China to Me (6 page)

This idea made a lot of sense, at least to my amateur ear. Sinmay and I were both full of enthusiasm and went to work immediately planning each our own paper. Mine was to be called Candid Comment in English, and the Chinese twin had a name that meant the same, or, more directly in translation, Free Speech. My first hopeful plans of exact copies, one with an English title and the other Chinese, but with the heading stamped on the back for Chinese consumption, had to be given up. Chinese can be printed much more cheaply than English because the soft paper that takes printed characters is cheaper and also because you can get thousands of words into comparatively small space. The use of a different kind of paper necessitated using different types of illustrations generally. And then, too, the same illustrations, even the same cover, would not appeal to both publics. No wonder we had not been able to make a go of Vox! We had been idiots to try. In the end we struck a compromise: my magazine and Sinmay's used the same chief leader and many of the articles, but in format, illustration, and all other art we went our separate ways. Whenever I received and used an English article that Sinmay liked, he translated it and used it. The same went for his Chinese contributions. I had the better of that bargain. My contributing public was limited; how many Americans and English in the Far East are expert writers? Whereas through Sinmay I had the choice of all China's output, insofar as Chinese writers sent their contributions to him. It wasn't quite as nice as that for me, because Sinmay's time and good will limited me; I was at his mercy. I saw only what he bothered to submit to me in translation. Nevertheless it was a good field.

Whenever we ran short of text we wrote some. Whenever we needed illustrations we called on Sinmay's artists. I found out that almost every educated Chinese is a good draftsman; it is the result of their calligraphy, which gives a manual control that we don't develop in our Western writing. Young men who wanted to specialize in this branch of art, who felt they had more than just technical talent, often drifted into Sinmay's printing factory and adopted desks where they could work among friends. Two of our crowd were the famous Chang boys, caricaturists who had developed an attractive style of burlesquing the classic paintings and drawings of ancient China. They had a host of imitators and followers. I was to meet them often in Hong Kong after the surrender: they were left alone by the gendarmes for months as harmless artists, and they ran a gay little restaurant in the sad, dull city that was an oasis for all of us, refugees from Shanghai days. In time, of course, they had to run for it. They are in Chungking now.

One day Grace Brady, the woman who traced Chin Lien's history, dropped in on me. I was always glad to see Grace. She had a passion for creating things out of material that other people threw away, and she kept an entire village of Chinese workmen employed on her ideas. It is hard to sum up what Grace made, as her conceptions varied. Her whole house was an original creation. Certain rooms of it she never left alone. Her bedroom at the time I left Shanghai was made of shells from the South Sea Islands; walls and ceiling were lined with the shells and the windows were made of the same material polished down until it was translucent. She used many mirrors, too. I can't describe it better than that, but you felt as if you had come into a deep-sea cave when you entered the door. Her dressing-table top was glass, with soft, many-colored lights inside; so was another table she kept near by. She dreamed up handbags out of any and every sort of thing. I still have one that her workman made of the undershell of small turtles, soft and blond in color. There was another bag made completely of ducklings' bills and feet. It had a beautiful cobwebby color, I remember. Grace knew a lot about Chinese things; I mean what I said, things. Carved wooden gods, and bird cages, and woven material that I never saw anywhere else. One saw nothing hackneyed in her house, and Sinmay had a lot of respect for her. Of course most people thought she was crazy but they didn't resent her, because her husband had been head of the Stock Exchange at one time, which made her a solid citizen and not suspicious at all. She was, I suppose, an old woman but I never thought of her as anything but a beautiful one.

This morning she came straight to the point. “I have a large family of nephews and nieces,” she said, “whom you have never met.”

I looked inquiring.

“My brother is a brilliant man in a way,” she continued. “He takes after my father, who was editor of the paper here, you know. Desmond speaks about fifty Chinese dialects perfectly, so that you couldn't tell with any one of them that he did not come from the district himself. Well, he married a Chinese woman.” She paused for a moment, then with an effort said, “I don't see why he should not have done it. She is a woman from Peking and has been a good wife to him. But Desmond doesn't face reality. They have all these children and he has never been quite able to cope. You have never met them at my house.”

“No,” I said.

Grace looked worried. “I do what I can for them. I'm particularly fond of Paddy, the eldest boy. That child is so talented, you won't believe it if I tell you, and so I want you to meet him. I would like your friend Mr. Zau to look at his drawings. Paddy is only sixteen, but if Mr. Zau thinks it worth doing, we might give him a little exhibition, and then, perhaps, educate him abroad. … I don't know. Everything costs so much nowadays, and Desmond never seems able to help; why, he hasn't bothered to get himself any false teeth and he needs them terribly. May I bring Paddy to lunch? Please ask that nice Mr. Zau to be here too.”

She departed soon afterward, and I looked after her smart, slim figure wonderingly. I had the customary American attitude toward the people we call “Eurasians.” That is to say, my attitude was customary to those Americans who haven't lived in the East. I didn't think much about them one way or the other; I had toward them none of the definite reaction we are all given by environment toward the Negro race. Probably we Americans, even before China became our ally in this war, thought it romantic to have a touch of oriental blood. Certainly it added to the glamor of a movie actress or a dancer if she could claim a Chinese or East Indian ancestor, not too recent. … But any United States citizen, save perhaps a Californian, was shocked at his first experience with the China Coaster attitude toward Eurasians. (N.B. I use the term “Eurasian” to denote a person with Asiatic and Caucasian blood.) Why, I realized suddenly, Grace was as ashamed of her brother's family as if he had been in America and married to a Negress! It is probably obvious to any reader who knows what category I fall into that I don't see why white people should not marry Negroes, but my category does not include the majority of the public.

Now I found that a lot of “foreigners” in China and Japan feel about Eurasians as our own Southerners do about mulattoes. I had just begun to realize it. That is why I was sorry for Grace Brady. She was a lovely lady and an intelligent one, and yet she felt that her brother's marriage had been a tragedy. It wasn't her fault; it was just that she was British and brought up in Shanghai. I wasn't young enough or sure enough of myself to be indignant with Grace, but my imagination was stirred, and I waited eagerly for the lunch with Paddy.

He came walking softly, like a lean young leopard, in the footsteps of his aunt. He was of the age when some boys are spotty, but his skin was clear and he looked almost completely Chinese, with high wide cheekbones and thick, straight, black hair. He wore the tight-waisted, shoulder-padded coat that high school boys in the Shanghai Chinese schools were using that year, and evidently he was growing very fast because although it was not an old coat the sleeves came down only to the top of his slender, well-shaped wrists. Paddy O'Shea looked like any modern healthy Chinese lad until I saw his eyes. They were Grace's eyes, arrestingly beautiful: huge, mournful, brown Irish eyes with thick lashes.

Grace treated him like a little boy and he acted like one, staring at his shabby shoes except when she asked him direct questions. Sinmay was late, as he always was, and Grace flatly refused a cocktail for Paddy when I offered it. “He is a little boy,” she said, just like the kindly but watchful aunt that she was. Then we were both surprised, because Sinmay drifted in on a breeze of chatter with the servant, and he and Paddy nodded carelessly to each other and said in Chinese, “You here?”

“You've met?” demanded Grace.

“Oh, ah, yes.” Sinmay looked puzzled. “This is your nephew?”

Paddy murmured something in the Shanghai dialect. “It is really funny,” said Sinmay; “I know this boy well, but never did I know that he was English. He is in my press every day, drawing pictures,” he explained to Grace. “We consider him a very talented boy. I have always thought he was Chinese. I have never thought about it at all, that is to say. We call him ‘Chow.' ”

“Well, isn't that nice,” said Grace, looking as though she thought it not very nice, really. “Then I needn't have made you come out to lunch today. How naughty of Paddy not to let you know he was English. … I hope he doesn't get in your way when you are working?”

We were not gay at lunch, and afterward Paddy sat in silence for a long rime, tacitly refusing to go away with Grace until she asked him outright, “Paddy, are you coming with me?”

Paddy shook his head with a sweet smile that was fleeting. “No.”

Then he and Sinmay went on talking rapidly in Chinese. Defeated, Grace left us alone at last, and as the door closed Paddy relaxed in his chair with an eloquent sigh. He smiled again, straight into my face. “I like your house,” he said. “May I have a drink now? My poor aunt worries about such things so I humor her.”

We talked all afternoon about Candid Comment. I am anticipating a little but it doesn't matter; Paddy ultimately gave me a cover design for the magazine and it was by far the best that I ever published, though I had some good ones. A few months after this he had his exhibit. He also had a full-page spread in the Sunday North-China rotogravure section. Grace was proud of him, but when the Sunday-paper feature was arranged she went privately to ask the reporters not to mention Paddy's relationship with her in the write-up. Poor Grace. Paddy died the next winter, suddenly, of a throat infection.

Sinmay and I went to dinner with her some months after his death. She lived alone in her big palace in Ziccawei; she had lived like that ever since her husband died, but until then I always thought she filled the house sufficiently all by herself. After all it was her own creation; she should have been mistress of her strangely conceived rooms. Now she wasn't any longer. We inspected all the new things dutifully, the Ningpo bed she had discovered, a huge room in itself, all of red lacquer, with yards of mattress and a window on each side of the framework, and gilded pictures all over the outside. We went up to the sun porch. There was an exquisite bird cage up there, with a stuffed bird in it. “The Chinese keep dead birds in their cages rather than leave them empty,” explained Grace. It looked mournful, and the stone floors were cold all over the house, and the lights, shining through polished sea shells, were too dim. And Grace had shrunk and did not trouble to be beautiful. Her life looked dim that night as the light through the polished shells.

“He would not have died if I had always taken care to see that he had good food,” she said suddenly. “That house, it was not properly run. Desmond's wife has too many children. There is still the next boy, Dennis, but I cannot feel the same about Dennis. He can take care of himself. He is studying to be an engineer,” she said with a queer snobbish scorn in her voice. “Must you go? I hate this house; it is too big. Come back soon, my dear.”

“Oh, it is terrible,” said Sinmay as we drove away. “That house is not only full of ghosts, it is a ghost itself. I will never go back. Yes, I must. We should go back every night. I must bring all my children. Oh, poor Mrs. Brady. You foreigners do not know how to manage death: I am sure Paddy's mother does not suffer in this way.”

Of course he did not bring all his children, nor did he go back. Grace died after the Japanese took Shanghai; I hope she was allowed to live in her house until it happened.

Paddy's was not a real Eurasian story. The tragedy was not his but his aunt's. Being a Eurasian had nothing to do with Paddy's short life; he considered himself thoroughly Chinese, and because he was young and had his drawing there was no trouble in his mind about what would happen to him in that small, foolishly cruel community. I think he lived very much as did the other artists in Sinmay's big studio. It is not Poor Paddy, not at all. It is Poor Grace.

Candid Comment attracted attention and had a success, especially among the Chinese readers. The Chinese version sold at a low price and gave a lot for the money, and the political opinions that Sinmay published were strong — stronger than mine, although they were along the same lines. After almost a year I had to give up, but we took over Sinmay's side of the publication and carried on with it ourselves for much longer than that. Indeed, I think we are entitled to boast a little, for the Japanese paid us a sincere compliment on the magazine. One day a man named Ken — I think that was it — invited me out to lunch. (This, by the way, was after the Japs had moved into China in 1937 and surrounded our Settlement. You must allow me to anticipate a little, because the story belongs here.)

Ken — I don't know if it was his first or his last name — said he was a newspaper agency man. He brought with him to the luncheon another Japanese, a bald, unlovely man whom he called “Colonel.” We three ate at the Metropole, the best restaurant in town, and they asked me right away if I owned Candid Comment; I proudly admitted it.

“It's a good paper,” said Ken, “a good paper. But you haven't much advertising.”

“No, unfortunately that is true,” I said.