Travels with Myself and Another (5 page)

U.C. considered me thoughtfully. “The trouble with you, M., is that you think everybody is exactly like you. What you can’t stand, they can’t stand. What’s hell for you has to be hell for them. How do you know what they feel about their lives? If it was as bad as you think, they’d kill themselves instead of having more kids and setting off firecrackers.”

From agonizing over the lot of my Chinese fellow men, I fell into a state of hysterical disgust with hardly a pause. “
Why
do they all have to spit so much?” I cried. “You can’t put your foot down without stepping on a big slimy glob! And everything stinks of sweat and good old night-soil!” The answer of course could be that spitting was due to endemic tuberculosis, and as for the stink, I had seen where and how the people lived. I knew I was being contemptible. To avoid more hysterics, U.C. moved us to a country hotel at Repulse Bay. We couldn’t go farther because we hadn’t yet received our papers and permissions for the journey to the interior. The hotel at Repulse Bay was as near English as possible, set in lovely gardens and done up in chintz. Soft-footed servitors bore pink gins around the place. No spitting and no smells, no visible poverty. U.C. teased me about my contentment in this clean non-Oriental enclave but was quite happy himself; he’d had enough company and was satisfied to read and walk over the hills.

We decided to walk to a sampan city for lunch, balmy weather, nice walk, and the prospect of rare fish dishes. The sampan city entranced me, from a distance, because it looked like picturesque China in the movies. A Chinese woman staggered along the dirt road towards us, pleasing U.C. who was partial to Chinese drunks. I think he felt that the Hongkong Chinese, given to gambling, rice wine and firecrackers, had great
savoir vivre.
The woman then began to vomit blood and collapsed. U.C. said, “She’s had it, poor old lady,” and hurried me off.

We had just seen the cholera epidemic in close-up. The cholera epidemic was due to practice air-raid alerts, lately discontinued. The night-soil coolies, terrified by the sound of the siren, dumped their baskets of excrement and fled; and cholera followed. I believe U.C. was more impressed by the sight of that woman dying than he ever said; he became the Medical Officer on our China travels. In China, water is like justice in that it has to be boiled and seen to be boiled; U.C. supervised this. U.C. also checked the quinine intake, which I’d have forgotten or muddled. He arranged extra shots against all the available diseases. By myself, I’d have wrung my hands and groaned and caught every germ and ended up dead.

Reporting on the Chinese army in action seemed a rational project in New York but absurd in China due to distances, lack of roads and transport, and any form of communication and the quiescence of the war. The Japanese held the best three quarters of China and had no need to push farther; they bombed without opposition when they felt like it. No front was anywhere near remote Chungking so U.C. decided we would do a short aerial jump over the neighbouring mountains and the Japanese, and make our way back towards the Canton front which was next door to Hongkong. I now think it astounding that this trip ever got arranged; at the time, not knowing the practical obstacles, I fumed and fretted and complained of the delay. What more natural, I asked, than for war correspondents to look at war?

My glimpse of conditions inland had given me ideas: I stocked up on Keating’s Flea and Lice Powder, Flit, thermos bottles for boiled water, disinfectant for unboiled water, towels, mosquito nets and bedrolls and fancied we were comfortably equipped. U.C. did the tedious staff work and bought not enough whisky but how could he guess that Chinese generals would down this new tasty drink like water. As it worked out, we flew for an hour and a half from Hongkong to Namyung, where the true horror journey began, and took seven days on the ground to travel half of that distance.

On 24 March 1941, we presented ourselves with our gear in the middle of the night at the Hongkong airfield and stood around in a gale-force wind until the flight was scrubbed. Visibility at Namyung: zero. The next day we left at 11 a.m. for Namyung in blanketing cloud. From notes: “lovely landing (blind).” Showing off to myself, as an old China aviation hand. It was raining at Namyung. Here we met the first batch of our Chinese escorts. I described them to my mother as “two Chinese officers, both officers by courtesy, since one was in the Political and one in the Transport Department. Mr Ma, the politico, our interpreter, early showed himself to be a dope . . . Mr Ho, the transport king, was as efficient as humanly possible in this repellent country and we liked him very much. He spoke a language that resembled French and had a vocabulary of some thirty words.” Yet Mr Ho, whom we approved, is sunk without trace while Mr Ma lives on tenderly preserved in my memory.

Mr Ma was all round; round specs, round nose, round cheeks, round, permanently smiling or open (waiting to smile) mouth. He said he had been educated at the University of Michigan which we didn’t believe for a minute and as time went on we doubted that he understood either English or Chinese. The smile was infuriating; poor Mr Ma, so hardworking and good-natured, he couldn’t help being a fool.

In China, vehicles were manned by the driver and the mechanic, who leaped out to start the car, tinker with the engine, change tyres, and put rocks behind wheels to keep the vehicle from rolling away. We set out in a small old Chevrolet, seven of us and both U.C. and I bigger than any Chinese. Wedged in, we got our first taste of the infrequent roads. Not roads; rivers of mud, rutted, gouged, strewn with boulders. You caught your breath after each back-breaking crash. The tyres, not unnaturally, exploded like firecrackers. This drive lasted until dark when we arrived at our hotel, the Light of Shaokwan, in the city of that name.

Mr Ma had assured us of the elegance of the hotel so we were a bit daunted to begin with. We had a room with two sets of planks for beds, a trembling bamboo table, a brass washbowl full of dubious water and a spittoon to empty it into, a hard bamboo chair and a bamboo stool, two toy kerosene lamps, malarial mosquitoes and a stand-up hole-in-the-floor toilet down the corridor. The toilet must have been unique, in that I do not mention it with hatred, possibly a jar of water was provided for flushing. It was still raining—it was always raining—and cold, but cold did not discourage the mosquitoes.

I wondered aloud about the washing arrangements: how exactly were two people to manage with one bowl of water? Did we both wash our teeth in the same water, then our faces? U.C. told me earnestly not to wash at all and if I dreamed of brushing my teeth I was a nutcase. I had better control my mania for keeping clean. “Cheer up,” U.C. said, battling with a mosquito net. “Who wanted to come to China?”

We spent only three days in Shaokwan, a record of speed, making the necessary politeness visits. They drove me to frenzy, all the politeness visits, then and later, and U.C. was heroic. The burden fell squarely on him; he alone had to swap compliments and reply to flowery toasts. As a woman, I was expected only to smile. I was free to be a mere presence, mute and suffering, though sometimes so beside myself that I went off into insane giggles, which were ignored. Mr Ma translated, a slow and wearisome affair. Thinking it over, after these many years, I put a proper value on U.C.’s patience and courtesy, neither his most familiar qualities, and believe he must have been upholding the honour of the United States. He was also obliged to deliver rousing speeches. How did he survive it? Enjoying Chinese food helped him a little, and tolerance of rice wine, yellow kerosene to me. At Shaokwan I noted: “Lunch with General Yu. Looks like Buddha. Staff of generals, Chu, Chiang, Wong, Chen etc. Bottoms up on Chinese fire-water. Vast food. Many compliments exchanged before lunch. U.C. terrific. Drink tea at separate table before and after meal. Home to mosquitoes.”

Waiting for who knows what further permissions, we drove with a General Chu, and certainly without enthusiasm, on the ruinous road to a monastery. U.C. was no sightseer. I remember it enough to remember that I thought here was a religion, whatever it might be, even more unappealing than most. From notes: “2 gates each with huge wood statues of angry painted devils 25 feet high. Inside temple, 396 clay Buddhas, 3 enormous gold Buddhas. Great bell. Priests in blue, all filthy, look like cretins. 6 shaved spots on head show full priest. Fine trees. No one knows names.”

We drove for three quarters of an hour each way, shaken and bruised, to breakfast with the Provincial Governor, to save his face; he could not be upstaged in hospitality by the General. He gave us jasmine tea, tasting like cologne, and sweet biscuits. I would have blessed Shaokwan had I known what lay ahead. Instead I was panting to leave, thinking to escape compliments and Generals and spraying the Light of Shaokwan with Flit and eating quinine and reading on a bamboo stool. “Whatever else you can say about war,” I informed U.C., “when you get to the front, it’s not boring.” U.C. raised his eyebrows but refrained from comment.

We left Shaokwan in a very old truck; in the cab, driver, mechanic and us; behind, our troops, three officers—“a nice General Staff Officer named Tong, who only spoke Chinese, had joined us,” also sunk without trace—and four soldiers in faded cotton uniforms, all looking about twelve years old. The road outdid itself. We braced one hand on the roof of the truck, one foot on the dashboard, and despite being joined together like Siamese quadruplets on the front seat, we were badly battered. The trip lasted three hours and covered thirty-five miles, which was all the road there was. Being new and unbroken in spirit, we were still able to laugh whenever we had breath in our bodies. My notes say: “Kind of truck you can hurt yourself in.” So we came to the banks of the North River, marked on the map as a wandering rivulet, but as wide as the Mississippi and crowded like everywhere in China. Our water-borne transport was an antique rusty Chriscraft towing a large covered sampan by a rope that looked like a raffia clothesline. It was the sole motorboat on the river.

The pilot or captain of the Chriscraft was a skinny little ancient, with a few grey wisps of beard and a bamboo pipe. He sat crosslegged and silent on a high stool, up forward in the cabin. A tiny boy, his grandson, apparently lived in the toilet, a closet of unutterable stench and filth, and served the Captain as a steward, bringing him bowls of rice and tea, filling his pipe. Every other hour, he pumped out the Chriscraft to prevent it from sinking. On the sampan, the military contingent settled in with the sampan family, descendants of the Chriscraft ancient. There were two women, one new baby (who cried all the way), two boys and two men. The women cooked for everyone on charcoal braziers. The teenage soldiers made up beds for the officers and boiled water for our thermoses.

Everything was fine except no room for U.C. and me. We moved to the small sloping roof of the Chriscraft where we disposed ourselves on coiled ropes and boathooks, not the best mattresses, and were glad to be out in the air, away from the pervasive odours, if not the pervasive sounds. U.C. said, “You’ll have to get used to it, M. You wanted to come to China.” Everybody has idiosyncrasies. One of mine, involuntary and unfortunate, is a reaction to the sound of hawking up phlegm, collecting it in the mouth and spitting it out. My reaction is to retch. Nothing violent, no carry-through, but an instant sudden spasm. This hawking was background music from the sampan.

I didn’t mind belches, no matter how long, rumbling and gaseous. I was inured to non-stop Chinese talk which is not melodious but a nasal, harsh sing-song. The hawking got me. “Put cotton in your ears,” U.C. said. “You won’t miss anything.” We had no cotton. In time, I managed to retch so that it looked like swallowing. No one noticed except U.C. who would leer at me, mockingly. The punishment didn’t begin to fit the crime. Who brought us to China?

We had a nice view from the cabin roof. Small temples sprouted out of rock cliffs. Sailing junks were pulled up river with chanting like the Volga Boatmen. Bamboo and pine grew by the shore. Sandbanks showed like whales’ backs in the stream. We saw an egret and then a single black duck. “That’s the best sign so far,” U.C. said. It was quite beautiful and calm. In forty-five minutes the tow-rope snapped. Mr Ma was looking at pictures in
Time.
Mr Ho slept. The baby cried.

At 4 p.m. the sampan drew close to the Chriscraft for the dinner hour. If all went well, we got two meals a day, at approximately nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. A bowl of rice and tea, unless being entertained with compliments and gastronomy by Generals. We had whisky with boiling hot water from our thermoses for dessert. The river shone silver in the evening light; blue-black mountains stood out against a greenish sky. As we passed the poor river villages, huts on stilts, massed sampans, U.C. said, “They think happy days are here again. Tourists are coming back to the North River.” Then he slept, a talent I envied. In the starless night we began to run aground on sandbars. A man from our sampan took soundings with a boathook. Other unseen boat people shouted at us; I suppose we were a traffic block. After the fifth being stuck and grinding off, the tow-rope wrapped around the propeller, the Chriscraft went in circles and the sampan was bumping our stern. The military lay snugly tucked in, on the floor of the sampan, asleep in their long underwear.

“Mr Ma! Mr Ma! Do these boats usually go down the river at night?” Mr Ma, wakened, put on his glasses.

“Oh yes, all the time. Very often, maybe.”

“Do they
want
to go now? Or have you ordered it?” I could too easily imagine being stuck forever with the propeller broken.

“They say they can’t see a thing.”

“Well then, let’s anchor.”

“We go back to that town now. Is more safe.”

Somehow we untangled and chugged inshore to a sampan village, the shape of the moored boats showing in the flicker of kerosene lamps. Their smells and noise and mosquitoes blew in a cloud around us. U.C. woke, sat bolt upright, and announced, “This town is called Tintack, the disease centre of South China.” He stumbled to his feet among the coiled ropes and called benignly, “You boys got any cholera we haven’t got?” Women shrieked, babies howled, people leapt away from us, retreating to distant sampans. I scolded U.C. for frightening the populace out of its wits. He said he was only trying to be friendly, the boys must feel lonely stuck off by themselves with their cholera. Hadn’t I seen the black flag? I remarked testily that he was making it up, even Mr Ma wouldn’t be so idiotic as to anchor us in a cholera epidemic. U.C. went back to sleep while I listened to a man, on our sampan or an adjacent one, slowly and noisily suck in three bowlfuls of food, then counted his belches. Talk resumed in the village. Men chanted on the shore, more Volga Boatmen stuff. For three hours of darkness, China was almost quiet. By the dawn’s early light I saw the black flag.