No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  Weeks later when the Japanese attacked Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, the Central Executive Committee of the Party granted Mao a divorce. Zizhen was sent to Moscow for political study; Lily Wu was banished from Yan’an.

  “I will miss you,” Agnes said as Lily padded about the cave, crying softly and gathering up papers. Agnes, who had escaped formal censure, lay on Lily Wu’s bed, easing her injured back. She’d fallen off her pony, Yunnan, that Zhu De had stolen from a rich landlord during the Long March and given to her. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve been assigned to a theatre group at the front.”

  Agnes brightened. “You can see the war firsthand.”

  “I don’t want to see the war firsthand,” Lily sobbed. She wadded up papers, set them in the dirt just outside her cave, and touched a lighted match to four corners.

  “What are you burning?” From the bed Agnes watched the small flames waver, catch, and burn brightly.

  “Poems from the Chairman.”

  Love poems, Agnes thought. October to July had been a brief respite from battle, and Mao Zedong had permitted himself the luxury of writing poetry and exploring romantic love. She was not surprised that Lily and Zizhen were being punished—in her experience it was women who paid for men’s pleasures. But now Mao’s months of personal indulgence were over. Chiang Kai-shek had finally declared war on Japan.

  With Lily departing and Zhu De already at the battlefront, Agnes would have no close friend in Yan’an. She packed her bag and typewriter and, looking back once at the cave which had been her home from February to September, limped down the terrace to hitch a ride into the village.

  In town, Red Army soldiers explained the war to civilians gathered in the dusty streets. On maps printed by Kang Da, the Anti-Japanese Resistance University, or drawings hastily scratched in the dirt with a stick, they pointed to China and Japan, to Shaanxi Province where the peasants had lived all their lives with only the vaguest concept of Asia and the world.

  Agnes sat down gingerly on her suitcase near the old city gate and took a final survey of Yan’an and the past seven months of her life. A solemn gong sounded and a bugle played from the ancient pagoda overlooking the town and the Yan River. A line of peasants in blue-gray uniform came walking down the road. There was no cheering. The people knew great hardship lay ahead. Their faces were serious. There was a peaceful, fatalistic certainty about them. By contrast, Agnes’ life seemed anchored in nothing more than struggle and rejection.

  29

  Red Army Headquarters 1937

  Marine Captain Evans Carlson smelled coffee. Immediately he embarked upon a reconnaissance mission through the abandoned Presbyterian schoolhouse that served as Eighth Route Army headquarters. He went from room to room, an American intelligence officer turning away from every pot of tea he saw, consumed by the smell of the coffee bean and home.

  The smell grew stronger. He peered into the anteroom outside Zhu De’s office. A slender, grim-looking Western woman in a military uniform and muddy puttees, her short, straight hair pushed back off her high forehead, stood at a small charcoal stove boiling coffee. On the table behind her he saw a handwritten list on lined paper: “Carbolic acid, gauze, medical cotton, dressing instruments, bullet probes, large and small scissors, artery forceps, camphor ampules, morphine tablets, codeine tablets, bleaching powder, salves.” There were shorthand notes beneath, which he could not read.

  “I haven’t smelled coffee since I left Hankow,” he said. Agnes turned to face him. When she saw his American military uniform she turned back to the coffee and ignored him.

  “I’m Evans Carlson,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “It’s not a pleasure for me,” Agnes said. Evans stared at her back, dumbfounded. The only American within hundreds of miles, and she wouldn’t introduce herself.

  “I haven’t smelled coffee since I was in Hankow, and I haven’t tasted it, either.”

  “Here,” she said, and poured out a cup. He slurped noisily, making a show of enjoyment. Then he forgot about making a show because it was so good and he was so damn tired of tea.

  “Wonderful!” he said, and walked out of the room.

  “What’s so wonderful?” the woman growled. “A little coffee. A little boiled water.” He was already out the door.

  She was weatherbeaten, and you seldom saw a face with so much suffering in it. But the eyes warmed to him when she at last decided he wasn’t trying to get her kicked out of China as, she later told him, so many Westerners wearing uniforms and sporting titles had tried to do over the years. It didn’t take her long to realize he wasn’t going to ask her what she saw in the Communists, or if she wanted protection, or if she wanted to leave the field and go live with missionaries, or if she wanted to go to Hong Kong where it was safe. Since living in the Yan’an cave for seven months, she’d been knocking about China, sometimes asked to help, sometimes not. The Chinese admired the foreign woman, while keeping their distance. Westerners in China mistrusted her or pitied her for her misplaced sympathies.

  Every evening Agnes carried the little stove to her room, partly for warmth, mostly for coffee. Evans began to join her, at first drawn by the coffee, gradually drawn by her. Huddling over the hot charcoal, they talked about China and America and themselves.

  “Why were you so interested in the freedom of India?” he asked when she’d caught him up to the year 1919.

  “I’m for the underdog,” she said. “Why should one country dominate another? India was my family. Now it’s China. I am Indian. I am Chinese.”

  Evans Carlson was the son of a Connecticut minister. All his life his friends had told him he was a romantic. Simple-minded in his patriotism, they said, simple-minded in his admiration for integrity. And now, in this grim woman who seemed less grim all the time, who laughed and sang and had a wide grin that illuminated the tough face, he sensed a unique lack of self-interest. She claimed to be an atheist, yet she sacrificed herself in what he thought was almost a Christ-like manner.

  “You don’t sound like an atheist,” he’d said once, studying her.

  She looked at him intently. “I revere great men and women, particularly if they’re despised. I hold Jesus and his twelve conspirators in the highest esteem.” She looked defensive, waiting for an attack.

  But Evans was not on the attack. “I have never met anyone like you, Agnes.”

  She flopped onto the bed. “I’m chronically unhappy,” she admitted. Her eyes were large and unguarded. “Why do you think that is?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. “All my life I’ve been an outsider. And I’m still an outsider.” She looked mournful, not at all tough. Evans drew up his long legs, went over to sit on the bed beside her, and took her in his arms.

  It had been a very long time since Agnes had touched a man. His cheek with its two days’ growth of beard electrified her. How had she lived without a man’s beard, a man’s height and weight, arms and hands? A man’s mouth? She reached up and touched his hair. He kissed her and she took in his strength, his fighting spirit, his tenderness. When his hand moved to her breast it was because she moved it there. And with that signal his kisses grew hungrier and she gave up all the love collected within herself from years of loneliness and outrage.

  The next night he came to her room again. While the charcoal stove glowed, they sat close and talked. “Yesterday I saw a bamboo thatch structure with posters on the walls, pictures of Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Madame Curie. How do they know about these Westerners?”

  Agnes looked smug but said nothing.

  “I saw soldiers who can read teaching others who can’t. Newspapers plastered to walls. And wall writing”—he fished in his jacket pocket for several slips of paper. “For example: ‘Purpose of guerrilla warfare is to turn enemy rear into Communist front,’ and ‘Civilians must gather up dropped weapons of retreating enemy.’”

  He stood. The Reds’ disciplined behavior and comprehension o
f the goals they were fighting for was what American troops needed, he told her excitedly. It was ethical indoctrination and he wanted the same thing for the American military. “We’ve grown flabby, unwieldy, bureaucratic.”

  Agnes gazed at him in passionate agreement that turned to softness when he touched her hand. He guessed she had not always been so tender and soft with other men as she was with him. He sometimes forgot that he would have to leave soon.

  They spent Christmas Eve together, 1937, far from carols and lighted trees and the English language.

  “I brought you a present,” he said, and handed her a half pound of roasted peanuts. She hugged him.

  “My gift is more coffee.” They stepped back to look at each other. Their separate breaths steamed in the cold room.

  He took a harmonica from his pocket. “Do you know any carols?”

  “Silent Night,” said Agnes, and began to sing softly while he played a simple accompaniment. Since she couldn’t remember the words to the second verse, she sang the first verse twice.

  “How about a spiritual?”

  “When Israel was in Egypt. Let my people go,” she sang, and began to cry. Evans pulled her to him. “I’m losing my revolutionary edge!” she bawled into his large handkerchief. He threw back his head and laughed.

  “This won’t sharpen any edges,” he said, “but it will dry your tears.” And he rendered a wheezy version of “From the Halls of Montezuma.” When he finished, Agnes asked for “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” She stood beside the stove, took off her soldier’s cap, and sang with it held over her heart.

  At the end of the song she broke into more sobbing, then slammed the cap on her head. “I don’t understand all this damn emotion!”

  Evans brushed away her tears with the back of a finger. “You’re starved for a home and a country,” he said. “Whether you know it or not, you’re a fine American, Agnes.”

  “I’m not an American,” she said. “And I’m not Chinese.” She told him about being rejected by the Communist Party. She looked pale, and the circles under her eyes were dark. Without comment he led her to the bed and began massaging her shoulders and back. He lay down beside her.

  “You don’t fit into an organization,” he said. “You would be a brave soldier but not a good soldier.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You don’t follow orders very well.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as: Give me a kiss.” She refused. He planted one on her stubborn mouth. “KP duty for you.” She struggled. He pinned her down with one leg. “Stop laughing,” he said, “and take your punishment.”

  When, a few days later, he prepared to return to his intelligence work, she was disobedient again. Zhu De ordered her to remain at headquarters rather than accompany Evans to the front lines.

  “I must go with Captain Carlson,” she said, and stomped her foot. She even cried.

  But Zhu De said she was more useful writing and organizing than fighting on the battlefield. “I am requesting you to go to Hankow soon. There you can raise funds from the West for medical supplies.”

  “The West may not give me funds. I am not so popular with Westerners,” she retorted, still stung by his refusal to let her accompany Evans. “Some of them call me immoral. They say I’m a camp follower, a prostitute. And worse: a Red.” She grinned and Zhu De grinned with her.

  “It is not only Westerners I want you to meet,” he said. “You must tell Dr. Lin about our needs.”

  “Who is Dr. Lin?”

  “The founder of the Chinese Red Cross.”

  She turned away from him and left the room. Mentally she argued: I don’t want to meet the founder of the Chinese Red Cross. I want to stay with Evans Carlson. It’s hearing English spoken without an accent. It’s having a friend who drinks coffee. But mostly it’s the man himself. I do not want to be separated from him.

  But she would not say such things to Zhu De. If one American male, if the English language, if homesickness for a home could call into question all that she had devoted herself to for the past eight years, what kind of woman was she?

  30

  Hankow 1938

  She met Dr. Lin in the lobby of the YMCA in Hankow. Agnes was noticeable in her slacks and mannish haircut, and Dr. Lin, too, stood out: a short, slight Chinese man who wore knickers and carried a cane.

  “How do you do,” he said in precise English colored by a Scots accent. He had been educated in Edinburgh. “There is much work to be done in caring for China’s wounded. You are a great foreign friend. On behalf of China, I thank you.”

  “I understand you are a friend of Chiang Kai-shek,” Agnes said.

  “We are acquainted.”

  “I do not like Chiang Kai-shek but I am prepared to work with you and with the United Front.” It was 1938. The Kuomintang and Communists were, for the moment, cooperating in the defense of China.

  Dr. Lin bowed courteously. “We must all work for the greater good of China.”

  But it would take more than courtesy to hold the United Front together. Disharmony extended even into the workings of the Red Cross. Agnes began receiving negative replies to her solicitations for funds.

  “Madame Sun Yat-sen reminds us that any monies sent to the Chinese Red Cross and Dr. Lin,” read one letter, “will unavoidably fall into the hands of the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. We, of course, cannot run the risk of helping to sustain the Kuomintang in any way. Henceforth our contributions will be made through Madame Sun Yat-sen.”

  Agnes stormed into Dr. Lin’s office in the temporary structure that housed the new medical school in Hankow. “Look at this!” she said, and thrust the letter in his face.

  Dr. Lin read it and looked up with a whimsical expression. “The two sisters are struggling over China.”

  “Madame Sun Yat-sen has no right to interfere with our fundraising!” Madame’s rejection years earlier intensified her fury. “We’re laying the foundations for socialized medicine! It’s part of the reform that will isolate her brother-in-law after we lick the Japs! Why can’t she understand that?”

  Dr. Lin donned his Tam O’Shanter. “Aye, lassie,” he said gently. “China is divided against itself.” With a melancholy expression he twirled his cane and walked away. He had been warned about Agnes Smedley’s emotionalism, but this was the first time he had seen the blaze for himself.

  For the next year and a half Agnes burned brightly. In make-shift hospitals on the Central China front she organized medical service and supplies, tended the wounded, and wrote news reports at night for the Manchester Guardian. But the hot flame used her up, as if her health were a too-small draft in a large furnace.

  “I don’t sleep well these days,” she admitted to Evans on one of their brief visits together. They were spending the night at a guest house in Chongqing, the relocated Chinese capital. She felt the chest pains again.

  “I am so sorry,” she whispered as they lay together in bed. “I don’t feel well enough to make love.”

  Evans kissed her on the cheek, then rolled onto his back and stared into the darkness.

  “Very few Americans have spent as much time at the front as you, Agnes.”

  She supposed he might be right.

  “How long have you been in the field?”

  She didn’t know. Over a year. Months and months. She eased herself onto her right side. Someone had told her that, in bed, the heart works best with the chest’s weight beneath it. Evans had fallen asleep. He pulled air deep into his rangy body and let it out in slow expulsions that sometimes alarmed her because they were so long in coming.

  She had grown terribly insomniac. She returned to her left side, toward Evans. Bugger her weak heart. She nestled against him and was comforted. She slept, but awakened to the sound of a single airplane engine overhead. The buzz hovered, circled Chongqing as if it were lost, then retreated into the distance. She lay in uneasy wakefulness.

  Evans loved her in China, but what about aft
er the war? Would he love her in America? Would she even want to return to America? His parents were high-class New Englanders, and they would sniff at her lack of education, be appalled by her reputation in politics and sex. The more she thought about them, the worse they became. By the time the Upper Yangtze fog had lifted enough to let moonlight shine through the small window—and with it, the risk of Japanese bombers—she was convinced that the Carlsons didn’t deserve their wonderful son.

  It was silly to imagine being married to him, she who didn’t believe in marriage.

  “Agnes,” Evans said, covering her, “you’re having a bad dream.” She put her arms around him and clung.

  31

  Hong Kong, early morning, August 26, 1940.

  Agnes disembarked from a small mail plane. She and the pilot had flown all night over Japanese lines. Even before she reached the taxi waiting for her, two immigration officials walked up and took her into custody. The British Secret Service had been tracking her activities for the past twenty-two years, they said, ever since her work with Indian nationalists in New York. She would not be permitted to incite the Indian population in Hong Kong to rebellion against Great Britain. The next day a bewigged judge asked her about past Indian activities and accused her of being a loose and immoral woman.

  “I have slept with many men,” she answered the representative of the Crown, “but if any were English, I cannot remember, for they made very little impact upon me.” She was released, not because of her cocky humor, but because there was not enough evidence.

  Agnes was in Hong Kong, safe and remote from action, when fighting broke out within the New Fourth Army between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. The United Front immediately disintegrated. Agnes spilled out her unhappiness in a long letter to Evans Carlson. The New Fourth Army was her army. For months she had marched with them. It was her story and she wasn’t there to write it.