James whistled cheerfully as he inspected the company. Squinting down a filthy rifle barrel, he realized that the tune was “Gaudeamus Igitur,” an unconscious echo of music appreciation courses in Hong Kong under the Jesuits. But why not? He was young, and there was reason to rejoice. He tossed the weapon back, remarking that it would blow up in Ferret Yang’s face if he could not trouble himself to run an oil-soaked wad through the barrel. James contemplated his tattered rapscallions with affectionate distaste before rasping in his high-pitched, parade-ground voice: “Move out!”
With the shuffling gait of men still more at ease in grass sandals than leather boots, the company debouched between the red gate posts of the Buddhist temple into a muddy lane. The scuffling of many feet—some bare, some sandaled, and some leather-shod—was the true anthem of the Revolution. The second company joined them at the junction of the lane, and the third fell in behind them. At the head of the column, Lin Piao issued no new orders. His officers already knew their assignments, and it was too late to tinker with the plan. They were committed.
Irregular volleys sounded from the stone-faced three-story building with the dun-tiled roof that housed the offices of the Nanchang government and garrison. When the Communist column moved cautiously into the city’s central square, James saw that the cadets had anticipated them. Though lacking the spit-and-polish smartness of the officer candidates at the main school in Canton, the 1,200 cadets at Nanchang were already an effective fighting force. Commandant Chu Teh, the broad-faced, thick-set archetype of a Yunnan Province peasant even to his shuffling gait, gave his orders with no more excitement than a farmer sowing the spring rice. The first fierce volleys from the defenders were already dwindling to scattered single shots as Lin Piao’s battalion went into action.
The August First Rising, which was to be commemorated as the birth of the Communist People’s Liberation Army, won total victory within hours. The Nationalist Governor surrendered, and his troops joined the insurgents. For the first time, Communist regulars had seized a city by armed force. For the first time, they held a firm revolutionary base. The new revolution—no longer national bourgeois, but Socialist and Communist—had begun spectacularly, and the soldiers rejoiced. Irrevocably committed to the Communist cause, James Sekloong rejoiced with his illiterate followers. His doubts and skepticism had dissipated; he knew he had made the right choice.
James’s renewed confidence survived the shock of Major Lin Piao’s quiet announcement at the officers’ morning conference on the third day after General Chu Teh had proclaimed the Communist Provisional Revolutionary Government of China.
“Comrades,” the Battalion Commander directed, “we move into the countryside this afternoon. The reactionary forces converging on Nanchang are too powerful to resist. It would be folly to sacrifice our victory by fighting them and risking defeat.”
“Then we surrender our victory, instead?” a shocked lieutenant objected.
“No, Comrade!” The undertone of hysteria normally apparent in Lin Piao’s voice shrilled. “We consolidate our victory. Our deeds these past days have laid the foundation for our ultimate victory. How foolish to toss that precious pearl away like yesterday’s burnt rice by hazarding defeat. The glorious conquest of Nanchang will inspire and inflame the masses. Soon, very soon, we will win total victory—when all China is aflame with the hatred of a politically conscious proletariat.”
Rejoining their units, the officers issued their orders for the withdrawal. Some were subdued, those who yearned in their new-found confidence to fight the encroaching Nationalist forces. Others, having learned revolutionary patience, consoled themselves with Lin Piao’s promise of ultimate victory. The pragmatic common soldiers were glum.
“A great victory!” James heard his First Sergeant, Old Baldy Chang, grumble. “A great victory, screw their mothers! Some victory! We take a city and then surrender it. You can’t win if you don’t hold the ground.”
The troops dispersed. Some units followed General Chu Teh and his cadets into the hills of northern Kwangtung Province. Lin Piao’s battalion marched toward Swatow on the coast of Kwangtung Province, three hundred and forty miles northeast of Hong Kong, to seize that undefended port and proclaim a People’s Commune that endured a few weeks. In the hills of Hunan, Mao Tse-tung led his beloved peasants in the Autumn Harvest Uprising and was sent reeling in flight by two companies of local militia. The Central Committee of the Communist Party was purged and the Secretary-General himself removed as a “Trotskyite traitor.” A new group took command, Chou En-lai prominent among them. But it all amounted, James Sekloong reflected during the retreat from Swatow, to “no more than a heap of dog turds,” in Lin Piao’s favorite phrase. The Communist movement was in total disarray, its remaining troops scattered in a half-dozen encircled pockets and its leadership splintered.
The Nationalists’ simultaneous discomfiture was little consolation to James, who feared he had indeed traded his expectations of life for an illusion. Both the left wing and the right wing of the Kuomintang were reeling under the blows of their resurgent warlord enemies. Hsüchow, the high-water mark of Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition, was already lost, and the united warlords drove southward to threaten Shanghai and Nanking in mid-August. Faced with a mutiny by his generals, Chiang resigned “to remove dissension” and dashed off to Japan to woo Mayling Soong, Madame Sun, Yat-sen’s youngest sister. Bereft of almost all military strength, President Wang Ching-wei fled to Canton, which he formally designated the capital of his tottering, virtually powerless regime. Harry Sekloong observed with bitter humor that they could have saved themselves much trouble and travel. Wang and he were back where they had begun with Sun Yat-sen more than a decade earlier, while a rump National Government of conservatives sat in Nanking and Peking remained in the warlords’ hands.
With China once again reduced to anarchy, the shrewd Chiang Kai-shek returned to Shanghai with his new bride, Mayling Soong, to again claim supreme political and military authority over the demoralized Nationalists. Having embraced the Soongs’ Methodism, the man branded a “Bolshevik bandit” after the Nanking conflagration in March had by late November won enthusiastic foreign support as the champion of law, order, and private enterprise. When Wang Ching-wei embarked for Shanghai to negotiate with Chiang Kai-shek, Harry Sekloong remained in Canton to preside over their simulacrum of a National Government. The final act of the gory tragedy into which the year 1927 had been transformed for the Chinese Communists by their own ineptitude and Moscow’s conflicting orders was played in that southern metropolis.
Sir Jonathan Sekloong had lost little of his capacity for indignation, though he was seventy-four years old in late 1927. Ever since the virtual collapse of the Nationalist forces in mid-August he had lived in a fever of discontent. He was, nonetheless, mildly gratified when the Kuomintang’s left wing and his son Harry finally split with the Communists, finally following the lead of Chiang Kai-shek, whom the Old Gentleman despised with the unrelenting contempt of one arriviste for another. Despite that contempt, he continued his discreet subsidies to the General, who, he felt, was the only man who might impose some order on China’s chaos. His sons Sydney and Gregory Sek assiduously courted Green Dragon Tu Yueh-shen, Chiang Kai-shek’s “blood-brother.” Sir Jonathan was determined to extract whatever advantage he could from the spectacular disorder that seethed behind the calm façades of the foreign-ruled treaty-ports.
“The family is scattered all over China,” he observed to Mary and Charles on November 30, 1927. “Harry’s in Canton, but can’t come near us. Thomas is back in Shanghai with that clever gangster Chiang Kai-shek. As for James, God knows where he is! I must know what they’re all about.”
Mary was deeply worried about James, who had vanished from their ken after the Swatow Commune’s collapse in September. But she remained silent, lest she provoke a new anti-Communist tirade from the increasingly choleric Old Gentleman by expressing her fears for her favorite son. Charles replied quickly in o
rder to forestall another of his wife’s biting comments on China and the Chinese.
“Jonnie can lend you a hand here. Suppose I go up to Canton and talk to Harry?”
Sir Jonathan had, as usual, elicited the response he desired. He characteristically amended Charles’s suggestion.
“By all means, and take Mary with you,” he answered. “The servants in Canton want shaking up. I’ll manage with Jonnie. He’s finally displaying some glimmerings of business sense. Anyway, things are slack. Thank God this disastrous year’s almost over.”
Mary Sekloong’s spirits rose when she and Charles boarded the Canton steamer two days later. She had felt herself virtually a prisoner in Hong Kong while the armies wheeled and counterwheeled like the Duke of York in the nursery rhyme who marched up the hill with 10,000 men and then marched right down again. She had tried to guard her tongue, for Sir Jonathan had grown hypersensitive to any allusion to the inability of the Chinese to either govern themselves or refrain from betraying each other. He had also grown more credulous, as if seeking in the supernatural realm the certainties that suddenly evaded him in the material world. His heartfelt thanks that 1927 was drawing to a close, she knew, echoed the promise of the old soothsayer, Silver Seventh Brother, that 1928 would be a good year, a very good year for both the Sekloongs and China. It would be the Year of the Dragon, auspicious for all, but particularly auspicious for the clan whose emblem was the winged dragon. Though she scoffed at Silver Seventh, Mary, too, hoped for a favorable turn of fortune. And Christmas was coming, and it was good to escape Hong Kong, even briefly.
Austerely elegant in his high-collared Sun Yat-sen tunic, Harry met them at the Canton Wharves. The throngs parted before the three-spoked star on the radiator of the Mercedes-Benz, virtually his badge of office as President Wang Ching-wei’s counselor. He, too, was in high spirits, and he confidently predicted that Wang Ching-wei would very soon attain a working agreement with Chiang Kai-shek to reunite the Nationalists.
“And then we’ll sweep the chessboard clear,” he added. “Chiang just wants to play soldiers. After we take Peking, he’ll be happy with the geegaws—the uniforms, gold braid, decorations, and parades. We’ll get on with building China. There’s also an excellent chance of reconciliation with the Communists.”
“I hope so.” Mary did not wish to mar their reunion with sour skepticism.
Charles allowed himself a tight smile. Thomas’s artless letters praising his General were revealing. Charles felt with Mary that only supreme power, free of all restraints, would satisfy Chiang Kai-shek. But he, too, wished to avoid a political argument that could become acrimonious.
“I hope you’re right about Chiang, Harry,” he said while the Mercedes maneuvered through the narrow passage between the gate posts of the Kwok Family Mansion. “And I hope your confidence in the Communists proves justified.”
“After all, they’re still good Chinese, the Communists,” Harry laughed. “They’re your people and mine. They’ll be all right.”
Mary glanced sharply at her brother-in-law, remembering the mocking irreverence and the clear-sighted rejection of illusory cant that had first drawn her to Harry. He had changed fundamentally. It appeared that politics, like journalism, demanded a special kind of hard-shelled, humorless naiveté of its practitioners.
The wrought-iron gates closed behind the Mercedes, and the three Sekloongs were enclosed by the ancestral womb, the tiled courtyard of the Kwok Family Mansion. The servants were lined up to greet them, sixteen in all from the immaculate Number One Boy to three ragged gardeners. The entrance hall sparkled with new paint and polished woodwork. Someone, she saw, had already shaken up the staff.
“I think it’s not bad, Mary.” Harry reacted to her unspoken thought. “Though it’s been a bachelor household since Mayling took Jason to Shanghai last month. Time for the boy to spend some time with his grandparents.”
Delighted at being spared Harry’s vapid wife, Mary wanted only a hot bath to complete her contentment at playing truant from Hong Kong. The riverboat always left her feeling grittily unattractive; she wanted to wash away the grime of the voyage before having her hair done by the skilful Ah Fung and restoring her make-up. At forty-seven she supposed she should be beyond such vanity, but she reveled in the undistracted attentions of the two men who meant most to her—and to whom she was determined to remain the most important and the most attractive woman in the world.
A tall man in a gray tunic stepped from behind the inlaid Coromandel screen that masked the moon-gate leading to the family quarters. The tight-curled hair, the mocking smile, and the laughing hazel eyes were achingly familiar. For an uncanny instant, she felt she was again meeting the young Harry Sekloong.
Powerful arms closed around her, and her son James exclaimed: “Mother! Mother! What a joy to see you!”
Mary felt overwhelming relief. James was obviously safe and quite sound, though a new maturity had etched itself upon his features in the eighteen months since she had last seen him.
James embraced Charles in an unusual display of affection and said softly in Cantonese: “Respected Father, I rejoice at our reunion.”
A fleeting frown clouded Harry’s brow. Mary knew that he had kept their compact not to tell James of his true parentage, though the temptation must have been great.
“James,” she said, “James, my very dear, my favorite rascal. How did you come here? You are well? You must tell me all about …”
“So many questions, Mother,” James replied with new authority. “Later we can talk. First, may I present my respected teacher?”
A slender man with glowing black eyes set in a lean face stood before the Coromandel screen. He bowed with the boneless grace of a Chinese opera star.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sekloong,” Harry made the introduction in Mandarin, “my beloved sister-in-law Mary and my honored elder brother Charles. General Chou En-lai, who is staying with us.”
“Enchanté, Madame, M’sieu,” Chou En-lai responded in heavily accented French before continuing in Mandarin: “I am honored to meet the parents of my young pupil, the eldest brother and sister-in-law of my protector.”
“Protector?” Charles was startled, but quickly remembered his duty as the host, the senior Sekloong. “We are, of course, honored by your presence. May I, belatedly, also welcome you to our home?”
“General Chou is too kind.” Harry laughed, and his natural gaiety dispelled his professional politician’s self-importance. “I’m hardly his protector. But, for the moment, both he and James are better off behind these high walls.”
“How much longer, Uncle Harry?” James asked.
“A few weeks at most. Once the President and the Generalissimo have come to terms, there’ll be no problems. Patriotic Communists are Chinese first. We’ll all be working together again soon.”
Mary wondered again at Harry’s optimism, so different from the laughing cynicism of his youth. He, too, had become a believer like her son James and the suave General Chou En-lai. If they still believed so earnestly in China’s future, she could not intrude her own disillusionment. Besides, they would undoubtedly dismiss a woman’s opinion with courteous inattention. The tight ring of Chinese masculine superiority was closing around her once again. But she responded against her will to Chou En-lai’s charm, and she fell in love again with her troublesome third son.
Chou En-lai and James did not quit the shelter of the Kwok Family Mansion. Harry’s black Mercedes bore him off early each morning, and he returned late at night, still pursued by messengers bearing telegrams. As the days passed, his high spirits visibly declined. His jests about family matters and his high optimism regarding the negotiations in Shanghai were forced. Mary and Charles called at the offices of J. Sekloong and Sons, but business was slow. Besides, the atmosphere in the litter-strewn streets was electrically disquieting. Despite the dank, cold weather, workmen gathered on streetcorners to sneer at the police and the soldiers. Even the antique splendors of the reconstructed Kwok F
amily Mansion behind the high, glass-shard-studded walls was besmirched by the creeping unease. A young German called Heinz Neumann regularly slipped through the small garden gate to confer with Chou En-lai. He invariably arrived after midnight, and James interpreted his fluent, ungrammatical English. The presence of the Comintern’s representative within the walls of the fortress Sir Jonathan had built against the world was palpably menacing.
On December 11, 1927, Chou En-lai and James Sekloong left the Mansion for the first time. When Mary awoke at seven, the Number One Boy told her that they had been gone for several hours. Puzzled but not worried, Harry drove through the gates in his Mercedes at 8:30. Half an hour later, he returned on foot.
“Something’s up,” he said soberly. “But damned if I know what. Barricades across the roads, and I had to abandon the car. We’re cut off, and I don’t know why.”
Harry repeatedly tried to telephone his office, but evoked only the repeated surly reply from an unfamiliar operator: “I cannot connect you.”
Mary glanced at her watch when clashing cymbals, pounding drums, and booming gongs sounded in the normally quiet back street at 10:43. The harsh chanting of male voices rose above the discordant din. They sang “The Internationale,” and the words were even more menacing in clacking Cantonese: “Arise ye prisoners of starvation, Arise ye workers of the earth … The International Soviet shall be the human race!”
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