China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  I was cross with the British myself. But I didn’t think it was Captain Boxer’s fault; he did not seem to me the sort of person who would not appreciate the Living Buddha’s special flavor. I defended him steadily whenever Bob went off into a typical Winter tirade.

  “Anyway,” I pointed out, “the Buddha is having a lovely time here. He has learned to go on the Peak tram all by himself.”

  “He has,” Bob admitted. “He goes up every day. Yesterday he picked up another Mongolian, up on the top; he was awfully pleased about that, and I think it was remarkable myself. He likes collecting fountain pens too.”

  I gathered as much information about the old man as I could, for my private delectation. I liked him. Of course one is predisposed to like a person with such a history; it is just like being bemused by Chinese women and their charm. But I would have liked the Delawah if I hadn’t known who he was. He had a sweet smile, a pleasant chuckle, and a halting delivery of Mandarin which was enough like mine to make conversation possible. He didn’t like Chinese as a general rule, Bob explained; Mongols often do not. He found that he got on better with Europeans. He was doomed, evidently, to a lifetime of nostalgia for the steppes of Mongolia, although one human life should not seem long to an immortal, and our old Buddha didn’t seem inclined to complain. Obviously he looked forward to the windy uplands of Tibet, which, as he remembered from another incarnation, was rather like Mongolia.

  One day when I was wondering how much longer I was to live in that awful hotel I received a mysterious message from a Chinese official. The ticket for Mrs. Wang, he said, was all ready, and I was to drop in and get it that afternoon. For no reason which any Occidental could possibly figure out it had been decided that I was to travel incognito on the plane. Don’t ask me why, because nobody ever explained it to me. That is simply the way things are done in high circles in China. I was writing the life story of the Soong sisters, and so I traveled under an assumed name, by special arrangement with the British and Chinese authorities. Everyone was duly apprised of this fact: Mrs. Wang’s ticket was made out. I called for it, feeling uneasily as though I should have worn a thick black veil and come by night, instead of strolling into the CNAC office on a sunny afternoon. (Donald always used an assumed name too.)

  The passenger planes flying between Free China and Hong Kong did as much of their traveling as possible at night. They started out from Hong Kong between midnight and two in the morning, and they started from Chungking or any other inland airfield at a time calculated to bring them over Japanese-occupied territory in the dark. None of us had forgotten the plane that was forced down into the Pearl River, when Woody, the pilot, had to swim for his life and passengers struggling with the river current were machine-gunned by Japanese.

  The pilots of passenger planes were for the most part American. By the nature of their work they were thrown pretty much together. They all lived in flats near Kai Tak, in the most modern building you could find in Kowloon, the Eu Gardens. The pilots’ wives saw each other as constantly as if they had been members of the same family. They lived the life of an American small town, glorified by the fact that out here in Hong Kong there was no servant problem and the “boys” made wonderful money, with bonuses whenever they went on extra trips. The women played mah-jongg all day, or bridge; they gave delectable lunches for each other and for the other American wives in town. They dressed in the American fashion and so they were the smartest women to be seen in town, perhaps the only smart women to be seen, because the young Englishwomen, though they tried, hadn’t really learned yet how to dress. I couldn’t keep up with them — I couldn’t drink enough, or play mah-jongg well enough, or spend enough money, but just the same I was proud of them, on behalf of America. They kept the town stirred up. But they were their own club, with little communication with the outside world save through the medium of the American Club, over in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. They were definitely one clique.

  If you lived on the Hong Kong side of the harbor, setting out from Kai Tak airport at two in the morning offered a problem to the uninitiated. The ferryboats stopped running at twelve at night, I think it was — or was it? Dear me, the war has knocked all of that out of my head, and yet those ferry schedules used to be engraved on our brains in the old days. Anyway, the ferry didn’t run late enough. An old-timer in Hong Kong would have known that you could always hire a little motor boat, called a “walla-walla,” for onomatopoetic reasons, I think. I was not an old-timer and I fell for the plane company’s suggestion that I go across early and register at some hotel on the other side. It was an elaborate and unnecessary program, but I fell for it. Mme. Kung was as kind as she always is, and arranged everything for the journey. She still maintained stoutly that I would stay in Szechuan only a week end, long enough for one interview with her illustrious sister. She laughed at my luggage, which was more plentiful by far than she considered necessary. But she helped.

  One of the Kung bodyguards was told off to see me into the plane. He carried out his duties with unnecessary thoroughness and made me feel decidedly of another world. He accompanied me on the ferry and saw me to the Kowloon Hotel, a building later to achieve unsavory fame as a Jap concentration center for American and British prisoners. The theory of this hotel stop was that I should lie down and rest until it was time to go to the airport. I couldn’t lie down and rest. I was much too excited. My head was spinningly full of Mme. Kung and Chungking and everything else. I packed my bags all over again, and when I started out to go just once more to the ladies’ room I was astounded and dismayed at stumbling over the feet of the Kung bodyguard, who was standing in front of the door with his arms crossed, duly guarding me.

  I had already tipped and dismissed him, with a secret feeling of relief, so it was a nasty shock to find him still there. It was worse when he came along with me to the lavatory, standing grimly on guard in the hall until I came out again. All the Chinese around there regarded me with becoming awe. I blushed and hurried back into the bedroom, cursing inwardly. At last it was time to go to the airport; the guard stood waiting, faithful to the last. As I climbed clumsily into the taxi I had a hopeful idea that he would now say good night, but he didn’t. He got in too, next to the driver.

  I climbed clumsily in and I climbed clumsily out when we reached the field, and there was a reason. Everybody who has traveled by plane in China knows why. And since everybody has also written about it in his memoirs I won’t drag out the explanation. We are limited in our baggage on these planes but there is no extra charge for bodily weight. Therefore travelers usually wear as many clothes as they can, and carry whatever they can cram into their pockets, and also carry extra coats over their arms. I was taking an overcoat up to some young bank clerk whose old father in Shanghai had begged me to do him this small favor. The old man had stuffed all the pockets of the coat with socks, tooth-powder cans, bond certificates, and God knows what else that was contraband. I had my own clothes to worry about too. They had told me that Chungking was cold and I was taking no chances. First I was wearing a woolen dress and jacket. Over that I wore a cloth coat. Over that a fur coat of Chinese mink. On top of all that the Chinese padded gown of plum-colored silk. On my feet were the famous sheepskin boots, on their first trip and gaining fame by the minute. I looked like a deep-sea diver. I walked like one too.

  There were lots of other passengers waiting to get aboard, but I was the star for the journey. I was expected. The bodyguard followed me through the necessary ceremonies, including the weighing in (I weighed one hundred and eighty pounds), and then before I had gone through the magic barrier that led to the field a tall man in ordinary clothes, with a drooping mustache and a British accent, invited me into the office room of the hangar. He was Moss, civil officer in charge of the airport. I came to know him so well later that I feel a slight shock as I write this account, at the thought that there was a first time for us to meet.

  He and Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr were about the only public-office Britons I e
ver met who could get along on sensible, human terms with the Chinese. These two, who bad very little in common otherwise, managed to cancel out a thousand snubs and unconscious stupidities perpetrated by less civilized colleagues. Nobody had told me about Moss, and I was puzzled but pleased at meeting him on the eve of my entry into Chungking; it was fitting, and a good omen. All the while we talked, while the plane was warming up, the Kung bodyguard stood just within the door in his now familiar attitude, arms folded, face sternly watchful.

  “He’s taking care of you all right, that chap,” said Moss, laughing. “He’s seeing you straight into the plane or know the reason why.”

  They telephoned up to the office: all was ready. Once more I put on the fur coat and the padded coat and the cloth coat and everything else; once more I shouldered the old man’s banker son’s overcoat, and I clumped down the iron stairs and was hoisted into the plane and wedged into my seat. I shook hands with Moss, I waved good-by, really good-by this time, to the bodyguard. He saluted. The plane roared, raced across the field, and suddenly was up in the air, heading into a dark but starry sky.

  Chapter 18

  It is hard to estimate how many books of memoirs will be written about the Chungking of those days, and how many times you, reader, will go through descriptions of the Chungking Hostel. Quite a few on both counts, I should think, because we are living in a good age for writers, and almost everyone who has ever published an article gets himself sent into Szechuan sooner or later. On the other hand, you will get a lot more data on the Press Hostel than you will on my first stopping place, the Chungking Hostel, because I didn’t rate as a newspaperman, and I had my reward: I didn’t have to go and live under Holly Tong’s wing. I fell into the same category as visiting plane salesmen and oil people. The Press Hostel was quite exquisitely uncomfortable, whereas the Chungking Hostel was just mildly awful.

  I had a shattering experience the minute I arrived in town. I got myself lost. The plane dumped us, about eight in the morning, on a sandspit at the foot of a shabby-looking cliff on which houses were propped with every sort of wooden beam, strut, or stilt, sticking out from the rocky wall at any possible angle that would balance. Some of the houses looked fairly solid and stony, but most of them were built of reeds or other woodeny material. There was a shaky wooden pathway out to the sandspit, and there were sedan chairs waiting for us as we got through Customs. Nobody met me at the plane.

  I walked out into the murky half-light that passed for daylight in Chungking and got into a sedan chair. My luggage was piled up in front of me and on my lap, and the coolies started straight up the side of the cliff, like mountain goats.

  I have never gone through the phase experienced by most Europeans in China when they first see rickshas. I was always ready to admit that it was shameful to be pulled around on wheels by another human being when I was just as able to walk as he was. But, I said, why balk at a ricksha when you are doing just as much harm in every other way, merely by living like a foreigner in the overcrowded country of China? The shoes I walk in have been made by sweated labor; the shoemaker, beaten down by my bargaining, takes it out of his workers, and so they are being exploited (by me) just as much as the ricksha coolie is. The only difference between the shoemaker and the ricksha coolie is that I don’t have to watch the former during his travail. The same goes for the farmer in the field, growing my rice, and the little boys in the kitchen of my favorite restaurant, and the workers in the coal and salt mines. And so, because I want to go on wearing shoes and eating meals and using coal and salt, I use rickshas too, without wasting time in insincere pity and oratory. But those chair coolies got me down.

  They breathed in loud, stertorous gasps before we were halfway up to the first zigzag in the road. I saw how their shoulders had been warped into great lumps from the carrying poles, and their legs looked foreshortened and squashed with all their muscles, from being pressed downward. We hadn’t gone very far when I yelled at them to stop.

  Mandarin and Szechuanese have an occasional sound in common. They knew what I was saying, and they stopped and argued with me. I said I would walk for a while. They said never mind, they felt fine. I said never mind, I wanted to walk. They told each other I was a missionary and resignedly trotted along at my heels. For some time I hoisted my overclothed, overfed body up the steep track, much too winded to look at the view, which grew better with every step I took. At last my breathing grew louder than that of the coolies at their worst.

  “You have walked,” said the front one. “You have walked well. Now sit down again; we are in a hurry.”

  Then we ran into more difficulties. We couldn’t seem to agree on where we were going. I said, “Chungking Hostel,” over and over again, and at last in desperation I changed it to the Chinese for “American consulate.” Nobody had told me that we had no consulate in Chungking, strictly speaking, because we had an embassy, and this embassy was across the river on the South Bank. The coolies knew it, though. They talked to each other awhile and then, resigned to fate, they started again at a brisk pace to take me straight into the Chialing River.

  At least that must have been their plan. They were going down to the bank just as fast as they could, when all of a sudden I saw two English people, a man and a woman. They were so out of place there in that Chinese village street that I thought for a moment they had been cut out of a book, like paper dolls, and pasted down on this background. The man was smoking a pipe and wearing plus-fours and a tweed jacket, and the woman, palely blonde, wore a camel’s-hair coat and no hat, and they had a Scotty dog on a lead. I shouted at my coolies to stop, I climbed out of the chair and rushed over to them. Their name was Milligan and they too were surprised at the meeting.

  “Where is the Chungking Hostel, for God’s sake?” I demanded. “My name is Emily Hahn and I come from Shanghai.”

  “It is just behind you over beyond that building,” said the man, and the woman said, “From Shanghai? Did you know my brother Jack Crompton?”

  I said, “Why, yes; he told me he had a sister in China.”

  “Our name is Milligan,” said the man. “You were going straight into the Chialing River. There’s no more roadway in this direction.”

  They set me down at the right place this time, and told me how much to pay the coolies, and went away. Waiting at the hostel was a worried little man who should have met the plane but had overslept.

  You must have read about the hostel; it didn’t have much future by the time I arrived. It had been put up for the pilots originally and for any official connected with flying, but now there was such a boom in occidental travelers that Dr. Kung had taken it over for them, and Chinese weren’t supposed to live there. They were distributed among other places where there wasn’t any running water and where the toilets were more primitive. We had nothing to complain about in regard to the plumbing; in such a flimsy structure it was really wonderful that we had plumbing. I was given a room on the ground floor next to the plumbing. It was a big room, much superior to the little cubicles upstairs where regular residents were salted away. Out back was a courtyard surrounded by more cubicles; the cook boys lived there and there was a big private assembly hall or dining room. The whole thing was built of cardboard, or, as Donald told me later, of lath and plaster. The government, expecting a lot more bombing, did not waste labor or stone on real buildings.

  I was downcast by the darkness of the weather, but I didn’t realize that. In Chungking for most of the year you must battle a weather depression that is something like the feeling an inexperienced person has in London. It is dark and moist and foggy in Chungking. This adds to the discomfort of the mud underfoot and the insufficient heating in wintertime.

  After a while I got over it, just as I always got over it in London, but that day I was chilly and sleepy from flying all night, and I must have felt like hell because I can still remember it. I went to bed. It was possible to go to bed in that room, and it was also possible to sit at a table and typewrite, and if you ha
d any clothes you could hang them up in a rickety wardrobe. There was one other chair, and that was all there was in this room, which was the best the town offered and which cost a very great deal. I don’t notice comfort much or discomfort, but even I noticed that the bed wasn’t very good. Just the same I went to sleep, and I didn’t wake up until several hours later when Corin Bernfelt knocked on the door.

  She was not pretty but she looked alert and amusing. She was small and skinny; her hair, light brown, fell around her shoulders long and straight and was held off her face with an Alice band. There was nothing to do about hair in Chungking, she explained, and without a good permanent she never could manage her hair anyway. She was English and talked exactly like my younger friends in London, rapidly yet with a drawl.

  There is nothing in Chungking but the war and the people. Except for the native population, who are only waiting anyway until we can go away and leave them as they were, there is nothing there and no way to live in the cardboard houses unless you make your own world on that camping ground. You make that world, when you have learned your way around, out of the people who, like you, have pitched their tents there for as long as they must. As things turned out Corin was a good friend of mine and an important figure in my self-built city, and I should have realized at the beginning that we didn’t think alike about people. It would have made a difference later on and it might have saved Corin’s life if I had taken the lead in those matters. Although she seemed self-sufficient and downright she wasn’t really. She was younger than I by a few years, and all alone in Chungking; she had drifted there by a queer series of circumstances.