China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  General Grassett, commander of the forces, had been exchanged. The new general was an unknown quantity and I couldn’t make Charles give me any opinion on him at all. I wasn’t interested, anyway, in anything but Carola. Gordon had at last let me supplement her diet with ordinary milk, and she was putting on weight fast on a half-and-half basis. I was preoccupied with all that, arranging my day so that I could nurse her at the right times. When she reached eight pounds we stopped the three-hour business, and that was a great relief. The household revolved busily around the nursery, and out in his cage my last black gibbon gnashed his teeth in impotent jealousy. When the coolie wheeled the pram past the cage the gibbon would throw himself at the bars and shake them, and howl bitterly. One day he got loose, but he didn’t attack the baby. He just kept circling around us at a distance, looking her over.

  “So that’s fairly safe,” I said to Charles. “Still, until she’s older I won’t get any more gibbons, if then.”

  “Much better not. And as for that cat,” he said, looking with mistrust at Jocasta, the incestuous Siamese cat that Cooper had given me: “I wish you’d dispose of it. Cats smother babies, don’t they? They want to get warm, and they climb into bed with them and smother them.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, they do. Vera says so. You’d better dispose of it.” He added, “I read in the paper Sunday that it’s not good for a child to be the only one in the family. We owe it to Carola to have another one, don’t we?”

  “Yes indeed,” I said. “Do you mean to say you really got that idea out of the Sunday paper?”

  “Why, yes. Sometimes there’s a good deal of sense in those syndicated articles.”

  The public watched Charles narrowly when Carola was born, hoping to catch him out in some outrageous behavior, but they were disappointed.

  “He was buying drinks for his friends and looking happy,” one lady reported disapprovingly to Vera, “just like an ordinary father.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, he is an ordinary father!” snapped Vera.

  Hilda came to dinner one evening, and we talked about the war. Everyone in town was supposed to have signed up for some “essential service,” and I had missed out in the rush, having been in hospital.

  “What can I do?” I asked. “I don’t drive a car very well, but I can do that in a pinch. I can typewrite, and manage a switchboard badly, and — ”

  “You can be a dispenser,” said Hilda. “I did that course myself, and all you have to do is telephone the A.N.S. leader, Nina Valentine, to sign up as an A.N.S. (Auxiliary Nursing Service.) In the meantime, while you’re untrained, consider yourself a dispenser. You know something about drugs and medicine, don’t you?”

  “Yes, a little, from Africa.”

  “Then that’s all right. And listen, Charles: if it happens, I think Mickey would be better off with us on the Peak. That’s settled; the minute it strikes, I’ll come down and pick her up with the baby.”

  Charles was relieved and grateful. I had better explain before we dive into the war that the whole Colony had already been warned for some months that we would in case of emergency go in for “billeting.” The authorities were suitably vague as to why they would want a lot of housing space in such a case, but they were definite in saying that they wanted it, and this is the way they proposed getting it: all of us were to move at the first sign of war. Those of us who lived on mid-level, as I did, would be given addresses on the Peak. We were to lock our best things up but leave all our rooms but one free for the billetees, and our bedding and cooking implements were to be left for their use.

  People living at sea level would be moved uphill too. People in Kowloon were to be brought over to the island. Nobody said what was going to happen to Kowloon.

  Afterward we pieced it out. The “defense plan” stipulated that the troops were to hold the enemy off as long as possible, probably three weeks. When at last they retreated the civilian population of Kowloon was to have been safely transported to the island, and there we were supposed to hold out against the besiegers for three months. It was all planned down to the last ridiculous detail, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it except that it didn’t work. We couldn’t hold the enemy off at all as it happened.

  What with everything going as it did, the letter from Ursula didn’t cause nearly the excitement it would have done before the baby’s birth. It arrived just two days after Carola. In restrained and ladylike tone Ursula announced that she was applying for divorce, not only for various other reasons but because Charles had said he wouldn’t live with her any more in any case. She wanted Vera, in another letter, to send her some decent clothes from Hong Kong, as Vera had such good taste. Ursula was beginning to love Singapore, she said. She would be willing to stay indefinitely.

  Vera studied the letter suspiciously.

  “It’s a great improvement,” I said, “over the last letter she wrote Charles.”

  “So she will get a divorce, and then there’ll be six months, and then — Well, what do you think?” asked Vera.

  I said, “Honestly, I don’t know. I suppose we’ll marry. It doesn’t seem to matter any more.”

  On Saturday, the sixth, a large Japanese armada was sighted steaming south, off the coast of Indo-China. The Volunteers were mobilized in Hong Kong. The paper said that Roosevelt had sent a cable to Hirohito, direct, pleading with him to avert this disaster, and the Japanese in Tokyo must have laughed grimly when it arrived. I don’t believe that Hirohito ever answered that cable.

  On Saturday afternoon Maya Rodeivitch was taking photographs of Carola and me, and, under his protest, of Charles, who dropped in for lunch in uniform. He was rather sleepy, for the night before he had been at a big Japanese dinner party given by his old friend the general, out on the border of the New Territories. He was worried, too. Me, I had spent the evening Friday with Colin MacDonald of the London Times, and an amusing Australian newspaperwoman named Dorothy Jenner. Colin had met her in Chungking, and he took us out to dinner at the Parisian Grill. I invited them both for cocktails at Charles’s house on Sunday evening.

  They came, and so did Charlotte, looking handsome in dark green. Our good friends, Barbara Petro and her husband, were there. A few others came, too, including Hoffman from our consulate. He told me a story about one of the consulate girls. It seems that she had hurried into his office one morning, twisting her handkerchief, and blurted out in frightened tones, “Emily Hahn has had a baby.”

  “I know it,” said Walter Hoffman. “In fact I’ve seen the baby. It’s a nice baby. Well?”

  “Well,” gasped the girl, “she’ll have to register it here, won’t she? I mean, that’s my job.”

  “Yes,” said Hoffman. “She’s coming in next week; we’ve already arranged that. What’s the trouble? I’ll be here; she’s going to telephone before she comes.”

  “Don’t you leave me alone with her!” cried the typist.

  “I suppose,” added Walter, “she thinks it’s catching.”

  Charles had a better story. In Hong Kong when a child is born the parents are supposed to register it in the city registry in person. Although I hadn’t known it, the nurses in hospital had been thrown into a regular jitter when it came to signing a required preliminary paper, after the baby’s birth. They didn’t know what to put in under the heading, “Father’s Name,” and they milled around in utter confusion until the almoner, Margaret Watson, a friend of Hilda’s, reminded them acidly that they had only to ask Miss Hahn. Charles had signed it, naturally, and then gone home, supposing he would be informed when it was time for us to go downtown to the registry office and do the job properly. One morning he received a mysterious telephone message from the registrar. Would Major Boxer come in to see him at his earliest convenience?

  Wondering, and a little apprehensive, Charles went. He was taken hurriedly into an inner office, and then into the inner office of all, and there was the registrar himself, looking very nervous and pink. “Majo
r Boxer,” he said, waving toward the hospital slip which we had signed, “you don’t have to do this, you know. There’s no law that forces you to recognize the child. …”

  Charles had been angry.

  The cocktail party went on to a buffet supper, but none of us was really merry. Charles’s uniform, and the fact that he sat at the radio most of the evening, had a dampening effect on our spirits. People went home about midnight. I stayed. We listened to a broadcast from Tokyo at four in the morning, but there wasn’t anything special in that, and at five o’clock I had to go home. Carola was to be fed at six. I climbed the hill, holding my long skirt up out of the dew and watching the cracked stairs carefully in the dawning light, for my ankle was still weak. It was a lovely fresh morning, just turning cool. Hong Kong nights are often stuffy, but the dawns are better. It had been raining.

  I was feeding Carola when the phone rang at six.

  “Mickey?” said Charles. “The balloon’s gone up. It’s come. War.”

  Chapter 38

  All over the world, how many people are telling a story like mine? Thousands; millions. It seems to me now that I felt the weight of the world’s numbers at that minute, and then I thought of Carola, and then I thought of how to behave, all in a split second. But I was stupid for a little.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “All over. Pearl Harbor and Malaya and everywhere else.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can’t tell that,” said Charles impatiently. “Well, can you manage? I’m going down to headquarters. You had better phone Hilda.”

  “Yes, I’ll do that. You call me back if you have time.”

  This was two hours before the general alarm was given, but Ah King and the rest must have been waiting, just as I had been waiting, for the news. He was in the hall fully dressed when I hung up, and he looked at me, silently inquiring, and I nodded. “I must pack,” I said. “Call Ah Choy and tell her. We’ll take all the baby’s clothes and my winter things. Two suitcases.”

  Hilda hadn’t heard officially, but when I told her she was calm and everyday in her manner. “So that was it: Selwyn’s gone downtown already. Very well, my dear, I’ll come and pick you up on one of my trips. Could you be ready this afternoon? I’ll be going up and downhill all day.”

  We talked about supplies, and distribution of people, and a lot of things I don’t remember. “I do hate to pack,” I told myself crossly. Then I think I must have gone in and sat down by the cot. I crouched over the sleeping baby for an hour. I don’t remember anything about how I felt. Being a nursing mother rather dulls your brain, and very likely I wasn’t feeling anything.

  Charles called again at eight, to find out if I was arranged for.

  “I could probably get away long enough to take you up there,” he began doubtfully, and even then I felt glad that he was willing to go back on his Spartan word that much. But it wasn’t necessary, I said. “Hilda’s all fixed; she’s coming for us. You have their phone number? Charles, you’ll be all right?”

  “Me? Nobody’s going to get me. They protect staff officers,” he said, laughing. “I’ll be locked up underground, honeybunch. … Listen. Hear it? There they are now.”

  Through my free ear I heard the siren. Through my telephone ear I heard it too, just a second later. It was a weird effect. Then the bombs, those familiar bombs that I had been hearing since 1937, off and on. … The year’s dream was broken. I woke up.

  Charles was talking through the hooting of the siren. “Well, Mickey, I’m sorry about all this.”

  “Darling, you didn’t do it!”

  “Anyway, Carola’s too young to care; that’s a good thing. … All the best.”

  Click.

  I went out on the stone terrace and looked across the bay, and there at Kai Tak was smoke bubbling up. Inside his veranda, my neighbor across the way was sucking his pipe and staring at it. We had never spoken before.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Here it is.”

  “Yes.” He shook his head. “Japan’s committed suicide.”

  I went indoors and crouched over the baby again.

  “Come and eat breakfast,” said Ah King.

  Ah Choy, the wash amah, folding up clothes in the bedroom, turned to me as I came in. “You scared, missy?” she asked.

  “Nooooo. You’re not scared, are you, Ah Choy?”

  “Yes,” said Ah Choy, and began to cry.

  I went back and sat over Carola.

  Hilda Selwyn-Clarke is an admirable woman, and I wonder now why my fortnight’s association with her is marked by so much irritation. It must have seared my soul. Perhaps like a lot of other people I blow off steam by getting angry with the nearest object, instead of letting go and being frankly terrified. Also, I’ve never liked feeling like a guest too long at a time; I like to be boss in the house.

  We were crowded in the Selwyn-Clarke house, big as it was; we had a Chinese doctor and his wife and son, and Constance Lam, a girl who adored the doctor and who was now acting as housekeeper for the mess, and Miriam, a Chinese nurse who was Mary’s governess, and the Valentines — Douglas Valentine was Selwyn’s assistant, and Nina, his wife, was head of the A.N.S. — and a lot of other odd bits and pieces, doctors and such. On the third day the Armstrongs arrived. They had been warned out of their house next to the Peak tram, because the Japs had begun shelling the face of the mountain with obvious intent to put that tramway out of order. Oh, we were crowded, and the wonder is that we didn’t all blow up, but we didn’t. We behaved almost admirably. If we slipped now and then, if somebody talked loudly for a moment, we hushed it up straight away. If Hilda seemed shockingly self-centered to me, and obsessed with the welfare of her own people, I know that my seeming oblivion to Carola got on her nerves terribly. I don’t deny that I avoided that baby. I made sure that Ah Cheung was standing by, and that she had her food, and I turned up for her feedings when it was time, but for the rest I stayed out of her way. It just hurt too much, looking at her.

  “I can’t understand that woman,” Hilda said angrily to Vera. “Why, when Mary was that age, if she cried I cried too.”

  “Which must have been a great help,” said Vera.

  You are to understand that we were under constant fire. I’m not going to write much about that part of it because it is impossible to give you the feeling of it. If you’ve been in a war you know. If you haven’t you can’t know. The first day was child’s play, but the second day we had more than air raids; we had shelling from the approaching Jap forces across the bay, and from a few of their ships that had stolen up close to the island. It is probably an idiosyncrasy of mine, but I prefer bombs to shells. I’m more used to them. You can see the plane they are coming from, and you can hear the bomb coming down, and you know where you are. To be sure, in Hong Kong you are out in the open, or crouching inside some ridiculous stucco doorway, because there is nowhere else to go: Hong Kong had not prepared many dugouts, you remember. But anyway, once a bomb has popped, it has popped, and the plane can’t stay in one place pegging away at you. Shells are different. Shells keep coming and hitting at the same spot. Shells are the devil. Especially were they unpleasant up there on the crest of the mountain, on the tipmost top of the proud Peak.

  In those early days none of us admitted that things weren’t going to be quite all right. We waited patiently at first, and then impatiently, for planes to come up from Singapore and drive away these impertinent little pests. No planes came. Instead we listened to the radio and discovered that the Japs were having quite surprising luck down in Malaya. But the radio didn’t tell the truth either. They kept talking about troops from China attacking the Jap forces in the rear. They talked about us: gallant little Hong Kong, the fortress. People sent encouraging messages, very important people, even the King of England. It all went according to plan, because the authorities really knew, remember, that Hong Kong couldn’t be held. We were supposed to delay the enemy, that was all; the enemy was to be delayed from going south
for three months.

  Hilda and I went downtown on Monday afternoon, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday. I saw Charles in town on Wednesday, and he looked grim, and he was quiet. I wasn’t. I was jittery, worrying about him. Hilda kept me fairly well stirred up. Hilda has a strong histrionic sense, and she must have found some compensation in letting it rip. She talked dramatically and made wide, sweeping gestures like a woman on a lecture platform. She gasped a good deal, and said, “Oh, my God.” She stuck pins into me about Charles and Carola. Her idea of comforting talk for a nursing mother was not mine: she would stand, streaming with tears, watching me as I glumly nursed the baby, and she would say:

  “You’ll never keep her alive. Never. Why, I won’t keep Mary alive, and she’s almost six.”

  Other people will tell the story of the battle of Hong Kong better than I can. I watched it, and traced what was happening pretty well, but the chess games of military strategy don’t interest me, even when I’ve been a pawn. The Japs came into Kowloon on Wednesday, almost three weeks ahead of schedule. The Royal Scots were supposed to have held the front line, but the Royal Scots didn’t.

  In our house, preoccupied with medical service, this withdrawal from Kowloon was marked by Nina’s indignation over her girls, the A.N.S. There were many of these auxiliary nurses stationed in Kowloon, in hospitals and at first-aid posts, and Selwyn had left them there. Nina was being besieged by outraged husbands and mothers and fathers, demanding to know why their womenfolk had been thrown to the Japs. Strictly speaking, I suppose Selwyn was right; I suppose there isn’t a question of it. Nurses must be left to take care of the wounded, and in the old days when war was more civilized, the days in which Selwyn was mentally living, doctors and nurses were treated with respect by the enemy. Maybe. I have my doubts. I think people have always misbehaved in wartime, and they always will.

  Looked on as a plain problem in ethics, Selwyn was justified. But this wasn’t a bloodless problem. These girls were our girls. Nina knew them all. Nina felt responsible for them. She was a harassed and ghost-ridden woman during those days, and she hated Selwyn bitterly for a while.