China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  Chapter 20

  It was not included in my plans that I experience an air raid during my visit to the capital. (And incidentally, it is high time that I get off my chest the inevitable expression we all use about Chungking: “the city built on rock.” Something about the air-raid tunnels brings that out, sooner or later, with every visitor.) As I figured it, the Japanese stayed away from the place every year from September until late April or May. Only in the summer months did the milky, subdued radiance we knew as Chungking daylight become strong enough to show up the earth to Japanese bombardiers. That, as no doubt you know already, is why Chungking was chosen as the capital for refugees in the first place. In the second place, it is the ideal spot of the world’s surface for air-raid tunnels. It’s all solid rock, with enough steep hillsides to cut down the necessary engineering to a minimum. When I arrived the Chungking Hostel was just beginning to appreciate its newest possession, a private dugout with two entrances, according to all the latest rules for such hidey-holes. We discovered much later that it wasn’t a good dugout at all. It was too shallow and the roof was not thick enough to sustain a direct hit. In the late months of 1939, though, we weren’t yet tunnel experts, and we were very proud of our private one.

  It wasn’t quite finished. I was taken on a tour of inspection by Su-lin Young, the glamorous hostel hostess, and she showed me a pile of wooden struts which were destined to be put in place later on, to help hold up the roof. We crept down a long staircase chopped out of rock, and at the dark dank bottom our electric torches showed us an impressive cavern with benches and folding chairs waiting in rows for the hostel public, and several black puddles of wicked-looking water which had seeped through the walls. Su-lin told me what the whole affair cost; I have forgotten it, but it was an impressive figure, and somehow that bit of information made me feel even safer while I was below ground level.

  Well, the very next day we had occasion to use the place officially. I was idling around in the lounge. I had put my portable typewriter on a desk, intending to write up a few notes, and the room at ten o’clock in the morning was filling up with hostel guests in search of warmth and company, when all of a sudden a loud, rude noise filled the air. We all know now what it sounds like, but it was my first air-raid alarm, for we hadn’t run to such modern appliances during the Shanghai Incident.

  “Wooooooo, wooooooo, wooooooo,” sang the siren.

  I swallowed hard and looked inquiringly at a man near by. “That’s it,” he said. “Maybe practice, maybe not. It’s an unusually bright day for the season.”

  And it was; it was definitely possible, that day, to see ahead of you for as much as fifty paces. We asked the clerk, though, just to make sure. “No practice scheduled for today that I know of,” he admitted. “It must be them.”

  Corin Bernfelt suddenly appeared, at least an hour earlier than she usually woke up. Corin slept an awful lot in order to save money which she would otherwise spend on breakfast, and which she couldn’t spare out of her Co-op salary. Salaries in these organizations are always inadequate. She was an old hand at air raids. “Collect whatever papers you are especially fond of,” she directed me, “and bring your typewriter.”

  We were led in a giggling, chattering procession down the stone steps and into the cavern. Maya Rodeivitch was already there with Choux, her Alsatian, saying “Tais-toi” to him without the slightest effect, for he had a fine baritone voice and he liked to use it. I could see her pretty well, as we were now lit up with electricity. Whenever Chungking’s power station wasn’t out of commission they were lavish with their use of it, I will say that for the hostel.

  Peggy Durdin sat next to me, expressing disgust and annoyance because her work had been interrupted. She meant more than she said, though; her voice trembled as she talked lightly, and she smoked incessantly until we were told not to use up the air that way. She and Till had twice been bombed out of their flat the first week after they arrived, the bad month of May 1939, when Chungking took such a terrible beating. She hadn’t been well since, had lost forty pounds, suffered in the climate, but steadfastly refused to go down to the comparative comfort of Indo-China and wait for her husband on week ends. A lot of people who have had histories like Peg’s feel the same way. She was a missionary’s child, which didn’t stop her wholehearted attacks on the mission system. She was born in China and spoke fluent Mandarin. She had taught school in Shanghai, and naturally her patriotism was divided between America and China. Although there is no logical explanation for the feeling, Peg had a sense of duty toward Chungking. Even I, after a much shorter experience, acquired that sentiment ultimately. I was already slipping under its spell.

  We waited down in the cave for about two hours that first time. The planes never flew over at all, but went to the military airfield. I’ve sat in so many caves so many times since that my memory is a bit clouded about my first raid, but I haven’t forgotten P. C. Kuo, or, as I insist upon calling him, Kuo Ping-chia. I hate that way of dubbing Chinese by initials, as it they were so many Rotarians or bank clerks. Ping-chia would make a good bank clerk at that, to look at him. He was introduced to me by Corin, and he started talking eagerly about America, which he knows pretty well because he took a degree at Harvard. Ping-chia always talks eagerly to ladies anyway. He has a romantic nature and freely admits it. But that nature, and his romantic appearance to go with it, has not prevented him from developing his very good brain by a first-rate training in history. I consider him one of the best specimens of young China, as compared with Sinmay and tradition.

  I forget just who detailed him to keep an eye on me, to help me when I was stumped for information or paper or typewriter supplies. I am very grateful, whoever thought of it. Without Ping-chia’s help I should have taken a much longer time with my manuscript. Although he is ambitious and a hard worker, he was at loose ends just then and he found time to call on me at the hostel every day. He was paying his first call that day of the raid, and as we sat wearily through the long, long hours underground he and I began to discuss Chinese music. Now and then our discussion was punctuated by a bomb, far off on the airfield.

  Ping-chia looks more like a Latin American than a Chinese. He is tall and broad-shouldered and he wears his Western clothes carefully. But this exterior is deceptive, for in his heart he dislikes the West and loves the classic arts of China. Not all those years at Cambridge could spoil his passion for the music and opera of his native land. When he was living in Hankow, teaching history at the university, he knew every little place in town where singsong girls gave selections from the old plays. He couldn’t tell, himself, if it was the girls that attracted him or the songs. When he found out that I was interested in the custom, so strange to our Western minds, that educates and encourages prostitutes and singsong girls to learn classic opera, he poured out his heart.

  “I do a little singing myself,” he admitted. “In Nanking we gave many shows, and even in Hankow while the government paused there we put on one play, though I believe the authorities consider it frivolous and wrong to pay attention to music while we are fighting this war.”

  That was another interesting difference between our civilizations. Imagine Parliament or the Senate condemning grand opera because there is a war on! But in China the stage, being a pleasure, is naturally looked on as a frivolity as well. Those productions you used to hear so much about, those presentations of Met Lan-fang, are considered by the dour authorities of the New Life Movement to be bathed in the same light we would shed on the latest Cole Porter show.

  “Can you sing?” demanded Ping-chia eagerly. “Can you sing Chinese opera?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I haven’t even seen many of the plays. Back in Shanghai Sinmay wouldn’t go to the theater unless there was something extra-special. And of course in Shanghai we didn’t have the best Peking players very often.”

  “But you did,” said Ping-chia. “Shanghai is a wonderful city for the theater. I have heard some of the best plays produced in Shanghai.
Have you heard any of the famous girl performers? Have you heard Lily Lee? She is really good.”

  Lily Lee! I remembered suddenly a girl Sinmay had brought to my house one afternoon, with a story of squandered fortunes. I had seen Lily again in Hong Kong. I told Ping-chia about it.

  “We had dinner at Lily’s house,” I explained. “She’s improved wonderfully in her English, hasn’t she?”

  He looked mysterious. “There was a reason for that,” he said.

  “Oh, I know.” It was a romantic story that Lily had told me at the dinner table that night, while Sinmay drank rice wine and chattered with friends. She had fallen in love with an American she met in Hankow. After the latest exodus she had gone up to Chungking to see him. Followed a few weeks of loving bliss, and then she started back to Hong Kong, her plane ticket in her pocket, going in a sedan chair down to the riverbank, as befitted a great lady and famous artiste. But Lily Lee had never reached the plane. Chinese plain-clothes men took command of her chair coolies before she entered the airfield, and Lily was whisked off to prison for “questioning.” She stayed in jail for five months without trial, while the young American made frantic endeavors to get her out. The government was very suspicious of Lily, and accused her outright of being a spy. As to what sort of spy, they were rather vague. I suppose they thought she had been planted by the Japs, and then her fondness for the foreigner was not so good, either.

  “I was not uncomfortable,” Lily admitted. “But one bad old official, he pretended to set me free, and when I realized what it was all about I was living in his house. He wanted me to live with him, to be his concubine, and when I would not they put me back into the jail. I was never tried at all. My boy friend was very good about it. After I got out of jail, after I came to Hong Kong, he lost his job. I am going to America to marry him.”

  I thought of all this while I talked to Ping-chia, and he nodded excitedly several times.

  “That is it. Yes, it is that Lily,” he said. “I was very much in love with her in Hankow at just the same time, before she was arrested. It began one evening when there was a moon. We had met during rehearsals of a play, and that night Lily came to my garden and serenaded me. Out there, under the moon, she sang to me. …”

  “You must have been much distressed, then, when she was put into prison after the government moved up here?”

  Ping-chia sighed. “She wrote to me from the prison,” he admitted. “She sent me a Christmas card. But of course I dared not answer.”

  “Whyever not?”

  His big brown eyes looked startled. “Why, they would have put me in jail!” he cried. “I would have been implicated! … She was a beautiful girl, Lily was. I loved her very much.”

  In the course of the air raid he decided to teach me a Chinese song. When he spoke of songs he did not, of course, mean the amusing little jingles that Sinmay taught me when we were playing with his children in his Shanghai house. Those songs, like Japanese songs, were not unlike our own; they had a familiar rhythm and they rhymed after their own fashion. So too did the poems that my teacher taught me to chant, like little children learning their first characters at school. We had made translations of English nursery rhymes, and often when we went to the movies I would see how our simple American popular melodies caught on with the Chinese. “Oh, Susanna” was such a success in China that Sinmay insisted it was originally Chinese. Sometimes our songs puzzle them, especially the ones in two or three parts. They don’t understand harmony until they grow familiar with it through us. Ping-chia’s songs, however, were completely different. They were dramatic monologues or dialogues; the music of the song depended completely on the words. Each word had to be sung in a certain way, following a pattern of music that has been set down rigidly for centuries. You cannot fit other words to the music. Words and music are the same thing, inalterably tied together. Each artist has his own interpretation of the song and there are many subtle changes from one performance to another. All this Ping-chia tried to tell me, down in the dugout.

  “I will teach you a sympathetic one,” he decided enthusiastically. “We will now sing ‘Ma Tso’ — ‘Scolding in the Palace.’ It is a very popular song. I will tell you first what the words mean. The speaker is a queen, very angry with her stepson because he has poisoned her husband, the king. …” He went on and on, telling one of the familiar old stories of blood and intrigue. Then he began singing.

  At first, though I tried politely to follow him and to sing the same notes, I confess I felt very silly. It meant nothing to me. It sounded like caterwauling. Ping-chia’s face looked simply funny in the dim light of the cave, and it was hard to believe that anyone could get aesthetic pleasure from those discordant, thin sounds. Then, after I had gone through it with him two or three times, the miracle happened, the miracle that has made such a difference to me, ever since. I don’t know what it was. There was a sort of click in my mind; my ears opened. I liked it. It made sense. It had melody. I remembered it. After that, whenever I heard Chinese music it made sense and I liked it. And belatedly I recalled a scene in the Congo, on the broad veranda of the African house, when we played records on the little gramophone of an evening. We had a collection of songs from all over the world, and I used to marvel at the Negroes because they actually liked the Chinese records best. Those black men with their wonderful voices, and their songs that are the forerunners of our own melodies, those black men loved Chinese opera. They would crowd around the machine and listen raptly, and when the record came to an end they would beg for repetitions. Now I understood. I opened my mouth and sang lustily. The time hastened as we sang over and over, Ping-chia and I, “Scolding in the Palace.” …

  “Mickey, for God’s sake!” It was Peggy Durdin speaking. She had obviously failed to follow me into the new realms I was discovering.

  “I say so too,” grumbled Maya.

  “Do you mind changing the record?” demanded Ed Pawley, the usually genial plane manufacturer from Loiwing.

  “We wouldn’t mind,” they all chimed in, “if it were real music you people were singing, but this stuff — a joke’s a joke.”

  Astonished, I glanced at Ping-chia. “Never mind,” he said. “We know. We can practice some more after the raid.”

  The All Clear sounded and we hurried up the steps into the fresh air.

  Mail came very irregularly from the outside world, especially mine. Because of the time lag everywhere in mail delivery my family in America continued for a long time to write me in Shanghai, and the letters I did receive came in sudden quantities, after long silences, from the Shanghai house, with a covering note, usually, from Sinmay. I had been so long in the rigorous, comfortless atmosphere of Szechuan that these letters came as rather a shock. Sinmay was indulging in one of his bad moods, and it went on and on, lasting from one mail delivery to the next, until I found myself growing very irritable with him.

  To begin with, he had somehow forgotten, from the sound of the correspondence, why I had gone to Chungking at all. In Shanghai he had been eagerly co-operative. Without him I could never have gotten into contact with the Soongs. Later he had been eager to dig up local color for me, and to find people who could give me those trifling remembrances of the Soong family that make all the difference in a biography. Even when I packed to come away on this, the most important trip of all, he had been charmingly helpful. It was a disappointment to me that he refused to come along.

  “It will cost too much,” he had argued, “and you won’t be gone such a long time as all that. If I stay here you won’t be tempted to stay so long.”

  “It will be worth the money,” I insisted with sincerity. “How can I get along without an interpreter? I always thought you meant to come with me. I’m afraid to go without you. China isn’t like Europe.”

  “No, no, don’t be afraid. You are all right now. I couldn’t leave my press for such a long period of time, and really, it is too expensive,” he said with finality. “I cannot do it. It I were to go to Chungking, beside
s, the Japanese would know it and they would make trouble for Zoa.”

  The last argument convinced me. Still, with the memory of that conversation fresh in my ears, I thought it unfair of Sinmay to take the attitude he now maintained, which was that I was far away in one of the gayer of the nation’s capitals, dancing and drinking and whiling my life away generally, while he kept the home fires burning in faithful loneliness. Never did he mention the book. His letters seemed to have been written with an eye to posterity, and they drew a stark, simple, unlovely picture of a sort of forsaken merman. Sinmay was cuddling a broken heart. Why, he wanted to know, wasn’t I hurrying back? What was the attraction in the hills of Szechuan? He had had a dreadful dream, he said, on Christmas Eve. He was sure I had found my true love at last. There could be no doubt about it; plunged again into the world which I forswore for his sake, I had forgotten all about Shanghai and my Chinese family.

  “I have been hearing things,” he said darkly. It was an old one and I recognized it, but just the same I was a little hurt. I had been looking on myself in quite a different and much more heroic light. I had thought of myself as quite a he-woman, carving out a career against tremendous odds.

  Then too, Sinmay wasn’t getting on very well with the German refugee, who for a year had been living unobtrusively in my house. “Your housekeeper,” as he called him, was stirring up trouble with the servants and had vowed a vow to get rid of my inoffensive old amah. Wolf wasn’t co-operating in the liaison which had always flourished between the two households. They were squabbling over my car, and they were squabbling over my money. I had left a certain amount, calculated to cover housekeeping expenses and something more for Sinmay, because Sinmay was always needing money unexpectedly; now there wasn’t enough. And on top of all these little pinpricks, they weren’t following my directions about those new gibbons. You remember the gibbons? The pet shop had promised me a pair of young ones, but they hadn’t arrived when I left. Now, evidently, they were there and Sinmay had followed my instructions by going to inspect them, but he was disobeying me. I had agreed on a price. Well, Sinmay thought I had agreed on too large a price and he was trying to beat the pet-shop man down.