No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  She admitted to him that it might be time to leave China. Did not everyone’s usefulness sometime come to an end? Had not Evans, himself, resigned from the military to protest the complacency of superiors who refused to believe the United States should prepare for war in Asia, should study the strategy and methods of the guerrilla fighters in Northwest China?

  Agnes booked passage for America on a Norwegian ship. Three days before she left she wrote a speech in shorthand, fast and with passion, to deliver at a fundraising banquet in Hong Kong. She wanted to give the audience a taste of what it was like to cross the Yangtze in Japanese-held territory. And she wanted to remember what it was like to fight for China at the front.

  Now I want you to come with me with a band of these guerrillas and see how they organize and carry out a night march. We are going to cross the Yangtze River between Japanese garrison points. The Yangtze is patrolled by Japanese gun boats…

  …we pass through the night and come to a small village at dawn. On the surrounding hills we can see figures of civilians with guns, standing guard. The guns are often not much—old bird guns, some of them. But that is something. We rest in the heart of the people…

  …as we pass through the poor villages of mud walls and thatched roof, we always hear sounds of moaning. It is a malarial region, and there is no medicine other than what our army has…

  No talking, no coughing, no smoking, no matches lit. Carriers, test your burdens so that no squeak sounds. Stick leaves or grass in places of friction…men with white face towels must tuck one end inside their collar at the back and let the towel hang down so men behind can see…

  Once, we come near a village and rest at command. Right under the bushes I see a small temple to the Earth God, and a bright new candle burns in the little alcove. It is a signal that all is well. This is the last stop before we pass through the enemy defense positions. The whisper comes: ‘March quickly.’

  …I hear the night birds, the wind through the trees, and the stars are very bright. Once, from our left, far away, I hear a faint blast on a horn, like the bellow of a water buffalo calf. Then I hear a long, low blast of another horn. They come from near the enemy and our troops are telling us that all is well. I love our troops that night. I love the civilians. I love them with all my heart…

  As we near the Yangtze, we come out on top of the high mud dikes that rise fifty feet in the air to hold back the river at high tide. Dark lagoons lie on either hand, breeding places of the malaria mosquito. Then a traitor appears. It is the moon, rising over the mountains back of us. We curse under our breaths, and begin to run. We crouch and run and our carriers drop into a slow dog trot…

  Then, ahead of us, we see a light suddenly flare up, and we see the gate of the village ahead of us outlined. It is directly on the Yangtze…

  On a short tributary…lie two big river junks, with sails up. Two gang planks run up the side of each. Our carriers run up one plank, silently drop their burdens in the hold and run down the other plank. And within five minutes the junks are loaded and we have run up the planks, the planks are drawn up, and the big oars begin to work. Soon we come out upon the Yangtze, now a sheet of silver in the moonlight. It is misty and we cannot see far. We know a gun boat is down to our left at Kikang, and that it could reach us within seven minutes—and it takes forty-five minutes to cross the Yangtze…

  We approach the north bank of the river and see the outline of soldiers standing watching. We touch land, and then leap out and run to meet a large number of people waiting for us. The local government official comes toward us laughing, welcoming us. And since the Japanese have never even been once to this village, we are safe, and we begin marching inland, singing the guerrilla marching song. After about ten miles, we come to the great sprawling home of a big landlord. This landlord is a remarkable creature, for he and his three sons are guerrilla leaders and the entire income from their estate helps finance the guerrillas.

  In this way we crossed the Yangtze.

  Wanla… .Finished.

  32

  Ojai, California 1941

  “So many white buildings make perfect bomb targets,” Agnes said to Aino Taylor as they walked down the main street of Ojai, California.

  “Then let’s stick to the woods,” said Aino, a young housewife whose mother gave Agnes massages and treatments for her injured back. They cut through the oaks that separated Agnes’ rental cottage from Aino’s house. Somewhere in the woods a mourning dove cooed. Such a beautiful little town, set in a valley of orchards north of Los Angeles and inland from the Pacific Ocean. Friends had directed her to this peaceful place to finish her book. Like everyone else in town, she paused for “the pink moment” when the sun touched the top of Topa Topa Peak and rendered the valley magical. But the light and fragrance were tenuous. And there were all those white buildings. Peace felt like an interval in war. It was May 1941.

  Every day she worked on her book. When she couldn’t write any more, she called Aino. “I’ve got to get away from ‘The Odyssey.’” She meant Battle Hymn of China.

  “I’ll meet you in the oaks,” said Aino.

  These oaks discouraged gardening. Agnes’ cottage was so shaded that she’d decided against planting. It was just as well. The book required all her effort—there was not much time left to tell Americans what she knew about China.

  Agnes was already out of the oaks and beside an orchard. The late afternoon was fragrant with orange blossoms, almost too sweet. She slowed her pace—she was still accustomed to marching with men—and stopped to look at a hollyhock beside the road. The plant was as tall as she.

  America seemed very different to her than it had the last time she’d lived here, twenty-three years earlier. Enough time had passed for an entire new generation to come of age. Everyone seemed to think about money, and a constant barrage of advertising poisoned the airwaves and the air. There were some fine changes, though. Labor unions were admitting Negroes. The New Deal helped equalize wealth.

  Mostly as she walked, picking wild poppies for Aino, pausing at a patch of sage to kneel and smell the lemony scent, she missed China. China’s history was her history. Away from China she was only half herself. Quantities of food, hot running water, a warm bed were nothing compared to righteous struggle.

  She saw that luxury weakens people. Here in Ojai there was a cult of Theosophists who sat at the feet of an Indian religious leader, Krishnamurti. These spiritually hungry Americans with their great wealth had not the slightest idea of India’s poverty and mistreatment under Great Britain. This Krishnamurti preferred being adored in a comfortable setting to struggling with Gandhi and Nehru for the release of his country. He could not hold a candle to a man like her ex-husband Chattopadhyaya.

  Agnes felt deeply alone in America. No one she knew had the faintest idea of what life in Asia was like. And yet there was that American openness, a willingness to listen and question, a sense of fair play. There were the Aino Taylors. Aino might not understand from experience what Agnes talked about— she was, after all, a young housewife and Agnes felt slightly desperate when she thought of this bright and efficient woman spending her life washing and ironing and looking after her husband—but she intuitively understood all that Agnes tried to tell her.

  “I don’t know if I can write this book!” Agnes said, seated at Aino’s kitchen table. Unexpectedly, she broke into tears. “I must write about a boy who was wounded in the fighting. I can’t forget him.” Her hand shook. Coffee slopped over into the saucer. She poured it back into the cup. “He was sitting against the wall of the mud hut which was our hospital. His head was bandaged. I asked him to tell me how he was wounded.

  “’It is such a little thing,’ he said. ‘It is for my country.’ His head sank onto his chest. I lowered him onto the pallet and he died.”

  Aino sat, still and electrified. “I am too tired to go on,” Agnes whispered. She had left China in a daze, afraid that when she returned to Asia, all her friends might be dead. When she ca
me back, China might belong to Japan.

  Aino leaned forward. “You need rest.”

  Rest. That is why she had come to this pretty little town. But it is hard to rest after forty-nine years of not resting. She looked down at her hand on the table beside Aino’s. The fingernails were just beginning to grow in again. She had lost them from malnutrition. “Malnutrition” was a serious word, a dangerous word. Agnes had not died like Mother, but she was struggling for stability. She’d been eased out of China, she knew. She’d come close to being Chinese, yet failed in essential ways to be Chinese.

  Aino, this blond-haired, blue-eyed woman of Finnish descent, slender and light on her feet, was looking at her intently. Aino’s maiden name was Haanapa. Agnes liked the name. It was cool, fresh, useful, like Aino herself. Aino listened to her stories without shock or a sense of foreignness. She did not have the look Agnes had seen in her sister Myrtle’s eye on a recent visit to San Diego: distrust. Myrtle had worked herself up to superintendent of schools in San Diego and didn’t want her fellow teachers to know her sister worked with the Communists. She did not want to hear about life in China.

  Ernest, her ex-husband, had called her. Dear Ernest and his sister and his wife wanted to see her—wanted to see the damage, perhaps. Because there was damage. She looked far worse, was in poorer health, she was sure, than any of them.

  She turned toward Aino for distraction. “Tell me something amusing. Tell me about your actor friend.”

  Aino went to the stove and opened the oven door. Agnes breathed deeply. Heat and fragrance rolled over her.

  “He lives in the country in a fieldstone house topped by a round tower.” With a toothpick Aino pierced the center of the cake. “He’s Austrian. His name is Norbert Schiller. He plays Nazis in the movies.”

  “Have you visited him?”

  “Of course,” said Aino. “He has a goat named Helena. He drives her around with him in his red convertible.” Aino took the cake out of the oven. When she stood, her face was pink. “Once I saw Helena go to the bathroom on a small round table in the house. She deposited her turd nicely and kept her feet together while doing so, like the delicate lady she is. Norbert swept it up as if it were nothing.”

  Agnes laughed and felt better. The mood would last, she knew, until she was alone again with her manuscript. Then she would miss China so intensely that life apart from its simplicity, fatalism, humor, seemed unendurable.

  Agnes knew a failed night when she saw one. From bed, she watched Evans Carlson. He’d tossed his pillow onto the floor, preferring a flat surface under his back, a man as used to hardship as she. Under a day and night’s growth of beard, his face was strong and bony. The night before, they’d talked about China like two homesick children. There were no other Westerners who knew where the Eighth Army headquarters had been, what Zhu De said to his troops, how a small charcoal stove glows in the night. But a hotel room in San Diego has no charcoal stove and they had created no blaze of their own. Though he’d invited her to meet him for a few days, she knew he was sorry he’d asked. Now, sensing her wakefulness, he stood up from the floor, leaned over her bed, and touched the tip of her nose. After a few minutes in the bathroom, he was washed, shaved, and dressed.

  “Ready for breakfast?”

  Agnes, who’d stayed in bed in hopes of rekindling even a small fire, got up and began to dress.

  “I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said. “I want to get a newspaper.”

  At a patio table beside a swimming pool, Evans dug into his ham and eggs. Agnes played with her toast.

  “Roosevelt and Churchill have signed the Atlantic Charter,” he said from behind his newspaper. “The end of imperialism.”

  Agnes snorted. “The end of white imperialism. The Japanese want the same opportunity. We taught them how.”

  Evans looked up. “Not hungry?’ He pushed the jelly dish toward her.

  “I can’t eat beside a swimming pool.”

  “Too much luxury,” he agreed. “Not good for people.” Still, she noticed, luxury hadn’t damaged his appetite. He reached across the table for her hand. In the past, his touch had always restored her.

  “Shall we see each other soon?” she asked at the train station. He was returning to Washington to form a Marine battalion modeled on the Chinese guerrillas; she was returning to Ojai and her book; both would rather be in China than America. He kissed her and held her close so that she would know he loved her. But she was afraid he loved her now as a friend, not as a lover. It was, Agnes thought, a hell of a time to find the one man you wanted for the rest of your life.

  Ernest, Elinor, and Thorberg arrived for their visit in a comfortable American car. And what other car should they arrive in? They were comfortable and they were American. Ernest parked in front of Agnes’ redwood cottage and walked toward her with the light, slow step she remembered. He put his arms around her, then moved away and opened the car door for his wife.

  “How are you, Elinor?” Agnes said bluntly, without waiting for an introduction. The woman looked surprised, even alarmed.

  “Thorberg!” Agnes hugged the tall, calm, blonde woman who emerged from the back seat. They pulled away to look at each other, and hugged again. For the rest of the visit, Agnes ignored Elinor.

  “She didn’t like me,” Agnes told Aino after the visit. “Elinor and I can never be friends.”

  “She didn’t seem to dislike you,” said Aino.

  “Oh, she’s got good manners. She knows how to hide her feelings.”

  “Well, it’s obvious that Ernest and Thorberg are crazy about you. I thought the visit was grand. And when you and Thorberg and I sat listening to Beethoven—”

  Agnes’ face softened. Nourished by friendship with Thorberg and Aino, she’d relaxed into quietude. “Beethoven,” she mused dreamily. “And the cactus flower in its vase on the white mantel. It was a moment I’ll never forget.”

  “Nor I.” Both women fell silent.

  “Our ride to Pomona College was not so peaceful,” said Agnes, breaking the mood. “I was terribly nervous in the back seat before my speech. I couldn’t carry on a conversation. I’m afraid I groaned.”

  “All the way to Pomona?”

  Agnes nodded. She laughed behind her rough hand. Sometimes she delivered herself of this dainty, almost coy laugh which she half-hid, a gesture Aino associated with Asian modesty.

  “Was your speech a success?”

  “The audience seemed to like it. On the way home I felt wonderful. We sang in the car. Ernest spun a story about how he, Elinor, Thorberg and I will retire together on Thor’s farm. I’m to do the plowing with one mule and Ernest will help me. Thor will lie in a hammock and recommend books for us to read.”

  “What will Elinor do?”

  “He didn’t say. She took no part in the conversation. But then”—here Agnes’ eyes grew dark and she pressed her hands to her forehead—“the car ran out of gas, miles from anywhere. Ernest and Thorberg went for help so I had to sit in the parked car with Elinor, and it was such a terrible come-down from my speech—I was furious.” She looked up at Aino. “I ranted and I cried. I just fell to pieces. I could tell by Elinor’s face that I was behaving badly.” Agnes didn’t look particularly sorry for behaving badly. “I think she was shocked. But I knew she disapproved of me, anyway. Didn’t want me there. So I might as well do what I felt like doing.”

  She stood up suddenly. “Comfortable people make me sick. I don’t trust them. All except you,” she added, for Aino at that moment was sitting comfortably at her kitchen table, dinner in the oven, her young daughter playing in the back yard.

  “Elinor is like so many American women I’ve met. Comfortable, vacuous, unhappy, narrow. They have less to do with their country than the peasant women of China. At that moment in the car, when people all over the world are starving and dying”—Agnes was trembling now—“well, I just misbehaved, and I didn’t mind upsetting that comfortable American woman at all. And I didn’t mind yelling at Ernest.�
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  Aino came over and began to massage Agnes’ shoulders.

  “The Communists don’t want me and neither do the Capitalists,” Agnes said bitterly. Aino worked in silence. Agnes dropped her head and stopped thinking.

  Excessive devotion to home alarmed Agnes. In her opinion, Aino took more time with her daughter’s clothing than necessary, paid too much attention to her husband’s comfort, and was so excellent and thorough a homemaker that she lost impetus for creative work; Aino had confessed to Agnes that she had a secret longing to sculpt and to write.

  From New York where she was working with her editor on Battle Hymn of China, waiting for the publication date and a paycheck, Agnes wrote Aino, “Just because you have a husband and a home you love, with a secure income, the danger of drifting is all the greater. I wouldn’t want to see you without some security,” she added, “but you should use it and use it hard. Shake yourself daily and try to write and model. Don’t be a mediocrity, nor just a ‘nice woman.’”

  John Taylor defended his wife. To Agnes he wrote a letter, reminding her that she relied on the very home Aino created; the very home she was criticizing. Though she might not know it, he said, Agnes needed family, maybe more than most, and that’s exactly what the Taylors were to her. She would always be welcome in their home because they loved her, he said.

  Agnes replied that she loved them, too. She admitted she did not know of any place in the world that had discovered a substitute for family, but she would continue to look.

  She was also continuing to look for publications where she could place articles about China. She needed money, but high-paying magazines like Reader’s Digest, though they led her on for a while and even talked with her about projected work, backed off when they discovered it was the Reds she wanted to write about. The Reds were material for a book, perhaps, but not Reader’s Digest. The editor asked her if America would eventually have to feed China, “the yellow peril,” he called it.

  “Oh, they have been feeding themselves for centuries,” Agnes told him. “It would, however, be nice if America stopped selling scrap metal to Japan.”