Eve of a Hundred Midnights (8 page)

In this essay, which was never published, Mel also skewered the sizable segment of Shanghai's international community whose members casually slung anti-Semitic slurs and stereotypes about the thousands of people who lived across Wàibáidù Qiáo—the Garden Bridge—a 105-meter-long steel truss bridge over the Suzhou Channel, in Shanghai's Hongkew (Hongkou) district. Over the previous year, 17,000 Jewish emigrés forced out of Europe had found a home in Shanghai. World leaders had turned their backs on the thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis. Conditions in Hongkew were cramped, however, and resembled the Jewish ghettoes many of its residents had left behind in Europe.

Mel did publish another piece. In it, his first bylined story from China—though he wrote under the pen name Mel Jack—Mel described walking through a crowded Shanghai neighborhood when he suddenly heard a little girl shouting in German.

“A few blocks more and I saw buildings displaying signs in German,” he reported in the two-page feature for the
Los Angeles Times
's Sunday magazine. “Delicatessens offering Yiddish foods, small markets, tailor shops, radio repairmen and dentists all offered their wares and services.”

Only a year earlier, Mel wrote, Shanghai had been home
to only seventy Jewish residents, but as other ports around the world slammed their doors it fast became the last place accepting Jewish refugees. That welcome didn't last; by December 1939, Shanghai had begun to “pull in her welcome sign.”

In his feature, Mel lusciously described every nuance of life in the vibrant, but strained, Jewish refugee community. “It looks hopeless,” Mel wrote to his parents, describing the Jews' plight and the article while he was still trying to sell the piece. Aside from the hopelessness of these refugees' situation, Mel was fascinated by how strenuously they identified themselves, not just as Jews, but as Germans or Czechs or Austrians.

“How strange that nationalism was still fostered among people sent from their own countries,” he pondered. “Could they get along living together in Shanghai? Could they make a living? If not, where can they go?”

Shortly after arriving, through Woo and his other contacts, Mel was referred to one of the most influential Missouri “Mafiosos” then working in China: Hollington Tong (Dong Xianguang). As vice minister of the publicity bureau, “Holly,” as friends called him, was also an influential member of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. Mel, who'd admired a speech Holly gave on the Central Broadcasting Service (CBS) right after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937, soon learned that Holly was the architect of much of free China's propaganda. His office wrote the government-sponsored news dispatches that were sent to wire services and newsrooms; after a government shake-up, it was also about to set up shortwave broadcasts from XGOY, the government-run radio station known as “the Voice of China.”

Woo told Mel that the government was looking for someone to organize the operation at XGOY and write publicity as well. The job would put Mel in contact with some of the
most important people in China and let him see the day-today workings of the Chinese government from a perspective available only to a few. The job, which was Mel's if he wanted it, would give him a reason to leave Shanghai and move to Chungking, where the action was and where he could embed himself among a small but dedicated community of reporters.

“That's just the place I've been aiming at so all would be quite well should it turn out right,” Mel said.

However, many of the journalists Mel had befriended in Shanghai warned him not to take the job. They thought the propaganda elements of it would kill Mel's dream of working for newspapers in the future. Others disagreed that it was a bad idea. Even though the position involved writing propaganda and paid poorly, the capital's allure—and the allure of being in free China—was difficult to resist. Besides, Mel hoped, a propaganda job didn't have to be permanent. Moreover, if he took the job, he'd end up in daily contact with the Kuomintang's inner circle and other high-profile sources. As Mel weighed the access and excitement of working in Chungking against the possibility of being permanently marked as a propagandist, the decision was made easier by the exhausting day-to-day life of Shanghai.

By Thanksgiving, when Gould and his third wife had Mel over for Thanksgiving dinner, he realized that he'd befriended more or less every American journalist in Shanghai. Regardless of what decision Mel made, they were all confident in his future.

“All seem quite anxious and convinced that I'll land something soon,” he said. All of them, he added, had advice about each of his potential jobs.

“I'm darn choosey,” he admitted. His other options included Woo's newspaper (Mel gave him some informal advice on how to improve it), an offer from Reuters that Mel thought would
also be propaganda-heavy, just in favor of the British, and waiting to see whether something concrete turned up with the United Press. He'd become familiar with the syndicate's Far East manager, so he felt confident about being offered a job, but it could still be a while.

Ten days later, Tong's office asked Mel again about the position in Chungking. At that point, Mel's biggest sticking point was the contract that the publicity bureau was asking him to sign. He wanted to be able to leave if a real journalism opportunity appeared. This was quite possible, especially because Mel expected the reporters he'd met in Shanghai to regularly circulate through Chungking, allowing him to maintain the network he'd developed. Finally, Tong's office relented and agreed to hire Mel without a contract.

“I am more than glad now to be about to do something no matter what the compensation,” he wrote. “At least it's a living—and an interesting one.”

M
el began his journey to Chungking on December 10, 1939. It would be a long trip. First he took a boat to Hong Kong, then a flight from there to the Kuomintang's capital. During the long voyage, Mel reflected on the complexities of the war in China and beyond.

His previous visit to China and now these first six weeks back there had helped convince Mel that the world was in the state it was because so many people were unable to look beyond their own situation. He insisted that if people paid more attention to the rest of the world, Hitler wouldn't have been on the march, Japan would have been kept from expanding into China, and labor disputes wouldn't be as hostile as they were in the United States. Mel also made it clear that he thought the situation in Asia was even more consequential for the world's future than the war in Europe.

“Japanese domination can spell only one thing—the East against the West,” he concluded. “And no one can stop this revolutionary shift in Asia besides the United States. I don't know whether she wants to or should. But anyway it is now her problem. Asia is too close. The Philippines are too important now for us to ignore the Pacific.”

During Mel's stopover in Hong Kong he visited Macau and
saw Marie and Carlos Leîtao. “The long line of Marie mothers and sons and daughters accorded me an appropriate welcome. That is I had plenty to eat.” Mel also tried to contact Chan Ka Yik, but he had no response to the letter he had sent to his old roommate's home in Kwangsi.

Hong Kong was “full of uniforms,” its harbor mined and blocked by steel netting. Prices were skyrocketing, but the hotels and nightlife were full of wealthy Chinese who “don't care who wins their war, don't follow the news.” These people infuriated Mel.

“Makes me believe in purges,” he wrote, but he added that “there are other sides to Hong Kong. Refugee camps, orphans homes, charity affairs to aid the soldiers.”

The closer Mel got to Chungking, the closer the war seemed. But Mel was ready. He admitted that he missed home and its comforts before he left Hong Kong, but he was still looking forward to the trip. He felt that he would find more people who shared his perspective, and he was impressed by the colony's resilience after two years of war.

Finally, sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 one early morning just after Christmas, a China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) DC-3 took off from Hong Kong with Mel aboard. He fell asleep, then woke around eight, just as the plane circled above a thick soup of fog and began its landing. Beneath, obscured by the clouds that always seemed to hang across its hills, lay Chungking.

In early 1940, Earl Leaf and T. K. Chang, the Chinese consul in Los Angeles, had an intriguing offer for a dentist in a small California beach town called Ventura. Leaf, who was also a former logger, sailor, and journalist, had heard that the dentist Charles E. Stuart was a world-renowned amateur radio “ham.”
For nearly thirty years, “Doc Stuart” had been making his name known in amateur radio circles for his ability to contact people in some of the world's most remote places via shortwave. In this era, achieving clear signals over great distances, especially doing so consistently, still required considerable skill. Stuart's radio skills would be crucial to China as it tried to generate sympathy and support for its war effort in the United States. So Leaf and Chang asked Stuart to receive propaganda broadcasts sent from China, record them, and retransmit them to a Chinese news service with offices in four U.S. cities.

In a little room off the side of his dental office in downtown Ventura, Stuart and his dental assistant (and soon-to-be wife), Alacia Held, set up a miniature studio with radio receivers, headphones, a teletype machine, and even a device that could capture ten minutes of audio on each side of a twelve-inch record. There, Stuart would tune in to broadcasts from XGOY, the government-run radio station in distant Chungking, while Alacia set up recordings of each broadcast and transcribed every word spoken. Stuart would become both the primary link between China and the United States and the primary vehicle for the work Mel was about to begin in Chungking.

Aware that an American audience would have a difficult time understanding heavily accented English, especially over what was often a poor signal despite his radio expertise, Stuart asked his counterparts in China to hire an announcer who could speak the language clearly. Peng Lo Shan, XGOY's station manager and also an employee of China's Ministry of Information, turned to Holly Tong to find out whether Mel, the young American he'd just hired to work in his publicity department, could help organize the radio station. This idea had intrigued Mel ever since Tong's agents had approached him a second time in Shanghai, and he was finally able to start working shortly after his arrival that foggy late December morning.

In a highly political move, China's broadcasting service had been moved to the publicity bureau from another government ministry on January 1, 1940. Aside from running XGOY, the publicity bureau also compiled material for daily and weekly English-language news summaries, handled foreign correspondents, censored outgoing copy, and saw to other public affairs needs of the government.

Mel's first task with the publicity bureau was surveying its radio capabilities and needs. He quickly recognized the need that Stuart had mentioned: a clear-speaking American announcer who understood the U.S. radio audience.

“No one up here knows much about broadcasting, particularly the kind of programs to send to the U.S.,” Mel wrote.

The United States, not China, was XGOY's target demographic. If XGOY could generate sympathy for the Chinese cause in the United States, it might be able to help sway public opinion and put pressure on the Roosevelt administration to assist Chiang Kai-shek's war effort.

Mel had a friend from Los Angeles who he thought would be a capable announcer, as well as a source of advice about broadcasting. They corresponded about XGOY for a few months, but the friend never came to Chungking. Thus, Mel became the announcer.

Aside from needing someone who understood the United States, XGOY had other problems. For one thing, it broadcast in thirteen languages besides English, so news copy had to be translated into each of these. Those translations were of varying quality. For another, there were any number of technical complications. And none of it mattered if, as happened more than once, someone forgot to flip the switch that made the broadcast go live.

Mel's job wasn't simply to assist at XGOY. He also helped rewrite newspaper and magazine copy originally written by
the publicity bureau's Chinese staff. He even was a ghostwriter for a column that a local bishop supplied to a newsletter called
McClure's
. From the beginning, Mel wasn't particularly charitable in his descriptions of some of the bureau's work that he had to rewrite. Much of it was unintelligible when it reached Mel, even though it had been written in English.

“Two of us retranslate these atrocities into a news story form whenever possible,” Mel said. Moreover, many of the original stories were written by government ministers and other important Kuomintang leaders, or their advisors. Mel had to be cautious before he made any changes.

“Of course, there is the problem of face and toe-treading,” Mel noted. “So when
certain
writers butch badly—that is permissible.”

However, Mel added that he might have been somewhat exaggerating how bad the work was for good reading. He admired and respected his boss, Hollington Tong, the vice minister of publicity. Mel thought Tong was an active, good-natured official with a modern slant. He also liked the people he worked with, even if their work habits sometimes annoyed him.

“No one here knows exactly what routine means,” Mel wrote that January. “Even getting your salary is rather confusing. I asked for some money since I was broke and low [
sic
] and behold a boy brought me a large envelope crammed with more bills than I know what to do with.”

When Mel wasn't working, he was constantly exploring his new hometown by foot. Chungking was a makeshift metropolis perched atop a series of steep hills. It centered on a peninsula four miles long and a mile or so wide that thrust eastward into the junction of the Chialing (Jialing) and Yangtze (Chang Jiang) Rivers. Bamboo houses on stilts climbed up the hills, bunching up along the cliffs that rose precipitously from the banks of the Yangtze.

Central Chungking was divided into an upper city, a lower city, and flood-prone markets along the river. Before the war, merchants had traveled along the length of the Yangtze, the world's third longest river, to Chungking from places like Hankow, Nanking, and Shanghai. On the south bank of the Yangtze was a small foreign district inhabited by some of the city's foreign embassies, Christian missions, and major business concerns, such as Standard Oil.

Crossing the peninsula just west of downtown Chungking was a new road that had recently been renamed Zhongshan, in honor of the national hero Sun Yat-sen. Up Zhongshan, the Kuomintang's leaders convened at the Executive Yuan. Nearby were other government offices, as well as homes occupied by the Chiangs and other notables, including the Communist emissary
Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai) and the Nationalist spymaster Tai Li (Dai Li).

Chungking felt unfinished. By the time Mel arrived, its newly paved streets teemed with refugees from the conquered coastal cities, but much of the city still lacked modern roads. Once a key city in the ancient Baˉ Kingdom and located in the heart of Szechuan Province (Sichuan), Chungking had been something of a backwater in China for a while.

But then, as Mel wrote, “the 20th Century caught up to Chungking in two leaps and a bound.” The first leap: in 1891 the English established regular steamer service along the Yangtze between Shanghai and Chungking. The second: in 1931 regular flights began from the coast to Shanhuba—the rocky airfield in the Yangtze's riverbed.

The bound? That was Chiang Kai-shek's announcement on November 20, 1937, that China's capital was moving from Nanking to Chungking, rapidly transforming the city into free China's center of gravity. As the historian Rana Mitter wrote, this transition was a key piece of the country's wartime strategy of trading space for time.

“Moving the entire government 1500 kilometers up the Yangtze River helped to consolidate ideas of a united China that spanned the whole of the country's landmass,” Mitter wrote. Chungking was far inland, in the country's southwest. Though located roughly in the center of modern China, in 1940 it was considered the frontier.

China's government survived, but to resist an enemy as powerful, rich, and modernized as the Japanese, China also needed a thriving economy. When the Kuomintang moved its seat of power to Chungking, it orchestrated a massive relocation of Chinese industry and commerce. Entire factories were dismantled and floated on barges up the Yangtze from
Hankow. Railroads were laid just ahead of trains that carried boilers, refineries, and other industrial equipment into China's heart.

While the thick fog that clung to Chungking's hills kept Japan's bombers away in the winter, this was a city with its attention otherwise directed skyward. Chungking was the “most raided city in the world.” Life seemed to revolve around the city's many dugouts—air raid shelters—tunneled into Chungking's many hillsides. These dugouts were often not glamorous. Many of the deep, damp tunnels were “often used for the wrong purposes” and consequently disgusting enough to convince Mel to carry a flashlight for his visits. The city's leaders still had to teach the city's many new residents to use them when the raids did finally come.

“Chungking is probably the world's most uncomfortable capital to live in,” Mel wrote in “Unheavenly City,” one of a handful of his unpublished stories from the summer of 1940. “A servant heats your bath water over an open fire, and by the time it gets to the tub, it's either cold or the air raid siren has sounded. A single chocolate bar is split a dozen ways, and American cigarettes are almost as rare as taxicabs.”

New roads had been paved, but it was a city where most people walked. Few owned cars, and taxis were rare. Webs of stone staircases and steep, winding alleyways cut over the hills and between the bamboo-and-paper buildings perched on stilts along Chungking's cliffs. The steps were coated with muddy, slippery blankets of moss.

Chungking was a city of smells, of scents “evil and new—and yet intimately familiar and human,” Carl Mydans would write later. Summers were stifling, damp winters were chilling, and everyone smoked the Three Castles cigarettes advertised in local publications as “Still My Favorite.” Chungking's deprivations
, squalor, danger, and inconveniences were myriad, yet the city got its hooks into nearly every visitor.