Randall of being easily frightened by squeamishness. He promptly spoke up in opposition to the missionary and had the satisfaction at last of getting as a reply from Ching-ling the sort of silence (she converses in silences) that showed her mind was not closed, at any rate. I owe it to Mme. Kung that her sister’s mind remained the slightest bit open, during the rest of the book’s writing.

  Getting ready in Shanghai, I decided to prepare for cold weather in Chungking. Perhaps I would have enough of it after a week end, but I doubted it. Things never move that swiftly. It would be bitterly cold there, esp
ecially in the houses. I duly bought long pants, and sweaters, and a padded Chinese gown which made me look absolutely cubic, if you can imagine a cube with bulges here and there. Zoa made that gown her special care, selecting deep plum color for the outside and a lighter purple for the lining. She said that I should really go the whole hog and order another one, padded only half as thick and done in a pastel color, for underneath. Chinese ladies did that, she said, when they were going into the interior, but it took up a lot of room in packing and we decided against it.

  The most important purchase to my way of thinking was the boots. I have suffered from chilblains in cold weather ever since I spent a winter in sunny Italy, in an ancient stone palace without rugs on the floor. Therefore I ordered those boots which were to make me a laughingstock, but at least a comfortable laughingstock, in China’s wartime capital. They were high boots like waders and they were lined with sheepskin. I’ve seen something like them since I came back to America, something that goes by the name of “stadium boots.” But stadium boots are tiny, dainty things compared with the waders I took to Chungking.

  The days were filled with noise and activity. Chin Lien had already left my employ, having saved up enough in years of slow, patient squeeze to invest in a little glass factory where he wouldn’t have to work so hard. He called on me once in a while, bringing peculiar glassware objects as presents. It would not be so much of a wrench, now, to leave the house.