China to Me (20 page)

This was in our minds in spite of what everyone told us on the radio over in America and England. I paused, sighed, looked wonderingly at the excited refugees, who were taking it very hard, and went on with my preparations. I was very angry with the government of Hong Kong for making a lot of silly new regulations about letting people in.

The shipping companies kept all their sailings secret, so my departure was simple and not crowded. Chin Lien saw me off.

“I'll be back in three months at the most,” I promised everyone. “I'll stay just long enough to gather the rest of the material, and then I'll come back here to write it up. So long; I'll be seeing you!”

I never saw Shanghai again.

Chapter 17

From now on my life was to be managed on a budget. I had made up my mind to put away the little extravagances of Shanghai, and as an earnest of good intentions I traveled second-class to Hong Kong and went to a definitely second-rate hotel when I got there. The cheaper hostelries of Hong Kong can always be recognized because they are built out of cardboard, and mine was no exception. The floor telephone was just outside the door of my room, and all day and all night the floor boy answered its ring with a long-drawn-out “We-e-e-e-ei!” that sounded like a newborn kid calling its mother. The entrance was on a steeply sloping street, and our whole building was tucked in next to the Matsubara Hotel, reserved for Japanese people. I used to peer into the next-door lobby with great interest as I climbed the hill to my own place. Officially the Japanese were still friendly with Britain, and many of them lived in Hong Kong; you saw their squat, bowlegged women sauntering about the mid-level streets, May Road and Kennedy Road and MacDonnell Road, all favorite residence districts for the Sons of Heaven.

Mme. Kung promised to get me to Chungking without a lengthy wait, although there was an imposing list of people anxious to travel up to Szechuan by the only short route left to us. In the meantime I played around: I bumped into Ian Morrison again, fresh from a trip through Indo-China, and spent a lot of time with Bob Winter from Peking.

Peking, like all the other never-never lands of the world, has its little collection of traditions and good stories, and its aristocracy of old-timers. Bob Winter is one of the old-timers. You will probably not read about him in the Peking novels and travel books that fill any Far East bookstore, but he is famous in his world nonetheless. A very long time ago he taught Romance languages in Evanston, but for the past eighteen years, I think it is, he has spent most of his time in Peking, working for the Rockefeller Institute and teaching at a university there. He is a big man with freakish glands or some other accident of physiology that has prevented him from showing any signs of advancing age. Perhaps his life has had a lot to do with it. Bob in all those years has been doing exactly the sort of thing he likes doing best. Few people can claim a record like that.

Like myself, Bob is an exhibitionist and would sell his grandmother if the transaction would make a good story. Or rather, he wouldn't bother to sell her; he would merely say he had done it and make a better story than the truth out of the old lady. Unlike me, though, be isn't a good listener, and our relationship developed along unusual lines. Bob did all the talking, which is not unusual, but I did all the listening and that is. I have since learned how to bully him into listening to me sometimes. There is a certain grim quality about all of our conversations, due to this unending struggle.

He had much more to talk about in those Hong Kong days, anyway, than I did. Peking had been under Japanese influence for some years, and the happy, peaceful life Bob led was threatened to such a degree that he had beaten the other lotus-eaters to the inevitable decision. He was giving it up until happier days. Farewell, then, to the Winter house with its famous flower gardens and the fruit-cats and pet deer which he kept in the gardens. Bob had decided to go in for a life of espionage. I am giving away no secrets when I tell this, because Bob wasn't like Ian Morrison and the other British Intelligence boys; he advertised himself directly instead of by implication.

Spy work is fun, of course, to anybody who hasn't grown old beyond redemption. Bob had a grand time. All his activities were thought up by himself, carried through on his own, and rewarded with nothing but an occasional thank you from the Chinese in Chungking. Bob was no government employee; he worked against the Japs purely as a side line, and usually as a personal favor to some friend in the guerrillas or somewhere. He never laughed at himself; he was deadly serious about it all. His methods were highly colored and reminiscent of Oppenheim or Sax Rohmer. There was the story of the white jade carving, a tiny bit of a thing which Bob carried around in his pocket. You see them in quantities in curio shops. There was some intricate business about a message and a radio for the guerrillas of Shantung: Bob kept a receiving set in his house which was to be given to the wandering soldiers, and the man who called for the set must be identified, so Bob broke the carving in half, gave one piece over, taught a password to the contact man, and there you were. When the messenger came for the radio he produced the missing half and the password, and all went well. Bob loved that sort of thing.

I have noticed it before about the people who live in Peking; they all seem to go in for lurid adventure along these lines. If they haven't fooled around with smuggling from Manchuria they have had a lot to do with the local wars. The Japanese venture, in their eyes, was just more of the same kind of excitement, but they were proved wrong in the end and the game went too far and was taken out of their hands. Not that it was ever in their hands. I have always thought it very nice of the Chinese to let Peking foreigners preen themselves on their “influence.” Since those fabulous days when almost any missionary who happened to be around could nab a cushy job as adviser to the Ch'ing court it has been the same up north; the Chinese have handed little commissions over to us, small favors involving our passports or errands for us to run, back and forth between Chinese officials. We have been very useful to the Chinese of the old school, and they have been duly grateful. I don't think the newfangled Chinese need us quite so much, or feel quite as grateful, but I think they will let us go on working for them as long as we want to. Romance in China is not yet dead.

Bob was this romance personified. He brought a large retinue down from Peking, including a Eurasian girl in search of her papa down in Indo-China (she carried The Papers in her girdle), a little Japanese woman whose Chinese husband was teaching in a university in Free China — this girl had always been very useful, Bob assured me, and she simply hated the Japanese — and the Living Buddha of Outer Mongolia. This last item completely overshadowed all the others. The Delawah Butuktuk (the spelling is my own version of his Mongol name) was introduced to me at the hotel where they stayed, a Chinese hostel down on the water front, with mah-jongg parties going on all day and all night in practically every room but Bob's and the Buddha's. The Buddha was a new one on me but Bob assured me that he was a famous figure in Peking. For more than twenty years he had lived there, an exile from Outer Mongolia since the Russians had driven him out of his own country when they took that territory under their protection.

We are apt to think there is only one Living Buddha, the Dalai Lama whose picture, done up in gold paint, we saw everywhere when he was installed in office as a little boy of five. There are, however, at least seven of them. The Dalai Lama just happens to be more publicized than the others. Bob's Buddha was a man between fifty and sixty, with charming manners and a pock-marked face. According to Bob, he had decided that it was time to get out of Peking before the Japs grabbed him and incorporated him in their plans for a free, glorious New Asia. He wanted to go to Tibet, his spiritual home, a place he knew well, although in his present incarnation he has never been there. The Buddha depended heavily on Bob for guidance in this venture. He planned to go first to Chungking, to assure the Generalissimo of his preference for Chinese rather than Japanese, and then he would make his way south, around the coast, over India into Tibet.

Bob undertook to get him out of Peking. It entailed a disguise, of course, and disguising a Buddha is not a simple matter. Bob's first plan was to dress him like a Tibetan, and then to hire a number of ordinary Tibetans and to send them all together through the frontier guard in a Ford. The Buddha didn't like that notion. It seems that a Buddha must always wear a certain shade of yellow, regardless of what shape his clothes may take. Thus, though he was willing to wear Western clothes suitable for a Tibetan tourist of the middle class, these clothes had to be yellow. He appeared for the journey in yellow tweeds, with a yellow plush hat something like a Homburg. And here at last they were, safe in Hong Kong!

It would have been all right, probably, if Bob as raconteur had been satisfied with the story of the clothes and of the old man's retort when the Japanese emigration official asked him if he had been vaccinated: “Isn't my face enough for you?” he is alleged to have retorted. But Bob was proud of the fact that he bad meddled with his divine ward's passport. I don't remember what sort of passport it was, but Bob had erased the date on it and substituted another one. He probably had excellent reasons for doing so, if he ever really did it, which is always a pertinent question to put to Bob when he tells stories. But he need not have boasted about this deed so much in Hong Kong, where all the officials were nervous and jumpy and very watchful. Bob forgot he had left China behind, outside the Colony limits. He was in British territory now, among suspicious imperialists. He and the Living Buddha couldn't get up to Chungking as quickly as they had hoped. They were detained and questioned. Rightly or wrongly, Bob put this delay down to Captain Boxer's address: we had all lunched together one day and everyone but the Buddha got intoxicated, and Bob thought Charles had squinted at him suspiciously or something. Anyway, the questions began next day, and since Charles was chief of Intelligence in Hong Kong the whole thing, in Bob's judgment, was obvious. Because of that man Boxer he and his poor old Buddha were being persecuted by the stupid, thickheaded, bureaucratic British.

I was cross with the British myself. But I didn't think it was Captain Boxer's fault; he did not seem to me the sort of person who would not appreciate the Living Buddha's special flavor. I defended him steadily whenever Bob went off into a typical Winter tirade.

“Anyway,” I pointed out, “the Buddha is having a lovely time here. He has learned to go on the Peak tram all by himself.”

“He has,” Bob admitted. “He goes up every day. Yesterday he picked up another Mongolian, up on the top; he was awfully pleased about that, and I think it was remarkable myself. He likes collecting fountain pens too.”

I gathered as much information about the old man as I could, for my private delectation. I liked him. Of course one is predisposed to like a person with such a history; it is just like being bemused by Chinese women and their charm. But I would have liked the Delawah if I hadn't known who he was. He had a sweet smile, a pleasant chuckle, and a halting delivery of Mandarin which was enough like mine to make conversation possible. He didn't like Chinese as a general rule, Bob explained; Mongols often do not. He found that he got on better with Europeans. He was doomed, evidently, to a lifetime of nostalgia for the steppes of Mongolia, although one human life should not seem long to an immortal, and our old Buddha didn't seem inclined to complain. Obviously he looked forward to the windy uplands of Tibet, which, as he remembered from another incarnation, was rather like Mongolia.

One day when I was wondering how much longer I was to live in that awful hotel I received a mysterious message from a Chinese official. The ticket for Mrs. Wang, he said, was all ready, and I was to drop in and get it that afternoon. For no reason which any Occidental could possibly figure out it had been decided that I was to travel incognito on the plane. Don't ask me why, because nobody ever explained it to me. That is simply the way things are done in high circles in China. I was writing the life story of the Soong sisters, and so I traveled under an assumed name, by special arrangement with the British and Chinese authorities. Everyone was duly apprised of this fact: Mrs. Wang's ticket was made out. I called for it, feeling uneasily as though I should have worn a thick black veil and come by night, instead of strolling into the CNAC office on a sunny afternoon. (Donald always used an assumed name too.)

The passenger planes flying between Free China and Hong Kong did as much of their traveling as possible at night. They started out from Hong Kong between midnight and two in the morning, and they started from Chungking or any other inland airfield at a time calculated to bring them over Japanese-occupied territory in the dark. None of us had forgotten the plane that was forced down into the Pearl River, when Woody, the pilot, had to swim for his life and passengers struggling with the river current were machine-gunned by Japanese.

The pilots of passenger planes were for the most part American. By the nature of their work they were thrown pretty much together. They all lived in flats near Kai Tak, in the most modern building you could find in Kowloon, the Eu Gardens. The pilots' wives saw each other as constantly as if they had been members of the same family. They lived the life of an American small town, glorified by the fact that out here in Hong Kong there was no servant problem and the “boys” made wonderful money, with bonuses whenever they went on extra trips. The women played mah-jongg all day, or bridge; they gave delectable lunches for each other and for the other American wives in town. They dressed in the American fashion and so they were the smartest women to be seen in town, perhaps the only smart women to be seen, because the young Englishwomen, though they tried, hadn't really learned yet how to dress. I couldn't keep up with them — I couldn't drink enough, or play mah-jongg well enough, or spend enough money, but just the same I was proud of them, on behalf of America. They kept the town stirred up. But they were their own club, with little communication with the outside world save through the medium of the American Club, over in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. They were definitely one clique.