China to Me (10 page)

Sinmay had a valuable library. Most of it was Ming, but some was even older. It was the one day that I hadn't been nervous of bringing the trucks out: what ordinary sentry, I had asked myself, would care about old books? By bad luck, though, the sentry that day was not ordinary. He was a man of education, and he liked the library as soon as he saw it. He promptly stopped us and said that he would confiscate the load until he could be sure that it contained no Communist literature.

For three anxious hours I hung about on the wrong side of the bridge waiting for matters to be straightened out. A nasty little fat man with an admiral's hat — at least that's what it looked like — shook my arm and said over and over, “You go back. No cross bridge. Go back Yangtze-poo.” I phoned the invaluable Malcolm and he sent the police interpreter, and everybody talked at once, and in the end they gave in to the claim that I was a Chinese scholar, and let me go. It was a bitter cold day but I sweated a lot. I felt very much like a heroine when I came home at last to the anxiously waiting Zaus. They had been sitting in front of my fire, but they ran out into the street as we rolled up triumphantly, and there was a little dance of rejoicing, and afterward Chin Lien brought me a dish of his own famous meringues, of which there were never quite enough. Today I had enough and more. We spent happy hours in the following weeks, sunning the books and looking them over for silver fish, the tropical insect that is the scourge of libraries.

The fighting crept around the edge of the town and now it was getting close, too close, to Yuyuen Road. There came a day when I admitted that it was too close. A plane swept over the house so low that it almost hit the chimney, and soon after it dropped bombs in the area near Jessfield Park and knocked over some neighboring cottages. In a great hurry I went out and found another house in the French Concession a few miles away, on Avenue Joffre. It was an ancient little bungalow which had been evacuated by a family of women now in Hong Kong, according to the landlord. He was a shambling, stuttering young man who did not seem to know or care much about the house, but he said I could live there as long as I liked, and that if I found it too cold, even with fireplaces, he would help me buy a cheap coal stove.

I hurried back to Yuyuen Road, all among the whistles and crashes of small shells, and loaded the car with the books of my erstwhile landlord. The rest of the furniture, they had said, didn't matter; the books did. All afternoon I traveled back and forth doing my duty, saving those damned books.

(A year later I had a tearful letter from the landlord. He said that one of the books had disappeared, and although he and his wife had looked carefully through all their things, they could not find it. How, he asked reproachfully, could I have been so careless?)

By the time all the rest of the neighborhood had moved out I was about ready to start taking care of my own possessions. It lasted the better part of next morning, but by noon I had settled all over again into the bungalow in Avenue Joffre. Soon afterward the Zaus pulled themselves together and resolved to find a bigger place for their family. After having moved three times they found another empty cottage in the same group of houses that I had moved into, and there they settled, and there, I believe, they still are.

We did a lot of rushing around during those weeks, driven by nervous energy. There was a long time, as it seems now, when we were certain that the war would spread into the foreign town and create another international incident. The Volunteers stayed in their barracks on the racecourse; business did not resume its normal swing; the newspapermen caught up with us. One by one and two by two they came, all the way from America and England and Australia. They moved between Nanking and Shanghai, where they spent their evenings in the Tower, a small night club on top of the Cathay Hotel, and there too we went, as often as we could, to drink and to watch the war. People liked the Tower as well as any place in town for the view it afforded of dogfights and general shooting and excitement.

I saw for the first time during those evenings a lot of people who came back again and again, later, throughout the whole dreary pageant of the China Incident. There were Knickerbocker, and Art Menken, and the English fellow who was killed one day by a stray bullet, during a battle, and Luigi Barzini, the Italian-American who turned out in the end to be Italian rather than American. There were Colin MacDonald and many others who were sunk in the Panay up near Nanking — Barzini was one of those. Knickerbocker introduced me to Stinnes, the German general who was advising Chiang's army and who was supposed to be an ancient and inveterate enemy of Hitler's. It was Knickerbocker, too, who phoned me in the new cottage one morning to announce that the last Chinese resistance had broken down.

“They're almost up to Nanking now,” he shouted excitedly, “and if they always make as good time as this they'll be in Tibet before Christmas.”

“You're all vultures,” I said. “This means you'll all be leaving town; that's one good thing.”

I hung up so viciously that the receiver almost cracked. Sinmay probably knew already, I reflected. Well, it would mean normality again, more or less. Only there would be no more trips into the country. We were surrounded. It couldn't go on forever like this. Someday the Chinese would drive them out again, surely? Surely!

Chapter 9

One of my letters sums up the state of affairs pretty well. It is dated August 24:

They say the mail is going out. I can scarcely believe it, and won't until I begin to get letters again, but I can't send air mail too often or I will go broke, and anyway I can just write scrawls in the time we get; nobody knows until the last minute, usually, just when the people who evacuate can get on the boats.

Not nearly so many people are trying to go now. Elaine Coutts and her sister keep canceling their passages just as promptly as their menfolks engage them, and I can't blame them. Why on earth must women be bundled out of town, down to an overcrowded city like Hong Kong, where cholera is raging and one fourth of a room is fifteen dollars a day? … I don't know what the papers have been doing; worrying you to death, probably. I am so terribly sorry about that; I can only imagine how worried you were. … Americans aren't allowed off at Hong Kong, which is too crowded; they must go on to Manila. The ships … are charging big sums to evacuate! I never heard of such a thing, did you? The Germans are taking their refugees out free, at least. …

I was dining last night with a Chinese who met me at the door — and said, “So sorry the other guests will not be here. They were all badly wounded in Nanking Road. Henry Wei is especially bad. Well, come along and have dinner, it's a good one.”

From the Park Hotel I saw the different parts of the native city burning. It was beautiful and horrible, with planes swooping around, adding to it. The streets are always thronged with Chinese carrying their children, gathering in crowds — you can't teach them not to — and peering into the sky. Now that I am in Avenue Joffre I don't have planes overhead any more. It was constant before, and was getting on my nerves. But though I am careful and don't take risks — the curfew makes everyone be home before ten o'clock at night — the most peculiar thing is that I have not been afraid as yet. Dick Smith says it is because I haven't seen a real bombing, and pieces of body all around. I am sometimes nervous, but not very. I am, however, very, very angry all the time, and sick at heart. … I cannot be interested much in who is winning. Nobody wins a war. … Customs College is full of refugees and my students have most of them gone, but Loy hopes to open sometime soon. Nobody can tell if the war will stay here or what.

We did open Customs College, quite soon. The war had not yet moved off from Soochow Creek and we were near the scene of operations: many times I had to stop lecturing until the reverberations of a bomb had ceased, because the students couldn't hear me. They didn't lead interesting lives for some weeks, poor boys. Because they wore the school uniform it was decided that they had better not go outdoors at all, and they were virtually locked up all that time. A Chinese building is spacious enough, with courtyards for taking the air, so it wasn't unhealthy, but they waited eagerly for teachers from outside such as myself to bring them the daily papers.

Loy Chang took his job of president very seriously, as seriously as he did the rest of his Customs work. Often he dropped in and talked over problems of teaching and curriculum. One day I mentioned idly that I was still in touch with some of the Japanese. “I don't know how to cut off the acquaintanceship,” I complained. “I don't dislike Matsumoto. In fact I like him very much. He's lived so long in China that I think he is sincerely against this war. But I've met another one who calls himself ‘Tiger' from some Rotary party — Tiger Kanai. He's a nasty piece of work, and he's been asking me to give him English lessons. I know that isn't what he really wants. He's trying to do a little spying on the foreign community. His English is all right.”

“But you should do it,” said Loy. “Do it, by all means. You might learn something from him, do you see? Yes, give him English lessons, and then tell me what he is saying.”

“Oh, in that case … It might be fun.”

Thereafter for some time I saw Mr. Tiger Kanai three times a week at the hotel where he lived. He never told me anything particularly interesting in itself, but he was my first good specimen of the unofficial ambassador. I listened for minutes on end to his fluent if ungrammatical exposition of Japan's true aims. She was waging this war, he assured me, with a breaking heart. And anyway it was all for China's good. And anyway it wasn't really war. Nobody had declared it as war. The Chinese didn't understand Japan, that was the whole trouble; soon they would, and then we would all be happy again.

The Matsumoto friendship was another matter entirely, and was built upon a melodramatic incident. I was at Sinmay's house one night when a few overheated young newspapermen had a meeting there. Sinmay and I often agreed that the Shanghai Chinese were far from perfect, and chief among their imperfections was a taste for indirect battle rather than the open, fair kind. They went in for assassination whenever they could, but very few of them volunteered for the more dangerous life of the Army. We heard countless stories of “guerrilla” activity on the outskirts of town, where small bands of Chinese bullies set themselves up to investigate lone travelers at night. If the man proved himself a “loyal” Chinese he was allowed to proceed; if, however, he was a “traitor” they robbed him.

“It's not good enough,” I said. “They're just little cowards using the war as an excuse.”

“Yes,” said Sinmay, “I hate all that loose talking.”

We heard a lot of it that night from the newspaper boys. They drank a little yellow wine and decided to “execute” the traitor Matsumoto. I stayed long enough to hear them make some rather fuzzy plans, and then I went home and phoned Shigei.

“Are you still living out near Kiangwan?” I asked him.

“Yes, though I spend most of my time at the Domei office.”

“Well, I oughtn't be doing this, but I don't approve of assassinations. … There's probably nothing to it, but if I were you I wouldn't go home alone after dark.”

“I see,” said Shigei. “It is only natural, I suppose. Though I have lived here twelve years and thought I had no enemies. Thank you, Mickey.”

And so, though I was now beginning to hate Japan with all the emotions I usually deplore, generalizing about race and working myself up to a strong desire for vengeance, I continued to see Matsumoto. We had a lot of conversation in those days when Shanghai was surrounded and besieged. I dined with him often, at least once every fortnight. I dined with him unwillingly, though, when the news reached Shanghai about Nanking. It was not because I had forgotten that Matsumoto was Japanese that I had managed to get along with him. I had liked his being Japanese. He was my last chance, I felt, to discover what was going on in the minds of these people before I closed and locked the door against them. I don't like finalities, and I still felt in those long-gone days that there could be a way out of war, if only people would be wise, if only they would try. That night after the sack of Nanking I lost my hopes. I suppose Shigei was the only Japanese in town who wouldn't have lied to me that night.

“It's all true, what they're saying about the soldiers and the way they behave?” I demanded.

Shigei nodded slowly. “It's all true,” he said.

“But why? How can you account for it? The Japanese I met weren't like that, surely? What has happened to your country, Shigei?”

“It is the Army,” said Shigei. “You can't know what they are like. You didn't meet those poor peasants who have been brutalized after years in the Army. They are permitted to do this. It is worse than that; they are encouraged. It is their reward for taking a town; the officers promise them three days to do as they like, when a town is captured. They always do. … It is because Nanking is so important that you Americans hear about it this time, but it has always been true.” He walked up and down his living room, much agitated. “It is a universal shame,” he said. “I will tell you something. When I was younger, to avoid serving my military term I made myself ill. I starved for a year, so that I would be too ill to be accepted for military service. I succeeded: they put me into the seventh class, which is very poor. But now there is no escape for a pacifist. I cannot fight the nation alone. Nanking is a fait accompli. It is our destiny to be here, in China, for some years at least. We will have power. We will have hatred, too, from China and the other nations, but we will have power. Do not doubt that.”

“And you are proud of it,” I said accusingly. “I can see, you're proud.”

“It is possible,” admitted Shigei. “I am human.”