by Emily Hahn
“I don’t suppose I’ll love them,” he admitted, “but I won’t be living with them. You can put them up in the Dogs’ Home, I should think. And then you’ll have no ties left in Shanghai.” He spoke with satisfaction. I dashed off to the telegraph offices and started to make arrangements. It developed that if I waited for the gibbons that would put off my departure for the States too. Their keeper wrote to me rather crossly that he couldn’t simply dump them onto a southbound steamer. No captain would consent to such a cargo. The gibbons would have to wait about for a proper chaperon, and people willing to chaperon gibbons for a week on the high seas are few and far between. He was looking around, but I would have to be patient.
I was. More cheerfully than I would have expected to do it, back in Chungking, I changed my ticket again. I was now booked to sail in November instead of October, and Charles was awfully pleased. “I can still get home for Christmas,” I explained.
One evening we set out for a party that promised to be out of the ordinary run of Hong Kong parties. It usually did seem to be that way when I went out with Charles, but this was stranger than ever. There was a man working for his office who had a queer history. He was Chinese but had been born in Mexico and brought up in Japan, and when he came back to his native land he didn’t marry an ordinary Chinese girl, but a Eurasian.
“It’s the old lady, his mother-in-law, that I want to meet,” said Charles. “She’s English. She married some Chinese out in Australia and went to a little town with him, somewhere near Canton, and they had about twenty children. This chap says she’s never gone back to England in forty years. I thought you’d be interested.”
I fell for Mrs. Lee right away. She may not have been back to England in forty years, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at her. She was British from top to toe. She dressed like a cockney and she talked like a cockney.
“Forty years over here, my dear,” she said to me. “I wouldn’t know the old town now, they tell me. Oh, I’ve had a life, I have. Helping my husband’s family thresh the wheat, just like any farmer woman, and me six months gone with my first. … Oh, I’ve had a life.”
The conversation was bewilderingly polyglot. Charles and the son-in-law chattered in Japanese, Mother-in-law and Mickey chattered in English, Mickey and Daughter chattered in Mandarin, and the young couple talked to each other in some other language, probably Shanghai dialect, while now and then Mrs. Lee said something to her offspring in Cantonese.
“I’ll have just a little of that wine,” said Mrs. Lee. “My daughter can tell you that I never drink, nor smoke either. But tonight’s rather an occasion, meeting the major and all. And you, my dear, how does it happen they didn’t ship you off for the evacuation? Did your husband the major put his foot down?”
“I was in the interior,” I said evasively, “and got a visa to come back after the evacuation ship had left.”
“Aren’t you the cunning one,” said Mrs. Lee.
I realize that it is time to explain the evacuation, before we go any further. We are in Hong Kong now to stay, and we must understand the situation clearly. In May, while I was still up in the Szechuan hills, the political developments between Britain and Japan must have taken a turn for the worse, though the public didn’t know about it. Charles and a few other experts recommended to the colonial government that the service women and children be sent away. This is always done in British colonies when things get ticklish. The Hong Kong government accepted the suggestion with alacrity, but they went further than any such government had ever gone before. In a way, they repeated the behavior of the British diplomats in Shanghai, back in 1937. They ordered the evacuation of all women and children.
A lot of confusion ensued. To begin with, the order wasn’t clear. Just what women and children, asked the public, were meant? The reply was ill considered: “Pure British,” said the government. This implied that the thousands of Eurasians and Portuguese who held British passports were not considered worth saving from danger, though the non-Asiatic women and children were. These Asiatics, always sensitive and considering themselves badly treated (which they were), blew up. The officials who answered their charges got in deeper and deeper. “You natives,” they said in effect, “are at home here. In a pinch you can go into Free China. Our women from England are in a different category.”
Now of course this wasn’t true. Most Eurasians born in Hong Kong have been brought up like English people. They wear foreign-style clothes, speak English, can’t write or read Chinese, and consider that they are as British as anyone. After all, that is what they have been taught all their lives, though they are snubbed too. They took the decision hard. They were very much insulted.
The Portuguese had a beef too. Although they come from Macau, they hold British passports and feel entitled to all the privileges pertaining thereto. And they are as sensitive as the other Eurasians.
“We can’t help it,” said the harried authorities. “We are giving free transportation to these women and children, all the way to Australia. We can’t send every woman and child in town down under. Australia couldn’t cope with them. It would cost far too much. And we would have to take the millions of Chinese too, if we start accepting Eurasians. It’s out of the question.”
It was a bad mess. On top of all that there was trouble with the “pures,” as the other Hong Kong citizens began bitterly calling the English-born people. Most of those women didn’t want to go. They didn’t want to leave their peaceful, luxurious houses. They didn’t want to leave their husbands. It would be for an indefinite period, they knew. Hong Kong was not in danger, they said, and anyway, what if she was? Weren’t they perfectly capable of seeing it through? Why must they be sent away like useless appendages? They were furious and disturbed and unconvinced and stubborn. Not the service women of course — they are used to being shipped around — but the ordinary women of Hong Kong.
“Go to Australia?” they cried. “Do you know how difficult it is to get maids in Australia, or cooks? Who’s going to help me with Baby? Why do I have to go if those Eurasian women can stay? Why must I go and leave my husband free to play around with Chinese tarts? What about my house? Why, this is my home. If I were living in England would you make me go away, just because there’s danger of an invasion from the Germans? And who says we are in danger here, anyway? Didn’t you say you could manage those silly little Japs?”
The husbands shouted, “Who’s going to pay the expenses of double households for me? Can you guarantee that my wife will behave herself? There’s a law, and I stand by the law.”
There began a great spectacle of shuffling and evasion. Although one of the officials threatened and stormed and said he would load the women on the evacuation ships forcibly, carrying them aboard kicking and screaming if necessary, he never gave the order. Some women went away quietly enough. Many who didn’t want to go managed not to go. They signed up as “essential war workers,” as nurses, or as some other sort of helper. Other women simply wouldn’t go, and when bullying and cajoling and threatening failed they were left undisturbed. Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, the wife of the director of medical services, caused a scandal by slipping out of town and taking her four-year-old daughter to Canton, where she remained quietly until the registration of the women was completed, and then she came back equally unobtrusively. On that wangle she was bound to get away with it.
Other confusion lay in the fact that women like myself, who were not British, were allowed to stay as we liked. The government didn’t consider itself responsible for us. If the American Government should order me out, that would be a different matter, but the American Government, according to our law, couldn’t do any such thing even if it wanted to. I was all right in Hong Kong. Nobody cared at all. On a Saturday night at the Grips you could see all of us, the Americans and the French and the Dutch and the Eurasians and the Chinese, not to mention quite a few Englishwomen who had got out of going. We were popular because we were becoming rare. It was a fine time for the girls.
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Indirectly the situation was responsible, too, for Ursula’s protracted absence. She had gone to Australia all right, according to plan, where she stayed with Charles’s cousins and didn’t like it at all. As soon as she could she started back to Hong Kong. When she arrived in Singapore, however, the blow had already fallen and the evacuation had taken place. If Ursula had been in Hong Kong at the time she would no doubt have managed to stay, as so many of her friends did. She might even have gone with her friend Vera Armstrong as far as Manila and then come back again, as Vera did, full of rage at the idea of being cut off from her house for any longer period. (“My husband’s a lawyer,” stormed Vera, “and he says they can’t make me go away; they can’t.”) But as it was, she was in Singapore. Singapore, too, was having evacuation troubles. Ursula decided not to risk being sent back to Australia. She quickly grabbed a job with a government department which entitled her to stay put, and sat down to wait for a later chance to get back to Charles. Well-meaning females began to write hinting letters to her, and Ursula hastily wrote Charles, asking him what mischief was afoot.
Now we can go back to Mrs. Lee and the Chinese restaurant. “Babies are dear little things,” she said, “though I did have too many meself. … Have you any babies, madam?”
“No,” I said, solemnly shaking my head. “No, I can’t have any children.”
“Oh, isn’t that a pity!”
Over on the other side of the table, Charles pricked up his ears and looked at me.
“Yes,” I said to Mrs. Lee, “I’m sorry too.”
“Nonsense,” said Charles crisply. “Of course you can have children.”
“As it happens, I can’t,” I said, and I thought I was telling the truth. “I’ve been told so, often, by doctors. I can’t.”
“Of course you can. I’ll bet you anything you like.”
“What is this nonsense?” he demanded in the taxi, after we had sent the guests off to the ferry. “Is that why you carry on so about children, weeping at Wu Teh-chen’s and keeping gibbons and all that?”
“Oh no. I don’t want children. I never did.”
“All women want children,” said Charles with amusing certainty. “But see here; do you really want a child? If so, I’ll let you have one.”
“Huh?”
“Let’s have one,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. It can be my heir. Just to make things all right, if I can get a divorce and if it all works out, we might even get married. If we want to, that is, and after a long time for considering.”
“Do you mean it?” I asked after a pause. I knew already, though, that he did. He was being flippant, but that is the way Charles is; he just is flippant. It didn’t alter the fact that he meant it.
“I never heard such nonsense,” said Charles indignantly. “Can’t have children! Whatever will Mrs. Lee think of me?”
“All right,” I said, “let’s try.”
“And you can turn in your steamship ticket,” he said. “You had better do that tomorrow.”
Chapter 30
Whenever I think back on September 1940, which is often, I am freshly surprised at the simplicity that marked our deciding. It was an important decision, but we settled it all in a few sentences; we must have been thinking it over, each of us, in a hidden way for a long time. If you are a writer you know how your brain seems to work sometimes all by itself, unbidden, and on company time. Then all of a sudden out comes a finished piece of work, well turned and neat and a complete surprise to the conscious level of your brain. That’s how Carola was planned, and though I may not have much in my life to be smug about, I recommend the method. I found it thoroughly satisfactory. It must have been right, too, because for the next year and a bit of time over I was happy. I have been happy before, but not like that, in such a solid way.
I don’t know how Charles felt. I don’t understand him at all and I don’t try to, because that is an impertinence I resent between lovers — poking and prying around in one’s emotions. But if I had worried on his behalf I might have been less selfishly happy. British folklore and Charles’s family history are rich in examples of women who were noble, who understood their men, and who denied themselves love when it was necessary for their mates’ careers thus to deny. I’m afraid I didn’t give it so much as a thought until my doctor scolded me, much later — too late. Even then I didn’t care as I should. I suppose like the young savage I was I felt that it was his career and his lookout. If he didn’t care, why should I? The doctor wouldn’t believe that Carola was Charles’s idea to begin with. Most people won’t believe it. Most people, naturally, think she was an unavoidable accident. They don’t know from nothing!
Then too I felt that as a career the Army wasn’t really very close to Charles’s heart. Not that he neglected the Army; he was supposed to be damned good at his work. But he hadn’t exactly picked it out for himself. It was foreordained. All his paternal ancestors were service people, just like those families we make fun of on the stage: Charles’s brother was in the Army, they meant Charles for the Navy, but he was too nearsighted and so he went to Sandhurst instead. It was taken for granted. Otherwise his tastes and talents would have made him a don in a university. Even after he had his commission, universities offered him fellowships, and he had to reject them, though reluctantly.
At the age of fourteen Charles was deeply immersed in Portuguese and Japanese. It is a combination that led him inevitably to sixteenth-century studies in the Far East. A great-uncle was captain in the Opium Fleet and lies buried now in Macau. Charles read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society when he was seventeen, and no doubt his interest in Asia is the direct result of that uncle and of the library that the family collected afterward, based on Nunky’s exploits. Decidedly he isn’t a straight military type, and I should be excused that I have never thought of him in that way. Yet he looked it, God knows, even when he wasn’t in uniform. He walked and talked and drank like an Army officer.
We never talked about his career. He would have snorted and spat if I used the word. He didn’t think much of the British setup out there. “Hong Kong is the dumping ground for the duds,” he said. “Including me. Any old fool who can’t be used elsewhere is dumped out here in Hong Kong. Look at them!”
Naturally we didn’t announce our decision to the city, but when I canceled my passage to America the word went around, as such things always did in that little gossiping community, and people wondered why, or, less delicately, who. Visitors from Shanghai were puzzled, too, and did a good deal of sniffing, trying to locate the rat. I embarked on a long series of cables home, asking my brother-in-law to find out how difficult it was, after returning to the States, for a woman to get permission to get out again. He knew what I meant, of course; none of the family had any illusions that I would want to stay home once I had got there. He looked it all up and answered frankly that my chances of getting back to the Far East, unless things cleared up a good deal, were slim. All of that correspondence softened the disappointment Mother felt when a letter came at last, putting off my return home yet again. For the first time, now that it was irrevocable that I was not going, I felt genuinely homesick.
I made plans. No bride could have gone about fixing up her home more calmly. The more I recall it the more I wonder now at the utterly natural way I went into the proposition. Maybe there are times in our lives when, in spite of all our civilization, we are capable of following instinct blindly. There was only one time I know of that Charles pulled back and took a look squarely at the difficulties of the situation.
He was always busy. You must think of the following year as one of hectic activity on his part. He had to be within reach of his office all the time, all day and all night, and he tried to arrange the week so that nothing would be neglected. On his free evenings he did his own work, reading and writing historical articles, and he wanted to be absolutely quiet and undisturbed at those times. He allowed himself one or sometimes two parties a week. When he was busy I did as I liked, but it w
as understood that Saturday was the one afternoon and night that he could spend with me without office work or any treatises on sixteenth-century Japan interfering. And Wednesday afternoon. Charles was always methodical.
This was on a Saturday evening. We were dining out and I was waiting for him, though it wasn’t time for him yet, when he called up. (I was still living in the Gloucester.) “I’m coming ten minutes early,” he said with a false sort of briskness. “There’s something I want to talk over before we go out.” It was just like him, and like the pressure of his work, that he had to plan hours in advance for ten minutes. He came in looking impossibly picturesque in his uniform mess jacket, strapped trousers, and cap. Hong Kong was full of such pleasant frippery in those days, when we were at war and yet we weren’t. I probably looked picturesque myself; I can remember how I loved that dress. It had a full, full skirt; it was a printed chintz, with enormous poppies sprinkled around it. The two of us looked like a scene in Cavalcade, but I don’t think we sounded like it.
“About this baby,” said Charles. He was walking up and down the room, not looking at me because he was embarrassed.
“Yes?” I said. I was sitting on the bed, looking straight at him for the same reason.
“Have you thought,” he said, “that if we have this baby it’ll show?”
I replied, after a short pause, that the idea had, as a matter of fact, already occurred to me.
“But then you can’t go to cocktail parties,” he said, very worried. “You can’t go around looking like that.”
I said, “I don’t have to go to cocktail parties when it comes to that point. I won’t want to.”
“You wouldn’t expect me to take you out to the Sheko pool?” he insisted.