China Seas

by John Harris

  The journey across the sea of Japan was uneventful, but, as they passed the Tsushima Islands and continued south-west past the Cheju Straits, leaving Shanghai on their starboard bow, a small twinge of guilt struck Willie. Thank God, he thought, that Abigail was in America.

  He was committed now and he persuaded himself that he was only rescuing someone who was in danger of disappearing into one of the Cheka’s concentration camps. He knew it wasn’t merely that, though, because he had spent the nights in the big captain’s bunk that Yeh used. Yeh had said nothing, merely moving his belongings into the mate’s cabin, while the mate disappeared into the bosun’s cabin and the bosun moved in with the ship’s carpenter.

  Hong Kong came up at last, Victoria Peak lifting out of the mist, then the deeply indented shores of the mainland and finally the white buildings of the harbour and the uneven tops of the new office blocks and the distant roofs of the hill properties.

  Like Shanghai’s waterfront, the harbour was jammed with sampans, tall Foochow junks gliding with unerring skill through the other vessels. A P & O liner lay alongside the main quay, preparing to leave, her decks brightened by the colourful clothes of her passengers. Passing her on the way to Macao was a squat ferry edging slowly into the stream.

  Simbang, née Lady Roberts,lay out of the mainstream of shipping and they went ashore by sampan accompanied by George Kee, who was to negotiate a cargo and then travel back with the ship to Shanghai. A cool monsoon wind was blowing, keeping the temperature away from the humidity with which the port was plagued, yet the sun was brilliant, making the water glitter with diamond points and the white buildings ashore glow as if under a searchlight. They found a taxi at once and Willie pushed Nadya into it with her suitcase and a box containing the objets d’art they had brought away in their pockets.

  They found a hotel, not the best but somewhere modest, because she preferred to be where it was quiet and where questions wouldn’t be asked. It had a shabby Edwardian façade and a creaking lift with clashing grills and slowmoving fans in every room. It had been built for comfort, however, and the room they were given was light and airy and there was a balcony which gave a panoramic view of the rooftops of Wanchai and the tall buildings of Hong Kong and the Peak. Across the blue water of the harbour, covered with ships of every kind and nationality, was the waterfront of Kowloon with a view of the bare hills of the mainland.

  Willie had always thought Hong Kong beautiful, with its mountains running down to the water and the green coves full of sand. It was a prosperous place, a useful outlet for Chinese produce and a useful channel for trade in gold and narcotics and, for that matter, for the agents the new Russia enjoyed passing out to the Western nations. Chinese from the mainland were always crossing the frontier, weeping with happiness as they arrived in the great Western centre, where they could earn better money in the sweat shops the Chinese and European tycoons had opened to produce cheap goods for Europe.

  They spent the afternoon buying Hong Kong-made boxes, neat, attractive and leather-covered, and carefully placing in them what they’d brought from Vladivostok and wrapping them with tissue paper. They took a lot of trouble because they were to become Nadya’s stock, her capital, what she was going to have to live on until she could get herself established.

  For once, though, she would be unable to call on Abigail’s expertise and would have to work on her own. She couldn’t even pass anything on to Brassard because Abigail saw his accounts and would inevitably spot items which she herself had not sent. But Nadya had a shrewd judgement of beautiful things, too, because she had lived with them all her life and she decided she could handle her own affairs.

  ‘There is enough to keep me for some time,’ she said. ‘But I must acquire a small premises with a room over it to live in, somewhere among Europeans because Europeans will be my customers. Then I shall spend time going round the shops and studying values until I know how much I must charge.’

  There was a dreamlike quality about the few days Willie spent with her. They were registered at the hotel as Mr and Mrs Kourganov and nobody queried the fact that Willie always spoke English. They dined in the waterfront restaurants and wandered through the narrow streets, the bright yellow and red banners billowing over their heads, splashes of vivid colour alongside the Chinese characters painted on the shop walls. An occasional English matron staying at the hotel attempted to get them into conversation for no other reason, they knew well, than to satisfy her curiosity, but Willie had no wish to be recognised because shipping often took him to Hong Kong and it was amazing how news could flash along the China Coast by the bamboo grapevine.

  At the end of the week, they had found a small place with a tiny flat above, between the Chinese quarter and the British shopping area, a small select-looking place which had once sold dresses, its décor and furnishings adequate until better could be provided. The walls and carpeting were pink and there were even pink curtains at the window. They found a Chinese carpenter who hurriedly knocked up a glass-topped showcase and installed a safe, and hired a Chinese girl as an assistant. A Chinese sign painter hoisted his steps into the window, and at the end of the day they stood back and stared delightedly at the words A N Kourganov, curving elegantly across the glass.

  ‘You’re in business again,’ Willie said.

  He had written her a cheque for a thousand pounds, but had not gone with her to deposit it in the bank in case he was recognised.

  ‘It’s a small gift to tide you over until you get going,’ he explained.

  ‘A loan,’ Nadya insisted.

  ‘I don’t want repaying.’

  ‘Which is all the more reason why I must repay. You have a wife.’

  The reminder of Abigail was disturbing, and it kept coming back in a thousand and one ways. He had gone into the affair with his eyes open, however, and he knew there was no going into reverse.

  ‘I shall have to go back to her,’ he admitted.

  ‘Do you wish to?’

  He thought for a while. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I do. I want to.’

  ‘Then that is as it should be.’

  ‘I’ll come and see you again, though.’

  ‘There is no need to. You’ve done enough for me.’

  ‘I come to Hong Kong at least twice a year.’

  ‘I shall always be pleased to see you. My house, small as it is now, will always be open to you.’

  She didn’t see him off when he boarded the coaster for Shanghai, and staring back at the flat façade of the waterfront, the old feeling of guilt returned. Though he dearly wanted to see Abigail again, he was also afraid of what might happen when he did.

  Part Four

  1923–1939

  One

  Abigail returned soon after Willie reached Shanghai. She greeted him warmly.

  ‘No,’ he said in answer to her questions. ‘Nothing much happened.’

  Lying was becoming easy, but falsehood had always been part of business and he had been in business long enough now to accept that the truth was never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There was usually a little to be discreetly hidden, a little more to say than need be said, otherwise business would never flourish.

  Abigail’s trip had been successful and Polly had confessed her fondness for young Elliott Wissermann and seemed ready to marry him as soon as he plucked up sufficient courage to ask her.

  ‘He’ll make a good husband,’ Abigail confided. ‘He’ll be running his father’s business at Yangpo before long and he seems to be getting on well with Edward, whose ship’s stationed up there now. It all seems to be working out well.’

  She paused and Willie glanced at her. ‘Except for Tom,’ he said.

  His son Thomas worried him a little. Not because he was wild or difficult. Quite the contrary. He was a hard-working student who was doing well at the university. Very often, in fact, he brought home information from his friends there that helped his father in what was a growing climate of unrest in the Chinese quarter of the c
ity. He seemed to know ahead of anyone else what was going to happen and usually he was right. The fact that he was a help to Willie was offset by the feeling that he was getting into the wrong company.

  Abigail had thought about it, too, but her reaction was different. ‘He’s at the age when he feels deeply about things,’ she said. ‘Most people do when they’re young. If they don’t they have no heart.’

  ‘And if they go on when they grow up,’ Willie growled, ‘they have no head.’

  ‘He’ll be all right. He only needs to settle down. He will before long. He’s still crazy about Chan Fan-Su.’

  Willie frowned. He saw nothing wrong in Tom’s fondness for the Chinese girl. Mixed marriages might be frowned on by the wives of the taipans of the European community, but they often worked and he didn’t give a damn, anyway, for the opinions of the British wives because he knew that a lot of their husbands, like Gerald Honeyford, for instance, supported Chinese girls, who gave them the opportunity to get away from the starchy atmosphere of the transplanted British suburb that their wives enjoyed.

  He was reluctant to abandon his protest, nevertheless.

  ‘He has some strange friends,’ he said.

  ‘Chinese, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ Willie was trying to sound as if he’d been busy in Shanghai. ‘Some of them very political Chinese, too. That chap, Chou, he brought home. I’ve heard he established a branch of the Chinese Communist Party in Paris when he was there and now he’s been appointed secretary of the Kwantung Province Branch of the Chinese Party in Canton and chairman of the political department of Chiang K’Ai-Shek’s Whampoa academy.’

  Abigail frowned. ‘When the Communists and the Nationalists co-operate, Willie, it’s not a good thing for us.’

  ‘Nothing that Chinese politicians of any colour or creed do is a good thing for us,’ he admitted.

  Abigail’s words, spoken so gravely so long before, had never left him, and the more he thought about them, the more he had come to the conclusion that she was right. Though he had never met a Shanghailander who was prepared to admit it, they were the foreigners, the white Chinese, yet to a large extent they were running the country.

  ‘The one thing they want to see,’ he agreed, ‘is the back of us. Japs first, because they’re the greediest, but in the end the rest of us will follow.’

  It had been obvious for a long time that the Chinese were at last beginning to realise their own strength. The atmosphere had begun to change, subtly and probably not very obviously to many of the Europeans, but to Willie, with his ear closer to the ground through the crews of his ships, it seemed clear that the Chinese had finally decided it was time they took a hand in the running of their own country. Incidents – usually small and unimportant – had begun to multiply until not a day went by without some trivial but – to anyone who took the trouble to think about it – ominous occurrence being reported in the newspapers.

  The tension seemed to increase with every week that passed and, driving to his office or to one of his ships, moored alongside with clattering winches and swinging derricks, Willie was increasingly conscious of it. It was as if the Chinese – almost as one man – had decided it was time for action, and coolie labour for the loading and unloading of ships was becoming more and more difficult to hire.

  ‘The students are behind it, George,’ he announced to Kee as they sat at his desk brooding over the new problem. ‘There’s going to be trouble.’

  The truth of the remark was proved soon afterwards when a dispute at a Japanese-owned cotton mill in the Chinese area of Chapei ended in a flurry of fists and the killing of a workers’ representative by the Japanese foreman.

  The North China Daily News’ headlines on the case were frightening, not so much to the European businesses but because of the implied threat to individuals. The workman had been a Communist and the streets were filled with angry Chinese posters demanding apologies, restitution, even the disappearance of the Japanese. In their house near the Bubbling Well Road they could hear the yells as the students swarmed on to the streets in protest.

  Nobody was hurt, but a British car was overturned and its occupants manhandled.

  ‘What do you expect, Father?’ Thomas asked calmly. ‘This is China and the Japanese behave as if it’s their country.’

  Willie listened to him with a grim face. It was going to be difficult for some time until the anger died down, he knew, because there were always strikes and protests. The place seemed to live on protests, and, sure enough, a few days later Thomas appeared with news that the students had called for a massive anti-Japanese demonstration.

  ‘Not in the old town,’ he explained. ‘Here in the International Settlement. So we can see it, as well as the Chinese.’

  ‘Are you going to be there?’ Willie asked. ‘You’re still a student.’

  Thomas gave a sheepish grin. ‘They might not welcome me.’

  ‘You can’t get away from the colour of your skin, son,’ Willie pointed out dryly. ‘No matter how much you sympathise with them. Are you a Communist?’

  ‘No, Father. Perhaps I’m a Socialist, but not a Communist. I’m in favour of equality, of course, because I have feelings and there’s too much influence among the established classes, and far too much here from money. But I’d never be prepared to go as far as they’ve gone in Russia.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s not Communism, Tom. Perhaps that’s just a dictatorship of power-hungry politicians, and you get those at all levels.’

  On the day of the demonstration, Willie closed the office and sent everyone home for safety. By mid-morning the streets had filled with students, all shouting slogans and waving banners so that the traffic came to a standstill and all trade stopped. Watching from his office, Willie saw the police appear in a convoy of cars and spill out. As they began to lash out with clubs and drag screaming youngsters from the mob, his eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened into a grim line. Abigail’s fears came back to him and he was glad he had begun to transfer capital to London.

  As the students were jammed into cars, buses, vans and taxis – anything on wheels, it seemed – the mob’s fury increased and before the afternoon was done the whole population of the old city appeared to be on the streets, odd ripples of the rioting swirling back and forth across the bund. From his office, Willie tried to monitor what was happening.

  ‘They’ve surrounded the Louza police station.’ George Kee, who was in touch with a contact on the newspaper, put down the telephone and turned to Willie. ‘They’ve taken the arrested students there.’ He managed a nervous smile. ‘It seems to have got a little out of hand.’

  During the early evening, they heard shots and, soon afterwards, Thomas arrived in the office. He was breathless and there was blood on his shirt.

  ‘Father, can’t you stop it?’ he yelled.

  ‘Stop what, son, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Some bloody fool ordered the police to fire on the crowd and they’ve killed a couple of hundred.’

  ‘That many?’

  ‘Well, I saw some bodies. About a dozen.’

  ‘That’s better, boy. But there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not a politician.’

  The storm of fury that the killings started was not just local. The North China News announced that the Communists had formed an Action Committee and that there were to be demonstrations in Tientsin, Hangchow, Peking and a dozen other places, and that a Workers’ General Union had been set up.

  ‘Two hundred thousand members here, Ab,’ Willie pointed out grimly. ‘That’s just about every worker in Shanghai. They’re going to carry some punch. Things aren’t ever going to be quite the same again.’

  The punch was felt at once. As the Shanghai businessmen held panic meetings to condemn the killings and decide what could be done, the city came to a stop in the best organised strike they’d ever seen. Shops shut, street cars halted, even the rickshaw boys vanished from the streets. Students swarmed everywhere, many of them armed with s
ticks, intimidating anyone who dared try to defy the strike. News from the south indicated that even in Hong Kong the strikers had brought the place to a halt. The name Hong Kong meant Fragrant Harbour, but without coolies to attend to the menial tasks, the atmosphere was less fragrant than stinking. Some of the strikers had even moved up the Pearl River to Canton, to spread the movement there, certain of support because Canton was the seat of the southern government and the core of Chiang K’Ai-Shek’s resistance movement against the ‘foreign devils’.

  Inevitably, there was an incident and it was obvious that the students had worked things so that there would be, driving the coolies to a frenzy of hatred with their slogans and demands for action, until the hard-pressed foreign troops had been forced to use their weapons for their own safety. Finally, the crowd demonstrating against the foreign concessions were fired on by British, French and Portuguese gunboats and two hundred people were killed or injured. In retaliation, the workers had simply organised a blockade of all goods from Hong Kong and established tribunals to beat up, even kill, any Chinese, of no matter what class, who tried to defy them.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Willie said grimly, ‘that those changes we began to expect have already started happening.’

  The effect of the troubles began to be felt immediately by foreign businesses. A few nervous operators pulled out to set up again in places like Singapore, Penang, Java and India, and as trading slowed, Willie heard that Wishart’s were in trouble. The stories going round the Shanghai Club indicated that Henry Moberley, once apparently so secure in office as manager and husband to Emmeline, had disappeared and that Emmeline was thinking of marrying a man called Barnaby, who was her new manager. There had been rumours about Wishart’s for some time and now the general belief was that they might not last long enough to enjoy whatever skill Emmeline’s new husband might have. Their credit was still good, however, but only just, and people were beginning to look askance at them and trying to avoid doing business in case they found themselves landed with bad debts.