China to Me (11 page)

It was Sinmay who first heard that I was suspected by the government of China, at least by some of the officials. I believe they actually put a “tail” on me, and discovered that the rumors were true, and that I was, indeed, in the habit of calling on a Japanese named Kanai three times a week. Anyway I was fed up with the Tiger, and he never said anything interesting once he had gone through his repertoire; after that it was all repetition. I gave him up without regret, but I did not give up Matsumoto. After about six months of rapidly increasing “power” in his office, during which all the other Japanese residents, too, gained in political weight, Matsumoto fell ill. He phoned one day to say that he was really not feeling well at all, and when I heard of him again he was struggling for his life against a bad case of typhoid. He recovered somewhat; his wife came and took him back to Japan, and he went on long sick leave. I didn't see any more Japanese socially. Ake tried to make a success of one of his mixed parties, during Christmas; he invited Sinmay and me to dinner and among the guests were the Horiguchis. Sinmay talked politely enough with Yoshinori, but before we had finished the first bowl of Swedish punch he decided to go home, and I didn't blame him.

One day I stopped at the Shanghai Pet Store and looked in the window. Mr. Mills, in a large cage with a little tree in it, looked out at me. He didn't get a good view from the branch on which he squatted, so he climbed down to the floor and put his head to one side and looked at me again. His face was black; his fur was beige. He turned a somersault.

I ran into the shop. “What is that in the window?” I demanded.

The shopkeeper, a Filipino, smiled lovingly. “A gibbon from Singapore,” he said. “I show you.”

Mr. Mills went running around the room, pausing now and then to look at me from odd angles. When I grabbed at him he bit me gently.

“Hold him by the hand, not the body,” advised the Filipino.

In the course of the next ten minutes before I bought him I learned something about him. He was quite young, not a baby, but about the same stage as a three-year-old child. He didn't like cold weather. He ate fruit and cake and insects, and especially worms of the kind the Chinese use to feed their birds. I could bathe him if I insisted; he didn't mind very much.

Mr. Mills bit me a couple more times and then I bought him, paying one hundred and seventy Shanghai dollars, which was only about one third the usual market price on gibbons. The war was forcing the Filipino to close out his shop. I bought the cage too, and went home in a state of hysterical happiness. I have always been fond of apes and monkeys, but I had throttled my natural affections since coming to China. The average commonplace monkey in those parts is the Singapore rhesus, not a particularly easy animal to manage in the house. This gibbon was something quite special.

I must have been a pathetic picture of a spinsterish woman at this time. I used to laugh at the picture of those two sisters in The Old Wives' Tale and their troubles over the poodle and the other dog, and now, I realized uncomfortably, I was contributing to a picture not unlike that one. I couldn't help it, though; being self-conscious about such things doesn't cure them. My letters home, which I have here at my elbow, were packed with stories of Mr. Mills and his cleverness. I would have groaned at such a letter from any proud mamma among my relatives, but I just couldn't help it.

“It's old age,” I said in a worried way to Sinmay. “I've made this sort of life for myself and I shouldn't complain about it, I suppose. I must make up my mind to it. I'll get old and fat out here, with my comfortable little cottage, and people will call on me, I hope, on Sunday afternoons.”

“Oh, you are morbid,” said Sinmay. “It is not like that at all. You are part of my family and will never be alone. I tell you what we can do: you must marry me and then it will be really all right.”

“Marry you?” Nothing Sinmay said had surprised me for more than two years, so I was not surprised. But I was puzzled. “Now how would you work that?” I asked. “You're married already. Zoa wouldn't like it a bit.”

“Yes, she would. We have been talking about it. No, do not laugh; we have been quite serious. It is about the press. You are claiming that it is yours, but perhaps the Japanese won't accept our word for that. So Zoa herself has made this suggestion, because you have said the other evening that you will never marry. Of course if you were to want to marry we could not do it. Zoa and I, according to the foreign law, have never married. It is often that way in careless old families like mine. Now suppose you were to declare yourself as my wife; the printing-press matter is settled, and all the work you have done for us, protecting us, becomes more permanent. In return for this help you have a family. You have us already, of course, but in this way it becomes true in the eyes of our friends, which would be nicer, wouldn't it? One of our children, any one you like (except my son as I have only him) will be yours, legally. We give her to you. I suggest Siao Pau, but it is for you to choose. The others will be yours and Zoa's together. Anyway they already call you ‘Foreign Mother.' And when you are dead you will be buried in our family graveyard at Yuyao. And when you are old you will come to live in our house, as I am always asking you to do now only you do not like it, I don't know why. I think it a good idea.”

Sinmay's ideas were so many and so fantastic that I didn't take it too seriously at first. Later, however, I decided it was not so fantastic. In the end I actually did sign a paper in his lawyer's office, declaring that I considered myself his wife “according to Chinese law,” and Zoa presented me with a pair of mutton-fat jade bracelets, in accord with one of the many customs of China. It was half a joke; none of us took it seriously. The paper was put away to be used it the Japanese demanded proof that I really owned the press, and I forgot about it for some years. But in one way Sinmay had been right: the thought of that grave in Yuyao comforted me, for some absurd reason. I ceased to worry about my old age.

Chapter 10

The foreigners of Shanghai, after having made sure that the war had indeed moved westward, began to creep out of their fox holes and adjust themselves. Those who had lived long enough in China to remember some of her many civil wars decided at last that it was no more than one of those. We saw the signs of increasing damage every day, in the slow death of all native business enterprise chiefly. Then, too, many of our Chinese friends crept away, but the foreigners didn't notice that so much. The brokers did, but they tried to be hopeful, meantime keeping a sharp eye on the Shanghai dollar, which slipped and slipped and slipped.

The “comprador class,” Sinmay's scorned acquaintances, moved down to Hong Kong where they could go on living like bright young things in safety. They didn't like Hong Kong very much; the band at the Hongkong Hotel wasn't really hot and the old-fashioned Cantonese didn't encourage them to enjoy themselves in a European fashion. Young men about town were limited to the older-style dissipations of West Point, and the young Chinese women of Shanghai found that they were expected to act demure and sober in Hong Kong. Nobody English thought of inviting Chinese people to informal parties. Not that they wanted to go, especially, but Shanghai was certainly friendlier.

The T'ien Hsia crowd had happier experiences. They departed from Shanghai in a tremendous hurry and a blue funk, soon after the fireworks started. Wen Yuan-ning was positive that his name was first on the Black List. That Black List needs some mention before I go any further: I was to hear about it all over China and Hong Kong whenever there was trouble in the offing. I still believe it is a figment of the lively Chinese imagination, and by this time I ought to know, but you will never convince the Chinese. They still believe in it. Well then; the Black List is supposedly made up by the Japanese Secret Service of the names of all the people most inimical to the Japanese conquest of Pan-Asia. One would suppose that such enemies of the Rising Sun would be led by generals, admirals, and other warlike experts, but according to literati like Wen, or certain brokers I have met, or even prominent hotelkeepers, the Japanese hate them first of all, individually and fiercely. Wen was certain that in the Japanese estimation he himself was Public Enemy Number One. I still doubt it, and as I have said before, I ought to know. … But I will never convince Wen. I used to try to, and oddly enough, instead of being reassured he was insulted.

Seriously, absurd as it may seem to an outsider, these claims were not the only preposterous ones I have heard made, and Chinese are not the only proud people who have made them. I've known many Englishmen and Americans to indulge in the same fantasies. One of the worst of this kidney was W. H. Donald. He was always sure that he was being followed, listened in on, set upon by bribed domestics, and otherwise harried. I don't deny for a moment that the Japanse did spy on Mr. Donald and on the hotelkeepers as well, and the brokers and Wen Yuan-ning and everybody else, even me, but I do deny that any one of us was as closely watched as he thought he was … or as important an enemy to the Japanese genius. I still think that the Japs would rather capture Chiang Kai-shek, for example, than any of us. I'll have a lot more to say about this. A lot more of it happened. For the time being we are talking about the precipitate flight of T'ien Hsia from Shanghai.

Wen would not have been quite as badly frightened if it hadn't been for John Alexander of the British consulate. John has a talent for sniffing out intrigue, I think, inherited from his Italian ancestors, and he thought he was on the trail of a really dangerous plot against Wen and the magazine. Now I don't think, really, that the Japs cared whether T'ien Hsia made its monthly appearance or not. Save for one editorial every month which repeated in a stately literary fashion that Chungking was the berries and Japan was not, T'ien Hsia could not be called anything but a cultural publication, given to articles on oriental calligraphy, history, and books. That is what it set out to be and that is what it was. It was the happy hunting ground of such people as Dr. J. C. Ferguson, who is an authority on Chinese bronzes, and myself. Wen wrote a good article on A Shropshire Lad and his author and published it in T'ien Hsia. Sinmay published a poem in its pages, and I wrote reviews. Nevertheless, according to John, T'ien Hsia and its editors were in the gravest danger, and they believed him, and turned pale, and scrambled aboard the first south-going steamer to get out of it.

I heard an uproarious description of that journey from one of the typists. The editors were afraid of running short of money at first, because they hadn't been able to arrange for funds at the bank in their hurry, and besides, they thought it safer to disguise themselves as plain middle-class. So they took second-class tickets. Once aboard the lugger, however. Wen looked around and felt that his fastidious taste was being offended by the sordid surroundings, so he went to the purser and moved up to first class. Then Chuan Tsen-kuo said to Yeh Cho-yuan, “If he does it, why shouldn't we? After all, T'ien Hsia should maintain its prestige,” and they too transferred to first class. It seemed too mean to leave the secretaries where they were, after that. Therefore the entire staff disembarked in Hong Kong like gentlemen.

They continued to behave in a manner befitting Chinese scholars. Wen, a graduate of Cambridge, felt all his Anglophilic tendencies coming back now that he was in one of the colonies of the Empire. Even in Hong Kong, he found, there were some young men among the British cadets and the government officials who admired China and Chinese culture. Wen met them all, went out to tea with them, talked literature rather than politics, and felt happy, happier than he had felt for years in Shanghai. The rest of the party acclimated themselves more slowly. They grumbled in letters to me about the high cost of living, but in the end they too decided to love the mountains and the beaches of the lovely island.

If I had known that T'ien Hsia was sending Charles to me with a letter of introduction I would probably have stopped resenting this flight. But of course I didn't know, and I resented it very much. I didn't think it had been necessary, and I missed them. I was lonesome, although Sinmay was still in Shanghai; I had liked the little office in Yuyuen Road. My comfortable world was broken up and I felt disappointed in Wen, and sore and angry.

Therefore I was short with John Alexander and Stella, his wife, one evening when I met them.

“We never seem to see Chinese friends any more,” said Stella. “You probably know some interesting ones, Mickey. Will you introduce us?”

“You don't get any more Chinese from me,” I retorted. “I'm not introducing you to any more. John would scare them away if I did.”

Chapter 11

We had gradually slipped into a state of affairs which would have seemed impossible a year before. We were living calmly, quietly, although we were completely surrounded by Japs. Up in Nanking were friends of mine in American and British diplomatic posts, people who had declared violently that they would immediately resign and go home if their careers entailed working among the Nips. Now they were to all intents and purposes stationed in the middle of Japan, and yet they were surviving.

We Chinese-conscious people in Shanghai grumbled, of course, about being cut off from China, though we still had many points of contact through Hong Kong, Ningpo, odd stations along the southern coast, and the guerrillas. Although with some delay, it was actually possible to correspond directly, through the Japanese-controlled post office, with Chungking after the government at last moved up there from Hankow. The Japs liked reading letters en route from the West so they let them come. I didn't do much of that at the time. I knew only a few newspapermen who had penetrated that deeply into China's west, and the Chinese who left Shanghai for the “interior” didn't write back.