Eve of a Hundred Midnights (7 page)

Mel and Charlie presented their paper at the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco, which was organized by Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur. A sort of complement to the World's Fair in New York, the Golden Gate International Exhibition focused on solidifying bonds among the nations of the Pacific Rim. When Mel, Shirlee, and another friend visited the exposition that summer prior to his presentation, they toured the expo's outsized pastiche of tourist kitsch, simplified presentations on Pacific cultures, and showcases of the latest scientific discoveries. Its highly touted features included a giant half-ton fruitcake baked in the Southern California enclave of Ojai with fifty dozen eggs and other outsized ingredients, a permanent burlesque exhibit called “Sally Rand's Nude Ranch,” and the “fascinating story” of “SEX HORMONES,” which “play a vital role in making woman what she is! In making man what he is!”

Cheesy displays aside, the exposition represented the height of New Deal optimism in a manner reminiscent of the utopian vision that Mel had laid out in that citizenship paper he'd written four years earlier, when he was starting out at Stanford. The event was an opportunity to present California as the heart of an idealized pan-Pacific economy just as the United States emerged from the Depression. The exhibition also showed off the
China Clipper,
Pan-Am's glamorous, silvery whale of an airplane, which flew regularly between Treasure Island and Hong Kong.

The Golden Gate International Exhibition took place at a time when some scholars and policymakers, especially those
involved with the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), an early and influential think tank cofounded by Wilbur, believed that Pacific Rim nations were becoming increasingly interdependent. The policy analysts and editors who attended Mel's presentation rewarded his fresh and potent perspective on Asian affairs with a clutch of introduction letters to important journalists, businessmen, and diplomats in China.

One of the sources Mel met while working on the thesis was Ray Marshall, the just-returned manager of the United Press's China bureau. Marshall now edited the syndicate's incoming cables in San Francisco. When Mel visited Marshall's Mission Street office, Marshall told Mel that he would make a strong recommendation to the United Press's New York office that Mel be hired to contribute from China. He even said he would urge them to try to pay Mel's boat fare to China, but told Mel that it would be worthwhile to go even if they didn't—which was likely because the syndicate was spending most of its money sending reporters to Europe.

Mel nearly fainted upon receiving such support from Marshall, though he knew a stable job wasn't guaranteed.

“It means that when I land in China, I am on my own,” he wrote. “I will have the task of doing my best to interpret a force which is taking a toll of several thousand lives daily. Perhaps I won't do a good job. I don't know.”

On top of Marshall's support and the letters he received from the Institute for Pacific Relations members, Mel was asked by the
San Francisco Chronicle
's Paul Smith to send him feature articles from China for
This World,
the
Chronicle
's Sunday magazine. If big news broke, Smith said the paper would also turn to him as its correspondent in Asia.

Mel knew this was a tremendous opportunity. Still, he had
to improve his Chinese in the few weeks left before he left California. His old friend George Ching, who lived in San Francisco, offered to tutor him. To help Mel meet more easily with Ching, Jonathan Rice, a friend from the
Stanford Daily
who also lived in the city with a number of other Stanford friends, invited Mel to room with him.

A few days after Mel made his presentation at the exposition, he wrote his mother with news about the commitment from the
Chronicle
. It was August 31, 1939, and probably not the best day for Mel to tout his ability to predict the news.

“Still looks like no war in Europe today,” he wrote.

The next day Hitler invaded Poland.

Because of the outbreak of war in Europe, few people recall more positive events that were happening at the same time, like the Golden Gate exposition or the IPR's lobbying for pan-Pacific cooperation. Perhaps, as Mel wrote on the eve of his return to China, such optimistic initiatives had simply run their course. The world had changed for the worse, and it was Mel's job as a journalist to acknowledge that reality, though he argued that a journalist's commitment to accurate reporting could help achieve peace.

“World conditions point to troubled years ahead,” Mel wrote.

No matter which way you turn, revolution, civil war, world war it all means people dying and suffering. It is the primary task of the correspondent to portray a real picture of what he sees before him. Yet it is his job to serve his own group best. That is the job I want to tackle. A job which means success if just one iota of misunderstanding is righted. It means that the world is just that much closer to harmonious living.

Mel's first stop in China was a place rife with misunderstanding: China's great international metropolis, Shanghai.

After his crash course in Chinese with George Ching, Mel left for China in the third week of October 1939. Crossing the Pacific aboard the SS
President Coolidge,
he stopped in Hawaii, switched ships in Kobe, Japan, and even encountered friends from Lingnan during the journey. On the boat from Japan, Mel also made a crucial contact: Randall Gould, the charismatic editor of the
Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury
and one of Shanghai's most influential journalists. Gould offered to introduce Mel around Shanghai and help him get acclimated in the city.

After arriving in Shanghai on November 7, Mel rented a room at the swanky $2-a-night Park Hotel (complete with three meals), which was next to a horse-racing track in the heart of Shanghai. This was far too expensive for Mel, and the guttural shouting of German guests in the hotel ordering around bellhops only increased his unease. Unfortunately for Mel, more affordable rooms were booked, so he needed to find either paying work or other lodging. In fact, he needed both if he was going to stay. Shanghai was not only a far more expensive place to live than elsewhere in China, it felt culturally isolated from the rest of the country. Recent events were also making it a decidedly less comfortable place to live.

Shanghai had long been a hub for expatriates, in part because foreign governments had enjoyed extraterritorial powers in the city for decades. Not only did these powers leave Shanghai under the control of a council made up of foreign officials, but foreign residents were subject to their own countries' laws, not China's.

“But if you aren't British or French or American or if your country hasn't got enough gunboats it isn't so international,” Mel wrote, referring to the many foreigners who came to Shanghai but were not nationals of countries that enjoyed extraterritorial powers. Paradoxically, among the most disenfranchised populations in Shanghai were Chinese nationals. And though Shanghai maintained much of its international identity when Mel arrived in 1939, in the two years since the Battle of Shanghai, Japan had consolidated power there and grown increasingly belligerent toward both the Chinese and Westerners.

“The Western world is being squeezed out of China,” Mel wrote. “Their last opening wedges—the foreign concessions—are fastly becoming subject to Japanese pressure.”

Even as the Japanese took over, Mel found Shanghai society distastefully out of touch. When he went to exchange money at the American Express office, the bright blue travel pamphlets inside always seemed disconcerting to him, especially when a stretch of cold nights hit Shanghai and he saw humanitarian workers piling the bodies of Chinese laborers who had frozen to death into their trucks. Shanghai, the people in it, and the way the local Chinese were treated strained Mel's patience to the point of anger. He said as much in one form or another in most of his letters.

“I hate to see the beggars (I'll see millions more),” he wrote. “I hate to see the rich kids in the cabarets, I hate to see the refugees, I hate to see the lousy foreigners in Packards and minks. Lots of money is being made now on the market and in business—but the Chinese peasant is taking it on the proverbial chin.”

Shanghai wasn't the only place where Japan had increased its influence in China. At the end of 1937, Japan had attacked
Nanking, then China's capital, opening an unimaginably dark chapter in world history. For three weeks, Japanese forces committed acts as horrific as any others in the twentieth century's grim gallery of atrocities. Between 20,000 and 300,000 civilians were killed in Nanking, while thousands of women, perhaps even tens of thousands, were raped.
^*

Many journalists bore witness, including a
New York Times
reporter named Tillman Durdin. Reporting from Nanking in 1937, Durdin observed citywide looting, summary executions, enslavement of able-bodied men, rapes, and other crimes. In one of his most shocking accounts, Durdin said he saw 300 men lined up against a wall and shot.

After Japan conquered Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek's government retreated to Chungking, a distant, hilly city to the southwest. Meanwhile, a former ally of Chiang's, Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jingwei), made a separate peace with Japan. Wang set up a collaborationist government, the Reorganized National Government of China. It claimed to represent all of China, but in reality it controlled only the Japanese-occupied portions of the country and was subject to the occupiers' dictates.

Wang's underlings set up a network of spies and secret police in Shanghai's International Settlement and the French Concession. Often coordinating their work with Japan's secret agents and frequently enlisting the help of Shanghai's expansive criminal underground, these agents operated out of nightmarish 76 Jessfield Road—a feared house that Wang's enforcers used for beatings, flagellation, electrocution, and other torture.

Early in 1939, the Kuomintang government in free China
had infiltrated Shanghai's police network and assassinated a string of high-profile collaborators. Wang's shadowy alliance of criminals and secret police retaliated by cracking down in the city. This crackdown included threatening Shanghai's press corps.

Though the United States had not yet entered the war, such threats weren't new to American journalists in Shanghai, as the writer Paul French detailed in his
Through the Looking Glass
.

“Things went from bad to worse to deadly,” French noted. Reuters reporter James Cox was murdered at a police station, and the
New York Times
's Hallett Abend—whom Mel would soon meet—was assaulted at Shanghai's longtime press gathering point, the Broadway Mansions. Gould, the journalist whom Mel met just before arriving in Shanghai, was one of Japan's frequent targets. As a result of numerous attempts on his life, Gould took many security precautions, like keeping heavily armed bodyguards outside his office and traveling everywhere in an armored car. Mel wasn't terribly convinced about the usefulness of such precautions.

“The gunmen still get their newsmen,” Mel wrote of the reinforced concrete guard booths and the “tanks” he saw outside of newspaper offices.

If Mel was at all frightened by the threats to journalists, he didn't say so in his letters. It's unlikely that he was. Instead, with Gould helping him make connections, Mel spent the better part of every day in Shanghai walking between news organizations to chat up editors, bureau chiefs, and correspondents.

He also spent considerable time with Abend, a Stanford alum who, as likely the highest-paid foreign correspondent in Asia at the time, was also an avid art collector. A longtime stringer for the
New York Times,
he invited Mel to lunch at his apartment after a referral from Gould. Over “an A-1 lunch,” Abend showed off a collection of Chinese art worth thousands
of dollars. Mel bought some silk paintings from a dealer whom Abend regularly brought to his apartment, but he was most eager to discuss the correspondent's work. Aside from contributing to the
Times,
Abend regularly wrote for the
Saturday Evening Post
and other publications.

Aside from Abend and Gould, Shanghai's journalism community was dominated by what Mordechai Rozanski later dubbed the “Missouri Mafia,” an influential cadre of reporters who'd studied at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. This midwestern school didn't just send a number of journalists to China—its faculty and administrators stayed intimately involved in graduates' activities in Asia even after they finished their schooling. Many journalists with ties to “Mizzou” also worked at Yenching University in Peiping, whose journalism department Mel had visited in 1937.

Only four days after arriving in Shanghai, Mel met a Chinese-born Missouri “Mafioso” named Woo Kya-Tang (Wu Giadang). Woo wined and dined Mel, urging him to work for the
China Press,
where Woo was managing editor. Even though Mel refused a job at the
China Press,
Woo, who had close ties with the Kuomintang, offered to work as Mel's agent. Mel also fielded offers to work at another paper, the
Shanghai Press,
and with the British news wire Reuters. But what Mel really wanted to do was get out of Shanghai and into free China.

To learn more about the mechanics of the news business, Mel tagged along at press conferences and watched how statements from Japanese, British, French, and American officials turned into headlines. He even once accompanied some reporters on a boat as they tried to intercept the visiting American ambassador for questions before he slipped past in the crowded waters of the Whangpoo (Huangpu) River.

“It's rather interesting hearing and seeing how the news actually
breaks and finds its way into America,” Mel wrote after one Japanese press conference.

While Mel scrounged for work in Shanghai, he wrote a biting essay contrasting Shanghai's selling points—its beauty, its modernity, its wealth, its internationalism—with the realities of municipal corruption, gunfights that the press never mentioned if Chinese were the victims, and tourists who marveled at Western-style buildings and gawked at the rickshaw drivers who tried to find them prostitutes.