China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  An exception was an American with a loud manner of talking, who said he was in the hide-exporting business. In actuality he was a secret agent and everyone knew it. We knew his real name, and his reason for keeping the German mistress who hung around the hostel. Once when we were caught suddenly by the blackout she was noticed by Morgan sneaking into the hostel when we had all been ordered to stay out of doors. She must have crept up the steps during the raid and indulged in her nefarious trade in the room of a German soi-disant refugee. A few nights later the refugee was arrested by Chinese soldiers. It was just like a movie: the German protested he had nothing to hide, though they searched his room and found a transmitter there. He chewed up a paper and tried to swallow it. It had a code on it, exactly like the movies.

  Everybody was badly shaken by the scene. Hitherto we had accepted him as a perfectly pukka refugee. He had introduced himself to me, naming several friends of mine in Shanghai as reference. My only reason for avoiding him had been that he was such a bore. I had put him down as one of those heavily Teutonic artistes from Munich, and he looked the part to perfection. But that night when he was arrested I wasn’t so sure. He didn’t seem surprised at the arrest, or even very indignant. He was angry and violent — he pulled a gun on the soldiers, and there was a struggle — but he wasn’t surprised.

  “Let me get dressed, will you?” he said. The soldiers let him dress, tied his hands with rope, and then marched him out past all of us, standing there in our pajamas in a row, our mouths hanging open. He didn’t look at any of us. That was queer too. If it had been me I should have appealed to the crowd, but he didn’t.

  Next day several people at the hostel were all for Taking Steps. There was an uneasy feeling that we Europeans should stick together, and that no doubt it was all a fantastic oriental mistake. I didn’t share the sentiments of the others in so far as they were based on race discrimination, but I did feel a little sick. Suppose it was a mistake? Allegedly he had been tortured by the Nazis before he escaped from Europe. So how could he possibly have been a spy for the Axis?

  I have never heard the end of the story. When I left he was still in prison. We heard all sorts of other stories afterward, the most reasonable of which was that he hadn’t been spying for the Nazis but for the Chinese Reds.

  Certain newspapermen, as usual, acted as if they knew all about it but weren’t talking. The American secret agent certainly did know, but he isn’t talking either. I wonder if he tells his friends the things he used to tell us while playing poker. I shouldn’t think so. Most of his conversation in those days was about women, and everyone in the hostel knew exactly what money he was giving the German lady, and for what specific services. He didn’t talk about those visits upstairs during the blackouts, though.

  A month of Chungking under fire was more than enough for Mme. Sun, and about the beginning of May she and her eldest sister went back to Hong Kong, where it was peaceful and quiet. Mme. Kung felt guilty at leaving her husband there, but he kept putting off his vacation for an indefinite period and she had promised Ching-ling not to outstay her in the capital. In our last conversation she said:

  “You had better stay here, after all. I’ve changed my mind. You certainly work faster here than in Hong Kong where there are distractions. My sister Mme. Chiang has promised to be more co-operative on the book, now that she has time. Stay here and finish your book: I want it to be a success for your sake. And then build a new life,” said Mme. Kung.

  “It is nice of you to help me,” I said sincerely.

  “I feel guilty,” she admitted, “because I’ve been interfering again. But I’m sure it’s all for the best.”

  “And as for the new life,” I said, “don’t let that worry you. I’m used to building new lives.”

  “I hope so,” said Mme. Kung, but she sounded dubious.

  Chapter 25

  As the mists dried out of Chungking’s atmosphere, leaving a hard bright world baking under the sun, so did my mind lose its dreaminess. This was an advantage in a way, not only for the good of the book but also for my new job which I took on just as the Soongs flew away, back to Hong Kong. I began to get worried about funds. I was taking much longer on the manuscript than the publisher and I had first intended. This wasn’t a surprise to the publisher, and it was less surprising to me. You can’t go on chasing people all over China these days without using up a lot of time. New York obligingly pushed the deadline forward about six months, so that was all right, but the advance which had been supposed to cover the calculated period of gestation was now running short. Perhaps you laymen don’t realize what a gamble a book is for the writer, who always does his year’s or two years’ work before he has any idea if it is going to give him returns. There comes a time for me during every book’s writing when I tell myself that I am an idiot and that I must find another job with a Saturday pay check. This time the impulse overpowered me and I actually found the job, with Havas.

  So nowadays I spent a good deal of time in the Press Hostel, and could have insisted on my rights as a journalist in good standing to live there altogether. I didn’t, though. I wasn’t tempted in the first place by the exquisite discomfort of the Press Hostel, nor in the second place by the jolly, quite maddening lack of privacy that prevailed there, nor in the third by the worse-than-primitive plumbing. (We used to have better plumbing facilities in the Congo than obtained at the Chungking Press Hostel.) There was another reason, too, that I didn’t move in under Hollington Tong’s wing, and that was Ma Ping-ho, who spent all his time with Holly’s crowd. Nobody was allowed to mention my name in Ma’s hearing, or to let him know I was back.

  No one really works very hard as a foreign correspondent, and since Marcuse and I were dividing the job we had a lot of freedom. He wasn’t a perfect person to work for. He had his bad moments. We had a couple of rows, when he forgot who did what, and when, and where; but they blew over. More serious was the phase we went through when Marcuse, a newcomer to Chungking and unacquainted with air-raid procedure, bawled me out for leaving the office and going into a tunnel during raids. “You must Stand By!” he shouted. “What? Go into a dugout? I never heard of such a thing. You’re yellow!”

  My reply was brief and emphatic, and supported by the combined protests of whatever other gentlemen of the press overheard him. A few days later, when the whole office was bombed and came tumbling down, Jacques stopped talking that way and we had no more of his heroic nonsense. But then his mind at the time was mostly on Corin.

  The rapidity with which that friendship developed was the cause of great anxiety to Holly. He couldn’t very well station himself at the door of Jacques’s room in the main building. He didn’t want to reprimand the representative of Havas, either. But he didn’t like that sort of thing going on in the respectable precincts of a respectable government building, either. And Marcuse, who dominated Corin completely, was mischievous. I often suspected him of going out of his way to shock Holly and the others. In the early days before the raids grew really intense, while he was still trying to insist that I stand by my typewriter during the bombings, he saw that Corin was in a bad state of nerves. She had a respect for bombs which Jacques refused to recognize. When the Japanese flew over he wouldn’t allow her to run for shelter, or, rather, he refused to go and so she couldn’t. There must have been some strange scenes aboveground. When the All Clear sounded and I went up to knock on his door and to get my cables for the day, I would find Corin with traces of tears on her cheeks, and Jacques puffing one of his clay pipes and looking masterful.

  Being a sort of benevolent aunt to the lovers came natural to me. Corin would drop in during the afternoon while I was working and we would have a pleasant visit, if the Japanese didn’t interfere. She was looking well and happy except when the scenes over air raids upset her. Jacques was attentive and complimentary and he gave her no cause for uneasiness. To be sure, there was a girl in Shanghai who refused to accept the congé he tried to send her by mail; Jacques made no secret
of his dilemma but proudly showed her frantic telegram around the hostel, and asked advice from everyone, and talked it over with Corin. It was going to be awkward, Jacques said to Corin, and she agreed that it was going to be awkward. But of course Jacques loved her now. He loved her, and all of the other affairs were over. They would go to Shanghai as soon as his term in Chungking was finished, and they would be married.

  Then the European blitz came along.

  As Havas correspondent, I listened in on the successive stages of that incredible moment of earth’s history. We would read the terse sentences and stare at each other, wondering if it wasn’t just a bad joke. It couldn’t happen, it couldn’t! Why, in all our lifetime it had never happened. Everyone knew how good the French Army was, didn’t they? And we couldn’t afford to let France fall: what would happen to the world if France fell?

  Chungking was seething. The Dutch Minister fell away before our eyes; he must have lost ten pounds in a few days. His two boys were in Rotterdam. And the Nazi Army smashed ahead, crossing rivers over whose unfamiliar names I toiled as I made out the day’s flimsies. When the Havas sources closed down and fled, before they set up their new offices in Vichy, we got our news from a French gunboat that was stationed there in the Yangtze. When the Belgian King capitulated the Ambassador in Shanghai published a repudiation of the surrender and declared himself for the refugee government. When the smoke died down and we looked around there were the ugly facts — French resistance finished, and the retreat from Dunkirk accomplished.

  I do a lot of picking at the British, but I have the usual American sentimental feeling for them, after all. It has nothing to do with principles, and not very much to do with politics. We have their literature and their language, and we have borrowed a lot of their law. You can’t argue yourself out of that close a relationship without working at it. I had no desire to work at it. I suffered too.

  In a way I was lucky. We were all lucky in Chungking, because we heard the news in a peculiarly exact way. We heard the German side and the Allied side, just as it came through from the offices on the spot, unmarred by editorial comment and uncolored by radio announcers. I have often sighed since for that clean, uncluttered sort of reporting, smothered as I am by extraneous voices in my newspapers and on my radio programs.

  We still didn’t realize how bad it was until the Germans bombed Paris, and I remember meeting a Frenchman, Leo, in the hostel corridor, early in the morning, en route from the bathroom. I was clutching soap and towel, and holding my bathrobe together in front; Leo, similarly attired, was going to try his luck at the men’s bath. But we stopped to talk.

  “Paris bombed!” he said. “But it is terrible, hein?” It was the only time in six years’ acquaintance I had seen Leo wholly serious. “Bombs falling on Paris, I cannot believe it,” he said. “My sister is living there; I have dispatched a cable. Ah, ah, ah.” A lady in peignoir and slippers drifted past us in the dark hall and Leo looked after her appraisingly. “Who is that?” he demanded. “Not bad at all.” Then he remembered again and his plump face resettled in lines of anxiety. “Terrible, hein?” he added.

  Over at the Press Hostel we gathered and shifted and gathered again in busy little groups. The American young men — Mel Jacoby, Frank Smith, Teddy White — felt uneasily that it was time to stop playing around the Far East; time to enlist somewhere, probably in England. Marcuse, the one European of our group, said that he was going immediately to join the Free French, which sent Corin into yelps of protest which did not cease until I reminded her that Jacques would have to wait, anyway, for formal release from his post.

  I don’t think I had any strong urge to join up in anything, but there was a sort of premonitory prickle at the roots of my scalp, and I felt guilty that the States hadn’t gone into the war as yet. I don’t think I realized how strong the isolationists were at home. I had fallen out of the habit of believing anything I read in the news magazines (and I didn’t learn my mistake for years). I was certainly out of touch with my country, without knowing it; those stories and photographs of America First meetings which I was to see in the following months registered themselves in my brain merely as typical exaggerations, cooked up to fill the columns with something readable.

  It is odd when you come to think of it that I accepted without question the necessity of our entry into the war. I had been brought up in the age of pacifism. We were taught in school that war was wicked and totally unnecessary. All the more “enlightened” educational groups took that attitude. We were filled with statistics of the munitions industry and with the conclusions our seniors drew from these figures. We were given new propaganda regularly in the popular magazines, warning us against warmongers. … It worked, evidently, on the minds of many of us, enough of us to slow down our actions by some years. I suppose it didn’t work on me when the time came because I was outside the country and had a different point of view. The same goes for anyone used to traveling beyond America’s limits. But I had doubts, up until the last minute and even beyond. I didn’t doubt that we should be fighting, but I regretted the blind manner in which so many of the English hurled themselves into the fire.

  “Morgan Crofton is wild to get back to Europe and join up,” I said disapprovingly at lunch one day at the Clark-Kerrs’ table. Sir Archibald pricked up his ears.

  “You don’t think he should feel that way?”

  “He should join,” I admitted, “but he shouldn’t want to join. He shouldn’t enjoy getting into a war.”

  We had a long argument. I think it very likely that I was talking nonsense, but I can’t remember what we said. I remember instead that the Clark-Kerrs were having servant trouble; Sir Archie wanted to live on Chinese food and Lady Clark-Kerr couldn’t seem to convince the cook that she meant it. She was just as pretty as rumor had said, but fantastic as an Ambassador’s wife, whom one expects to look like a large burlap bag filled with flour and tied around the middle with rope. “Tita” Clark-Kerr is much more like a doll, with golden curls and tiny perfect features. The trace of Chilean or Spanish accent in her speech adds to the baby-doll effect and totally belies the dangerous truth that she is an intelligent and well-informed woman.

  It was soothing to lunch with those people. If the British still functioned through their diplomatic channels so smoothly, perhaps the civilization that I had become used to and fond of, with all its faults, might yet survive. Sir Archie, Tita, John Alexander — they all did seem to know what they were doing, though at the moment all they were doing was to concentrate on Tita’s poor forehead, which had a big painful boil on it. Between gossip and political discussion of a light, large sort, Sir Archie applied hot compresses to his wife’s brow. But we did talk, and he talked sense. He wasn’t optimistic. That too was soothing. I don’t know anything that upsets me more and makes me less sure of our survival than the hearty sort of Briton who tells me that they are bound to Muddle Through, and that they Lose Every Battle but the Last.

  After lunch Sir Stafford Cripps came in for a visit. I beat a retreat as soon as he got there, but I saw something that amused me before I went. Sir Stafford, a lugubrious, parchmenty person, looked at Tita’s boil and said, “What’s the trouble?”

  They told him about it, and he brightened up in a ghoulish sort of way — Sir Stafford knows a lot about doctors and bad health.

  “You don’t want to use hot water, you know,” he said authoritatively. “It spreads the infection. You want to bring it to a head and lance it, don’t you? Use cold water, the coldest you can get.”

  Immediately the Clark-Kerrs ordered cold water and changed their treatment. Just like me, I reflected as I rode downhill from their house. I’m a pushover for any sort of medical treatment, no matter who suggests it. There is a moral in that anecdote if you want to find it, but I haven’t time.

  It was decided that Corin should break her connection with the Co-ops and let somebody else, whose personal life was less full, take on the task of saving the Chinese. It was also decided by me
, with the hearty concurrence of Jacques, that my connection with the Fourth Estate come to an end when June did, and Corin could take my place. Meantime none of us did any work worth speaking of, because the Japanese reflected their ally’s success in Europe by giving us a burst of activity hitherto, as they say in the papers, unprecedented.

  As I remember it, life for a month or so was just one rush to get into a tunnel. The walk between my place and the Press Hostel was always anxious because if I was caught halfway it meant a long way to run before I got to a safe place, either end. The chief danger wasn’t the bombs, but the local police, who had ordered all residents to be off the street before the second alarm, which we called the “Urgent,” and which meant that the planes had arrived at the city limits. Anybody out after the Urgent was to be shot. Some people were. We really couldn’t complain. The watch system was good.

  We always had the first alarm fifty minutes before the Urgent, just as the enemy planes crossed over the border of Szechuan Province a long way off, out on the plains, and fifty minutes was enough to get into a tunnel anywhere in town if you ran, and if the tunnel authorities knew you and would let you in. For the Chinese there was a regular system, which was later applied to us. They were given tickets and told where they were to run to. We just went, by virtue of our whiteness, into the nearest hole. But the public ones weren’t very nice; they were overcrowded and you had to stand up. Our hostel dugout, as we have seen, had benches and chairs, and a limited attendance. I liked it better than the press one, but experience was to show that it wasn’t safe.

  Early in May it became evident that the Japs knew where the Chiangs lived and were trying to destroy their house. This was too bad for the Chungking Hostel because we weren’t far away from the palace. One day a bomb fell in the front garden where we had so often whiled away the moonlit nights looking for bombers, and a few tons of rich mud were thrown out into the street and our roof was slightly cracked. We went on living there anyway. But we couldn’t trust our dugout: the roof was sagging dangerously. It was duly condemned and after that all the guests went to Kung’s tunnel.