China to Me (5 page)

“This pony,” they said, “has a bad temper, so please do not ride him. He came along so that the horse would not mind leaving the stable. This horse is a real horse. He is very big and Dr. Chu likes him and says please do not hurt him.”

We were puzzled to know just what we were to do about our ride, but the groom explained. We took turns. First Helen got up and started at a slow, safe walk around the track. I thought she would gain speed pretty soon, but the groom, holding the bridle and walking rapidly at the horse's head, could not or would not walk faster, nor would he let go. After one turn around the course Helen, quite naturally, was thoroughly satisfied and gave the horse up to me without a murmur.

I had the same experience except that we went slower because the groom was tired. Then we got into the car again and returned to the hotel, and changed our clothes, and sent the boots and everything back to Dr. Chu.

But Nanking is a lovely place for horses. Don't let me discourage you. Without Dr. Chu one used to get plenty of satisfactory riding.

It wasn't for some years that I got fed up with racing. The other evening at a New York party a man told a story about a Chinese. I didn't interrupt him this time, or say that China bores me, because he told it more or less in my honor and I was glad that so many people think about China nowadays. This man hadn't been to China but he was obviously very fond of the place and had collected lots of anecdotes to show that the Chinese are a philosophical, gentle race. “Did you ever hear,” he said, “about the Chinaman they took to the races? Along about the third race he got up and started out, and when they said, ‘Here, where are you going? It isn't nearly finished yet,' the old boy said, ‘In our country it was proved thirty centuries ago that one horse can run faster than another.'”

The man smiled approvingly at his own anecdote and looked at us, a few old China hands, for comment.

“Maybe it was proved thirty centuries ago, but most of the Chinese have forgotten it again,” said C. V. Starr. “Or they take a lot of convincing. Mickey, do you remember the Shanghai racecourse on opening day?”

Of course I did. There is nothing like it in the world, except other race days in other parts of China. How they love it! They love any kind of gambling, and this kind more than anything else. Everybody was dressed up: everybody went around and around looking up at the grandstand and showing himself off. The little ponies ran valiantly, and one went faster than the others, and then the winner was led in, his big gangling jockey grinning, and the girl who led him had her picture snapped for the papers, and we went into the boxes for another drink. On big days the people who owned boxes used to give luncheon parties. We had Bagdad people in Shanghai, and Turks and Persians, so the luncheons were never dull. There were highly flavored gadgets and special curries and many other methods of getting away from English cuisine. The shops all closed on the opening day of the racing season; so did the banks. Nobody dreamed of working.

I wonder what happened to racing in Shanghai. I know what happened in Hong Kong. The Japanese always explained in advance that racing is encouraged “to improve the breed of the horses of the Emperor.” Just idle enjoyment of good horses or of anything else which is pleasant won't do. The Japs get a lot of money out of racing in Hong Kong. They make the Chinese pay a large per cent of the wagers they make in taxes, win or lose. And still, though the Chinese have to pay out most of the money they bring for the privilege of gambling, though the races are absolutely fixed beforehand and nothing is left to chance, though our friends feel guilty, knowing they should not dabble in anything so pleasant as racing while a Chinese soldier remains alive to fight — still the course is jammed, packed, full and overflowing. Only there is a difference in their appearance. They don't wear their pretty clothes any more. The men need shaves. The girls dress in wadded gowns, not fur coats. They don't laugh; they watch glumly as they win or lose their few cents. But they still keep coming to the races. A habit of thirty centuries is difficult to break. Even the Japanese cannot do that.

It doesn't take long for a newcomer to discover that printing and publishing are ludicrously cheap in the Paris of the East. What makes it cost so much here? Paper? It was made in Japan and China, and the best quality was cheap, but we didn't use the best quality when we parted out. Labor? But I was in China, and though labor was troublesome, the trouble was not on account of money. Anyone can publish something in Shanghai and almost everybody does.

Sinmay was a publisher from way back. He had spent a legacy on a large, elaborate printing press that included a rotogravure section. Most of the time the press worked at printing other people's publications, but in bygone days Sinmay had done a lot of publishing to please himself and some of his poet friends. Remnants of this former glory could be found in a small bookshop of his in Soochow Road, where “slim volumes” of forgotten poetry collected dust on the back shelves. The best sales were made by large, popular, cheap pictorial papers; Sinmay printed these too, and the famous humor magazine Analects.

“Why should we not have a magazine?” he said suddenly one afternoon in the shop. “A double-language one, English on one side and Chinese on the other. I suggest it because of the format, which will be original. You see, Chinese writing reads from the back of the book, and from right to left. Well, English is just opposite. Well, let the book be printed in such fashion that the English and Chinese meet in the middle! I can get plenty of advertising for the Chinese half; what do you think about the English?”

The story of Vox, our first bilingual paper, is a sad and common one. I hired one person after another to get advertisements. Usually it was a Russian who was willing to try it out when we talked, and then tried to sell me something widely disassociated from publishing. I sold two half-page ads myself. We gave away a good deal of space so that it would look all right, and as an afterthought I wrote the reading matter. We had good drawings because I used Chinese artists and Sinmay had plenty of those at his press — good ones, too. Whenever I needed a special drawing in a hurry Sinmay did it. Vox ran for three numbers, I believe. It was amateurish but would probably make interesting reading now, considering the date — 1936.

I moved at last from the multicolored love nest in the bank. At the end of the year a bigger flat became available upstairs, unfurnished. I forgot my nervous dislike of owning property and bustled about buying things: a wardrobe and bedstead of luan wood, the blond material that is so handy for cheap things in China. I bought yards of burlap from the Ewo Cotton Mills where they made flour sacks, and I dyed it henna color and made curtains out of it, and cushion covers. I bought thin but gay-colored rugs, crockery, secondhand bookshelves, and a studio couch. I found an old man named Chin Lien to cook for me; on New Year's Day he gave me the regulation present, a bowl of goldfish, and there it was all complete — a furnished flat. One could give parties in such a flat, eating off the refectory table and sitting on benches.

In almost no time at all a year had gone by. I have here at my elbow letters that I wrote home from Shanghai in those months, and one of them gives an idea of what must have been happening in our correspondence, Mother's and mine. During those years of travel Mother was always telling me indirectly, I suppose, that I ought to come home. She had no special reason for doing this, of course, except that mothers always want their children at home. According to Mother's expressed philosophy women have as much right to independence as men have, and she brought us up to think that it is a fine thing for women to earn their own livings. Nature will out, though, and there was another state of mind in which Mother really passed her days. These hidden thoughts popped out when she wrote to me. She probably never said it outright, but I felt it when I read her letters; between the lines she said, over and over, “Come on home. Come on home, where I can watch you and make sure you are safe. Come on home. Why haven't you married, so that I could put you out of my mind and off my conscience? Why are you living alone over there so many miles away, where I don't know what you are doing? Come on home.”

She never spoke so openly, but at times her control gave way and she went so far as to say that, after all, I could do my writing just as well in Winnetka. This gentle, constant tugging at my sleeve must have bothered me a lot. How much I have just realized, looking at these shabby old papers that she kept all these years put away in a shoe box. I remember now. I remember how that soft, insistent pull brought me out of the Ituri Forest and home from Africa, all the way around the world, back in '32. I remember how often I told myself savagely that she would not be satisfied until I did something desperate, something to cut the silver cord once and for all, something that would show her how I too was grown up, just like all my sisters.

“She won't admit my right to a separate existence,” I mused, “until I have had a baby. If I had a baby she wouldn't keep asking me to come home. I can't follow her reasoning, but I know it's true.”

This decision didn't help matters. Still in my unguarded, silent moments I heard that plaintive little call, secret and unspoken: “Come home, come home, come home. Come back to Mother.”

At least once, then, I seem to have answered at the top of my voice. Here is the letter:

About my coming home and why you want me to. Of course it's because you want to see me. A very proper reason. I want to see you too, very much. But, darling, that isn't the only thing we have to think about, is it? If I could afford it I would go back much oftener to see you, but I can't. … I know you would rather, in a way, that I get a job and stay in Chicago or, better still, marry someone and “settle down” somewhere not too far away. But jobs aren't so simple any more; anyway, I am set in my work, which is writing, and as for marriage — well, it just hasn't happened. …

I am certainly doing more work than I ever did. Can't you take this sort of seriously? Can't you believe I belong here just as much as if I were married to a man with a job out here? I'm not just wandering about childishly! Dear, I know you can't trust any place but America, and of course we miss each other or I wouldn't worry so — your letters have been bothering me terribly. But what can I do? I can't just drop things and run. What would I do after I got home? Go through all those gestures again of getting settled in? I'm in the middle of a book; I'm in the middle of a magazine; I'm in the middle of China! I'll come back when it's time, and when there's something for me to do there. …

Now please, dear, be good, and don't worry any more about my health; you never carried on like that about the marshy airs of Oxford. I think it's the word “Shanghai” that scares you. … Now will you stop believing everything you read in the papers? A lot of us, women, were talking the other day at lunch about the things our mothers cut out of the papers and send us, stories about China, and I swear I don't know where they come from. I promise to take care of myself if there is a war; suppose I'd been in Africa?

Well, well; suppose I had? Here I sit typing on a dining-room table in New York, after a busy day. I telephoned twice today to the nursery school where my daughter spends her mornings. They told me both times that she was quite all right, but of course I was uneasy until she came home, and even now … Just a minute while I open the door that leads into her bedroom. She might wake up and need something.

Chapter 5

I had not been long in the upstairs flat before I realized that my life was becoming far more social than before as a result of the move. The big long living room was a temptation to invite guests and so was Chin Lien, whose talent as a cook made me house-proud for the first time. He came from Peking, where people are proud of understanding the science of cookery. He was one of the few remaining cooks in China who could make a certain sweet, a basket composed entirely of glazed fruit and crème de marrons, covered with a cloud of spun sugar. Chin Lien began to enjoy a well-deserved fame, and people asked each other where he came from. Surely, they said, such a genius could not have lived long without being known among the foreigners in the town. It was Grace Brady, an elderly woman who was born in Shanghai and knew everybody, who traced him down.

“He worked for my friend Mrs. Davis,” she said, “and he was a wonderful cook, always, but his temper was difficult. In fact Mrs. Davis says that she had to let him go on that account. He was marvelous except for that queer temper of his — clean and honest for a Chinese cook boy, and, of course, just about the best cook in the world. But he had such a rotten temper. Have you noticed, my dear?”

Had I noticed! I spent whole hours cowering in my bedroom because Chin Lien was on a rampage and shouted wildly at his wife in the kitchen. At such times his old parchment-wrinkled face looked like a mask of drama; he seemed ready to weep with rage. These attacks always came on when I hadn't given him enough work to do. Unlike most geniuses of his class, Chin Lien was a happy man on the days we had dinner parties. When he was happy I was happy, and so … and so I gave more and more dinners. Fortunately I was beginning to make better money in America at writing, so I kept pace with the grocery bills.

Sinmay now produced a new version of his old darling, the Chinese-English periodical. I can't remember now if he thought of it first or if it was the idea of C. V. Starr, publisher of the Evening Post. Starr at any rate was willing to back the notion in a trial flight, while we used our own editors, and the idea was this:

Vox had failed. It was not the first bilingual magazine to come to grief. There was something in the idea that was fallacious to begin with, as Starr pointed out: just because Shanghai was a bilingual city, that didn't mean that people wanted to read their magazines in two languages, did it? A man reads English or he reads Chinese. Very few people read both with equal ease. Therefore, why should he buy a paper when he knows he will use only half of it? If we wanted to publish articles for both Chinese- and English-speaking people we must fall back on an older system, that of double production. Give a man his choice, an entire paper in English or an entire paper in Chinese, but don't thrust both down his throat. Why not publish identical magazines, one in English and one in Chinese, but separate?