China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  Often on Sundays I broke my old rule and consented to go over to the South Bank for lunch. I was much more inclined to accept invitations of the sort nowadays, for the South Bank was safe from bombs if you stuck to the diplomatic district, which was supposed by the rules of war to be immune. The Japs dropped leaflets, warning all third nationals and diplomats who still lived on the North Bank to move over to that charmed neighborhood before they were blown to bits. The British embassy said, “Pooh, pooh.” We still felt somehow safe in that stately building. I walked over there early one morning and found that Tita Clark-Kerr had come down for the day with her husband. Time hung heavy on our hands, even after an air-raid signal sounded, and we decided to wash our hair. The two of us went upstairs to one of the luxurious bathrooms that looked so good to me, and got to work.

  We had finished washing and were setting our locks, Tita doing wonderfully well with her pale blonde ringlets, when the Urgent sounded. We paused and looked at each other questioningly.

  “Shall we?” I asked. After all, it was her embassy, not mine.

  “No,” she decided. “We’ll catch cold down there and I look a fright.” So we went on pinning and chattering. All of a sudden there was a whirling sort of noise and Sir Archie stood there, red in the face with haste and anger. “Go downstairs immediately,” he said in an awful voice. “The idea!”

  Complaining bitterly, but under our breaths, we obeyed him. It was just as well we went when we did. That day bombs fell almost on the lawn. We felt the concussion and didn’t like it at all. Later — but it happened a good deal later, and I will wait for the proper time to tell it.

  I ought to take time off here to talk a bit about my emotional reactions to the Japanese, but I didn’t have any after the first few raids. At first I did; I felt hatred and defiance and a furious impotence, crouching in a hole in the ground without the chance of even hitting back. Later I lost any personal feeling about it. Subconsciously I put the raids into the same category as earthquakes and measles. They seemed more like acts of God than deliberate attempts on the part of human beings to kill me. This was due, no doubt, to the fact that we didn’t see planes as much as we had done at first, in the carefree, daring days when we stayed aboveground and took risks. I was still afraid. A big “crrrump” sounding near by always put my stomach out of order and was followed by a strange desire on my part to go to sleep. Sooner or later in a dugout I always went to sleep. But my fear was not an angry fear.

  I regained all my personal animosity that day that I washed my hair, however. In the afternoon, after four hours underground, Morgan Crofton and I walked back together to the hostel, and we had a hard time getting there. Many city streets were in flames and the way was blocked, so we had to crawl roundabout through back alleys and over fences to get home. We saw no dead bodies; casualties were growing less because the people were learning to take shelter. But the destruction was enormous and I was hot with anger.

  “I would laugh,” said Morgan, “if we were to find the hostel spread all over the ground.”

  Well, we did.

  Chapter 26

  One half of the building, the back part, had disappeared completely save for pieces of the walls and roof which were lying on the slope of the hill back of the hostel. There was a lot of debris spread out in the street in front of the door too. By the time we arrived they had cleaned up quite a bit of it, so that traffic was able to get through, and we were allowed to go in the front door. My room was still there, open to the sky more or less, but there. All my belongings, however, were thickly coated with plaster dust. All the guests who had come out of near-by dugouts were there, doing what Morgan and I were doing — salvaging our property. We decided that the rooms were still habitable, at least until something else could be rigged up. Why, the flush toilet was actually still working! It is true that the bathroom door had been torn from its hinges, but if you propped it up again the room was usable.

  We spent a rather grim evening. Although the bombers hadn’t yet hit the electric power plant and we had light, everyone was wondering what the rest of the season was going to be like if the spring had brought so much variety into our lives. The hostel manager bustled about, getting us to pack up whatever we didn’t need so that he could put it into safety. Really valuable things, he promised, he would place down in the dugout where they would be out of danger of rain and bombs. Everyone had in mind going over next day to Chialing House, to see what could be done about taking rooms there.

  Chialing House was an imposing plaster edifice out along the main road some distance from the hostel. It had been built with loving care and a lot of expense by a government group headed by H. H. Kung, for the purpose of entertaining distinguished visitors who were not foreigners and who couldn’t stay in the hostel. Kung also used it for big official parties. That was where he gave his cocktail party and reception for Mme. Sun. There were tall red pillars in the main hall, and lots of windows overlooking the river, and hanging terraces. But when it came to rooming facilities, Chinese tradition in hotelkeeping had triumphed. The rooms were small and uncomfortable and there weren’t as many of them as you expected when you looked at the place from outside.

  I went to bed early, tired out as I always was after a long bombing. An air raid leaves you, for some strange reason, aching in your bones, as if you had been walking for many miles instead of sitting in a stuffy little cave all day. Probably I wouldn’t have waked at all, in spite of a lot of noise and thumping that trickled from the real world into my dreams, if one of the men hadn’t come in and pulled my arm.

  “Get up, get up before you’re brained,” he called, and hurried out again. I sat up, tangling myself in the mosquito net which appeared to my fuddled senses to be sopping wet. I heard a queer noise that came again and again: “Smack. Smack.” Then I realized I, as well as the net, was soaking, and that a heavy rain was coming down from heaven, right through the holes in the ceiling and onto me. The smacking noise was plaster that was getting wet and falling in slabs from the mangled remains of the roof. It was really dangerous to stay there. I groped around in the dark and got a dressing gown, and hurried out, slipping on the slimy floor.

  Downstairs everyone was huddling in the lounge and the lobby, looking cross. There was a good deal of comforting helpful efficiency on the part of the hotel boys. They put me to bed with Maya in a small dining room, stretched out on tables and wrapped in blankets. It was about midnight, and I dozed off, in spite of the noise and the glaring lights, until falling plaster woke me again. This time it was no joke, for the rain had soaked through the floor upstairs and now large gobs of plaster were falling on the first floor, all over the place except the middle of the lobby, which was protected from upstairs by a strip of intact roof. We were herded into this safety zone and stood there miserably, sharing umbrellas and looking sour.

  It was all so awful that we became hysterically silly. Morgan was brewing hot soup with bouillon cubes and a thermos of water, and he insisted that we drink the stuff. Some American boy brought out a jug of local wine and we had a bit of that, though it tasted like fusel oil. We laughed and whooped and sang, and our blood began to run again, and I was feeling better until Maya said, “Thank God for a sense of humor.”

  As soon as morning dawned Morgan jumped into his battered car and drove over to Chialing House and booked rooms. He helped me move most of my things that morning, just in time, for the hotel was filling up with people from all over town who had been bombed out.

  “They’ll bomb here next,” he said, “but for the time being it will do.”

  I went to Holly’s dinner party that night, a gallant effort considering that half the roof of the dining room was gone. Guest of honor was Wu Teh-chen, deposed Mayor of Canton. I hadn’t seen him since Hong Kong days and he greeted me with enthusiasm. Wu’s English is good but just a trifle academic. “Well, well, Miss Hahn!” he cried, shaking hands. “How are you after all this bombing? Still intact?”

  It is a tribute to t
he Pawley family’s peculiarly original flavor that more people haven’t heard of them. They have a long and fascinating history which dates back to the last generation, when the father of the four boys settled his family on an island in the West Indies and brought them up to do business in a big and imaginative way. I suppose Kipling had the Pawley type in mind in his earlier phase when he was enthusiastically fond of Americans for their initiative and poetry and practical sense of values. Nobody could have lived long at the Chungking Hostel without noticing that there seemed to be rather a lot of Pawley around the place, popping in and out. The thicker-set one who didn’t say much, and who rather drawled when he talked, was Ed. The thin nervous one who talked a lot, rapidly, and swung his watch chain round his finger was Bill. At that period we saw only those two Pawleys, but more were to follow. But it was Bill who told me about their factory in Loiwing. They came and went, Ed spending more time in town than Bill. I was slow to realize what an enormous thing it was that they had done, building an entire city in the jungle at the Burma border, bringing large numbers of American engineers and mechanics out there to live, and giving them all the comforts that could be thought of to make them happy about being thus cut off from home. I wanted very much to see the place, but it wasn’t to be my destiny. First I couldn’t afford the time, then I couldn’t afford the plane fare, and in the end (1942) the Japs found Loiwing and wiped it out, all the hygienically screened bungalows and the employees’ dance hall and the Capehart and the movie house and the hospital and, of course, the factory and the planes. The Pawleys were always spectacular in a modest way. Once they flew a panda from Chengtu: not a giant panda but a regular one. It looked like a surprised raccoon with the tail of a red fox.

  Ed was missing his wife and four children more and more acutely as time went on and his duties kept him away from his home in California. He is charmingly uxorious. And so one day Bill, flying through America, stopped off to see his sister-in-law and on a characteristic impulse scooped up the family, put them into a Clipper and brought them to Hong Kong. Ida, Ed’s wife, came on up to Chungking as a pleasant surprise. The Pawley ensemble happily took a wing of the hostel and made it vastly more comfortable than were the other cubicles, with a remarkable addition of a pair of V-spring mattresses.

  When the hostel was bombed the first time the mattresses were deserted by Ed and Ida. They went over to the APC House on the South Bank, where they decided to stay until things quieted down a little. Ed foresaw that there would be a rush for that South Bank safety zone soon, and he made his arrangements accordingly. The man in charge of APC in Chungking was Teddy Gammell, an Englishman, and with permission from the head office in Hong Kong he agreed to divide up with the Pawleys on the house and expenses. During her short stay at the hostel I learned to like Ida very much. People always like Ida. She is a gentlewoman and exceedingly nice to look at, with a lovely face, prematurely gray hair, and pleasing clothes. Visiting their wing was a refreshing relief from the grim facts of existence as we wrestled with them in the rest of the hostel. There was actually extra furniture in their living room, and there were flowers in vases, and pictures of the children in silver stand-up frames, and all the little amenities that depend so much on transportation. That was how the Pawleys had come to know the APC personnel so well; the European young men of the town trooped to their rooms for bridge games of an evening, even all the way from the South Bank. Though I don’t play bridge I would be there too, drinking real whisky and luxuriating in civilized comfort. I missed them now.

  Living in Chialing House was just like living in the hostel except that there were no Pawleys and I had a longer walk to the Havas office every day. The dugout was further away, and you always had to run for it. Many a time did I toil up the face of the rock cliff where that Chialing House dugout was located, puffing and blowing and sobbing for breath before I fell into the cave’s mouth, just as the Urgent went off. Life was more complicated now, however; one of my suitcases had been lost over at the abandoned hostel and this was a serious loss. My manuscript was in that bag, my photographs, cuttings, and practically all the impedimenta of the book except the current chapter. I was awfully worried. Every day between raids I went over and pestered the people who were sorting out the rubble. It took time. At last I was permitted down in the condemned dugout and allowed to root for myself. I quickly found the suitcase in a small cache there, covered with green mold but undisturbed.

  We had been told that we could probably move back in a couple of weeks, when the indefatigable Chinese had rebuilt the place. I was much relieved because my claim on Chialing House was soon to expire: there were dozens of people on their waiting list. One day there was a real humdinger of a raid. When it was over I looked at my watch and discovered that I would still have time to keep a date I had made with Mme. Chiang at her house, if I hurried. I duly hurried, along the road from Chialing House, noting with interest as I passed the Press Hostel that a whole lot of the front structure of the place was now down in the road, mingled with blocks of stone from the built-up bluff next door. Just as I started to cross a particularly muddy street, in a spot I knew well, the Generalissimo came along in his car going the other way. I turned around to look at him as he sped past, and at the same time I went on walking across the street with vague intent to dive through a shallow mud puddle which I had navigated only that morning in safety.

  Alas! Since I had crossed that street a bomb had fallen on the same place and the puddle which had been shallow was now a deep crater. I couldn’t have known. It still looked the same from the top. I walked bang into it. The passers-by were much edified.

  No Chungking pig could have been filthier or thicker with muck than was I when I climbed out of that hole. What was more serious was that I had skinned my knee badly. There was no time to go back. I had to finish my journey and present myself to Mme. Chiang all dripping and stinking as I was. I did it too. Madame didn’t care very much, for she was having her own troubles that afternoon. The Japs had got the range of her house at last and knocked a piece off the corner, and her husband had given orders to move outright to their country house across the river. Everything was in a confusion of packing. I had my interview, washed my knee, and went back to Chungking Hostel just to see what was up. It was on the way home, anyway. As I had expected, nothing was left at all, this time. The hostel was gone.

  There was Ed Pawley, with the office car, loading it up with his handsome luggage and the now sodden V-spring mattresses. Helping him was the APC assistant to Gammell, a cheerful young giant named Gidley Baird, famous in European circles for his size and in Chinese circles for his habit of taking on a chair coolie’s job whenever he felt facetious. Gidley was an enthusiastic bridge player and an old acquaintance of mine from the Pawley parties. Both men set up a cheerful shout when they saw me.

  “Get your traps,” said Gidley, “you’re going home with us.”

  “Just the girl we want,” said Ed. “I promised Ida I’d bring you.”

  “What is this?”

  “We think you had better come on over to the South Bank,” they explained. “This bombing is going to get worse and worse, and you’d better beat it while the beating’s good. You’ll be very happy at the APC House.”

  It was a wonderful invitation. There were people who were rushing around offering their eyeteeth for a similar chance, but nobody wanted eyeteeth. They wanted houses.

  “Why?” I asked suspiciously. “You don’t love me that much, surely?”‘

  They side-stepped the question, telling me to hurry up and get ready. It took a little more work to discover their reasons for such a sudden burst of hospitality, but I dug it out of them at last. They wanted me purely and simply to help push out another guest who was quartered on them and who was unwelcome. To get rid of that person they told him that I had arranged before his arrival to come over and live in the last available APC room. “And so,” said Ed, “you’ve got to do it, to back us up. Besides, we’ll be awfully glad to have you, of c
ourse.”

  “But I can’t come over here every day to my job and go back every night,” I objected. “What with the ferry and everything it takes two hours each way.”

  “Quit your job,” said Ed.

  “I did,” I admitted. “I’ve only three days to go. …”

  “Well, then! And Ida needs another woman in the house.”

  “Your Madame’s moving to the other side,” urged Gidley. “I heard about that today from the bank.”

  “Yes, that’s true. … Well, okay, and thanks a lot.”

  “You can come over and go back with me for the three days,” Ed assured me. “I’ve got a private boat.”

  “You would!”

  “No sense being niggardly,” said Ed. It was a saying he often used, and an attitude which was extremely irritating to people more inclined to be economical. Ed never knew how peeved he made Englishmen with that habit he had of paying high for what he wanted. But then lots of Englishmen peeved Ed too. Terribly.

  Joyfully I hurried back to Chialing House, a place I hadn’t learned to love, and gathered up my belongings. They weren’t much of a bother already. I had lost about half of what I brought to Chungking. I still wonder what coolie picked up my opal brooch from the hostel rubble, but it served me right for having left it out in an air raid. We drove the car over to one of the ferry stops and started down to the river. It seemed a long time since I had first climbed that cliff so as not to be cruel to the chair coolies. Now I knew every step of the way. Parts of the path were chopped out of the rock and parts were built up of planks, zigzagging down across the face of the bluff; some of the stairs were protected by railings and some were really dangerous to navigate. Here and there we passed a temporary house built of wood, perched crazily on the steep slope. In spring, when the water was high, this house would be swept away. After the subsidence its owners would come back and build it all over again.