by Bill Lascher
“Japanese domination can spell only one thing—the East against the West,” he concluded. “And no one can stop this revolutionary shift in Asia besides the United States. I don’t know whether she wants to or should. But anyway it is now her problem. Asia is too close. The Philippines are too important now for us to ignore the Pacific.”
During Mel’s stopover in Hong Kong he visited Macau and saw Marie and Carlos Leîtao. “The long line of Marie mothers and sons and daughters accorded me an appropriate welcome. That is I had plenty to eat.” Mel also tried to contact Chan Ka Yik, but he had no response to the letter he had sent to his old roommate’s home in Kwangsi.
Hong Kong was “full of uniforms,” its harbor mined and blocked by steel netting. Prices were skyrocketing, but the hotels and nightlife were full of wealthy Chinese who “don’t care who wins their war, don’t follow the news.” These people infuriated Mel.
“Makes me believe in purges,” he wrote, but he added that “there are other sides to Hong Kong. Refugee camps, orphans homes, charity affairs to aid the soldiers.”
The closer Mel got to Chungking, the closer the war seemed. But Mel was ready. He admitted that he missed home and its comforts before he left Hong Kong, but he was still looking forward to the trip. He felt that he would find more people who shared his perspective, and he was impressed by the colony’s resilience after two years of war.
Finally, sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 one early morning just after Christmas, a China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) DC-3 took off from Hong Kong with Mel aboard. He fell asleep, then woke around eight, just as the plane circled above a thick soup of fog and began its landing. Beneath, obscured by the clouds that always seemed to hang across its hills, lay Chungking.
In early 1940, Earl Leaf and T. K. Chang, the Chinese consul in Los Angeles, had an intriguing offer for a dentist in a small California beach town called Ventura. Leaf, who was also a former logger, sailor, and journalist, had heard that the dentist Charles E. Stuart was a world-renowned amateur radio “ham.” For nearly thirty years, “Doc Stuart” had been making his name known in amateur radio circles for his ability to contact people in some of the world’s most remote places via shortwave. In this era, achieving clear signals over great distances, especially doing so consistently, still required considerable skill. Stuart’s radio skills would be crucial to China as it tried to generate sympathy and support for its war effort in the United States. So Leaf and Chang asked Stuart to receive propaganda broadcasts sent from China, record them, and retransmit them to a Chinese news service with offices in four U.S. cities.
In a little room off the side of his dental office in downtown Ventura, Stuart and his dental assistant (and soon-to-be wife), Alacia Held, set up a miniature studio with radio receivers, headphones, a teletype machine, and even a device that could capture ten minutes of audio on each side of a twelve-inch record. There, Stuart would tune in to broadcasts from XGOY, the government-run radio station in distant Chungking, while Alacia set up recordings of each broadcast and transcribed every word spoken. Stuart would become both the primary link between China and the United States and the primary vehicle for the work Mel was about to begin in Chungking.
Aware that an American audience would have a difficult time understanding heavily accented English, especially over what was often a poor signal despite his radio expertise, Stuart asked his counterparts in China to hire an announcer who could speak the language clearly. Peng Lo Shan, XGOY’s station manager and also an employee of China’s Ministry of Information, turned to Holly Tong to find out whether Mel, the young American he’d just hired to work in his publicity department, could help organize the radio station. This idea had intrigued Mel ever since Tong’s agents had approached him a second time in Shanghai, and he was finally able to start working shortly after his arrival that foggy late December morning.
In a highly political move, China’s broadcasting service had been moved to the publicity bureau from another government ministry on January 1, 1940. Aside from running XGOY, the publicity bureau also compiled material for daily and weekly English-language news summaries, handled foreign correspondents, censored outgoing copy, and saw to other public affairs needs of the government.
Mel’s first task with the publicity bureau was surveying its radio capabilities and needs. He quickly recognized the need that Stuart had mentioned: a clear-speaking American announcer who understood the U.S. radio audience.
“No one up here knows much about broadcasting, particularly the kind of programs to send to the U.S.,” Mel wrote.
The United States, not China, was XGOY’s target demographic. If XGOY could generate sympathy for the Chinese cause in the United States, it might be able to help sway public opinion and put pressure on the Roosevelt administration to assist Chiang Kai-shek’s war effort.
Mel had a friend from Los Angeles who he thought would be a capable announcer, as well as a source of advice about broadcasting. They corresponded about XGOY for a few months, but the friend never came to Chungking. Thus, Mel became the announcer.
Aside from needing someone who understood the United States, XGOY had other problems. For one thing, it broadcast in thirteen languages besides English, so news copy had to be translated into each of these. Those translations were of varying quality. For another, there were any number of technical complications. And none of it mattered if, as happened more than once, someone forgot to flip the switch that made the broadcast go live.
Mel’s job wasn’t simply to assist at XGOY. He also helped rewrite newspaper and magazine copy originally written by the publicity bureau’s Chinese staff. He even was a ghostwriter for a column that a local bishop supplied to a newsletter called McClure’s. From the beginning, Mel wasn’t particularly charitable in his descriptions of some of the bureau’s work that he had to rewrite. Much of it was unintelligible when it reached Mel, even though it had been written in English.
“Two of us retranslate these atrocities into a news story form whenever possible,” Mel said. Moreover, many of the original stories were written by government ministers and other important Kuomintang leaders, or their advisors. Mel had to be cautious before he made any changes.
“Of course, there is the problem of face and toe-treading,” Mel noted. “So when certain writers butch badly—that is permissible.”
However, Mel added that he might have been somewhat exaggerating how bad the work was for good reading. He admired and respected his boss, Hollington Tong, the vice minister of publicity. Mel thought Tong was an active, good-natured official with a modern slant. He also liked the people he worked with, even if their work habits sometimes annoyed him.
“No one here knows exactly what routine means,” Mel wrote that January. “Even getting your salary is rather confusing. I asked for some money since I was broke and low [sic] and behold a boy brought me a large envelope crammed with more bills than I know what to do with.”
When Mel wasn’t working, he was constantly exploring his new hometown by foot. Chungking was a makeshift metropolis perched atop a series of steep hills. It centered on a peninsula four miles long and a mile or so wide that thrust eastward into the junction of the Chialing (Jialing) and Yangtze (Chang Jiang) Rivers. Bamboo houses on stilts climbed up the hills, bunching up along the cliffs that rose precipitously from the banks of the Yangtze.
Chungking (Chongqing), China, and one of its many stone-step pathways. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.
Central Chungking was divided into an upper city, a lower city, and flood-prone markets along the river. Before the war, merchants had traveled along the length of the Yangtze, the world’s third longest river, to Chungking from places like Hankow, Nanking, and Shanghai. On the south bank of the Yangtze was a small foreign district inhabited by some of the city’s foreign embassies, Christian missions, and major business concerns, such as Standard Oil.
Crossing the peninsula just west of downtown Chungking was a new road that had r
ecently been renamed Zhongshan, in honor of the national hero Sun Yat-sen. Up Zhongshan, the Kuomintang’s leaders convened at the Executive Yuan. Nearby were other government offices, as well as homes occupied by the Chiangs and other notables, including the Communist emissary Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai) and the Nationalist spymaster Tai Li (Dai Li).
Chungking felt unfinished. By the time Mel arrived, its newly paved streets teemed with refugees from the conquered coastal cities, but much of the city still lacked modern roads. Once a key city in the ancient Baˉ Kingdom and located in the heart of Szechuan Province (Sichuan), Chungking had been something of a backwater in China for a while.
But then, as Mel wrote, “the 20th Century caught up to Chungking in two leaps and a bound.” The first leap: in 1891 the English established regular steamer service along the Yangtze between Shanghai and Chungking. The second: in 1931 regular flights began from the coast to Shanhuba—the rocky airfield in the Yangtze’s riverbed.
The bound? That was Chiang Kai-shek’s announcement on November 20, 1937, that China’s capital was moving from Nanking to Chungking, rapidly transforming the city into free China’s center of gravity. As the historian Rana Mitter wrote, this transition was a key piece of the country’s wartime strategy of trading space for time.
“Moving the entire government 1500 kilometers up the Yangtze River helped to consolidate ideas of a united China that spanned the whole of the country’s landmass,” Mitter wrote. Chungking was far inland, in the country’s southwest. Though located roughly in the center of modern China, in 1940 it was considered the frontier.
China’s government survived, but to resist an enemy as powerful, rich, and modernized as the Japanese, China also needed a thriving economy. When the Kuomintang moved its seat of power to Chungking, it orchestrated a massive relocation of Chinese industry and commerce. Entire factories were dismantled and floated on barges up the Yangtze from Hankow. Railroads were laid just ahead of trains that carried boilers, refineries, and other industrial equipment into China’s heart.
While the thick fog that clung to Chungking’s hills kept Japan’s bombers away in the winter, this was a city with its attention otherwise directed skyward. Chungking was the “most raided city in the world.” Life seemed to revolve around the city’s many dugouts—air raid shelters—tunneled into Chungking’s many hillsides. These dugouts were often not glamorous. Many of the deep, damp tunnels were “often used for the wrong purposes” and consequently disgusting enough to convince Mel to carry a flashlight for his visits. The city’s leaders still had to teach the city’s many new residents to use them when the raids did finally come.
“Chungking is probably the world’s most uncomfortable capital to live in,” Mel wrote in “Unheavenly City,” one of a handful of his unpublished stories from the summer of 1940. “A servant heats your bath water over an open fire, and by the time it gets to the tub, it’s either cold or the air raid siren has sounded. A single chocolate bar is split a dozen ways, and American cigarettes are almost as rare as taxicabs.”
New roads had been paved, but it was a city where most people walked. Few owned cars, and taxis were rare. Webs of stone staircases and steep, winding alleyways cut over the hills and between the bamboo-and-paper buildings perched on stilts along Chungking’s cliffs. The steps were coated with muddy, slippery blankets of moss.
Chungking was a city of smells, of scents “evil and new—and yet intimately familiar and human,” Carl Mydans would write later. Summers were stifling, damp winters were chilling, and everyone smoked the Three Castles cigarettes advertised in local publications as “Still My Favorite.” Chungking’s deprivations, squalor, danger, and inconveniences were myriad, yet the city got its hooks into nearly every visitor.
“Few foreigners desert Chungking without wanting to return,” Mel wrote. “The set formula is to tell friends in Hong Kong what a hell-hole they are missing, and then to rush right back on the next plane loaded with only thirty pounds of clothes and bare essentials.”
Chungking was simultaneously brand-new and decrepit. Fast becoming the “most bombed” city in the world, it was also the epicenter of the country for any serious journalist. Outside of Mel’s work at the publicity bureau, Mel began to use the contacts he’d developed before leaving California to pitch reporting with his own name on it. He also acquired a Contax Model II camera, which he brought with him everywhere he went, shooting photos whenever he got a chance. He even sold some photographs to the Associated Press (AP). And after the Los Angeles Times published his article about Shanghai’s Jewish community, he arranged to write more features, like one about the selection of the Dalai Lama for This World, the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle.
In California, Shirlee, Mel’s girlfriend from Stanford, had been keeping in regular contact with his mother. The two swapped news from Mel and tried to interpret what his brief, sometimes cryptic telegrams meant. (They spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out the meaning of his cable address, “SINOCOM,” which simply stood for “Chinese [Sino] Communications.”) One thing, however, was readily apparent to them: the letters Mel sent from Chungking had a far happier tone than anything he’d written from Shanghai.
This may have had much to do with the community Mel had found at Chungking’s Press Hostel. If Chungking was wartime China’s center of gravity, Mel and many other journalists in the city found theirs in the Press Hostel, a thin-walled structure of mud, bamboo, plaster, and stone that before the war had been a middle school.
After the government moved to Chungking, Holly Tong convinced H. H. Kung—possibly China’s richest man, its finance minister, and Madame Chiang’s brother-in-law—to finance $10,000 in upgrades to the school so that foreign reporters could live and work there. It was cheap and uncomfortable—water for baths had to be carried up by porters, and there wasn’t much of it—but it quickly felt like home.
Maya Rodevitch, Melville Jacoby, Randall Gould, and Hugh Deane socialize outside of the Press Hostel in Chungking, China. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.
Built into a small, grassy bowl between two ridges spanning the peninsula that gave shape to central Chungking, the hostel was within walking distance of key Kuomintang facilities and foreign embassies being built in the surrounding hills and valleys (though more were constructed in districts across the city’s two rivers). Holly’s own residence was near the Press Hostel, as were his offices and the studio of China’s Central Broadcasting Service (which also had facilities elsewhere).
Mel lived in a small room with two large windows and whitewashed mud walls. He slept on a small metal cot with a hard, half-inch-thick mattress. There were a couple of end tables, a small desk with a lamp, some chairs, a dresser, and a washbasin. A forever-damp carpet covered part of the cement floor.
There was also an office that Mel shared with Maurice “Mo” Votaw, another Mizzou grad, who was on hiatus from teaching at a journalism school in Shanghai. Gaunt, with slightly receding, wavy brown hair and a mustache, Mo played a somewhat avuncular role for Mel and the other young journalists who haunted the Press Hostel.
“If you are a correspondent you live at the Chungking Press Hostel,” Mel wrote. “It’s almost like being back in a college dormitory. Meals, because of the 25-1 exchange in operation, cost you about two American dollars a month. You know, or at least think you do, more about everyone else’s business than your own. Family problems nine thousand miles back in America are Press Hostel problems. Try and keep the contents of a letter secret, and your name is mud.”
As they ate, slept, and suffered raids together, the other journalists came to feel far closer than mere colleagues. To Mel, the people he met at the Press Hostel—among them Till Durdin and his wife Peggy; Israel Epstein; Mel’s old Lingnan friend Hugh Deane; the prickly, misogynistic Jack Belden; and the woman Belden pursued, Betty Graham (another former Lingnan exchange student who in turn had an unrequited crush on Mel)—became an extended family. Yes, the Chungking press gang compete
d for scoops—indeed, foreign reporters came and went with shifting assignments and shifting fortunes—and of course bitterness and heartbreak occasionally crept into Press Hostel affairs, but everyone who lived there shared a bond.
There were often light moments at the Press Hostel: pickup basketball games and volleyball with Ministry of Information officials or local kids in the dirt courtyard; the excitement of chocolate bars and whiskey when someone returned from a trip to Hong Kong; the time Mel sat fully naked—though strategically covered—in the hostel’s bath and someone snapped his somewhat miffed picture.
Denizens of the press hostel loved welcoming returning or newly arriving correspondents with long, late-running parties. When Randall Gould came in early March, Mel and another friend set up a large dinner for him.
“Put on a pretty good feed and lots of rice wine—twenty-four pewter jugs to be exact,” Mel wrote.
Those jugs were hoisted by twenty-three extremely colorful guests, who together represented the sort of cosmopolis that Chungking had cultivated. Among Mel’s invitees were a Polish woman who worked for the League of Nations and was the Chinese war minister’s mistress; an American writer named Helen Foster Snow (aka Nym Wales), who helped organize the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives movement and was married to the author Edgar Snow; Peggy Durdin; an unidentified Bank of China advisor; and Theodore H. White, Time’s correspondent.
“What a group we got here, too,” Mel said. “Our press hostel houses enough characters, but when we join the crowd from the Chungking Hostel [a private lodging house where many foreigners lived] then the fun begins—someone someday will write a book on Chungking society.”
