by Emily Hahn
“You have insulted the woman I love,” he said, shaking with passion. “You have spoken her name. I challenge you to a duel,” or words to that effect. Teddy was really his closest friend among the foreigners, and his champion to boot. It was an awkward and painful situation. Holly smoothed it over for the time being, and gave Ma some work out of town so that he might calm down at leisure. Holly was worried, though, and displeased with me, which was natural but unfair. He didn’t know what I had been up to with his difficult protégé, but he suspected the worst.
Teddy hurried over to make his report to me and to find out what had been going on. “Did you correspond with Ma?” he demanded.
“Certainly I did,” I said. “So what?”
He moaned. “Oh, you shouldn’t. … He might show those letters around,” he said. “He isn’t responsible.”
“But there’s nothing to show,” I said. “Let him show them if he likes. What’s the matter with you, Teddy?”
Teddy, an innocent boy in spite of all his ambitions, had the hot and easily fired imagination of all innocent boys. He stared at me with moist bright eyes. “Did you make love with him?” he persisted.
“Either get out of here, Teddy,” I said, “or talk about something that makes sense. Have you ever looked at his teeth?”
Teddy is very difficult to convince away from something he hopes is true. We settled down to a half hour of poetry. I always enjoyed those sessions because Teddy let me read aloud as much as I liked, and what is more, he listened. But I still felt ruffled. I was getting just a bit fed up with Chungking.
One day toward the end of March I found myself being jolted out of the routine forever. At least I thought so then. Donald telephoned me and told me he was leaving town. I had to coax and tease him a bit before he would go any further, but at last I elicited the information that Mme. Chiang, too, was leaving town. Anybody else would have put it the other way around — Madame was going and so, therefore, was Donald — but that wasn’t his way. For some months she had been hinting that she would give in to Sister Ai-ling’s pleading and go down to Hong Kong for a visit, but she had put it off again and again. When it wasn’t a group of her girls graduating and needing her to make a speech it was a misgiving that she had no right to take time off from the rigors of war, when all the soldiers were suffering so. It was the state of her teeth that settled matters. Other doctors could be brought up to Chungking to do their stuff, like Dr. Harry Talbot — Harry had so impressed Madame by his treatment of her sinus that she made him operate on practically everybody in the family before he went back to Hong Kong. There wasn’t a Soong sinus infection left in Chungking. But dentists were different. They need their gadgets and their offices. Mme. Chiang couldn’t put it off any longer, unless she was willing to cast herself on the mercies of a Chungking dentist, and she wasn’t. She was particular about her teeth and very wisely didn’t trust British dentists either, but imported an American from Shanghai to meet her halfway.
“That’s disturbing news for me,” I said very crossly. “Here I am and she goes and runs out on me. What am I supposed to do now?”
“There is nothing to prevent you copying me,” said Donald blithely. “I have been given to understand that an ordinary passenger plane, leaving at about the same time as Madame’s, has one place still available for a passenger.”
“Oh.”
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t forget you, as you can see. But don’t talk about this to anybody. There’s always a good deal of unofficial interest when Madame takes a trip by plane.”
“Is it possible that she’s going to America?” I demanded. That was a hardy perennial rumor, and it had many guises whenever it appeared. “If so, will I be permitted to go along? If so —— ”
“She’s going to Hong Kong, so far as I know,” said Donald, “and that’s all. Now you’d better go and pack.”
You don’t do much packing when you leave Chungking. There is an unwritten law which has never been broken by anyone, to my knowledge, except Wen Yuan-ning, and that is never to take anything away from the capital which can be used by anybody remaining there. It is almost impossible to get clothes and toilet articles up to Chungking for the market, because airplane transportation is the only method they have for getting supplies, and the available airplane space is needed for much more important things. A dress which means very little to a woman in Hong Kong or India makes all the difference in the world to a woman in Chungking. The same goes for men’s clothes, shirts and ties and braces and shoes, all those things. Departing journalists and oil men hold “potlatches” in their rooms when they go, and I did the same.
There were rules already laid down for my clothes. Most of them had been bespoken long since. I put aside those for Corin and those for Maya. I made as fair a division as possible of my few drops of perfume. I handed out the toothpaste, the stockings, the hats. Nobody seemed interested in my padded gown and I kept that, but even my Chinese mink coat was eagerly snapped up by Corin, though it was so old and badly tanned that the fur kept splitting.
I had left, when this was finished, my typewriter, the clothes I was wearing, my toothbrush, and my hairbrush and comb. I had still another toothbrush, but Kuo Ping-chia kept that. He said he could boil it and use it for a long time. Foreign-made toothbrushes were hard to get. I even left my empty luggage except for one faithful square hatbox which has been with me for twelve years and has never yet carried a hat. Fenn Lynch was invaluable on occasions like this because he had a car and government petrol. He always took people down to the plane. We got there in ample time, with Corin and Ping-chia, my faithful allies, accompanying me as far as they could. The airfield, that famous battered strip of sandspit, was Fenn’s own stamping ground and he careered happily around it, introducing me to Woody, the pilot, and talking to everybody. Ping-chia shook hands vigorously. Corin cried. Fenn, as the plane roared off, saluted dramatically. It was all quite poignant, because I thought that I would never be back again.
“And I’m sorry about that, too,” I said to myself, flattening my nose against the window to look my last at the roofless fire-whitened houses of the old city, and the rapids where the rivers ran together at the point of the flatiron. “It’s quite a place, Chungking is. How I hate to leave Corin! She didn’t cry because I was leaving; she cried because she is staying behind. Can’t I dig her out of there before she melts into the fog entirely? Get her a job or a man or something? Can anyone make up for someone else’s deficient vitality? Oh, stop it, Emily Hahn; you can’t manage other people. Look what happened to you with Ma Ping-ho.”
The trip grew a little rough, and the Chinese were noisily sick. They often are, on planes, because they think it is expected of them. One thing led to another and finally I found myself, very much out of character because I am not mechanically minded, piloting the plane with Woody keeping a sharp eye on my technique. It couldn’t have been flawless work, for the manager back in the passengers’ compartment noticed the difference right away. He wrote us a note, commenting on the shakiness of the plane since I had taken over, but I sat up there feeling important and doing what Woody told me to do until we reached Hong Kong, after dark.
How lovely it looked! We had not gone in for blackouts in Chungking as yet, but in retrospect I seemed to have been living in darkness. Hong Kong’s red and blue neon lights and the brilliant yellow illumination all along the face of the Peak grew more and more beautiful as we circled around, lower and lower. It had been a foggy day but as soon as we dropped lower than the clouds the air seemed crystal-clear.
“I’ve been breathing fog and mist for more than three months,” I said joyfully to Woody. “Now I can live again.”
“Going to stay here long?” he asked.
“No, just long enough to finish up the book,” I said. “Then back to Shanghai and my gibbons.”
“That’ll be nice.”
Little Billie Lee, the faithful secretary of T’ien Hsia, had been clamoring for me to keep an old prom
ise and stay in her flat for as long as I could spare the time. It was late in the evening when I got there. With a Eurasian girl named Mavis Ming Billie occupied a ground-floor flat of four rooms, out in Happy Valley.
Happy Valley, out where the racecourse is, strikes a pleasant sort of average for white-collar workers and bachelor girls like Billie. She could get in to work on the tram or the bus. She could afford one servant, an amah who did all the work of the house for seventeen dollars a month. She shared expenses with Mavis and with any third girl they happened to get to help out with the household; at the moment they were alone.
Billie did practically all of the real work that was done at T’ien Hsia, lived in a state of suspended exasperation with Alice Chow, and saved a little bit out of her ridiculous salary every month. Mavis, a stenographer for the Co-ops, had an absorbing and important hobby: she conducted a gymnasium class which had headquarters in England and was known as the “Women’s League of Health and Beauty.” Theoretically Mavis should have been able to live on her profits from the League, but it hadn’t worked out very well. The pure white ladies of the town didn’t take her seriously because she was Eurasian, even though they were obsessed with reducing, and the Eurasian girls couldn’t pay very well for their classes. So Mavis divided her labors, and she too put by a little money every month.
I sat down on my bed. “Now tell me about you,” I invited. “What is all this about getting married?”
“Yes,” said Billie, blushing. “Last December it was, soon after you went to Chungking. You met him last summer at the beach — remember? Paddy Gill. He’s a soldier.”
I remembered him. He was an Irishman, prematurely baldish. A sergeant or something, I recalled.
“It’s a good thing Mamma died last year,” said Billie. “It would have been an awful shock to her, me marrying a soldier. We don’t think much of soldiers in our family. But after the war Paddy is going to get out of the Army, and he was going to be sent away soon, and he had been after me for more than a year, and I wouldn’t have been happy marrying a Chinese. I’m too foreign in my ways. So we were married secretly. You were the very first one I told, honestly, Mickey.”
I yawned widely. “I don’t mind soldiers myself,” I said. “How are the Boxers getting along, speaking of soldiers?”
“Oh, all right, I guess. Mrs. Boxer’s been helping out at the Co-operative office, Mavis says. Mavis says she isn’t much help though; she doesn’t come in regularly. It’s always that way with volunteer help, and these society ladies don’t understand how to do regular work, I suppose.”
The girls showed me around the bathroom and left me to my accumulated letters. Vaguely I noticed that Billie was getting rather thick around the waist. Still, in wartime and with these sudden marriages, those things were likely to happen. I would wait until she talked about it herself. I yawned again and started to undress.
Billie poked her head in the door. “I forgot to tell you,” she said, “that this neighborhood is full of sneak thieves. Don’t leave anything near the window where they can reach it through the bars. Mavis and I keep hockey sticks by our beds just in case anything happens: I lost a dress last week. Blue taffeta it was, and it cost eighty dollars: I was just sick. They use long poles with hooks on them. We haven’t enough police in Hong Kong, you know, now that the town is so full of refugees. Well, good night.”
Chapter 23
The girls had a host of friends. They knew all the Eurasian and Chinese and Portuguese secretaries and stenographers in town. Billie kept in touch through her friends with all the downtown firms and all their private business, including the private business of the employees and employers. There were no secrets from me in Hong Kong, no facts or rumors kept from the keen eyes of those little girls, who recounted them all at home. They were also in touch, through Mavis’ job at the Co-op office, with the leftist element among the Europeans, and through Billie’s job at Wen Yuan-ning’s with all the visiting journalists. For girls with their limited background they managed to develop an unusual sense of what was going on in the world outside the tight little colony. They were well ahead of the other stenographers; instead of merely grousing vaguely, as the others did, about the unfair system that kept them underpaid and underfoot, they investigated the whys and wherefores of this state of theirs and saw a future when these injustices might possibly be wiped out. Mavis was fiery and resentful, but Billie was gentle and her feelings were easily hurt. Both of them really discussed the problem; they didn’t just blow off steam and then forget about it.
“Write us a book,” urged Mavis. “I’m sick of all the nonsense they print about Eurasians. Write us a good book.”
“It might help,” said Billie hopefully. “I’m thinking about my baby. Paddy says he’ll be all right in England, but I don’t know.”
Every day I listened to them giggling and chattering and talking on the phone to their friends, and I felt very old and motherly. When breakfast was over and they had rushed off to catch their bus, and the amah had cleared off the table, I would bring out my typewriter and the manuscript and get down to work grimly, for I was at that stage all writers know when I was near the end but just couldn’t seem to get there. A whole lot of things stood in the way, chief among them this visit Mme. Chiang was making to her sister. Mme. Sun had joined in the reunion, moving outright to Sassoon Road, and the three of them were having a great time, acting like schoolgirls and sinking all their political differences and even refusing to quarrel — for the time being. It was a nice sight, but it was bad for my book, because even the faithful Mme. Kung was too busy to help me out and answer questions.
Bored and worried and feeling stale, I turned for comfort to society. I didn’t know many people in Hong Kong; the young couple who had contributed to Sinmay’s distress were back in England on a visit, and Ian had gone to Indo-China. I missed Sinmay acutely but, remembering what had happened before, I dared not press him to come down to Hong Kong, and I didn’t want to go back to Shanghai too soon, not before I had wound up the Soong reunion. If it had been possible to telephone Shanghai by long distance this book would have a very different plot from now on. As it was, my only news of Sinmay was a long letter remarkable in content. For five closely typed pages he accused himself of having been a son of a bitch and worse. He went into details and lashed himself into a perfect sweat. He was more than honest in his analysis; he admitted having been lazy, selfish, neglectful, and even spitefully jealous of my capacity for work. As I read it my heart grew more and more light and gooey, like a slowly baking meringue, until I came to the last page. In the final paragraph he asked me for five hundred dollars, quite simply, and then in a postscript added:
“If you want to know why this letter is as it is, it is because I have been reading, How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
Damn the Japanese, who wouldn’t let me bring any of my old letters from China. The missive was a perfect description of Sinmay from his exasperating best to his charming worst. I groaned when I finished the last page, because there was no one there who would appreciate it with me, and because I couldn’t reform Sinmay, and because I knew that I couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t go on with the Zaus. It was beyond my power; we stood on opposite sides of a suddenly swollen river. I felt it, as clearly as I saw myself in the mirror. But still …
“I’ll have to go back,” I resolved, “and talk it out face to face. There are things to be arranged; we have to get all disentangled on that printing press and everything. And I owe Sinmay a personal explanation. He won’t really care; he doesn’t mind anything in the end. It’s my loss, not his.” Now that I had made the decision I was unhappy. It was tempting to hope that I could be persuaded to change my mind, back in Shanghai. Sinmay had always persuaded me before. But Chungking had made a difference in all that.
Oh, why couldn’t I relax, I wondered, and let things just drift along? Five years earlier I had made up my mind and chosen my place and selected a life and a burial plot in China. Why s
hould I now feel that I must undo everything, smash the edifice I had built, throw myself out onto the road again? I didn’t exactly know. I had never before stayed in one place so long, and the familiar routine of starting out fresh did not seem so familiar any more. Nor was it attractive, after all this time.
“Am I going to go on doing this forever?” I demanded, growing frightened. Again I didn’t know, but I did know one thing. If I had a child I would stay put, somewhere, somehow. The idea was there, a certainty standing all alone in the middle of my mind, and how was I to guess that it was just as big a mistake as my other ideas?
The only people I knew who were still in town were the Boxers. I telephoned Ursula.
“We must have you to dinner,” she said, planning aloud. “Wait a minute while I look at my book. …”
I felt a little thrill of displeasure at those words. People should not need books to tell them what their dates were, I said to myself severely, fresh as I was from the sparse social atmosphere of Szechuan.
“Here we are,” came her voice again, high and shrill and English. “Can you come alone — that is, are you — er — with anybody this trip?”
I recalled her frightened glances at Sinmay’s brown robe whenever he wasn’t looking at her. “All alone this time,” I said blithely. There was a definite note of relief in her reply.
“Oh, splendid. Would Thursday suit you?”
Yes, Thursday would suit me fine.
I met Alf Bennett at the Boxers’. Alf was an RAF officer, at once deliberately comic and knowingly glamorous. He had an incredible mustache, curled at the ends like Father’s in the Clarence Day play. He had high blood pressure and a growling voice; he roared, and drank, and knew poetry, and fancied himself a picturesque figure, as he was. Picturesque and privileged. Everybody knew Alf, and women were wistful about him, but a little afraid.