Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Mel, Hugh noted, was among those few.

  Early that December, when Mel scrawled his letter from his moonlit dorm, China and Japan were racing toward war, and he wondered if, instead of staying at Lingnan after winter break, it made more sense for him to leave the school. Some classmates decided to drop out of the program to explore Asia. Mel criticized them at first, but reconsidered around the holidays. While he liked Lingnan, he felt that its academic offerings were limited and wondered whether he might be better served exploring other parts of China. He wanted to stop in Peiping (Beijing) and “see it before the Japanese [wreck] it,” visit Japan itself, and perhaps even travel across Russia.

  “I’m far from a Bolshevik, but I do believe Russia is worth looking into and really seeing what’s what,” he said.

  Whatever Mel decided about the school year, he made one clear assertion about his future.

  “As for me writing anything for publication, I don’t want to ever do that,” Mel wrote. “So please get that out of your mind. There are hundreds of other people here in the Orient from the States who see just what I see and most of them have written about it. Why should I contribute a little more trash?”

  In the middle of December, Chiang Kai-shek traveled to Sian (Xi’an) to confer with Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang)—also known as “the Young Marshal.” The Young Marshal had inherited control of Manchuria after Japanese agents assassinated his father. But he was forced out after Japan invaded Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. The Young Marshal continued to direct his armies against Japan’s forces in Manchuria until 1935, when Chiang’s government instructed him to back off and instead focus on the Communist forces gathered at the inland city of Yenan (Yan’an), west of Sian.

  A year earlier the Communists had arrived in Yenan at the end of their “Long March,” a grueling, nearly 4,000-mile flight from power centers in Canton and Shanghai. Though it began with 100,000 troops and support personnel, only a few thousand marchers survived the yearlong trek across dozens of rivers and mountain ranges while beset by government attacks and starvation. After reaching Yenan, Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) consolidated his power as the Communists’ leader and his party cast the heroics of the march as one of its key foundational sagas.

  Chiang had wanted the Young Marshal to help fight the Communists, but Chang, who still saw Japan as the greatest threat, devised a scheme to make that country the Chinese government’s priority. On the pretext of discussing military strategy, the Young Marshal invited the Generalissimo to Sian. When Chiang arrived, forces loyal to the Young Marshal detained the Generalissimo and put him under house arrest in a nearby villa. The kidnapper spent the next two weeks trying to compel his captive to commit to a “United Front” with the Communists against Japan.

  “News flash, twenty hours old, but important enough to cause a war if one suspects it’s true,” Mel wrote of the Sian incident to his mother and stepfather just before Christmas 1936.

  “It would be a good time with the English so busy for the [Japanese] to strike,” Mel wrote. The Sian incident began on December 12, 1936. The day before, Great Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson.

  News of Chiang Kai-shek’s detainment spread through a shocked China. Rumors abounded. Had he been handed over to the Japanese as a prisoner? Had the Young Marshal engineered a coup? Kuomintang officials quickly spun the story. The message reaching Mel and others in Canton, for example, was that the Young Marshal had “sold out” to the Japanese.

  “We think that Chiang Kai-shek is dead now, but even if he isn’t, this move has lost him so much face that it will be a long time, if ever, before he regains the place he lost in the eyes of the people,” Mel told his parents.

  Chiang turned out to still be alive. Two weeks of backchannel negotiations among the Kuomintang, the Communists, and a number of foreign mediators won his release. In return for freedom (and the Young Marshal’s surrender to house arrest), Chiang agreed to a United Front. The deal was structured to appear as if the Communists agreed to set aside differences with Chiang for the duration of the war, allowing the Generalissimo to maintain the face that Mel was certain he’d lost. The country needed to project the image of a powerful leader as it prepared for war.

  Although Mel noted the kidnapping, he wasn’t initially distracted by the event. Having begun learning to fly at Stanford, Mel continued his training at an aviation school in Hong Kong while he was studying in China. There he met Carlos Leîtao, the son of a tycoon who owned the Bela Vista and Riviera Hotels in Macau, a Portuguese colony about sixty miles southwest of Canton. Carlos, whose Portuguese father had three wives and more concubines, all of whom were of Chinese ethnicity, invited Mel and other Lingnan friends to Macau for lively weekends full of parties flowing among the colony’s hotels, cabarets, and casinos.

  Just after the new year, on the first of these weekends, Carlos brought Mel to the Bela Vista, a colonial structure of pastel pink, white trim, and wide south-facing balconies that overlooked the winding Avenida de La Republica and the bay beyond. There, Mel met Carlos’s large family. He was immediately entranced by Carlos’s sister Marie.

  “Everyone says she is the best looking girl that they have ever seen,” Mel reported to his parents.

  Through the ensuing months Mel would return frequently, whether to see Marie—the two began dating, though their outings were always chaperoned by her “mothers”—party with Carlos, or just relax in the tropical courtyards of the family’s hotels.

  Mel wrote many letters home expressing his fondness for Marie and admiration for Carlos. Many of his pictures and home movies also feature Marie striking poses with her siblings near Macau’s waterfront and sashaying in fur-lined coats and formfitting gowns, her hair in meticulous braids or pinned in tight waves. Ultimately, though, the romance stayed in Macau.

  At the end of January 1937, during Lingnan’s long winter break, Chan Ka Yik led Mel, fellow Stanford student Jack Carter, and Bud Merrell of Wesleyan to his homeland in Kwangsi, China’s “Western Expanse.”

  A day into the trip, sticky-sweet clouds wafted from dazed opium addicts who lay across bare slabs of wood inside the riverboat cabin. On the ship’s deck, pigs squealed from inside bamboo crates. In the ship’s galley, soldiers beat a criminal who was chained mere feet from where passengers dined.

  The four twenty-year-old boys ate quickly, doing their best to ignore the prisoner’s rattling shackles, then rushed from the disturbing scene to their opium-polluted cabins. Meanwhile, the Pearl River rolled on, through mist-enshrouded hills and bright green rice paddies.

  The aftermath of Chiang’s disappearance still rippled through provincial China. In every town Mel and his friends visited, children gathered in schoolyards for lectures frothing with Nationalist propaganda, anti-Japanese rhetoric, and suspicions about foreigners, including themselves. In larger cities, police checked their passports and warned the Americans about taking pictures.

  Once their boat reached Tai Hong Kwong, a village alongside a sharp bend in the Pearl River north of Kweiping (Guiping), Ka Yik led his American friends down the muddy, narrow streets to a shop belonging to his father.

  A servant unlocked the door of the family’s musty, cramped store.

  “When we stepped into that dank and narrow shop we stepped into the middle ages absolutely,” Mel wrote.

  Ka Yik’s cousin greeted the boys and led them up five rickety flights of stairs. The shopkeeper’s wife was playing mahjong, even though the game was forbidden by the social reforms of the New Life Movement, the fascism-tinged cultural movement led by Chiang and his wife, Mayling Soong (Soong Meiling). In a room overlooking the village’s waterfront, the boys drifted off to sleep with the sound of pigs squealing in the distance aboard their erstwhile conveyance.

  Morning brought a tour of the village, where most shopkeepers were tenants of Ka Yik’s father. After a “noonday gorging” on sweet pancakes and other treats at
a local teahouse, the boys returned to the family store. There a militia sent by Ka Yik’s father greeted them; though much of the lawlessness that accompanied the upheavals of China’s recent “warlord” era had subsided, bandits still occasionally attacked travelers.

  “Quite an army it was,” Mel wrote, noting the automatic Mausers the “soldiers” carried in their hands and the weapons’ incongruity with the men’s bare feet.

  Army or not, the men were professional and clearly loyal to Ka Yik’s family. They scurried into position to escort the students to the Chan compound. Each young man was immediately offered a sedan chair; they reluctantly accepted, as it would have been rude to refuse Ka Yik’s hospitality. The porters wobbled under the Americans’ weight—at the time, Mel checked in at 188 pounds—then gathered themselves and proceeded out of the village in single file. Hundreds of school kids chased behind and yelled at the spectacle.

  Given his family’s background in Hollywood, Mel was accustomed to wealth, but Ka Yik’s home was something entirely unlike what he knew. Developed over centuries of feudal lordship, the home sprawled. Its entrance was framed by two identical towers with round octagonal observation platforms, topped by pointed, curved eaves. The compound’s heavy stone gate led to an interior courtyard, then a set of three decorative archways at the building’s formal entrance. There were potted plants everywhere, in the courtyards, along the walkways, and next to doorways. A number of long, low outbuildings ran up either side of the central structure. To Mel, the place looked more like a small city than a home.

  Ka Yik’s compound awed his American guests, but he was more excited to show them the fields and his family’s farming techniques. Despite his father’s extreme wealth and influence and his brother’s connections, Ka Yik paid little attention to the rumblings that could upend his family; he was more passionate about his studies—agriculture—than he was about politics. He and Mel developed a rapport in part because Manfred Meyberg’s work at Germain’s Plant and Seed had rubbed off on Mel, who was conversant in agriculture. Mel’s Chinese roommate was also a shy young man, the kind who asked his charming American friend to write letters to girls on his behalf and always asked about Mel’s own dates, even after the school year was over.

  “He talked about [Mel] often,” Ka Yik’s daughter, Emmy Ma, later said. “His eyes just lit up.”

  After the winter break, Mel decided to remain at Lingnan, though he reneged on his pledge not to write for publication. In part, it was the trip to Kwangsi that changed his mind. The journey’s conditions may have been rugged, but the Pearl River had pulled Mel deeper into China.

  After the Kwangsi trip, life at Lingnan shifted. Following the Sian incident, the school’s student body began dwindling. Many students and some professors left to join China’s military, but some of the Chinese students—like Chan Ka Yik and George Ching—remained. They even elected Mel and four other exchange students into a club of up-and-coming members of the Lingnan community. After picking apart each potential initiate, the club’s members identified a key personality trait that qualified him for membership; Mel heard that he was chosen because the club’s members liked the way he argued.

  Though stepped-up military drills and general antipathy toward foreigners made it harder for the exchange students to move freely off-campus during the spring of 1937, Mel’s friendship with Lingnan’s Chinese students continued to help him. For example, he and Ka Yik teamed up to acquire a new motorcycle. They combined their bargaining skills in another set of trades and purchases that ultimately netted them one with a sidecar. With Mel at the handlebars and Ka Yik in the sidecar, the pair frequently rode together to Canton.

  “It is an incentive to make friends,” Mel said. Ka Yik introduced Mel to modern young members of Canton society—indeed, the man Mel acquired this motorcycle from invited him up to spend the afternoon in the modern Westernized Canton apartment where he and his wife lived. Mel found such young people in Canton “more broad-minded than the Lingnan students who marry the first girl that they kiss.”

  Shedding taboos about kissing and flirting was just one way in which college students in China were adopting Western practices. Men were wearing suits with “shoulders padded out in the same fashion as Clark Gable’s,” Mel later wrote in an essay about cultural influences in China, while women were styling their hair into long wavy bobs and wearing “brilliantly colored dresses” cut to highlight their curves. Dancing remained forbidden, Mel wrote, but the students got around that by attending parties in private homes, where invitees danced around gramophones, or taking jaunts to Hong Kong.

  These trips didn’t just give Mel a more balanced look at Chinese society than what he’d been exposed to by the sheltered heirs he met at Lingnan or the poor crowds who plied the river near campus; they also gave Ka Yik a glimpse at modern culture. During their trips into the city, it was Mel who, though sometimes a bit reserved at home himself, nudged Ka Yik to open up in social situations, especially with young women.

  “Roommate Chan danced for the first time last night and has been telling me all the details including the fact he talked to the girl while he danced,” an amused Mel reported to his family that spring. Such casual conversation between genders, he said, was a thrilling change of pace from tradition.

  As much as Mel was having fun and beginning to feel at home in southern China, he still wanted to see more of Asia. As the semester at Lingnan drew to a close, he finalized plans for a trip through the interior of China, then on to Japan. Traveling through Russia or going to Angkor Wat and elsewhere in Southeast Asia no longer seemed feasible.

  “I have kept in mind the one point that I want a balanced view of the Orient although necessarily delivered in a hurry,” Mel said as he finalized his itinerary.

  Finally, on June 23, 1937, with a lump in his throat, Mel watched Hong Kong recede over the horizon as the SS Szechuan left the harbor.

  “I rather disliked leaving South China last week although I most certainly shall be glad to get home,” Mel wrote. “I know what it is people feel towards the Orient but I can’t exactly describe it. That I will return some day or the other I am more than certain.”

  The slow freighter continued up the Chinese coast, ultimately bound for the heavily Westernized metropolis of Shanghai. After a few days in that city—where Mel was disgusted by the “fat-bellied foreigners who are kings among themselves and servants” and where he visited red-light cabarets “so well policed that nothing was worth sticking around for”—he continued to Nanking, then China’s capital, before heading to China’s interior with another Lingnan exchange student originally from Hollywood, Harry Caulfield.

  After celebrating Independence Day at the U.S. embassy in Nanking, Mel and Harry began a two-day, two-night train ride to Sian. Centuries earlier, Sian had been China’s capital, but more recent events interested Mel and Harry: it was only seven months earlier that Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped just outside of Sian.

  Getting to Sian was hardly comfortable. Mel and Harry sat on a cushionless bench in a corner of their third-class railcar. Heavy scents of garlic and more obnoxious odors wafted in each time someone entered. Armed guards, better equipped than anyone Mel had seen in southern China, regularly patrolled the car. The ride was so bumpy that Mel’s fingers slipped off his typewriter keys as he wrote an unusually typo-laden letter to his mother and stepfather. A group of small children, amazed by the sight of foreigners, crowded into the compartment and watched raptly as Mel typed.

  “Wow, I wish this long night would end sometime,” he wrote. Outside the rattling windows passed a landscape of cornfields, dusty plateaus, cave dwellings, and historic sites such as Kaifeng, a town known for its ancient population of Chinese Jews.

  It was early on the morning of July 7 when Mel and Harry arrived at Sian. Mel relished the hot, dry air after his months in the south’s stifling humidity. Walking along paved but dust-covered streets, they passed armed sentries stationed at three huge archways in Sian’s forty-f
oot-thick, six-century-old walls. Many of the roughly 200,000 people who lived inside the walls wore flat, sombrero-like straw hats and occupied clay buildings that reminded Mel of Native American adobes.

  “[Sian] is entirely different than anything we have seen before,” Mel wrote to his parents. Once the terminus of the Silk Road, the city was also home to the twelve-century-old Nestorian Tablet, a nearly ten-foot-tall stone marker inscribed with Chinese and Syrian characters proclaiming Christianity’s arrival in China. Mel made an ink rubbing of the inscription and had his picture taken next to the tablet.

  “So here we are in the Northwest looking at the remains of the beginnings of China and perhaps the world—maybe not, too,” Mel wrote. “At least it is very interesting and a place very few people reach.”

  Mel and Harry spent forty cents in the local currency to rent a small room in a courtyard home, then sought out the few other Westerners who had reached Sian. One was Kempton Fitch, a young Texaco employee who had recently shuttled a series of Western journalists and academics to the Communist stronghold in nearby Yenan. The other was George Armstrong Young, an English World War I vet–turned–missionary who helped mediate Chiang’s release during the Sian crisis. Fitch and Young explained nuances of that event that hadn’t been reported in Canton to the students.

  “After trying to fathom the bottom of the problem during the past few months all of us over here have found that one link, the Communists, missing,” Mel admitted. “No one before told us that they came into the city here during the revolt.”