China to Me Read online

  “When I have my meal here,” he explained, “I go first to Jimmy’s Kitchen and eat something. Or I go over afterwards to Sun Ya and have noodles. Without rice, we Chinese go hungry.” After that I always had rice with meals even if it meant a bad selection of food values.

  An important thing for me happened in the green-and-silver room. Among all Sinmay’s hundreds of friends there were some who became intimate with me because they spoke English well and were fond of America or of England. There was Chuan Tsen-kuo, who had studied at Illinois. There was Wen Yuan-ning, more British than the British themselves, from Cambridge. Yeh Chu-yuan I met in Hangchow, and he later came to live in Shanghai as did a Hangchow friend, Mr. Yu, a novelist with a famously beautiful wife. Yeh is one of my more mirthful memories. He was very conscious of his home town, Hangchow, because it is one of the beauty places of China and because there is a famous school of poets there. Yeh tried to live up to the other poets. He modeled himself on the ancient Hangchow style and chanted his poetry in the Hangchow way, nodding his massive head as he recited and paced the room. He was a determined conservative, and my first visit to Hangchow was made memorable by a fierce argument I had with him on feminism, of all things; we shouted and struggled in a room overlooking the lovely lake. Regarding the exquisite hills in the distance, we went on talking like Yankee undergraduates. … It was a shame, but it was just like China.

  Those were palmy days for writers with a knowledge of both Chinese and English. Lin Yutang could vouch for this statement. He was another friend of Sinmay’s, and in those days was thinking of his first English book as he worked at editing a Chinese humorous weekly, the Analects. His was a popular name among the Chinese literati and Pearl Buck had to keep after him, at long distance, to persuade him to the English venture.

  These people were drawn together in an exciting new project, a magazine to be published in English, devoted to bringing about more mutual understanding between West and East by means of literature. The idea behind it was political but that was concealed. The same statements go for the man behind it — Sun Fo, the son of the founder of the Republic, now in Chungking and at that time spending a period, I believe, in Europe. The name of the magazine, a monthly, was decided upon as T’ien Hsia, which means “everything under the sky” and is of course, like any other connection of words in Chinese, a quotation. It means by connotation “the world.” A board of editors was formed with the names I have mentioned, plus a few others including Dr. John Wu, on the masthead. They asked Sinmay to write for them and he blithely promised, and sometimes even kept the promise. They asked me and I kept my promise much more lavishly. I loved writing for T’ien Hsia. I could be as snobbishly literary as I wanted and they liked it all the better. I reviewed a book for almost every number after they really got started, and now and then I did an article besides. Most of the other articles, I thought, were on the pedantic side, but that was only natural in China. People there like to be pedantic. They revere scholarship, and when they say “scholarship” that is exactly what they mean, in the old sense. Wen Yuan-ning was editor in chief, an ideal choice, for although his Chinese is not fluent — he is a hua chiao, an overseas Chinese — his ideals were thoroughly oriental. He loved learning and classical language. This love didn’t affect his sincere affection for T. S. Eliot, and led directly to a profound admiration for A. E. Housman. Then there was John Wu, who at that time was just beginning to be convinced that he should join the Roman Catholic Church. John had studied law at Harvard and was a pupil of Justice Holmes, with whom he corresponded for years. Now he was attempting to reconcile his Western past with his Chinese present; he was, like Sinmay, so Chinese that he refused to wear Western dress, and his house was severely in the old fashion. He went further than Sinmay and spoke English with a deliberate Chinese accent, a Ningpo accent, Sinmay told me. John was an odd, charming duck and he knew it.

  All of them, Lin and Wu and Yeh and Chuan, all but Wen, were reflecting the government’s actions in Nanking half consciously in these attempts to go back to Chinese tradition. Chiang Kai-shek was preaching resistance to aggression from outside, and the more emphatically he spoke the more blandly did Japan put on the screws. A lot of the Chinese journals were talking openly about the inevitable war. Chiang didn’t go quite so far. His enemies were in the happy position of being able to attack him from both sides, as being too precipitate in his desire for national independence and too much inclined to like Japan. Sinmay was a fire-eater. He wrote a lot of editorials for different radical papers and he had an editorial sort of mind; at least he did that year.

  “ ‘We will wait until the limit has been reached,’ ” he quoted Chiang in scornful tones, “ ‘and then we will rebel.’ But the limit has been reached, surely. What does he consider the limit?”

  The more I remember the way the British carried on in those long-ago days the less I can understand the Japanese attitude of hatred toward them now. England then seemed willing to give away as much Chinese territory as Japan deemed necessary to keep the peace. War would interfere with English trade and endanger her oriental holdings; Japan looked strong and would be the better ally (tacitly) in any case. The British diplomats of the Orient were of the stanch old-fashioned sort and all the Chinese talk of Russia and Communism frightened them even more, evidently, than it did Chiang Kai-shek. With Japan at least they knew where they stood in regard to those Communists. It is a small matter, but Japanese were permitted in the Shanghai Club whereas Chinese were not.

  Once during that first year I ran slam-bang into the British on the vexatious question of Russia. A young Englishman whose job was supposed to be decoding cables took me home from a party. I happened to mutter crossly about an Australian policeman who had, I thought, behaved badly in a mob the day before, keeping order. “He knocked an old Chinese man on the head with his truncheon,” I said angrily.

  The Briton cast a sidelong glance at me. “What do you do with yourself all day?” he asked in a careless tone. “Who do you spend your time with?”

  He went on looking at me sideways, and I said to myself, “Aha. Intelligence Service.” I was right, of course, and I enlivened the rest of a hitherto dull evening by allowing him to pump me. He elicited from me a lot of interesting facts. Besides having what he called an “anti-police complex,” I had Russian friends. Every Wednesday, I confessed tearfully, I met three bearded Russians at midnight, in a cellar on Bubbling Well Road, and we discussed Communist plots. The interview ended with my promise to be a good girl thereafter, and he took his leave excitedly. I went to bed in a cheerful frame of mind and promptly forgot the whole trivial incident.

  A few weeks later I ran into our own Intelligence officer at a cocktail party. He grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a severe shaking. “What’s that for?” I demanded, hurt and puzzled.

  “That,” said McHugh, “is for the trouble you have given me with the British. They have a dossier on you about a mile high. They did a lot of work, too, until somebody with a grain of sense wrote on the top page, ‘disregard Miss Hahn’s entire story.’ Don’t you do that to me again.”

  I didn’t. Of course, considering what has happened to me since, I’m sorry now that I pulled their legs. I tell the story for what it is worth as a curiosity.

  Chapter 4

  I went to Nanking when I was free of the newspaper work. There were other trips, but Sinmay wanted me to see the nation’s capital as soon as I could, because in a shamefaced way he was proud of it, still remembering his turbulent youth when he was one of the politically-minded students who tried to take a hand in remodeling the world. All the Chinese were proud of Nanking, the only capital, I suppose, that ever did duty for so many thousands of years in the same capacity.

  Once I met Loy Chang there just after I got off the train. Loy is as American a Chinese as you will ever meet: he was educated at Harvard and his children in Shanghai were students at the American School. Yet he said to me, “I love coming here, don’t you? It’s so exciting and
stimulating. And you see so few foreigners!” Then, realizing what he had said, he blushed and laughed. But I understood what he meant. It was honest pride that his country was governing itself at last without being helped too much by us. Even at that late date I was surprised at the long list I heard recited of American and British advisers to Chiang or Madame. Why, I asked Sinmay, were the Chinese so hungry for advice?

  “Perhaps they ask for it only to be polite,” he suggested shrewdly.

  The excitement Loy spoke of was that which one feels in any new, busy place. Nanking, the ancient city, was now a hopeful, bustling metropolis which existed for the most part in blueprints while the architects waited for material and labor with which to build it. Indeed, the Nanking Sinmay’s friends showed me as we bowled along in an ancient car looked itself like a blueprint. The roads were there, nobly and widely marked out on the dusty ground; estates were marked out too, with stakes and chalk lines and even, here and there, a fence. But except for a few costly and beautiful government buildings there was nothing there in the new city, just a modern hotel and miles and miles of horizon, including the Purple Mountain and Sun Yat-sen’s elaborate tomb on the mountainside. For life we had to go and see the older houses near the university, and the clubhouse where diplomats disported themselves. Usually Sinmay lived in a Chinese hotel in the old town. I stayed in the Metropolitan, a chromium-plated social center which must be the darling of the Japanese Government’s heart nowadays.

  “When I took part in the Revolution of 1927,” Sinmay said reminiscently, “I had a disagreeable job, helping rebuild Nanking. I was not the only one to work on it, you understand, but I had the cruel part to do. I rode out on a horse and told the workmen what houses to pull down so that we could have all these big wide streets. How the coolie people hated us! But we thought it was splendid, to tear down all of old China.”

  “Then you’re a member of the Kuomintang,” I said. You can see that I had been learning about Chinese politics or I would not have known that word.

  “I used to be. It was the People’s Party and we believed in it, but now I do not. I retired long ago from politics. I am an old man,” said Sinmay, who was thirty, “and I didn’t know when I was young how dirty politics can be.”

  Nevertheless he evidently retained some connection with the 1927 circle, for during those week-end visits I met many Kuomintang people who had been his contemporaries at school and university, and they had a lot to talk about. The conversational topic could not have always been just old times, I decided. Students, too, called on Sinmay as a favorite professor whenever word went around Nanking that he was there. A Mr. Tao who had a high position in the government was introduced to me in Nanking but spent most of his time in Shanghai. He became a familiar in my house, walking up and down the living room, waving his arms and ranting. For Mr. Tao was a dramatist and he dearly loved to act out his plays, making long, long speeches. … “This play Mr. Tao is going to produce,” I said one day after he had gone, leaving Sinmay silent and weary, “it must be rather boring. All that propaganda.”

  “Oh, it is,” said Sinmay. “You will see for yourself because he is sending you tickets for the first performance and it is necessary for politeness that you go to see it. And it will be good for your Chinese. Because of all his propaganda Mr. Tao is liked very much by government people and he has an important duty, which is why he stays in Shanghai.”

  “Can you tell me what he does, or is it a secret?” I asked eagerly.

  “It is very secret but everybody knows. He decides upon the government executions. The Kuomintang are always discovering people who are working against them. Judgment is passed and it is Mr. Tao who sees that they are executed,” said Sinmay.

  “You mean he is judge at the trials?”

  “Oh, there is no trial, in public. It is Mr. Tao’s responsibility to find out if they are guilty or innocent, a very secret work, of course. He does the execution afterwards. Not himself, but it is upon his responsibility. He hires the people to do the work.”

  “But, Sinmay, that’s assassination!”

  “No, it is execution.”

  Was he kidding the foreigner? I never knew, but I think he was telling the truth this time. Mr. Tao’s finely chiseled face frightened me thereafter. It would not faze me at all nowadays; I have seen too much.

  Anyway, the play wasn’t good. It was at the Carlton Theatre and in being bad was rather an exception for that place. I’ve seen a lot of good modern plays there. A stock company of eager and intelligent young people had a splendid time those last few years, breaking down tradition. Chinese tradition says that actors are a low-class lot; a number of old-timers were amazed that we in America and Russia made such a fuss about Mei Lan-fang, a mere artiste. Then too Chinese tradition used to have a strangle hold on the stage. Classic Chinese plays were like the classic poetry: they had long histories and were set in their ways — picturesque but dead. Sinmay was one of the reformers of poetry; he followed Hsu Tse-mo, a famous and beloved young poet who brought revolutionary ideas home from France and forced his country to accept new, supple poems in the vernacular. Hsu died in a plane accident, leaving a legend that did as much as he had done himself for his school of literature. As a loyal adherent, Sinmay refused to see any good in the old ways. Secretly he loved his classics, but he wouldn’t admit it. “You take the children to the theater,” he begged his wife of an evening, when the youngsters clamored to see the Monkey plays. “I hate it. All that noise of the orchestra and the singing; it gives me a headache and I can’t sleep afterwards.”

  A memory has suddenly come to me of my first trip to Nanking. Helen was with me and we were introduced on the train to Chu Min-yee, Wang Ching-wei’s brother-in-law, later to become puppet Ambassador to Japan after the war’s beginning, in 1937. Chu trained in Paris as a doctor, and used to be famous as an eccentric rather than a traitor’s relation by marriage. He began to be famous with his choice of a doctor’s thesis at the Paris School of Medicine: “A Study of the Vaginal Vibrations of the Female Rabbit.”

  When I met him he was dressed oddly in greenish-drab riding trousers and a fascist sort of shirt, and high soft Russian boots. Chu has always gone in for public games: kite flying, lantern making, fancy gymnastics, anything that a crowd can take an interest in and use for competition. Speaking to us, he discovered that we were both fond of riding. “You must ride my horses in Nanking,” he said. “I will arrange it all.”

  “But we have no riding clothes with us, Dr. Chu. We didn’t expect — ”

  “I will arrange everything,” he said.

  Next day a package was delivered to our room and we unwrapped two suits of Dr. Chu’s distinctive clothes, green trousers, boots and all. His chauffeur told us to put them on quickly, as the horses were waiting out at the race track. Very hastily we did so and were driven out to the course, just under the tomb of Sun Yat-sen. It was a beautiful course with the loveliest view, I should think, in all the world. Waiting patiently were two steeds. One was an old, cynical Australian horse; the other was a young, sturdy, but disinterested Mongol pony. The grooms explained the procedure:

  “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 b
ack 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.