Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  The day after the party, Gould borrowed an office car, and he and Mel drove into the countryside around Chungking. Fruit trees were beginning to flower, and Mel found the blooms a welcome relief from three months of the city’s gray skies. The two reporters took a dip at a hot springs resort, shot photos, and visited far-flung government offices that had been scattered to avoid concentrated disruptions from air raids, which gave them a sense of how the government was responding to the constant attacks.

  “It was quite a break for me to go along as gasoline is one dollar gold per gallon and people don’t use cars too much,” Mel noted.

  Usually, the diversions were less adventurous. Once, someone at the Press Hostel got ahold of a full Japanese uniform, complete with weapons. They proceeded to dress Time correspondent Theodore H. White in the getup. When he had the full uniform on, “Teddy” grinned widely, a rifle in one hand, a pistol in another, a helmet on, and a Japanese flag sticking out of the sleeve of his long field coat.

  The hostel felt like the center of an Edenic world, despite the horrors beyond the palm trees surrounding the hostel’s grounds. It was an era that Teddy, a quick-tongued Harvard grad, later recalled as “those days in Chungking, under the bombs, when life was so fresh and everyone was so good and all things were so simple.”

  Among the friends Mel made at the Press Hostel, Teddy may have been the closest. The pair’s friendship began right at the beginning of 1940, when Time magazine hired Teddy to work as its Far East correspondent and Mel took over Teddy’s previous job at the publicity bureau. They bonded in early January, after taking a crowded bus with Votaw to the center of Chungking for a night out eating Cantonese food and theater-hopping between a Chinese movie they couldn’t understand and a bunch of ancient, badly censored American newsreels.

  Teddy and Mel were an unusual pair. Smirking Mel was tall and athletic, with soulful eyes and thick hair. Broad-grinning Teddy was short and slightly rounder, bespectacled, and balding. The former was an only child and the darling of a wealthy California family; the latter had lived leanly with his mother and several siblings in Boston. Mel was often quiet; Teddy was loquacious when his passions were aroused.

  But both came from families with Jewish heritage, and each had a father who perished at a young age. Both men loved China immensely, but loved journalism even more. Each was brilliant in his own way. They were, as the author Peter Rand wrote, “soul mates” of a sort.

  The men became fast friends as the war progressed.

  “I don’t know how, if ever, words can recapture the joys and happiness of deep, living friendship,” Teddy later told the Durdins. “We carry so much around of our friends. It never leaves; it is the heat of Chungking, or the nights when the Japanese were raiding, or the restaurants and the good food; or the talking, most of all the talking.”

  Humidity suffocated Chungking. Mosquitoes infested Chungking. Buses’ charcoal exhaust choked Chungking. Parties in Chungking flowed with roast duck, scallion pancakes, and rice wine as Japanese rebels, German Communists, and American military attachés mingled with adventure-seekers, mercenaries, and bohemians from the world’s farthest corners. Outside these bacchanals, Chungking’s cacophonous streets crawled with beggars peddling broken tools and decrepit clothing and stinking of unwashed mothers trying to feed children defecating in the gutters.

  For much of the year, heat enveloped Chungking, even in the middle of the night. The thick, sultry air was as ever present as the noise. Silence was a concept so foreign in this pop-up capital that the word could have been cut from dictionary pages and never missed.

  Air raid season finally arrived as the weather cleared, and that brought the worst noise by far: the wail of air raid sirens. These were always swiftly followed by the urgent murmur of citizens rushing to dugout shelters. Then came the faraway drone of approaching bombers that climbed to a roar. This sound ebbed to a brief, eerie quiet, which, in turn, flowed away as deceptively distant blasts thudded above hundreds of feet of stone, “like suction cups plopping against water.”

  During attacks, the city’s residents did what they could to play it cool. On these days, while approaching planes were still distant, Chungkingers watched the skies with detached interest. The attacks had become routine, and the underground shelters a part of daily life. Young lovers stole away in the darkness to kiss. Cooks prepped lunch boxes. Bureaucrats read the newspaper.

  Such normalcy, if you could call it that, was possible because of an elaborate warning system. Spies near Japanese airfields reported bomber squadrons taking off to officials in Chungking. Local officials, in turn, estimated when the attacking sorties would arrive. While sirens sounded, a series of red paper warning lamps were hoisted onto poles atop the hills so that residents could gauge how long they had to get to one of the many shelters. When the first ball went up, they had two hours before the attack; the second came when the planes were within one hundred miles; the final was raised just before the planes arrived.

  Chungking’s air defense system had created what superficially seemed like an orderly response to the raids, but those raids carved stark, deadly realities out of the city’s resilient facade. After every bombing, residents emerged from the shelters to horrific scenes. Rickshaw drivers and bang-bang men—local porters who carried heavy loads up Chungking’s countless stone steps—lay mangled in the street, their bamboo carrying poles and baskets scattered around them. Women’s bodies were sprawled in roadways, bloodied skirts splayed in the dirt. Flattened buses smoldered. Flaming buildings burned. Smoke rolled into the sky and sank again into the city’s many valleys.

  Crowds pack Chungking (Chongqing), China’s, streets outside of one of the city’s many dugouts, or air raid shelters. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  Many people, particularly the starving and sick, couldn’t reach Chungking’s shelters in time. It was their bodies that lay mangled in the streets, their bamboo stilt and paper-wall houses that burned most often, their children’s wails that echoed on the city’s stone steps long after the thunder of the raids ceased. It was these people desperate to sell one more handful of peanuts or bunch of tangerines just to survive who were, in overwhelming numbers, the war’s victims.

  While horrified by the bomb victims’ experience, Mel wasn’t in the same great personal danger. Air raid alarms came so frequently that he eventually tired of how they interrupted his work, but he could always reach a shelter. There he tried to steal moments with his typewriter to bang out stories, but more often than he liked he found himself in a dugout too crowded, dark, or loud to work.

  Moments that Mel didn’t spend in a bomb shelter were filled with the noise of the teeming masses, the conversations and lovemaking unmuted by the Press Hostel’s paper-thin walls, the chatter of work, and the constant rattle of typewriters. Each morning, in front of a stack of radio equipment at XGOY’s control center, Mel and other news announcers read morning briefings with measured voices, while out on Chungking’s streets countless dialects pooled from China’s four corners to this polyglot bastion, where they swirled—particularly in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Szechuanese (Sichuanese)—from storefront to storefront.

  Mel also worked in close proximity to Chungking’s rich and powerful. Located near Zhongshan and the government offices that surrounded it, the Press Hostel was built where it was so that Chinese officials could easily watch over the press but also so that journalists had easy access to Chungking’s leaders while they reported.

  “You get to know Chinese officials fairly well and that makes you feel closer to the war,” Mel wrote. “Gradually you find that you have more Chinese than foreign friends, and that makes you feel good. You think of yourself in the center of this great gyration of events.”

  Mayling Soong, the influential American-educated wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, as photographed by Melville Jacoby. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  Newly arrived to this landscape was Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Soong Ching-l
ing (Soong Qingling), who that spring had moved to Chungking and a three-story home only a quarter-mile away from the hostel. In age, Ching-ling was the middle of the powerful trio of “Soong Sisters.” The youngest was Mayling—aka Madame Chiang Kai-shek—and the oldest was Ay-ling (Ailing), the wife of financier H. H. Kung, the individual who bankrolled Tong’s Press Hostel project. Their brother, T. V. Soong, born between Ay-Ling and Madame Sun, was a former finance minister and businessman who would later serve as a special emissary to the United States.

  Madame Sun’s arrival marked the first time all three Soong sisters had lived in the same city since the start of the war. It was also one of the biggest political events in the wartime capital, as it signaled the height of cooperation between the Communists, with whom she sympathized, and the Kuomintang, whose leaders were intimately connected to her sisters and brother.

  Mel was offered the opportunity to shoot pictures of the sisters’ first tour of Chungking. He almost missed it while in the bath.

  “Someone said for ——sakes get dressed, I was going out with Madame Chiang, Sun, and Kung,” Mel told his parents. Mel had just sold his camera to Hugh Deane and hadn’t yet bought a new one, so he grabbed Associated Press reporter Jim Stewart’s camera and caught up with the sisters. He then traveled around Chungking with their retinue as they toured bomb-damaged areas, air raid shelters, and factories.

  On the morning of April 17, Mel sat at a microphone in XGOY’s studio near the Press Hostel across from the sisters, the three most important women in China. Getting them together on the radio was a boon for Chinese publicity, and for Mel’s career. This day they were chattering together—in English, which they spoke to one another everywhere. Moments before the broadcast began, Ching-ling burst out in giggles. Soon her sisters started laughing as well. One of them looked at Mel and made a funny face. He lost it too.

  All four were still chuckling at 5:40 A.M., as NBC’s New York host broke in.

  “Go ahead, Chungking,” the announcer said.

  Mel pulled himself together. In measured, almost stiff tones, he introduced the three sisters. His voice was distorted and almost unintelligible because of the static, but back in their homes in San Francisco and Bel Air, Shirlee and Elza listened in wonder, thrilled to be hearing Mel’s voice for the first time in months and proud of him for introducing such important figures to the United States.

  “Thank you, NBC, and hello, America,” Mel said. “Here in the Chungking studios of the Chinese International Broadcasting Station are three of the foremost women in China.”

  Mel continued by introducing each of the women by name.

  “It is a rare privilege indeed to turn the microphone over at this time to Madame Sun,” Mel said as Ching-ling composed herself.

  “Quite a speech,” Mel later joked in a letter about his sparse introduction. “Lousy as an announcer as I am, the whole thing was sort of fun. People say I usually don’t sound so badly.”

  If he was not pleased with his announcing, Mel was even less pleased with the fact that both the end of Madame Chiang’s speech and a closing announcement of his were cut off when the segment went overtime. However, when Mel saw Madame Chiang again later, she told him she was pleased with the broadcast, and with him. She promised to sit down for an interview in the near future.

  “We are quite chummy now, you know,” a charmed Mel wrote to his mother. “Always calls me by name and gives me a nice smile.”

  Mel’s broadcast for the Soong sisters had been specially arranged with NBC in New York. On May 3, preparations were finally completed at XGOY for its own daily broadcasts from a new studio—this one safely dug into a tunnel deep beneath Chungking’s hills, where it was protected from the city’s constant air raids. At 4:00 A.M. each morning, Mel walked seven miles west to XGOY’s new station in the Shapingba district. After a breakfast of hot noodles, Mel broadcast the day’s news roundup for Doc Stuart. Afterward, if he didn’t have to help put out a fire from the constant squabbles between the station’s engineers and its programming staff, Mel left to pick up the day’s dope from sources around Chungking. That required walking up and down hills and stairs all over the city through thick, damp weather.

  For a brief period of time, after broadcasts were shifted to late evenings, XGOY’s main studio was out of commission and Mel had to use another transmitter. Doing so required leaving at 7:00 P.M. for a two-hour ride on the back of a truck or in a crowded bus to the other transmitter, which was far out in the countryside on Chungking’s outskirts; then he got another two-hour ride back. This was all after exhausting days of reporting, air raids, and meetings.

  “Not the easiest capital in the world to cover, Chungking presents a teasing array of difficulties to the correspondent,” Mel once reported to an editor.

  The reality of air raids usually kept Mel from getting more than one interview done a day before he had to find a dugout. Taking into account the time he had to remain in a shelter before the all-clear, it took too long to get between multiple meetings without a car. On cloudy days, however, Mel might have had time to take a sampan to the south bank of the Yangtze and the many foreign embassies, business outposts, and Chinese government offices located there. Then he would come back across the river. Faced with the steep stairways that led up the city’s cliffs, Mel normally refused the Chinese peasants who offered to carry him up in a sedan chair in favor of gingerly negotiating the thousands of slippery stone steps himself. Recalling the embarrassment of riding across the Kwangsi countryside to the family compound of his Lingnan roommate Ka Yik, Mel could bear neither the thought of twisting his stocky six-foot-one frame into the chairs nor the cultural discomfort of relying on the peasants’ servitude.

  “When you are climbing from one hill to another under a blazing mid-day sun, you curse their steepness,” Mel wrote in “Unheavenly City.” “A few hours later you are tucked away in a tunnel running through the center of the same hill safe from exploding bombs. You feel a five hundred pounder jar the hill above your head and your jaw snaps shut. But as soon as you can talk again, you remark to your neighbor how glad you are for Chungking’s hills, and thank goodness out loud that you aren’t in flat old London.”

  A building burns atop a cliff in Chungking (Chongqing), China, following an air raid by Japanese planes. Photo by Melville J. Jacoby. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  Atop the cliffs of Pipa Shan, one of Chungking’s many hills, Mel would stop to light a Three Castles cigarette and watch foreign pilots “miraculously” ease huge CNAC DC-3s between several large mountains, through the thick, yellow fog blanketing the Yangtze, and down toward the airfield at Shanhuba, though he would never quite see them land.

  “The field is rocky, unlighted and unmarked,” Mel said shortly after he arrived in Chungking. “You can’t even see it from the neighboring cliffs overlooking the water. Yet [the pilots] always miss the hills around here which they can’t possibly see, and land safely on a field that appears when they are about fifty feet above the ground.”

  Mel loved being in Chungking, but as the year progressed he became disillusioned with his government job. As he skipped dinners to write news roundups or wrangle guests for upcoming broadcasts, he kept a good sense of humor about how hard he was working.

  “See, I am earning my three dollars per week,” he wrote.

  Every day something angered Mel about the studio. Announcers at XGOY wouldn’t rehearse or properly time their broadcasts before going on air. Some would yawn on mic. Others just didn’t show up when they were supposed to.

  “Feel that I will have done my duty,” he wrote. “I can’t stand such an awful lack of efficiency much longer.”

  Mel was also upset that the office had peasants working every day around the clock without any breaks.

  “Makes me sore as hell,” Mel wrote. He wasn’t just upset about being a party to the exploitation, though that was part of it. Other laborers worked less. He was aggravated that this was one of many areas at his office
where there didn’t seem to be any sort of system or routine. He got so mad that he threatened to quit.

  That got Tong’s attention, and he sent word to Mel that he was so pleased with his work that he wanted to offer Mel a gold-based salary (which meant far stabler income given the rapid fluctuations of China’s wartime currency). It was tempting, but Mel still wasn’t sure. For one thing, he didn’t know if he could continue working as a propagandist. Though by that point he’d had a few stories in the Chronicle and he had been getting some bites from other publications, he wasn’t getting regular journalism work. Committing to work for the Ministry of Information would make newspaper work even less likely to come his way.

  If Mel accepted such a deal, he would be able to afford to pay for Shirlee to come out to Chungking. He also thought it was likely that they would get married if she did, and though he was open to that possibility, he didn’t think it was quite the right moment, especially because a wedding would have to take place far away from their families.

  “On the other hand, should I return in the next year to the U.S. I will practically lose all I have built today, and I will come home unless Shirlee comes out,” Mel wrote to his mother and stepfather. He told them he wanted to do the right thing, but he wanted their input too.

  Melville Jacoby and Maurice Votaw discuss a story outside of the Press Hostel in Chungking, China. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.

  Shortly after Mel first indicated that he wanted to quit, Madame Chiang came through on her promise of an interview. Over the rare treat of fresh orange juice, they chatted for forty-five minutes. Most of what May-ling said was off-the-record. Mel put the slim bit of information he could use into a feature he wrote about her for the Chronicle, but in exchange for access to her, he had to show her the draft for her approval. Once she finally returned it after many delays, she’d censored it heavily.