China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  I was obsessed during those days with the notion, no doubt erroneous, that the whole world wanted my gibbons. I had horrid visions of a host of people creeping up behind Sinmay and snatching those gibbons out from under his nose. I need not have worried, and I know it now, having had a certain amount of experience in trying to dispose of gibbons, but in those days I was not so wise. I talked all over the hostel about my gibbons. I cursed Sinmay. I sent telegrams, once every day:

  buy gibbons immediately.

  do not haggle comma buy gibbons.

  buy apes do it now.

  have you bought gibbons?

  received letter dated fourteenth no mention gibbons have you bought?

  And then at last came the answer, fiendishly worded:

  gibbons bought.

  Could anything be more maddening? What did the man mean? Had he bought the gibbons at last, or had somebody else done what I so greatly feared, and sneaked in and bought them before Sinmay got there? It took some weeks to get the proper answer, and I was furious long before that. All was well and the gibbons were even then making a happy mess of my back bedroom, but I didn’t know it. All I knew was that Sinmay kept on asking for more money. It was not a request calculated to soothe my angry breast.

  What I didn’t know was that Sinmay himself was suffering real doubts. He was truly the victim of his moods and I shouldn’t have been so quick to accuse him, as I always did, of cooking them up to get himself out of awkward situations. I think that he shared my moment’s vision in Hong Kong when I foresaw the end of my Shanghai existence, that long-ago summer afternoon. Time moves on and takes us with it, though the Chinese would like to stop everything short and keep it just as it is, like a still picture in the middle of a movie. It wasn’t my fault and Sinmay was unjust in scolding me for it, but Shanghai was over for me, and I suppose in his bones he knew it.

  But I didn’t. Up in Chungking, alone in my bare cold room, I swore at Sinmay and paced the floor, smarting under his rebukes.

  “As soon as I get back to Shanghai,” I vowed, “I’ll make him sorry for this. I won’t stand for it. Just as soon as I get back …”

  Furiously I sat down at my desk and wrote him a check.

  Chapter 21

  The living buddha was still in Chungking, and thereby hung a tragic story. His trip from Hong Kong had been ill advised. I don’t know, now, if it was his own idea to go and pay his respects to the Generalissimo or if one of his friends had been too officious on his behalf, but the result was very bad indeed for the poor old divinity, for he was now a prisoner. True, he could go out of doors if he wished. He could even visit neighboring cities, such as Chengtu. But whenever he tried to get out for good, to continue the journey to Tibet where his ranch and a quiet, peaceful death awaited him, the Mongolian Commission or whatever they call themselves would not let him go. They made all sorts of polite excuses, but I am afraid the truth of the matter is that they consider him in the light of a valuable prize, representing as he does thousands and thousands of Mongolian worshipers. He is being held as a hostage and a bank, I believe — at any rate he is being held, definitely against his wishes.

  One day he telephoned and asked me to come with Corin to see him. We were very glad to go, and only doubtful that we would be permitted into the building, but after a little delay that ticklish matter was arranged by Holly. God was sitting comfortably in a large room overlooking a hanging garden, and he had acquired a Mongolian servant to look after him. But he was bored — “I have nothing to do all day,” he said fretfully, “but chant the Sutras” — and his gouty foot was troubling him, and he was running short of his special clothes, for he had left most of them in Hong Kong at a Mongol boardinghouse. Bob Winter had gone to Yunnan and he intended to stay there with his university connections for a long time; the old man felt lost and deserted without this last link connecting him to his past. Just before Bob left we had all four spent a pleasant Christmas Eve together at a restaurant down in the town. We ate a lot and we talked and sang. I sang some American cowboy songs to God, and he sang some Mongolian cowboy songs for us, songs from his own homeland. One of them was especially nice; it was to be sung while milking a cow, and God went through the gestures and smiled sweetly as he sang in a fine, resonant voice, and afterward he looked miserably homesick. Twenty years is a long time to be exiled from the plains of Mongolia when you are a cowboy at heart. And now he was worse than an exile; he was a prisoner.

  “I was informed that I was Buddha,” he said to Bob, “at the age of six. Since then, you know my life. It has been a good life on the whole, not as stormy as some of my former incarnations. … But with conditions as they are, sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t seek different work.” Or, as Bob put it, “I wonder if I shouldn’t look for a different job.”

  After Bob left, Corin and I tried hard to keep the old man happy and interested in life. We were permitted one day to take him out on a picnic. Holly provided the car, a big favor in that petrol-hungry village, and we set out happily with only two bodyguards accompanying us to make sure we did not elope with our valuable friend. There are not many roads around Chungking; we took the one that leads to the governmental summer resort, and when we arrived God said that his foot was not paining him at all and that we must take a walk. It was a pretty place, the tiny collection of Chinese houses scarcely jarring at all with the mountains surrounding. God led us swiftly up a mountain path, so that we young women were panting in a few minutes, though he hadn’t turned a hair. We picked flowers and branches. We watched the birds, and he named them for us. The fresh wind blew down the hillside and gave him energy, and his face was flushed; we sat on the edge of a bluff and he picked a broad grass blade and made a whistle, and then blew on it so that you would have sworn a cuckoo was calling.

  It was a happy afternoon, one of the best Chungking afternoons that I can remember. If only more people could speak his own language, God said, he would not be too badly off in Chungking.

  It was much later in the year, in midsummer, that he determined to visit Chengtu. He was wretched during the bombing season, and hated to sit in the Mongolian Commission tunnel, or in any tunnel for that matter, for hours and hours while the Japanese planes prowled through the clean sky looking for their prey. He said so, frankly, and Corin was shocked.

  “But why shouldn’t he dislike air raids?” I asked her on the way home. I loved going home from his house, because our chairs glided through the hanging garden and from there we had a magnificent view of the town and the river and the green hills beyond. Besides, after seeing God I always felt twice as alive and keen and calm as I was normally. “Why shouldn’t he feel the way we do?” I continued. “You hate the raids yourself. You come out in spots during a raid season, you hate them so much.”

  “That’s different,” said Corin, “because I am a human. It is natural that I should be afraid to die. He’s God. He shouldn’t care.” She meant it, too: she was really shocked.

  The Living Buddha determined to go on his vacation in August, and he asked me if it were true, as he had heard, that the Japs, although they did sometimes bomb Chengtu, observed the laws of neutrality and refrained from aiming at the Canadian university campus. I said that this had been true, with an occasional exception which was no doubt due to accident or bad aiming. He explained that he would plan, this being the case, to go straight to the university grounds whenever he heard the warning siren. But nobody knew him in Chengtu, and he knew nobody, and perhaps the gates to the campus would be closed during a raid, in order to prevent mobs from flooding the district. Could I give him a letter to some of my friends there, who could see to it that he would be allowed to come in?

  Yes, I said, certainly. By that time my friends the Endicotts would have moved their household to Chengtu, as Jim was not renewing his advisership to Mme. Chiang and had been assigned to an English professorial chair at the university. A letter to their address and to the other missionaries would give the old man a contact, and he could do
the rest. I sat down to write the letter for him, and I found myself at a loss.

  After all, what was I to say? I was in effect committing to the care of a Christian minister one of the seven Living Buddhas of the Orient. The underlying ethics of the matter were unusual, but offered no real problem to my conscience: it wasn’t that. It was only that I didn’t know the polite way to put it. Anyway you write it, it looks odd. In the end I went at it bald-headed, desperately, with the following result:

  Rev. J. G. Endicott

  Chengtu

  Dear Jim:

  This will serve to introduce to you my friend, the Living Buddha of Outer Mongolia. Anything you can do for Him will be greatly appreciated.

  Very truly yours,

  Emily Hahn

  Chapter 22

  Spring was beginning to make the outlines of the Szechuan hills even more fuzzy than they usually were. Spring brought rain in earnest instead of in the halfhearted drizzle that kept our clothes messy all winter, and we plowed through the streets with mud above our ankles. The rich farm land of Chungking bade fair to swallow our houses completely. Pigs rooted about the streets and one even saw an occasional cow. The famous Chungking rats, enormous beasts, went to ground. There was an impression of warmth and a thinning of the fog, out of doors; indoors it was still cold and choked with charcoal fumes.

  For a long time I had been carrying on a queer correspondence with Ma Ping-ho, the Irishman who had turned Chinese and now had an office in Holly’s little hive of industry, over at the Press Hostel. I hadn’t seen him much, but Teddy White kept me informed. Teddy was often at our hostel, chiefly because he loved to chatter with the Durdins, but also because he liked coming in to see me. Teddy was a large part of Chungking as far as the Fourth Estate was concerned. I started out disliking him rather, because he was obviously a bright, precocious boy, and he knew it. This is an unfair reason for disliking anyone and I got over it. Teddy had learned to speak Chinese and to read and write the classical language before he left Harvard, and for this reason Time made him a Far East reporter. He was conscientious and in his work he had a broad clear field, without rivals. He came out East full of illusions and warm hopes of the leftist party in China, and although he still holds many of his early convictions he has had to go through a period of bitter disillusionment. Nowadays I think we ought to consider Teddy as a leading expert on many of China’s lesser-known territories, and we can trust what he says, almost completely. Then, I thought that his reports were too highly colored by what he wanted to see rather than what he actually saw. He made a trip that year to the northwest, through country which few white people had managed to get permission to visit, and he came back to Chungking and promptly wrote a book about it. The book was bespoken before he wrote it, and Teddy collected an advance on it which he needed, but when he had finished — and for this I respect him deeply and warmly — he decided not to publish it after all.

  “I read it over,” he explained, “and I realized that it was all padding except for a little bit, most of which wasn’t true. A book like that isn’t worth printing, so I withdrew it.”

  Very few of our fraternity would have been as honest as Teddy in like case. He would have been safe in publishing it, for nobody could argue with his statements. He would have made an early success — he was only twenty-six, and the world was eager to read about China’s mysterious northwest. He had worked hard on it too. I like Teddy a lot for that decision. It marked his entry into the adult world. But he wasn’t an adult when he talked to me about Ma; he was a mischievous schoolboy, peeking out at Big Sister from behind the parlor curtains when she was entertaining a beau. He insisted on considering Ma Ping-ho my boy friend. I wasn’t pleased at this conception: Ma was no prize. He was far too dirty and eccentric.

  A couple of days after I arrived I received the first letter of the series. Ma had written it in thick, crabbed black handwriting on soft Chinese paper on which the ink spread. It was an amusing and erudite attack on something I had said at the party. It was quite sane and civilized, and I answered it promptly. After that I found a note on my desk almost every day. Though through the weeks I never saw their author, I was glad to get them and amused enough to reply. Usually they were normal in tone, but sometimes they sounded a little vague and disturbing. That was only to be expected, from what Teddy told me. Ma was a good man to have in Holly’s department, according to Teddy; his Chinese was wonderfully fluent and his work for the most part was steady. He helped arrange propaganda broadcasts in Chinese. But there were times, said Teddy, when he grew too eccentric to be of any use for a few days. Holly made allowances for him, and went so far as to keep an eye on his physical well-being, buying his warm underwear out of his own pocket (for Ma gave all his salary away to beggars) and seeing to it that he ate more or less regularly.

  In all the time of my first visit to Chungking I saw him only twice. Through the medium of the notes he made a date with me to come out for coffee, early in the morning after one of his all-night sessions at the broadcasting studio. He came by the hostel, where his appearance called forth puzzled stares from the servants, and we plowed through mud down to a shop where they actually served coffee and hot cakes. He chattered cleverly, sounding exactly like any Oxford undergraduate who liked his books. It was difficult to believe in him when I looked at his gaunt, bearded face with the wen on the forehead, his grimy, faded blue gown, his bony wrists, his blackened teeth. Difficult and sad too. In one of the letters he had revealed a tragic terror that his mind was slipping. He had not begun to doubt his sanity because of any of his own actions, which of course seemed quite rational and ordinary to him, but because his grandfather had ended his days as a lunatic. I did a lot of thinking about Ma Ping-ho, wondering how to talk to him and help him out. Whatever I did in the end, as it turned out, was not worth the trouble I caused him. I need not have meddled.

  A few days after the coffee drinking he called for me without warning and said, “Come on out for a walk. It’s spring.”

  It was, a lovely day for Chungking. Still I hesitated. He looked even odder than usual, and I was busy, and I didn’t want him to get into the habit of pulling me away from my book. But he was insistent and persuaded me.

  We started out along the road by the Chialing River, toward Pei-pei. He strode along in his English way, fantastically unlike the slow stroll of the sages he wanted to imitate, and we covered the ground so briskly that in a short time we had left behind even the new village that was growing up at the outskirts of town. It was well on toward noon before I suggested that we turn back.

  “Not yet,” he urged. “We’ll sit up here on this grave and talk.”

  Off the main road he selected a high mound with a dry sandy patch on the ground near the little rock fence that marked an important ancestor. We sat down there and I rubbed my blistered heel ruefully.

  “Why isn’t Zau here,” he demanded abruptly, “taking care of you?”

  “He didn’t know I would have to stay so long,” I said.

  “But he should be living here,” said Ma Ping-ho. “The time for Shanghai is past.”

  It was very much what I felt myself. “You know the Chinese,” I argued. “They don’t give up their homes as easily as we do.”

  “I am Chinese,” snapped Ma, and I was silent. Then he went on talking in an incoherent way. He said that we were destined for each other. He didn’t talk at all about love in the ordinary way; I should have begun screaming, I think, if he had; but the burden of his argument was that he, Ma Ping-ho, by virtue of his own emotional history, was obviously my mate. We were both pilgrims to the shrine of China, as it were, forerunners of mankind’s new caravansary. Exalted, his cheeks bright red, he talked on and on, and I forgot to be detached and wise and all-understanding. I was tired and nonplussed and a little frightened.

  “Now,” I said as he paused, “I’m going back.”

  Oh no, said Ma. I was not going back. I was never going back. What was the sense of that? We were going
on, and on, and on. We were going straight along that road into the future, and it was time to be starting. He held out his hand to help me up so that we could continue the journey. I was wearing woven sandals and my feet hurt. Vexed and hungry, I argued with Ma more emphatically than was wise. His mood changed and he became ugly, but after a bit, when I insisted on calling a ricksha coolie, he capitulated. It was miraculous luck that I should have sighted a coolie at all, out there in the country, and Ma admitted that Providence seemed to be in favor of my return to town. I rode back at a good clip, and he ran alongside the ricksha, his long bony body enveloped in a cloud of dust. How he did it I don’t know, but he kept up with us all the way to the corner of the street where the hostel was.

  I got rid of him at the door and went to my own room in a bad state of nerves. I had missed out on lunch.

  After that I managed to avoid seeing Ma any more. Unfortunately he retained an acute awareness of me. One evening at the Press Hostel Teddy happened to speak of me. I don’t know what he said, and whatever it was, he assured me later, was trivial, something like “Mickey says she hasn’t had any mail for a month.” Anyway, much to the public alarm and amazement, Ma leaped to his feet and slapped Teddy lightly on the cheek.