China to Me Read online

  I wonder what happened to racing in Shanghai. I know what happened in Hong Kong. The Japanese always explained in advance that racing is encouraged “to improve the breed of the horses of the Emperor.” Just idle enjoyment of good horses or of anything else which is pleasant won’t do. The Japs get a lot of money out of racing in Hong Kong. They make the Chinese pay a large per cent of the wagers they make in taxes, win or lose. And still, though the Chinese have to pay out most of the money they bring for the privilege of gambling, though the races are absolutely fixed beforehand and nothing is left to chance, though our friends feel guilty, knowing they should not dabble in anything so pleasant as racing while a Chinese soldier remains alive to fight — still the course is jammed, packed, full and overflowing. Only there is a difference in their appearance. They don’t wear their pretty clothes any more. The men need shaves. The girls dress in wadded gowns, not fur coats. They don’t laugh; they watch glumly as they win or lose their few cents. But they still keep coming to the races. A habit of thirty centuries is difficult to break. Even the Japanese cannot do that.

  It doesn’t take long for a newcomer to discover that printing and publishing are ludicrously cheap in the Paris of the East. What makes it cost so much here? Paper? It was made in Japan and China, and the best quality was cheap, but we didn’t use the best quality when we parted out. Labor? But I was in China, and though labor was troublesome, the trouble was not on account of money. Anyone can publish something in Shanghai and almost everybody does.

  Sinmay was a publisher from way back. He had spent a legacy on a large, elaborate printing press that included a rotogravure section. Most of the time the press worked at printing other people’s publications, but in bygone days Sinmay had done a lot of publishing to please himself and some of his poet friends. Remnants of this former glory could be found in a small bookshop of his in Soochow Road, where “slim volumes” of forgotten poetry collected dust on the back shelves. The best sales were made by large, popular, cheap pictorial papers; Sinmay printed these too, and the famous humor magazine Analects.

  “Why should we not have a magazine?” he said suddenly one afternoon in the shop. “A double-language one, English on one side and Chinese on the other. I suggest it because of the format, which will be original. You see, Chinese writing reads from the back of the book, and from right to left. Well, English is just opposite. Well, let the book be printed in such fashion that the English and Chinese meet in the middle! I can get plenty of advertising for the Chinese half; what do you think about the English?”

  The story of Vox, our first bilingual paper, is a sad and common one. I hired one person after another to get advertisements. Usually it was a Russian who was willing to try it out when we talked, and then tried to sell me something widely disassociated from publishing. I sold two half-page ads myself. We gave away a good deal of space so that it would look all right, and as an afterthought I wrote the reading matter. We had good drawings because I used Chinese artists and Sinmay had plenty of those at his press — good ones, too. Whenever I needed a special drawing in a hurry Sinmay did it. Vox ran for three numbers, I believe. It was amateurish but would probably make interesting reading now, considering the date — 1936.

  I moved at last from the multicolored love nest in the bank. At the end of the year a bigger flat became available upstairs, unfurnished. I forgot my nervous dislike of owning property and bustled about buying things: a wardrobe and bedstead of luan wood, the blond material that is so handy for cheap things in China. I bought yards of burlap from the Ewo Cotton Mills where they made flour sacks, and I dyed it henna color and made curtains out of it, and cushion covers. I bought thin but gay-colored rugs, crockery, secondhand bookshelves, and a studio couch. I found an old man named Chin Lien to cook for me; on New Year’s Day he gave me the regulation present, a bowl of goldfish, and there it was all complete — a furnished flat. One could give parties in such a flat, eating off the refectory table and sitting on benches.

  In almost no time at all a year had gone by. I have here at my elbow letters that I wrote home from Shanghai in those months, and one of them gives an idea of what must have been happening in our correspondence, Mother’s and mine. During those years of travel Mother was always telling me indirectly, I suppose, that I ought to come home. She had no special reason for doing this, of course, except that mothers always want their children at home. According to Mother’s expressed philosophy women have as much right to independence as men have, and she brought us up to think that it is a fine thing for women to earn their own livings. Nature will out, though, and there was another state of mind in which Mother really passed her days. These hidden thoughts popped out when she wrote to me. She probably never said it outright, but I felt it when I read her letters; between the lines she said, over and over, “Come on home. Come on home, where I can watch you and make sure you are safe. Come on home. Why haven’t you married, so that I could put you out of my mind and off my conscience? Why are you living alone over there so many miles away, where I don’t know what you are doing? Come on home.”

  She never spoke so openly, but at times her control gave way and she went so far as to say that, after all, I could do my writing just as well in Winnetka. This gentle, constant tugging at my sleeve must have bothered me a lot. How much I have just realized, looking at these shabby old papers that she kept all these years put away in a shoe box. I remember now. I remember how that soft, insistent pull brought me out of the Ituri Forest and home from Africa, all the way around the world, back in ’32. I remember how often I told myself savagely that she would not be satisfied until I did something desperate, something to cut the silver cord once and for all, something that would show her how I too was grown up, just like all my sisters.

  “She won’t admit my right to a separate existence,” I mused, “until I have had a baby. If I had a baby she wouldn’t keep asking me to come home. I can’t follow her reasoning, but I know it’s true.”

  This decision didn’t help matters. Still in my unguarded, silent moments I heard that plaintive little call, secret and unspoken: “Come home, come home, come home. Come back to Mother.”

  At least once, then, I seem to have answered at the top of my voice. Here is the letter:

  About my coming home and why you want me to. Of course it’s because you want to see me. A very proper reason. I want to see you too, very much. But, darling, that isn’t the only thing we have to think about, is it? If I could afford it I would go back much oftener to see you, but I can’t. … I know you would rather, in a way, that I get a job and stay in Chicago or, better still, marry someone and “settle down” somewhere not too far away. But jobs aren’t so simple any more; anyway, I am set in my work, which is writing, and as for marriage — well, it just hasn’t happened. …

  I am certainly doing more work than I ever did. Can’t you take this sort of seriously? Can’t you believe I belong here just as much as if I were married to a man with a job out here? I’m not just wandering about childishly! Dear, I know you can’t trust any place but America, and of course we miss each other or I wouldn’t worry so — your letters have been bothering me terribly. But what can I do? I can’t just drop things and run. What would I do after I got home? Go through all those gestures again of getting settled in? I’m in the middle of a book; I’m in the middle of a magazine; I’m in the middle of China! I’ll come back when it’s time, and when there’s something for me to do there. …

  Now please, dear, be good, and don’t worry any more about my health; you never carried on like that about the marshy airs of Oxford. I think it’s the word “Shanghai” that scares you. … Now will you stop believing everything you read in the papers? A lot of us, women, were talking the other day at lunch about the things our mothers cut out of the papers and send us, stories about China, and I swear I don’t know where they come from. I promise to take care of myself if there is a war; suppose I’d been in Africa?

  Well, well; suppose I had? Here I sit typ
ing on a dining-room table in New York, after a busy day. I telephoned twice today to the nursery school where my daughter spends her mornings. They told me both times that she was quite all right, but of course I was uneasy until she came home, and even now … Just a minute while I open the door that leads into her bedroom. She might wake up and need something.

  Chapter 5

  I had not been long in the upstairs flat before I realized that my life was becoming far more social than before as a result of the move. The big long living room was a temptation to invite guests and so was Chin Lien, whose talent as a cook made me house-proud for the first time. He came from Peking, where people are proud of understanding the science of cookery. He was one of the few remaining cooks in China who could make a certain sweet, a basket composed entirely of glazed fruit and crème de marrons, covered with a cloud of spun sugar. Chin Lien began to enjoy a well-deserved fame, and people asked each other where he came from. Surely, they said, such a genius could not have lived long without being known among the foreigners in the town. It was Grace Brady, an elderly woman who was born in Shanghai and knew everybody, who traced him down.

  “He worked for my friend Mrs. Davis,” she said, “and he was a wonderful cook, always, but his temper was difficult. In fact Mrs. Davis says that she had to let him go on that account. He was marvelous except for that queer temper of his — clean and honest for a Chinese cook boy, and, of course, just about the best cook in the world. But he had such a rotten temper. Have you noticed, my dear?”

  Had I noticed! I spent whole hours cowering in my bedroom because Chin Lien was on a rampage and shouted wildly at his wife in the kitchen. At such times his old parchment-wrinkled face looked like a mask of drama; he seemed ready to weep with rage. These attacks always came on when I hadn’t given him enough work to do. Unlike most geniuses of his class, Chin Lien was a happy man on the days we had dinner parties. When he was happy I was happy, and so … and so I gave more and more dinners. Fortunately I was beginning to make better money in America at writing, so I kept pace with the grocery bills.

  Sinmay now produced a new version of his old darling, the Chinese-English periodical. I can’t remember now if he thought of it first or if it was the idea of C. V. Starr, publisher of the Evening Post. Starr at any rate was willing to back the notion in a trial flight, while we used our own editors, and the idea was this:

  Vox had failed. It was not the first bilingual magazine to come to grief. There was something in the idea that was fallacious to begin with, as Starr pointed out: just because Shanghai was a bilingual city, that didn’t mean that people wanted to read their magazines in two languages, did it? A man reads English or he reads Chinese. Very few people read both with equal ease. Therefore, why should he buy a paper when he knows he will use only half of it? If we wanted to publish articles for both Chinese- and English-speaking people we must fall back on an older system, that of double production. Give a man his choice, an entire paper in English or an entire paper in Chinese, but don’t thrust both down his throat. Why not publish identical magazines, one in English and one in Chinese, but separate?

  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 t
hem. 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.