China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  Veronica put a call through and got her mother on the phone, and asked for news of Carola. She looked worried when she reported to me. “There’s no evidence that Mrs. Armstrong ever called and got your baby,” she said. “At noon Mother was playing with Carola herself, and she says that old amah was getting nervous because they’d been packed and waiting for hours to be called for. Hadn’t you better phone Mrs. Armstrong?”

  Telephoning at that date wasn’t easy, but I did get Vera, and heard her explanation. She hadn’t been able to get through the bombardment, she explained; she had been forced to turn back. But she assured me that Carola would be safe at the War Memorial. “She’s got Ah Cheung, and a hospital, after all. … I’ll try again tomorrow, my dear. How’s Charles? We had a shell today on the edge of the roof. A spiky one.”

  It’s a story that has been in the newspaper and in several other places, how I lost Carola and how Bill Hunt, the American shipping man and dashing buccaneer, brought her back when I was just about ready to tear my hair out by the roots. I hadn’t dared tell Charles about losing her. I was following a pattern by that time, laid down by the Weills’ domestic arrangements: every morning we all drove over in one of the family cars to hospital and dispersed to our various jobs. The Weills, augmented now by Sophie, all did A.N.S. work.

  I sat with Charles and made little pads for his paralyzed arm to rest on, or wandered downstairs to help make bandages. His roommate, Captain Wiseman, was a jolly young sprig when his leg stopped hurting, and things were getting comparatively gay in our ward, as Charles felt better. Now and then I would go into the other wards to see what I could do. The hospital was badly understaffed and sometimes nobody came in all day to dress Charles’s wound. The paralysis was due to the bullet’s shaving too close to the nerve of the left arm, and Digby, the surgeon, was hopeful that after the first shock voluntary movement might come back. In the meantime be waited for the slight infection that had developed in the wound near the spine to subside. He based his hopes on Tony’s report that during the first-aid dressing Charles’s hand had kept opening and closing spasmodically. But Digby and the nurses were too busy to spend much time on the case.

  In the next-door ward Major Neave, who had been wounded with Charles in the same engagement, lay battling for his life against the odds of countless shrapnel wounds all up and down his left side. Whenever I brought Charles anything extra to eat he sent the best part of it to Major Neave, and for a while it looked as if Neave would win the battle for life. He smiled and talked sensibly when I went in, and he kept an enormous photograph of his wife and child where he could look at it, and I never had the feeling there, as I did in some of the other wards, that his spirit was nagging. He lost the battle, though.

  Mrs. Martin, the American wife of the British consul to Chungking, was another tough nut. Her husband lay dying of stomach ulcer, complicated, I think, by cancer. Mrs. Martin kept him eating the things he should have in defiance of the hospital’s growing miserliness with regard to food. She stormed the kitchen, she insisted, she raised hell. She kept her husband alive for a long time in spite of everything. That battle was lost too, in the end.

  There was a ward down the hall with two Volunteer men in it, one big cockney fellow who felt miserable but who did finally recover, and a poor little chap who had been shot through the groin and was delirious. Every time I came in he asked me for chocolate. I managed to get some and give it to him, day after day, time after time. He could never remember having had any before. The other man just wanted tobacco, and I got some for him too, but sometimes he didn’t even want that.

  Through all of this, for three days, I didn’t know where my baby was. I should have trusted Ah King, but one doesn’t think of that. Vera Armstrong couldn’t insist on bringing the baby into the Edmonston house against her host’s refusal, and she couldn’t very well tell me that, either. She believed sincerely that Carola was all right at the hospital, and of course she was, but I had no way of knowing. Actually, Ah King kept Ah Cheung at her job. When the poor old amah tried to run away, to find her own twelve-year-old daughter in the town, Ah King threatened and stormed and scared her into remaining. Whenever he could, he brought food down to the pair, concealed as they were in a room on the cellar floor. All the other Chinese servants had long since deserted, and the hospital had reason to be grateful to Ah King for remaining at his post — until the morning that Carola was taken away. Then without a qualm he deserted.

  Bill Hunt did it. I had reached him on the phone when I was insane with worry, what with lying every day to Charles and then trying to get some news of Carola after I got home. Bill first suggested taking her into his own hotel suite in the Grips, but he was hastily dissuaded by Judge Allman, who with six other refugees was sharing the rooms. There was no water in the hotel, Allman reminded him, and anyway, if Bill was going to the trouble of bringing a baby all the way from the Peak, why not just give her back to her mamma, where she belonged? Bill saw the force of that argument, and so on the morning of the twenty-fourth, after wrecking one car in the attempt, he brought a howling Carola, a quaking Ah Cheung, and a grinning Ah King out to Veronica’s house, to me.

  He did more than that. He stamped into the house, talking loudly and cheerfully, and he brought me a lot of supplies: tinned stuff of all sorts, a whole caseful of chocolate, biscuits, and fruit, and coffee. I needed it all too. I sat there with my face all tear-streaked, beaming, clutching the baby to me while she made up for lost time at nursing, and asked him about the war.

  “Well,” said Bill, “the little buggers are being pretty busy. They’re all over the place. They’re making headway in the Philippines, and they’re swarming down the Malay Peninsula, and they’re heading for Burma. … Christ, they’re all over the bloody place! How’s Charles? I’ll try to come out and see him later on. Say, that’s some cook boy of yours. I told him he couldn’t come in this car, because we were overloaded. And between you and me, it’s Selwyn’s own private car; I didn’t have any right to use it. But when we started to unload here he popped up. … You should have been halfway up the Peak when that shell missed us by an inch. I thought the old lady would shed her skin.”

  He left, and I mopped up and showed the Chinese where to sleep, and then I went out to see Charles, with a clear conscience at last. He talked a lot about Carola.

  Somehow or other everyone I knew seemed to be working with Selwyn now. Bill had been picked up in the Gloucester lobby. He was caught between planes in this trap, this Hong Kong where he didn’t belong. Selwyn, who didn’t know him, had come across him on the second or third morning, sitting disconsolate on a staircase with his unshaved chin propped on his hands.

  “Would you like to help move an orphanage in from the New Territories?” asked Selwyn, on a venture. He was always in need of men, always looking. Bill stood up, stretched, and said:

  “Where do I get the bus?”

  Joe Alsop was another. He had phoned me the second day; he said he was sitting in Hal Sweet’s bungalow in Kowloon, rapidly giving up hope that he could ever get out to his duty on a plane. I asked him if he would work for Selwyn in the meantime and he was enthusiastic. The last time I saw him he was carrying stretchers of human fragments at the Queen Mary, clad in a blood-soaked waterproof coat and looking grim. He did good work.

  Charlotte too. I told her where to find Selwyn because she wanted to volunteer, and God knows what she didn’t do before the war was over. She started rearranging an old school building for a hospital, one of her early duties. “There was a telephone in every room,” she told me later, “and Selwyn told me to take them out. The sheer joy of pulling telephones up cannot be expressed. Wait until you try it for yourself.” Losing Charlotte during the war — we were not to meet again for two years — distressed me almost more than anything.

  So there Carola and I were, reunited and among friends. It was wonderful. Susie taught the amah how to give the baby a sun bath out on the lawn. In Pokfulam that sort of activity was still
possible; only an occasional plane flew over our house. Little by little I began to sort out all the people who were living there. We ate carefully but adequately. Bill Hunt’s load of supplies was a great help. I would eat breakfast, go to the hospital, and when lunchtime came around either I nibbled a piece of Bill’s chocolate or went without. Charles couldn’t eat most of his lunch — a heap of rice and a spoonful of stew — and sometimes I fell on it and cleaned it up after him, but as young Bill Wiseman got better he became ravenous and even Charles’s ration wasn’t enough for him. Ah King, now that he had no more cooking to do, took to walking in to town and foraging around. He used his own money. He bought grapes for Charles, and they came in handy for Wiseman and Neave, if not for Charles himself. He bought chocolate and whatever cans he could find. One day I brought a parcel to the hospital; there were cigarettes for Wiseman and a tin of sausages (the little Vienna kind) and another tin of Brussels sprouts for Charles, and I was pretty proud of myself. But Charles looked at the sausages and the sprouts doubtfully.

  “You shouldn’t do this,” he said. “You should keep these things for the baby.”

  My subsequent lecture was all too successful. For the rest of the time we were in Hong Kong, Charles was convinced that Carola ate nothing but milk and sugar. He was still worrying about sugar and milk for her when we left Hong Kong two years later.

  All over hospital the patients were trying to eke out their diet with sweets. There was a certain kind of Australian jam, IXL brand, that flooded the market, fortunately. The men loved it. Charles could take a small tin of apricot jam and devour it in one day. Healthier men could eat much more jam than that. Instinctively they were trying to make up for the lack of fats and sugars that already was bothering them in their diet.

  We knew the hospital basement was full of supplies: cases and cases of sardines in oil and fruit and everything else. But the authorities were trying to save it all for the lean months ahead, never admitting to themselves that the Japanese would not be likely to let them reap the benefits of their caution. And upstairs the young men grew hungrier and hungrier.

  It made me laugh, withal bitterly, when Hilda and Mary trailed into the Queen Mary the day after my epic hitchhike. Hilda was airy about it. “Quite impossible, my dear. We had seven hits on the roof of the hospital the day you left. Constance is supposed to have packed your things and they are mixed in with mine. I’ll sort them out in time. My dear, it’s heaven at Margaret’s. I have her bedroom.”

  “Oh, she did make room then?”

  “Why, yes. I believe there were some people there, but Margaret asked them to move. Why?”

  “Nothing. … Did you bring my hairbrush?”

  “Probably,” said Hilda. “Of course I shall never understand why you dashed off as you did, without even packing a bag.”

  We were on chilly terms for some days. I know it was petty of me but I couldn’t help it. Hilda was the director’s wife and now at last, in Selwyn’s own hospital, she reaped the benefit of her position. She did as she liked there, and acted like the hostess of the place. She gained in stature hourly, only collapsing when her husband came home of an evening. I began to picture to myself those long cozy sessions she had with Margaret in the flat, over a bottle of whisky; they had tried me in the balance and found me wanting. “Rushing off like that, like a madwoman, my dear, abandoning her child . … Incredible!”

  The British hospital system, and the whole Western-world idea of social relief, develops petty tyrants to a dangerous degree. I was to discover that very shortly. On the day Carola was given back to me I met Margaret, the almoner, in the corridor of the hospital and she hailed me. Her brown eyes were looking hard.

  “How long do you intend to hang on with the Weills?” she demanded. “What are you going to do when they are put out of their house?”

  Instead of retorting, “It’s none of your business,” I asked, “Huh?”

  She spoke crisply but breathlessly. I suppose she was scared, but it didn’t show. “All the houses in the neighborhood are to be dispossessed,” she said. “They are to be filled with soldiers who are going to protect us from snipers. So the Weills will be forced to move, and where will you go then?”

  “Canavals’ house, I suppose.”

  Margaret took a deep breath. “You had better go away completely,” she said. “They will want the Canaval house too, very likely. They are going to protect us from snipers.” She spoke passionately. “You are hampering the war effort by remaining,” she said. “And another thing: you shouldn’t come here every day. This hospital, by virtue of the fact that we are taking in soldiers, is no longer a civilian hospital. It’s military. Now in a military hospital visitors aren’t permitted except once a week, often not at all. You come here in the morning, outside of visiting hours, and sit with Charles all day. You aren’t a relative of his, you know. I’ve heard a lot of talk about it and action will be taken soon. I’m sorry,” she said, “but there it is.”

  Fortunately I didn’t try to answer: I recognize panic when I see it. I walked off and left her, but I went to see Hilda and raised hell.

  “You’ve been working Margaret up. I won’t have it. If necessary I’ll appeal to Selwyn. Nobody takes care of Charles all day but me; they’re shorthanded and they know it. Now — ”

  Whatever tension had strung Hilda up to this amazing pitch broke down. “Oh, my dear, you’re hysterical. I haven’t told Margaret to say anything . … I’m sorry.”

  We set to work together making swabs, and when Margaret came back things were near sanity again. The two women now concentrated on another problem. How was Hilda to be smuggled out before the Japanese swooped down and took her prisoner, and tortured her, and murdered her? They seemed to take it for granted that Hilda of all people was in the gravest danger. She had helped Chungking; she was known as a leftist.

  “You must dye your hair black and be entered here on the books as Rose Smith,” decided Margaret. “Later we’ll smuggle you out. Your friends can be trusted.”

  “Oh, the Chinese won’t give me away. But Mary? Selwyn would never consent to my breaking for freedom and taking Mary with me.”

  “Then let’s do this. …”

  They talked on, and on, and on. Hilda’s voice trembled, as though she were wallowing pleasantly in danger. I didn’t think that she was in that much peril. Japan, it seemed to me, was now more seriously at war with Western nations than she had been with China or China’s champions. I thought for an uneasy moment of my own record — The Soong Sisters, and Candid Comment, and a lot of other things — and then with genuine relief I decided that I wasn’t important enough for the Japs to worry their heads about. I have always been an optimistic ostrich, but it gives me satisfaction now to reflect that this time I was right. I held my tongue, though. Hilda was in the saddle, not Emily Hahn and her Carola. I made swabs.

  Chapter 41

  Gwen priestwood and her government lorry dropped by every day. The war may have shown up a lot of people in a shocking way, so that I still blush for them when I think of it, but it brought out the most surprising heroism in others. It proved to me that I had been wrong in my opinions of practically everybody from the beginning.

  It was Christmas morning when Gwen came in. The Governor had already made his rounds the afternoon before. Charles was still too ill to be told the truth, they decided, so the Governor told him a lot of pretty lies about how magnificently we were doing, though when Alf Bennett dropped by later he savagely contradicted all of it.

  “They’re running a regular ferry service over to North Point in broad daylight,” he grumbled, “and God knows what’s happened to Repulse Bay. We need you, old boy; why did you go and get wounded? My Japanese is inadequate, to say the least.”

  Gwen, though, was cheerful and full of fight, and fresh from having driven her lorry through very hot territory.

  “Helen and Gustl Canaval,” she reported, “have given me permission to raid their house. I want to get clothes for you
, Charles — ”

  “But I’m all right,” said Charles. “You’ve brought most of my kit already.”

  “Also,” continued Gwen, “the Canavals have a cellar of sorts, and since looting seems inevitable, it might as well be me.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  I had always thought the Canaval house (next door to Mme. Kung’s) very near to the hospital. Today, though, what with a Jap plane sailing about overhead and exhibiting an awkward interest in our khaki-colored van, it didn’t seem so near after all. As we reached the Canaval driveway, notorious for its awkward steepness, Gwen peered up at the plane and said doubtfully, “I don’t think they’d waste a whole bomb on us, do you?”

  “N-n-n-o,” I said mendaciously. We drove down the hill and knocked on the door. The plane hovered about, still curious. A frightened servant answered our hail, overjoyed at seeing us, and he made no difficulties at all when we raided the house. Woolies, pajamas, books, and two dozen small bottles of rye whisky rewarded our search, and we felt very cheery as we started back, even though we stalled on the hill just as the plane swooped down to take a good look. Gwen was right; they didn’t waste a bomb. We brought the whisky back safe to the Queen Mary and distributed it in the privates’ wards, all but one pint bottle.