Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  One day during the voyage, a woman named Polly Thompson overheard Mel, Harry, and Eugene discussing the war in China. Thompson was the assistant for another Chichibu Maru passenger, Helen Keller, the deaf-blind author and activist. Thompson told Keller about the students, and Keller asked to meet them.

  For the next two hours, Keller discussed China and Japan with Mel and his friends. To overcome the communication barrier, Keller felt Thompson’s throat muscles as Thompson listened to the students; when she wanted to reply, she tapped out syllables with her fingers. Keller had been in Asia because Anne Sullivan, her “miracle worker,” had made a dying wish that Keller visit the continent. Though Keller had not wanted to leave Sullivan’s bedside, she finally relented and traveled to Japan on President Franklin Roosevelt’s behalf as a “goodwill” ambassador. However, though she was able to visit Japan, Korea, and Manchuria, the outbreak of war kept Keller from touring unoccupied China.

  Keller, Thompson, and the students wandered the decks of the ship as they discussed China, followed everywhere by Kamikaze Go, an Akita puppy that a Japanese police officer had given Keller. She wasn’t fully convinced that Japan’s cause was just, but she also wasn’t a fan of Chiang Kai-shek, who was too conservative, she argued, to lead China.

  “Discussing the Japanese people, she stressed her liking for them but declared herself ‘100 per cent against imperialism,’” wrote the Stanford Daily. “She also felt that the Japanese women should be given more educational advantages than they have at present.”

  Mel’s talk with Keller gave him an opportunity to reflect on his past year, especially his travels to Sian and Nanking, his trip earlier in the year to Kwangsi, and the friendships he’d formed with George Ching, Chan Ka Yik, and Marie Leîtao. By the time the Chichibu Maru arrived in San Francisco, he realized how much he had changed from the student, unsure about his future, who had left for China more than a year earlier.

  As he prepared to begin his senior year at Stanford, Mel was not certain what his next steps would be, but he had at the very least caught an expensive malady: the travel bug.

  “The itch is perpetual,” Mel said. “Realizing I can’t expect Papa to feed a parasite much longer, travel is out of the question unless done with a lucrative, or at least fairly lucrative purpose.”

  Back at school in Palo Alto, Mel was haunted by memories of the soldiers marching through Peiping, the suspicious customs officials, and the crowds worked up into patriotic ferment in both China and Japan. Indeed, Peiping fell two days after Japan’s Kwantung army attacked, followed in another two days by the coastal city of Tientsin (Tianjin). That August, Japan began a punishing drive against Shanghai, and it would rout China’s troops there the following November.

  While Japan maintained its siege during the Battle of Shanghai, it also attacked Canton. Chan Ka Yik, Mel’s former roommate at Lingnan, described Canton’s deteriorating conditions in letters to Mel.

  “The air raid in Canton by the Japanese bombers was so serious and so often,” Ka Yik wrote, referring to three weeks of raids between September and October 1937. Classes were still under way at Lingnan, though the dorms and other important buildings were surrounded by sandbags, camouflaged searchlights, and anti-aircraft guns, and only 250 students remained. Soon Lingnan was moved to Hong Kong, where it borrowed space from the British University and held classes at night.

  Refugees from Canton and elsewhere in China streamed into Hong Kong and Macau, where residents watched Japanese planes take off daily from a nearby island to bomb Canton. Still, Marie Leîtao, the Macanese woman Mel had dated during his second semester at Lingnan, believed that Europe and the United States should remain uninvolved in the conflict.

  “You Americans all should let China & Japan alone,” she wrote. “All so one-sided. Give Japan a fair play. She’s doing what England and the others did few centuries ago. I’m not Anti-Japanese. Are you?”

  This was a complicated question. Mel knew there were many factors contributing to the conflict, and after witnessing how Japan had bullied China during his recent travels—not to mention the suspicion with which its officials had treated him—he’d become deeply interested in the dispute’s causes. In a three-part series of “Inside China” columns that Mel wrote that fall for the Stanford Daily, he described his impressions of China and Japan as each country readied for war. The opening piece described Mel’s experience watching China’s many factions unify in the face of a greater outside threat.

  “Life as an exchange student was anything but drab during the past year,” Mel wrote in the first piece’s opening. “Around us was a turbulent, restless country growing in nationalism and unifying itself in the face of Japanese aggression.”

  That summer, George Ching—the son of a former Canton mayor and Hugh Deane’s roommate in China—came to the United States to study for his master’s degree in economics. Wanting George to study with him at Stanford, Mel enrolled him in the school before George had even arrived. George’s presence and Mel’s continued correspondence with Marie and Ka Yik maintained his connection to China.

  Meanwhile, Mel began his final year at Stanford with a newfound focus on Asian affairs and journalism. In one meandering school assignment written when he was back, Mel reflected that after being gone for more than a year, he realized how much he prized his independence.

  “Personally, I hate to be dependent,” he said. Somewhat paradoxically, he wrote that having his own car, partially paid for by his mother and stepfather, made him feel independent. But even his parents’ help didn’t seem to be enough to help Mel adjust to changes in Stanford’s culture.

  “Stanford is gradually being changed by an influx of Packard one-twenties,” Mel wrote, adding that the sedans heralded a new era when a Stanford education had more to do with social status than academics. “Not only a period where the lamented moleskin and corduroy trousers disappear, but one in which a Stanford diploma means entrance to social life.”

  Rather than lament his exclusion from Stanford’s social circles, Mel put his energy into work and joined Sigma Delta Chi, now known as the Society of Professional Journalists. His year abroad had also inspired Mel to pay more attention to international affairs, and in December he was elected chair of the Stanford student government’s International Relations Committee.

  Returned Lingnan exchangers Betty Leigh Wright and Margaret Wolverton were members of the club as well. Its top priority was establishing an “International House” at Stanford similar to the one at University of California at Berkeley. Already isolated by language difficulties, sixty-one international students from twenty-five countries also had to rent off-campus rooms in Palo Alto because Stanford lacked adequate housing for even its regular students. This left the foreign students with few chances to interact with Americans, or with one another.

  But despite a full-page blitz of stories arguing in favor of the project and other coverage in the Stanford Daily, continued lobbying in the student government, and other campaigning, the International House never materialized. Administrators wouldn’t pay for the concept, especially as they struggled to house nearly 1,000 graduate students. Creative (or desperate) solutions, like using a dedicated floor in a crumbling dorm the school had already decided not to repair, failed too. Mel and the club also tried to establish two scholarships for financially strapped Chinese students to attend Lingnan. Mel and others had received such support to study in Canton, and such a gesture of goodwill seemed more necessary now that war conditions put pressure on Lingnan and its students, but the idea was never backed by Stanford’s full student government.

  Under Mel’s leadership, however, the International Committee did streamline class registration for international students, which had long been a confusing mess for foreigners. The club also encouraged social interaction by hosting regular gatherings at professors’ homes and an occasional picnic. Additionally, it organized a “Peace Day” celebration for the international students in April of each year.

 
; Through the International Club, Mel met Shirlee Austerland, and the two started dating. A year behind Mel at Stanford, Shirlee was a politics major from Hilmar, California, a voracious reader, and an effusive letter writer. She and Mel had a fairly typical relationship consisting of outings in San Francisco to hear the symphony and see plays, cheering at Stanford football games, and having lunch with friends like George Ching, Franklin Mynderse, and Whimp Close.

  Aside from these friendships, Mel maintained his correspondence with Chan Ka Yik, who thanked Mel for his “sympathy to our country.” By spring, conditions in Canton had temporarily eased. Students were returning to Lingnan, and Ka Yik looked forward to graduating, even though he occasionally heard the sound of anti-aircraft guns firing and bombs exploding from the direction of Canton.

  “Mel, you are the best foreign friend of mine, and you understand our country [and] our people more than the others,” wrote Ka Yik, who by the fall would be back in Kwangsi, struggling to get by on $10 a month.

  Mel graduated in June 1938 with “Great Distinction.” That summer he worked for his stepfather, Manfred Meyberg, at Germain’s Plant and Seed, to find out whether he could stomach taking over the family business. He couldn’t.

  In the fall, Mel returned to Stanford for a master’s degree in journalism. That November he was Stanford’s delegate to the Society of Professional Journalists’ convention. Then, for their thesis, he and another master’s candidate, Charles L. Leong of San Francisco, studied the coverage of Asia and its emergent war. Through case studies and interviews with journalists, they examined stories about the events leading up to the July 7, 1937, Marco Polo Bridge incident and American journalists’ failure to cover not just the complex chain of events that precipitated the Second Sino-Japanese War but the many potential impacts of these events on readers in California.

  While he worked on his thesis, Mel rented a room at 556 Alvarado Avenue in Palo Alto. His landlord was May Smith, the widow of Everett Smith, who founded Stanford’s journalism program. Mr. Smith died before Mel arrived at Stanford, but his daughter, Shelley, attended for three years coinciding with Mel’s attendance, though she didn’t graduate.

  Shelley had moved to New York after leaving Stanford. There she ended up with a job at Life magazine as a researcher. At the magazine, Shelley met a photographer named Carl Mydans. Carl and Shelley instantly fell in love. Married in June 1938, the Mydanses came to visit Shelley’s mother later that year, while Mel was renting a room from her. That gave Mel a chance to learn from Carl.

  “He is a photographer for LIFE mag and a swell fellow,” Mel told his parents. Carl took an interest in Mel’s thesis and even asked to look over his extensive notes and source material. “I have learned a lot from talking to him already.”

  Despite Carl’s encouragement, Mel did not take to graduate work at first. By early February, Chilton Bush, Mel’s thesis advisor and the director of Stanford’s journalism program, told Mel he was alarmed and disappointed by the quality of Mel’s work. Discouraged by Bush’s comments, Mel considered quitting his master’s studies.

  He didn’t. He knew the problems with his thesis did not stem from lack of effort; after a few weeks of even more work, the project began to seem manageable again. There was little time for outside pursuits, like the flying lessons Mel had been taking. Aside from work on the thesis, he worked some training assignments at local papers and pitched freelance articles to national publications. He also attended lectures by prominent journalists and made numerous visits to local wire service offices. Impressed by Mel’s dedication, Bush’s attitude shifted. Where he once threatened to flunk Mel, he now pushed Mel on his thesis and helped him find career contacts.

  That June, Mel briefly visited Los Angeles. While he enjoyed seeing his family, he realized that his hometown lacked the kind of opportunities he might find in San Francisco, or the place he really wanted to go: China.

  “Perhaps I have the wrong slant on things, but I feel I would like just as broad an outlook on life as is possible to get and I can’t have that spending all my life in Bel Air and sitting on the sand at the Beach club,” he wrote.

  That summer Mel broadened his outlook further by working nights at a fruit packing plant in nearby Sunnyvale. His wasn’t the hardest task—he was a quality checker who ensured that each can of fruit salad or fruit cocktail had the right proportion of ingredients—but the summer job gave him his first experience with manual labor.

  “Cannery work has done me good in several ways,” he wrote. “Not only has it settled me to the idea of hard work, but it has brought me in contact with conditions I have been reading and thinking about for the last six years.”

  Despite the cannery’s lessons about the working class, Mel was getting anxious about finishing his thesis by the end of the summer. As the deadline neared, it was Charlie Leong whom Bush threatened to flunk. Mel’s writing partner only made matters worse when he took a full-time job that left him with no time to help Mel format the paper. Most of the work was done, but Bush still hinted that the whole thesis might need to be rewritten. Mel was reminded of how discouraged he’d been earlier in the year.

  Bush’s attitude was complex: though he was satisfied with the thesis’s content, he thought the paper wasn’t sufficiently polished. This was a frustrating assessment because Mel and Charlie were scheduled, only five days after Bush rejected the paper, to give a talk at Sigma Delta Chi’s annual convention, an event that was coming to the Bay Area in part because of Mel’s lobbying. Fearful that he would have to spend another year in school, Mel pushed Leong to wrap up his work. Somehow, by working through the night for days on end, they managed to wrestle their thesis into a form that Bush found more than acceptable.

  It’s unclear just why Bush changed his opinion so quickly. It’s possible that Bush never was as disappointed in Mel as Mel had told his mother Bush was. In any case, Mel and Charlie analyzed 2,000 stories in three San Francisco newspapers for the thesis. They also interviewed dozens of reporters in China, Japan, and the United States, trying to assess how the California press handled news from China and Japan and why U.S. journalism standards prevented adequate coverage of events in the two Asian countries. They found that West Coast papers lacked permanent correspondents in China and Japan, and that the correspondents they did have reported to editors who were unfamiliar with East Asia. As a result, fabricated stories could go unchecked, and editors with no knowledge of China or Japan made unreasonable requests of contributors.

  Mel had observed these problems firsthand when he was interviewed by San Francisco reporters upon returning from his year abroad.

  “Not one asked about the background of war and its effects,” Mel wrote in the thesis. “Each reporter pointed his questions during the interview towards eliciting responses which would give him a ‘horror’ angle for his story—as in the oft repeated question: ‘Did you see anyone killed?’”

  In their conclusion, Mel and Charlie outlined numerous problems that plagued journalists’ coverage, such as their attempts to appeal to the demands of uninformed audiences; their biases based on their source networks, knowledge, and political preferences and the editorial policies of their publications; language difficulties; and censorship. Mel and Charlie wrote:

  Until Americans are educated to the Far East and supplied with a sufficient background to enable an intelligent interpretation of events, news of China and Japan will continue to be built around spectacular and sensational overt events. Only those stories which fit the general news pattern will find their way into print. The more subtle, yet far-reaching movements, [such] as the mounting class war in China, will remain obscure to the American public. It will remain so until Americans either awaken to the fact that the Far East is no longer 8,000 miles away, or events in the Orient will prod the U.S. into action.

  Mel and Charlie presented their paper at the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco, which was organized by Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur. A sort of complemen
t to the World’s Fair in New York, the Golden Gate International Exhibition focused on solidifying bonds among the nations of the Pacific Rim. When Mel, Shirlee, and another friend visited the exposition that summer prior to his presentation, they toured the expo’s outsized pastiche of tourist kitsch, simplified presentations on Pacific cultures, and showcases of the latest scientific discoveries. Its highly touted features included a giant half-ton fruitcake baked in the Southern California enclave of Ojai with fifty dozen eggs and other outsized ingredients, a permanent burlesque exhibit called “Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch,” and the “fascinating story” of “SEX HORMONES,” which “play a vital role in making woman what she is! In making man what he is!”

  Cheesy displays aside, the exposition represented the height of New Deal optimism in a manner reminiscent of the utopian vision that Mel had laid out in that citizenship paper he’d written four years earlier, when he was starting out at Stanford. The event was an opportunity to present California as the heart of an idealized pan-Pacific economy just as the United States emerged from the Depression. The exhibition also showed off the China Clipper, Pan-Am’s glamorous, silvery whale of an airplane, which flew regularly between Treasure Island and Hong Kong.

  The Golden Gate International Exhibition took place at a time when some scholars and policymakers, especially those involved with the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), an early and influential think tank cofounded by Wilbur, believed that Pacific Rim nations were becoming increasingly interdependent. The policy analysts and editors who attended Mel’s presentation rewarded his fresh and potent perspective on Asian affairs with a clutch of introduction letters to important journalists, businessmen, and diplomats in China.

  One of the sources Mel met while working on the thesis was Ray Marshall, the just-returned manager of the United Press’s China bureau. Marshall now edited the syndicate’s incoming cables in San Francisco. When Mel visited Marshall’s Mission Street office, Marshall told Mel that he would make a strong recommendation to the United Press’s New York office that Mel be hired to contribute from China. He even said he would urge them to try to pay Mel’s boat fare to China, but told Mel that it would be worthwhile to go even if they didn’t—which was likely because the syndicate was spending most of its money sending reporters to Europe.