China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  “You’re fond of my sister, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I said that I was, and that such a book would be pleasant for me to write, as I could be sincere in concentrating on her sister. The question was how to go about the consultations. We decided that I should show the manuscript to the sisters as it was written or after a good part of it had been finished, and they would check it for facts.

  “I won’t do anything but that,” she warned me. “I haven’t time. At any rate you wouldn’t want us to touch the text.”

  “Certainly not,” I said warmly. “I don’t expect you to do anything about my opinions, either. Even if you might not agree.”

  “That’s arranged, then,” said Mayling. “If you make mistakes, my sister or I will tell you about them. We will not comment on anything else. It’s the only possible way such a book can be written. Otherwise it’s so much propaganda turned out here at Holly’s office.”

  She did not say, though, that I was to go straight back to Hong Kong. Instead she suggested several trips around the Szechuan countryside, to see her girls’ school, to inspect a stock-improving center and so forth. I had been quite right to bring my boots and all those coats, I reflected. I would have Christmas in Chungking, and the same idea had hit other people, evidently, because I found a couple of invitations in my room when I came home. Would I help do the Christmas broadcast? Would I go to see the War Orphans’ Home on the day Madame distributed presents? Would I join the hostel party on Christmas Eve? There was more holiday spirit up here in the Chinese mountains than we had floating about in the foreign settlement of Shanghai. China’s government really worked at being Christian; I found that out. I worked with them that year.

  It was a queer time for most of us, the winter of the phony war. Our life in Chungking was full of the British. Although the city was a makeshift capital, it really was the national capital, and the English were behaving accordingly. They had nipped in ahead of everyone and got hold of the best house in town for their embassy. It was halfway between the downtown district of the city where the banks were and the part we lived in, where the two hostels and the Generalissimo’s residence formed a nucleus for the rest of the circle of government people. I found some old friends among the British. The Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, was to arrive soon, after one of his periodic visits to Shanghai. They were all excited because this time he would bring his wife, the “pocket Venus” whose exquisite miniature beauty had stirred up the diplomatic circles of the coast towns. Among all of the men I saw most of Morgan Crofton because he lived at the hostel. Morgan was one of the decoders, a young man who was always called “amusing” because he puzzled and bothered people, and they didn’t know what else to do about him.

  Like Charles, Morgan had written home and asked the authorities to take him out of China and let him get into the war, which as everyone knew was in Europe on the Continent, and not in the East, no matter what they said. He fretted his heart out in Chungking. He used to tell me about it when we walked over toward the embassy in the morning, his fat fox terrier running ahead of us and sniffing at the mud. Morgan had an abrupt manner and his sense of humor was violent and sudden, so that old codgers took a dislike to him, but he was really a Tory and his political beliefs were those of old codgers in clubs. He defended Chamberlain; we had a lot of hearty fights over that. He thought Churchill admirable in many ways, but dangerous. He had been in the Army in India, and bitterly regretted having resigned. If he hadn’t resigned, he said, if he hadn’t taken this footling job, he would be in the war where he belonged and no Foreign Office clerk could tell him nonsense about being needed more where he was. … All the young men from England were talking that way and feeling that way in the winter of 1939, out in the Orient. So many of them wrote letters home asking for transfer that the War Office lost patience and sent a mimeographed reply, reminding them acidly that Whitehall could not devote all its time to sending individual no’s out to China and Malaya and Japan.

  Except for the British, who had said flatly that they wanted to be in the town itself and never mind the bombing, the diplomats chose to live in the “safety zone” over across the Yangtze, on the South Bank. They found more room there and a neighborhood of more familiar quality. There was a very little town and most of the houses that amounted to anything had been built in the past, in the spacious days of peaceful trade. All the big foreign companies were represented there: Standard Oil, and Texaco, and Jardine’s, and all the rest. One of the best was the APC, the Asiatic Petroleum Company, which was British. Some of these places were estates rather than houses. The APC House, which I was to know very well later on, had a large plot of mountainous ground enclosed by a wall and several wire fences, and there were two good-sized dwelling houses in the compound. Farther back in the hills, or upriver on what was known as the “Second Range,” there were more and more houses built by foreigners and lived in by foreigners, mostly missionaries of one faith or another. Houses were at such a premium that people went a long distance from town to find them. The British embassy had its own launch to call for its people on the South Bank every morning and take them back at night. Those who could do it, like the tall young American consul who lived on the Second Range, walked to work in the morning and back at night — he was lucky because his office was on the South Bank too, but it was an incredibly long and steep walk. A lot of people kept their private chairs for the journey. A few kept ponies, but riding a pony to work was just as complicated as you would expect. The groom had to come along too, on his pony, and he had to look after it while you were in your office, or take it home again for the day and bring it at night, and the whole thing was much too elaborate for anyone who had an impatient nature.

  Even the journey between the North and South Banks was too much for me with my impatient nature to face very often. Maya Rodeivitch dashed across the river every week end, and less enthusiastic souls went on Sunday for lunch, but I went protestingly, once in a very long while. You could go by day in the ferry, a ramshackle motorboat whose destinations on the riverside varied with the level of the water. Sometimes when the river was low the journey was doubly dangerous because of rocks that were exposed, and because of the increased fury of the current. It was never a safe journey at the best of times. But when the ferries were too full, or when it was late at night and they weren’t running, you could hire a small boat, and that was really perilous. The boatmen hauled and toiled and poled in the mud until they were well upstream on the jumping-off side, then they poled themselves out toward the middle and let go, and as the boat went dancing and bobbing downriver they aimed madly to get across before it was too late. Sometimes they did miss and you had a long time poling or walking back on the other bank. It is an exasperating and a fearsome thing, that river. I knew a few people who were capsized and who saved themselves. I know another man who didn’t survive the spring floods when his boat turned over. Now that I think back on it I am afraid, but at the time we didn’t think much about natural dangers. We saved up our emotions for air raids.

  I made the journey that winter only when I intended to spend some days with the Endicotts, and they didn’t live on what we knew as the South Bank at all; they were on the other side of the river, true enough, but a long way downstream, at a tiny village that was noted only for their own house and the school where Jim Endicott had taught for many years. I met them through Mme. Chiang. Just about Christmas time — I forget if it was before or after the holiday itself — Holly’s office sent me out on a day’s journey to a school.

  Jim Endicott was one of the men who came along with Mme. Chiang after we were deposited in the first classroom, waiting for the festivities to start. He acted as a guide during the exercises, whispering translations to me and now and then writing some explanation on an old envelope.

  I talked to him a little on the long drive back, but we didn’t really get acquainted until a few days later, when I was beginning to grow weary of trotting after Madame to ceremony after cer
emony. How do public figures stand it? I have never been able to understand what keeps them going, for surely all emotional reactions disappear after the first few hours of oratory that is all alike? As an onlooker I lost all interest after a week of it, and vowed to go on with this program only when it would seem violently rude to refuse. That wasn’t the sort of book I wanted to write. All Holly’s office was writing that sort of eulogistic thing every day, and maybe it helped China and maybe it didn’t, but I didn’t intend to add to the bulk of such literature. I was muttering to myself as I staggered off the campus of the university grounds where poor Madame had just made her nth speech to a graduating class of girls, and Jim caught up with me, taking enormous strides with his long legs, and said:

  “Just what is it you’re doing here? I haven’t got it straight.”

  It happened that that day I had overheard a passage between Madame and this Endicott which caught my attention. He was arguing with her. That was something worth eavesdropping on — a man, a European (to use our clumsy circumlocution for “white”) arguing with Madame, disagreeing with her! The subject was the new Youth Movement among the adolescent school children of Chungking, and Endicott maintained that they should not be called on to take an oath of allegiance en masse, or rather in the presence of all the government officials who had gathered to watch this planned ceremony. “You are not giving them a choice,” said Endicott.

  “They aren’t forced to do it,” Madame countered quickly.

  “Is any child going to refuse under such public pressure?” he asked.

  “No, perhaps not. But no child is told he must swear; no child is penalized for refusing. The question doesn’t come up, anyway. They all want to take the oath.” Madame spoke sharply, but without surprise. She seemed to be used to this man’s abrupt methods.

  “It’s like fascism,” said Endicott. “There’s no value in it. There’s no individual thought.”

  The argument tailed off, interrupted by the demands of the ceremony, but my curiosity and admiration were whetted. Endicott, he explained to me now as we walked toward the road, was one of the many “advisers,” their desire for which makes the government of China so peculiarly wistful. He had been asked to take the place of a man named Shepherd who had been the original “missionary adviser” to Mme. Chiang. “Think of the opportunities!” said everybody. But he wasn’t the man for it, Endicott admitted. He wasn’t tactful. He often irritated Madame; he couldn’t help it. When he saw things going wrong he had to argue, and as a man with leftist tendencies be was always seeing things go wrong.

  You can tell from as much of my book as I have already written that I belong to that class which is instinctively and traditionally inimical to missionaries. The chief reason can be expressed in a simple phrase that always creeps into discussions on the subject: “Why don’t they stay home and keep their noses out of other people’s beliefs?” Actually that’s a shallow and foolish question, and any wide-awake opponent could answer it a dozen ways, all satisfactory. Just the same I do feel that way about missionaries, that way and much more than that. Jim Endicott was the first one I met who was likable. I was to meet many more of the species, medical and teaching missionaries, and my liking of them has certainly removed the hysterical and unreasonable part of my objection to missions, whatever may remain of my more rational misgivings. Nowadays I don’t feel called on to act the missionary whenever I meet a missionary. I don’t agree with him, usually, but I don’t want to kill him, or convert him. I live and let live, and the beginning of this broad-mindedness in my make-up, the wedge that opened the door, was the Endicott couple.

  I remember how they startled me, Jim and Mary, the first day I accepted a kind invitation from them and settled down to work in their attic. They lived an intensely domestic life, with four children just growing up, following a regular routine which Mary supplied pretty much by herself because of Jim’s extracurricular duties over on the other side, as Madame’s adviser.

  Before they administered that shock they had already, quite unconsciously, given my convictions a pretty good shaking up. “If these people weren’t missionaries,” I kept telling myself, “I would put them down for any married couple in a university town. I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life with people just like this.

  “Their personalities should have nothing to do with your judgment of their usefulness,” I told myself severely on the first evening, after I had gone up to bed. “Yes, so you feel at home with them. Yes, so they are intelligent in just the fashion you like, and they discuss matters in just the manner you prefer your discussions. Yes, so this is a charming room and their children are charming children, and the house is a nice shabby homelike honest house. You have seen nothing of the things that sickened you in the African missionary’s house that one time you had to accept mission hospitality, where half a dozen underpaid Negroes were forced to work and make luxury for a spoiled, lowbred family of whites. No one but a bigot could accuse the Endicotts of exploiting the Chinese, personally at least. But what of the mission they represent? The actual, factual fallacy of missions still exists, regardless of the charm of the Endicotts.” With that I went to sleep, pathetically grateful for a change from my hostel cot. It was the next morning that they shocked me so.

  We were sitting in the attic, their workroom and mine. There was a stove there, an office typewriter, and unlimited copy paper. That morning, though, we didn’t do much work. We talked for several hours instead. It was while they were telling me of the university crowd in Chengtu, an hour away by plane, that they began talking, I told them accusingly, in a narrow-minded way.

  “You don’t think we should disapprove of such behavior?” asked Jim. They had been condemning a man and a woman of the faculty for having an extramarital love affair.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I think it’s their own business.”

  “But morality,” cried Mary, “surely it’s the business of the community!”

  “Conventions, if they are true conventions,” urged Jim, “have grown up as they are needed. There is a reason for them.”

  “I can’t agree,” I said. “Often they are the result of unpleasant jealousies, and are built up in spite and frustration. I feel deeply that we should leave people alone when it comes to sex. And also in regard to God, for a man’s god is his own business, just as much as his sex life is his own business. …”

  “But it’s the same thing,” said Jim and Mary together, in great eagerness. “It’s exactly the same thing!”

  I was severely shocked. “Really,” I said when I had caught my breath, “do you think that is the sort of thing your sort of person ought to say to my sort?”

  I should like, just as a proof to myself that I can write, to give you some idea of Chungking. You must have your own ideas of it, because for a time, for a long time, it was a name headlined in the papers and mentioned in the magazines on almost every page. I stumble over it now in the books I have tried to read all at once now that I am home where I can get books.

  The country is soft and green around Chungking. Somewhere I have asserted that China is an ugly, blank, treeless hunk of the world’s area. I was talking through my hat. There are many lovely places in China that I hadn’t seen when I sounded off like that, and Szechuan is one of them. Szechuan, at least the part I knew, is full of small fierce hills that make you smile and admire them as you do when you are confronted by a brave Pekingese dog. In everything but scale these hills are like the Rockies or the Andes: rugged in shape and running along in lines like ranges. They are thickly covered with trees. I am no botanist, but I was startled when I saw pines and banana palms growing together on a hillside. It is an ordinary sight in Chungking countryside. Szechuan is such a lush, moist, green kind of place that it is exceedingly fertile and has as many as four crops in one year.

  But for all this greenery there is no joyful dancing of light and shadow, because of the fog which keeps the Japanese away, year after year, except for two or three midsummer mo
nths. And the city itself, built on a slice of land shaped like a flatiron or a piece of pie, is nothing to rejoice over. I used to hear about it before the Incident when I lived in Shanghai like all the other tenderfeet. Chungking was that town up at the other end of the Yangtze where the gunboats landed after they had gone through the Gorges. Chungking was a Godforsaken hole with a club in it and nothing whatever to do there but drink, ride funny little ponies up and down the hills, and play tennis wherever you could find a piece of ground level enough for a court.

  Well, the war changed all that. Suddenly Chungking was much too big for itself. First came the august Chinese Government, and they filled the houses and populated the streets with strange, alarming people and wickedly beautiful women. Then came everyone else from all over the world. The native Szechuanese is undersized and pale and lacking in vitamins, and he looked with grave suspicion at all this beauty and fashion. Also, he is not a keen businessman. The business methods of the newcomers annoyed him, and jostled him, and fed him up. The rest of China is full of smiling people, but in Szechuan they pause in their work to look at you sourly, or they don’t pause at all when you come by. The native costume includes a kind of towel twisted around the head, and I used to feel that I was in a hospital ward of convalescents, none of whom was happy.

  Chungking. What does the name evoke in my mind? Air raids. Oranges. Szechuan food, good, full of strong pepper, probably to warm up the blood on the cold, wet, muddy days that come so often. Air always so moist as almost to drip. Houses either newly built of cards or old ramshackle palaces, damp and chilly. I can remember outings in the country when we rode pony-back and went swimming in a cold pool and came back merry and actually sunburnt, but they were exceptional. Yet Chungking is a place of flowers. You can have roses in your garden all the year round. I am not kind in my description of the rocky city, but I liked it. I was notorious in the foreign community for liking it. I suppose I liked it in spite of everything, because it was full of Chinese.