A crackling loudspeaker directed: “Remain in your homes. All will be well. Today, we have established the Canton People’s Commune. The workers rule. The people rule. The glorious moment has come!”
The Sekloongs waited, totally insulated from the seething city by the walled compound. Mary was oppressed by their isolation and by worry about James. Charles was sustained by his conviction of Sekloong invincibility. Harry wandered distracted through the courtyards, starting at each sound from outside. But no message came to the counselor of the President of the Republic of China until a loud hammering on the garden door startled them at two in the afternoon.
Harry and Charles opened the gate themselves. James stood outside grinning like a schoolboy in uniform. Behind him was mustered a ragged formation of six workmen awkwardly carrying rifles and wearing the red brassards of the Workers’ Militia.
“I’ve come to fix things,” he said incoherently. “You’ll all be safe.”
“What is it, boy?” Charles demanded. “Fix what? What the devil’s up?”
“Calmly, James, calmly,” Harry cautioned. “Explain yourself.”
“We’ve seized the city, we Communists. We’ve established a Commune, a People’s Commune. General Chou sent me to post an official notice that this house is under the protection of the Commune.”
“Damned decent of him,” Charles exploded. “But why? So he can kill us later?”
“You can’t hold Canton, you know,” Harry said quietly.
“Perhaps not, Uncle. I can tell you General Chou is not delighted. He counseled against this rising. But Heinz Neumann insisted, and he speaks for the Comintern. The insurrection will succeed, Neumann insists. Moscow has ordained it.”
James did not return to the Kwok Family Mansion for three days, and the telephone remained sullenly silent. But Harry’s network of agents began to function again. Fewer than five thousand armed militiamen, stiffened by a cadre of no more than five hundred Communist soldiers, could not control all egress and ingress to the city of 850,000. The first reports Harry received dismayed him: The Communists were systematically slaughtering their enemies, the bourgeoisie. The next reports were almost as daunting: Nationalist troops were marching on Canton to avenge those executions, and there would be more slaughter.
“It’ll be over soon,” Harry declared after a protracted session with a shadowy informant late in the evening of December 14, 1927. “Three corps are closing on the city. The Ironsides Division is only sixteen miles away.”
“About time, too,” Charles said.
“Damn those fool Communists,” Harry added bitterly. “This so-called Commune is the end. They’ve sown the seeds of bitterness deep. China will eat the fruit of sorrow for years.”
“And James?” Mary’s obsessive fear for her son excluded all other concerns. “What will become of him?”
“We must get him out,” said Charles. “But how?”
After his shocked inaction during the preceding three days, Harry was once again the vigorous activist. His self-confidence had rebounded when he learned that his allies were marching to his relief.
“How, indeed?” he repeated. “It can be done, but not easily. Though my signature should … but first we must talk to the young idiot.”
Again wearing the Sun Yat-sen tunic that was the Nationalists’ symbol, rather than military uniform, James slipped through the garden gate at two in the morning.
“You sent for me, Father?” His diffidence, which contrasted with Harry’s renewed confidence, demonstrated his realization that the Communists’ last adventure was doomed.
“Yes, James,” Charles answered. “You’ve got to get out of Canton. Otherwise, there’ll be nothing for you but a bullet—or jail, if you’re lucky.”
“Mei fa-tze,” James sighed resignedly. “Not a hope.”
“You’re giving up, James, are you?” Mary goaded him. “I never thought …”
“What’s the use, Mother? Besides, I can’t leave without General Chou.”
“Damn General Chou!” Charles snapped. “He got you into this mess. A strange way of repaying our hospitality.”
“But he kept us safe while others were shot or their houses were sacked,” Mary reminded her husband. “We are in his debt. What’s to be done, Harry?”
“Will Chou come with us?” Harry asked.
“Ta dzen-ma pan?” James shrugged. “What else can he do? Why should he be a martyr to a revolt he opposed?”
“I want you both here at six this morning,” Harry commanded. “Not an instant later. The Canton–Kowloon Railway’s too dangerous. But the first steamer sails at 8:45.”
“How can you possibly get us out?” James responded. “The piers will be heavily guarded.”
“Just do as I say,” Harry answered. “Six in the morning.”
When James had left, Harry told his sister-in-law peremptorily: “You and Charles must leave now, though, it would be safer to wait a few days. It’s the only hope for James.”
At 7:35 on the morning of December 15, 1927, Harry Sekloong’s black Mercedes emerged from the Kwok Family Mansion. The luggage rack was piled with Mary and Charles’s trunks, and their owners lounged in the spacious rear seat. Restored to his authority, the Counselor to President Wang Ching-wei sat beside them. Two servants in worn black suits covered by bulky overcoats were crammed beside the driver. One was a burly youth with an incongruous black fedora shading his face, the other a slender twenty-nine-year-old whose features were concealed by a woolen muffler drawn high against the morning chill.
The road to the docks took them through the center of the tormented city, past Admiralty House and the Wireless Masts that were the primary objectives of the relieving Nationalist forces and the last stronghold of the defeated Communists. The first roadblock the Mercedes encountered was manned by troops of the Ironsides Fourth Division. The lieutenant in command scrutinized the documents the chauffeur offered before stepping back and saluting Harry Sekloong. He glanced in curiously at the menservants who were huddled into their overcoats. There was no reason for him to suspect that one had been an upperclassman and the other the Communist chairman of the Political Studies Department when he himself entered the Whampoa Military Academy.
Mary relaxed her grip on her husband’s hand. After the Mercedes had moved another fifty yards forward, her nails dug into his palm. Three foreigners hung from a scarlet flame-of-the-forest tree. Their faces were livid purple, and their feet twitched in the air. Placards pinned to their chests identified them in black characters as SOVIET IMPERIALIST SPIES.
Beside the road, mutilated corpses were heaped upon each other. A grinning head lolled in grisly imitation of life. The corpse’s throat had been cut so savagely that only the backbone and a strip of skin joined the head to the body. A calloused hand, outflung as if imploring mercy, was bloodlessly waxen. From a bayonet thrust in the back of the topmost corpse fluttered a red brassard that identified the Workers’ Militia who had only yesterday been the masters of Canton, KUNG-JEN MIN-PING, it read—literally, WORKERS’ PEOPLE’S-SOLDIER. Some hand had crossed out the character min, meaning “people,” and written chu, “pig,” so that the brassard read: WORKERS’ PIG-SOLDIER.
Beside the gates to the docks fifteen militiamen slumped in sullen hopelessness against a corrugated iron wall. A machine-gun squad of the Fourth Division jeered at the Communist workers.
“Pigs and dogs’ legs! Pig-soldiers! Where are your great leaders now? Sister-rapers! Mother-sellers! Brother-buggers! Screw your mothers!”
Mary closed her eyes, but the machine gun’s cruel chatter imprinted the slaughter on her mind’s eye.
Yet the customs officers were attentive, and the party was bowed onto the deck of the Fatshan. The servants shouted curses at the baggage coolies until the luggage was stowed to their satisfaction. They then reported to their master and mistress.
“They’ll pay for this!” James muttered. “They’ll pay and pay—in blood.”
“All China
will pay,” Chou En-lai said wearily. “All China will pay—in torrents of blood. Mei-yu pieh-ti pan-fa! There is no other way.”
Part VI
JAMES AND HARRY
July 7, 1937–December 9, 1944
July 7, 1937–March 7, 1939
The pine groves of the Western Hills glowed emerald in the long summer twilight, and the old capital took its fitful ease on the ochre plain irregularly patterned with pale-green fields of ripening millet. The air was so still that the sweet-acrid tang of charcoal-fires clung to the red-and-gray-tiled roofs of the city called Peiping. The Nationalists had changed its name to “Northern Peace” after they finally took the city in 1928 and moved the government to Nanking, the “Southern Capital.” But the conservative natives still called the city Peking, the “Northern Capital.” The tired peace of the serpentine alleys called hu-tungs was occasionally disturbed by the swishing of a passing bicycle, the whining of a restless dog, or the cries of an itinerant hawker. The heat wave had just broken, and the exhausted citizens relaxed in the brief respite from the parched North China summer on the evening of Sunday, July 7, 1937.
The city was instinctively egalitarian, arrogant only in its assertion of cultural preeminence. Manual laborers and university students sat side by side at the time-rubbed tables of the eating shop called Lao Chiao Wang, the “Old Dumpling King.” The wooden walls were polished by oil-saturated steam that had for two centuries risen from cooking pots bubbling over the brick stove behind the cracked glass windows. Familiarly attentive as the staff of a private club, waiters in grimy white jackets squirmed through the maze of close-packed tables, bearing aloft heaped platters of dumplings, both the crisp-fried kuo-tieh and steamed white chiao-tze. The patrons avidly devoured the envelopes of translucent dough plump with minced pork and vegetables.
If culinary skill was a chief ornament of Chinese civilization, James Sekloong reflected, his people’s chief vice was gluttony. That universal passion defied explanation by his Marxist doctrine. It was common to all social classes, as was the city’s distinctive burr, which marked the speech of all from rickshaw men to professors. Perhaps twentieth-century Chinese were food-besotted because they, like their ancestors, had so often known gut-griping hunger. Perhaps, though, the gourmet passion was bred into Peiping’s citizens, as it was in the Viennese his sister Charlotte had met on the world tour that was her honeymoon. Peiping was in so many ways like the Vienna she had lovingly described. Both cities were utterly devoted to their cafés and their unique cultures; both cities were bemused by the vanished glories of imperial capitals that had endured so many sieges. Both Peiping and Vienna sustained themselves with those memories, for both had been reduced from centers of continental power to impotent political symbols.
James dismissed those pointless speculations, abashed by his lapse from strict intellectual discipline. He and his shorter, paler companion on the rickety bench, both wore workmen’s tattered blue clothing, and both were tautly alert. They dipped their chiao-tze into a blend of soy-sauce, clear vinegar, and sesame oil; they listened intently to their neighbors’ rough badinage. The students’ and workers’ accents were indistinguishable, as was their hearty pleasure in the dumplings. But the laborers bantered personal gossip and broad sexual jests, while the students muttered angrily at the implacable encroachment of the “Japanese dwarves” and anxiously discussed the fledgling alliance between the Kuomintang of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party of Secretary-General Mao Tse-tung.
After a decade of mutual slaughter, China’s chief political and military forces were again joining together to resist the invasion mounted by Tokyo. The Imperial Japanese Army had exploited China’s disunity to separate Manchuria in the northeast from the Motherland and to establish the puppet regime called Manchukuo, the Land of the Manchus, under the last Ching Emperor, Hsüan Tung. They had subsequently “maintained” their treaty rights in Shanghai and routed the Chinese defenders. All of eastern Hopei Province with its center at Peiping had been declared a demilitarized zone by the League of Nations, which, in theory, enforced the withdrawal of both Chinese and Japanese troops. In practice, the agreement rendered both Peiping and Tientsin defenseless, for the Japanese claimed the right to exercise their troops around Peiping under the terms of the Boxer Protocols imposed after the Allied Forces had relieved the siege of the Legation Quarter in 1900. Moreover, the Japanese Kempeitai, who were military police, intelligence operatives, and agents provocateurs in one, methodically subverted Chinese society.
Though naked Japanese aggression had finally compelled the Nationalists and the Communists to talk to each other again, the seeds of hatred sown in 1927 were still bearing their bitter fruit. After that disastrous year, the Communists had established scattered Soviet Areas under their rule, the largest in Kiangsi Province near Nanchang dominated by the bushy-haired agitator Mao Tse-tung, who was obsessed with raising a peasant revolt. Repeated Nationalist Extermination Campaigns had by 1934 driven the Communists to embark upon their eight-thousand-mile Long March to Shensi Province in the northwest. Only 16,000 of the 100,000 men, women and children who began the Long March reached that sparsely populated refuge. Mao Tse-tung had emerged as their chief leader, while Chou En-lai, ever flexible, served Mao Tse-tung as chairman of the new Soviet Area’s Military Affairs Commission and his chief emissary to the Nationalists.
Raised to the Political Bureau that ruled the Chinese Communist Party, the labor leader Liu Shao-chi was the Commissioner for the White Areas, responsible for covert activities in the territories under Nationalist or Japanese control. His mission had been defined by Mao Tse-tung’s secret directive: “Our fixed policy should be seventy percent expansion of our own power, twenty percent coping with the Kuomintang, and ten percent resisting Japan.”
Like James Sekloong, whom he knew as Shih Ai-kuo, Commissioner Liu Shao-chi eavesdropped in silence and marveled at the resilience of the people of Peking. He unconsciously used the city’s former name, as did the workmen and students. Through changes of name and regimes, the men and women of the city appeared unchangeable. Slow to rise to anger or to fear, their talent was to endure. Unlike the volatile students, the workmen resignedly accepted the presence of the new invaders whom they were powerless to resist. Despite some success among the students, James and his superior chafed at the slow progress of their seventy-eight-strong Agitprop group among the working masses. Even the students’ indignation was diluted by the centuries-old conviction that, whatever dangers threatened or calamities occurred, Peking would remain Peking.
James wondered if he, himself, was not being infected by the stolid Northerners’ complacency. He yearned for action. Though “underground work” was essential, it could not compare with commanding his own regiment during the Long March, when his decisions had meant life or death for hundreds. Besides, the police, who were infiltrated by the Kempeitai, harried the Communist agents in their own heavy-footed Northern fashion. Far more dangerous were the teh-wu, the “special duty” secret police of Chiang Kai-shek’s Central Government, and their allies, the neo-Fascist Blue Shirts of the Nationalists’ extreme right wing. Their pursuit was relentless, although both Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai were at that moment negotiating with the Nationalists at Lushan in Kiangsi Province. Telling himself that he, too, would nonetheless survive, James wiped his mouth on his sleeve and tossed a few coppers on the table.
“A reckoning of twenty-five coppers and wine money of five!” The waiter’s bellow signaled the departure of the two Communist agents. “Twenty-five and a munificent five. We thank the generous gentlemen, the open-handed lords.”
“A bourgeois hangover, no doubt, Comrade.” Comrade Shao-chi’s thin lips curled in a wry smile. “I suppose it reinforces the slave mentality, this crying out of the tip. But, I confess, I find it charming.”
“I like it.” James involuntarily contrasted the humane Commissioner’s relaxed tolerance with the hectoring dogmatism of his former commander Lin Piao. “But I s
uppose it will have to go.”
“Tipping, certainly,” Liu Shao-chi agreed. “But not all the old ways and manners. Changing everything would make China un-Chinese. Throwing out the soup stock but keeping the same bones—changing the forms but not the substance—would be worse.”
James smiled at his chief’s use of the old classical maxim that was itself gastronomical, reflecting his people’s chief passion. A strange conversation for two hunted “Communist bandits” making for a secret midnight meeting of their five chief lieutenants in a warehouse in the old Tartar City. Yet Comrade Shao-chi was like that. He was as uncompromisingly dedicated to the cause as the self-righteous zealots of the Party Control Commission, who were the Communists’ own Secret Police. But the man who staked his life for his principles every moment of every day and night leavened the revolutionary struggle with welcome humor. James used the word yu-mo in his thoughts. It was funny that there was no native Chinese word for humor, but only the transliteration from English. Funnier still that there was a perfectly good Chinese word for funny, though, perhaps, significant that ke-hsiao literally meant “laughable.” Although humor was an alien concept, Commissioner Liu truly possessed humor as well as compassion. Those qualities had won him a unique distinction among commissars whose nicknames were often derisory, like Eaglebeak for the hooked-nosed Lin Piao or Rubber Doll for the indestructibly compromising Chou En-lai. He was with much affection called simply Comrade Shao-chi.
The regular tramp of boots affronted the still night, and the pair blended into the shadows of the eaves overhanging the narrow hu-tung. Embraced by the darkness, they were virtually invisible in their dark clothing. The police patrol passed unseeing. The constables carried their rifles carelessly by the slings, and the ill-fitting tunic of the sergeant in command brushed James’s hand. The heavy tread of the constables’ boots and the rattle of their rifle slings receded down the twisting hu-tung. Their cloth slippers silent in the heaped yellow dust, the Communist agents moved cautiously away.
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