Ming Li crossed the street to avoid a Kempeitai patrolling the street. They were everywhere, the Kempeitai, especially on the bridges. Chinese and European alike, wanting to cross, had to first bow deeply to the Japanese Emperor, personified by the guard before them. And if the guard thought they had not shown enough respect, they would be slapped, punched, and even bayoneted. It was best to avoid the Kempeitai if at all possible. She stepped over a beggar lying across her path, turned into an alleyway and knocked on a door. It opened a crack, then wider to let her in.
Outside the door, P’i Gao squatted to the ground and waited.
The old woman examined the silver box. She scratched at the gilding, then examined her nail. Ming Li waited – she knew the routine.
‘Why do you bring me such rubbish? What do you expect me to do with this?’
‘It’s all I have. A Japanese will buy it; a gift for his mistress.’
‘Aiyah! “All I have”! You lie. Every time you come you say it’s all you have, then you come again. Where do you find these things, then, if it’s all you have, hey?’
Ming Li kept quiet, her gaze lowered.
The woman turned the box over. Examined the bottom, the inside. Scratched at the gilding once more.
‘All right, because you’re a good customer I’ll make you a deal.’ She rose and shuffled to another room, came back with a small packet of flour and sat down again.
‘Is it pure?’
‘Pure? You question the quality of my goods now? But perhaps you don’t need my flour. Perhaps that husband of yours can find you some soft white flour to fill your belly, your daughter’s belly …’
‘I’m sorry. Of course I don’t question the quality of your goods. I come back, don’t I? Would I come back if I thought your goods not of value? But the box – it’s worth more than that. A lot more.’
‘It’s worth what I say it’s worth. And I say this is what it’s worth.’ And she pushed the packet toward Ming Li.
Ming Li looked at the packet but didn’t pick it up. She sat quietly, her hands resting on her lap.
‘Well? Do you want it or not? I don’t have all day. I’m giving you a bargain, you know. This miserable little box you’ve bought me isn’t worth half this.’
Still Ming Li did not move.
‘All right – if you don’t want it, so be it.’ But the woman stayed seated.
Ming Li rose and took back the silver box. She was half out the door when the woman called her back.
‘Sit down, sit down! You’re so impatient! Maybe I have something you’ll like better. Wait. Don’t be so impatient. Sit down. Sit.’
She shuffled out of the room again. When she came back she pushed the flour aside and put a tin on the table.
‘Bully beef!’ she said with pride. ‘The foreigners feed it to their troops. How long since your husband’s tasted beef?’
‘Two tins.’
‘Two? Do I look as if I’m running a charity?’
‘Two tins.’
‘Two tins? Two tins of first class beef for one miserable little box? Oh, all right. But only because I like you.’
She returned with a second tin and placed it in front of Ming Li but didn’t let it go.
‘For two tins, perhaps you could ask your husband to enquire after my son. He was arrested yesterday.’
Ming Li’s gaze met hers. Slowly her hand moved to the packet of flour.
‘For two tins and the flour I will ask my husband.’
‘Mistress, stop! Look.’
At the end of her street, outside the gate of the tall granite wall that surrounded their house, stood two Japanese guards, bayonets fixed. The gate was open, more guards could be seen in the outer courtyard, but all was quiet.
‘I’ll go see what’s happening. You wait here.’
‘No. It’s my husband, my daughter in there. I’m coming with you.’
At the mention of MeiMei, P’i Gao frowned – he knew what the Japanese did to pretty young women.
‘Please, Mistress Ming, it’s better you wait here.’
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘No! Your husband knows how to handle this; you’ll just jeopardise his situation. You’ll get him killed. Get back out of this street and wait. I’ll find you as soon as it’s safe.’
Ming Li stared at her major-domo. If ever she’d doubted his involvement in her husband’s underground activities, his behaviour now removed any suspicion. She nodded.
She sat on the lower steps of a shop now boarded shut. On the top step a toddler smacked a snow-dusted bundle of rags lying across the doorway again and again, frustrated at not getting any response. Beside her sat an old blind woman holding a minuscule cage on her lap, inside which lay a dead cricket. She had her face turned up to the sky, and she smiled as she rocked back and forth, back and forth, oblivious to the crowd around her.
‘Why are you smiling, Grandmother?’ Ming Li asked, wanting to stop thinking. But the old woman just rocked and smiled at the sky, and Ming Li wished she too could go to a place where crickets chirped and the sun warmed her face. She stared into the crowd moving past, wanting to follow P’i Gao. Wanting to scream at the Japanese to leave her house. Trying not to imagine what may have happened to Xueliang and MeiMei. Wanting – praying – to stop thinking.
16
It had taken Edward and his men three weeks to travel the two thousand miles from Burma, across China into the Yunnan Province. First by truck into the mountains of Yunnan, where the bitumen soon ended and the road became so narrow that vehicles passing scraped each other. Upward to the very roof of China where the rarefied atmosphere made breathing difficult. The road snaked from mountain to mountain, and halfway down the steep slopes they constantly saw the shattered remains of vehicles that had come too close to the edge.
Onwards skirting the Mekong Gorge, through hills where wild geese flew over stunted pines, then into the Guizhou Province where the scenery eventually changed to undulating hills, then back again to ridges climbing thousands of feet.
The temperature dropped a little more each day and in the mornings they would find thick layers of ice on the windscreens, and cracked radiators were a common occurrence.
When they reached Guiyang they were welcomed by the Chinese Red Cross who put them up in their headquarters. There Edward met Dr Chen, once Consul-General to Australia, who told him Singapore also had surrendered to the Japanese. But more importantly for the men, the first mail they’d received in months awaited them.
As soon as possible without appearing rude, Edward retired to read his mail. A number of letters from his mother and from Charlotte, bringing news of Walpinya Station. Just two from Julia, so superficial in tone Edward wondered why she had bothered to write. And from Chen Mu, the largest pile – calm, thoughtful letters that not only brought news of Macoomba, but were also full of recollections of Edward’s childhood escapades. But what surprised Edward most was that Chen Mu also wrote about his own childhood – something he’d never shared with Edward before.
The next day they left the Burma Road and headed south towards the Kwangsi Province, where they transferred to a train which crawled north again into the Hunan Province, until at last they reached Kiyang where trucks took them past rice fields to a large building that was the guerrilla school. They were read a letter by Lieutenant-General Li Mo An who addressed them as ‘brothers in arms’, but by now all Edward and his men were interested in was sleep in a proper bed.
‘Bloody useless, the lot of them!’ a drill-sergeant complained to Edward one evening. ‘Raw recruits, each and every one!’
Edward knew the man to be exaggerating. While many were indeed recruits – some as young as fourteen – there were also those who were veterans of numerous campaigns. But several of his team found the Chinese difficult to teach. This was not so much a problem of language – as Canton was to be their operational area, they’d all had to learn basic Cantonese, and they also had interpreters – but because they’d been warne
d that telling a Chinese soldier he’d done something incorrectly risked making him lose face. Diplomacy was essential, but diplomacy was a slow and frustrating process for Australian drill-sergeants used to soldiers obeying their commands without question. How could these men be taught blind obedience, be taught to kill and be killed with calm acceptance, when their egos had to be considered?
There were other idiosyncrasies that also had to be tackled diplomatically, in particular the habit of Chinese soldiers to sing patriotic songs at the top of their voices when marching, and that of sentries to shoot any bird flying overhead when on duty.
‘It’s almost an instinct,’ Chong Lueng, a Chinese officer, explained to Edward as he threw the basketball over the branch that was their improvised hoop. ‘Most of these men are peasants who’ve lived through many famines – when they see food, they don’t let it get away.’
‘It’s an instinct that’ll get them killed.’
Edward liked Chong Lueng. The man had studied in America and lived all his adult life in Shanghai, though the two had never met before this. They’d become close and often spent their spare time together, trying to keep boredom at bay.
‘They’ll learn. They’re good soldiers.’ He threw the ball to Edward.
Edward agreed, but he was worried. These men were intelligent and spirited, and were becoming skilled guerrilla fighters. Their resilience was extraordinary, their patriotism beyond question, and he found himself admiring and respecting them more and more each day. But none of this mattered if not backed by artillery and air power, of which China had very little.
By the end of March the temperature rose, the rains came, and the coming of spring was evident; the locals called it ‘the season of excited little insects’. It lived up to its name as thousands of mosquitoes spread malaria, and millions of caterpillars smothered the pines and crawled into mess tins and between clothes and bedding. Jaundice and dysentery also became a problem, but still the training and the boredom continued.
Finally in early June the men were told they were moving out – not to Canton as expected, but to the Hubei Province, which prompted Edward to hold emergency classes in Mandarin.
For eighteen days they travelled upriver by sampan towards Kuantu, their explosives piled high on sidings. The boats had to be towed from shore, and they soon learned it was easier if naked except for the coolie hats they’d bought at the first village. The rains continued, swelling the river by inches overnight, and often when manoeuvring the boats around booms the ropes would snap. Then there were no more booms or villages but instead rapids to battle against, so that by nightfall the men fell exhausted on their bedding, indifferent even to the constant swarm of mosquitoes.
When they reached Kuantu they heard of the fall of Tobruk, but many refused to believe it; it could only be an over-exaggeration. In any case they were all too ill with diarrhoea, and many with malaria as well, to think too much about Tobruk.
For the next two weeks they travelled on foot, their explosives carried in small square baskets with the help of coolies. Their muscles ached, their feet blistered then bled then festered, until at last they reached their base in a valley near Hankou. From there they were deployed into smaller contingents. Edward had requested the one near the border of the Kiangsi and Chekiang Provinces. It would place him no more than two hundred miles from Shanghai. Two hundred miles from Ming Li.
From his bed in the sick-tent Edward heard raised Chinese voices. He was suffering from dysentery, but he considered himself lucky compared to some of the others – men who went to bed feeling fine would wake next morning shivering with a raging fever. Malaria, anaemia, dysentery and typhoid were now rampant. Stomach ulcers, snakebites, boils and scratches that wouldn’t heal were the norm. There was a doctor from the hospital thirty miles away who walked to their camp every few days, tended the sick and walked back again, but there was little he could do. He urged them to scour the black market for quinine, salts, anything that could help. In the months they’d been here food had become so scarce they all looked like skeletons, medical supplies were drastically low, and at any one time seventy per cent of the men were sick.
A gun went off and Edward reached for his shoes.
In the middle of the camp six Chinese men knelt on the ground, and beside them a seventh lay, a bullet through his skull. They were dressed as pedlars and each had a rope twisted around his ankles and wrists and up around his neck. Chong Lueng stood behind one of the men, the barrel of his gun against the man’s head. Others stood around, watching.
‘What’s going on?’
Chong Lueng glanced at Edward, but didn’t lower his gun.
‘Puppets,’ he said, and pulled the trigger.
Edward nodded. One of the problems they all faced were puppet soldiers – Chinese soldiers who had joined the Japanese. These men were better fed, better equipped and better paid than the soldiers of the Chinese army, and their job was to entice the Chinese to desert and join them. It had become very difficult to know who were the enemy and who were allies.
As Edward walked back to his tent he counted five more shots.
They’d helped bury the bodies and were sitting on the ground leaning against a tree, competing to see who could swat the largest number of big green flies that kept landing on their limbs to drink their sweat. Edward and Chong Lueng, like all the men, were now so weak that even something like helping dig a grave exhausted them. For weeks now nothing had happened. No new orders came through, the Japanese blocked radio communications as soon as they began, and they’d received no mail for months. They kept up marches and arms training but saw little action, and many Chinese guerrilla groups refused to work with the Western trained battalion. Morale was low and the men were going crazy with boredom or were too weak to care. There was talk of invaliding them out. They played cards until they couldn’t look at another card, and even read the labels on the tins of whatever food they had left, just for something to do.
A small detail that had gone out the previous night returned to camp, accompanied by a civilian from Shanghai. The man looked ill and starved. He had sores on his arms that he scratched incessantly.
‘They’ve been doing it for a while now,’ he said to Edward and Chong Lueng during his debriefing. ‘Any Westerner that’s still around is sent to the internment camps just outside the city.’
‘Security?’
‘Heavy during the day, but not so much at night. They’re a strange lot – at night, they withdraw the sentry to the main posts. So you only get the odd patrol.’
‘How did you get out?’
The man laughed.
‘It’s crazy – I just waited for the patrol to pass, lifted the wire and ran like hell. Thought I’d get shot any second, but no, nothing. I’m not the first to go like that.’
Edward nodded. They’d had other Shanghailanders reach them with the same story. If they made it through to their lines, the guerrillas would help them through free China to India.
‘And Shanghai itself?’
‘It’s bad. Real bad. They’ll shoot you right there in the street if they don’t like the look of you. The place is so crowded with refugees you can hardly move – five, six times what it was a couple of years ago. The Japs grab everything – houses, businesses, the shirt off your back if they fancy it. Then you’ve got the scum; they’ll denounce anyone to curry favour with the Japs, even their own mothers. Everyone’s edgy. You can’t trust anyone. Everyone’s starving …’
The man stopped and shook his head, frowning. His fingers picked at a scab on his arm, and in the silence he picked at it faster and faster even as it bled, still shaking his head. Edward and Chong Lueng waited.
‘There was this monk. Young fella, maybe thirteen, fourteen. He was begging; you know how they do. Then he collapsed. They were on him before he came to. On him like a pack of dogs …’
Edward poked at the fire, thinking of what the Shanghailander had told them. He was sitting in the smoke of a smouldering camp
fire with Chong Lueng in an attempt to escape the mosquitoes that were always worse at this time of the evening.
Earlier the men had received the first mail in months. It had been a strange experience for Edward. He’d received, amongst others, letters from his mother, but at the same time one from Julia, dated four months earlier, which told him of his mother’s death. She’d died quietly in her sleep, Julia assured him. The funeral had been attended by all those from the surrounding properties, and Macoomba had closed down for the morning so that everyone in the township could also attend. Even your old gardener was there, Julia had noted, and for that, Edward was grateful. Then, before he’d even come to the end of the letter, he’d quickly encapsulated his grief – to allow himself these feelings, here, now, would only weaken him further. He could not allow himself to lose control. He imagined his grief in a little box closed tight – one of those Japanese puzzle boxes that needed hundreds of moves to open, maybe – pushed down deep inside himself, not to be opened until back home.
Chen Mu had also sent his condolences, and he’d told Edward how he too had been away when his own mother had died, and how angry and helpless and guilty he’d felt, and how it had taken him years to realise that he had no reason to feel this way.
But amongst all these letters, there had been nothing from Ming Li. These past months, falling asleep thinking about her, Edward had been able to convince himself that she’d be all right, that Xueliang would keep her safe, that he’d get a letter from her telling him so in the very first mail bag to reach them. But there was no letter, and the Shanghailander’s debriefing left no doubt in his mind – he could no longer wait to find out Ming Li’s situation.
A shiver ran up his spine and he hoped he wasn’t catching a fever. Not now. He was so close to Shanghai; he could be there in a matter of hours. Find her. Convince her to leave. Her and MeiMei. And yes, even Xueliang, if it had to be so. He was willing to help Xueliang escape if it meant Ming Li would be safe. If he left now, he could be back tomorrow morning. Chong Lueng would cover for him.
The Yellow Papers Page 13
