China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  Nothing marred our simple enjoyment of the day until three in the afternoon, when Hilda ran in. Her hair was mussed up and there were tears running down her cheeks, and a break in her voice.

  “Do you know the news, Charles?” she blurted. “We’ve surrendered. The firing is stopped. There’s a white flag on the police station across the road. Selwyn just phoned me.”

  I suppose Charles was the only really surprised staff officer in town. You see, they hadn’t been telling him the truth. He didn’t say anything but “Yes, Hilda?” but he looked very grim and set his jaw. Hilda sank down on a chair and talked, and talked, and talked. Neither of us listened. Charles said once, “They didn’t tell me,” and that was all. After a long time I realized Hilda was still talking, and I didn’t want to hear her. I thought it was the end of everything. I thought they would take Charles away immediately. There wasn’t any time. “Hilda,” I said, “I want to speak to Charles alone.”

  “Why, certainly, my dear.” She was surprised but amiable.

  She hurried out to spread the news. Wiseman had gone out already in a wheel chair, and we were really alone, for the first and last time. I don’t know what I said. I cried on his good shoulder, I remember that, and asked him what would happen to him. Charles said that they would treat him all right, and that we must just try to see the war through.

  “In the end they can’t win,” he said. “I don’t see how they can, do you? Against America and England and Holland and China? We must try to survive, that’s all. I’m only sorry you’re caught.”

  “They’ll take you away from me,” I said.

  We heard three loud explosions; that was the big guns they were blowing up, he said. Wiseman rushed in to ask us if we thought it was the truth. Other boys came in then, old friends of ours, walking wounded with their arms in casts, or their heads bandaged, or their teeth missing. I sat there and tried to be normal. I wanted to go back to Carola but I didn’t want to leave Charles. I suppose I’ve never been quite as unhappy and frightened in my life. It is no use trying to write about these things.

  Veronica came in to tell me it was time to go home, and she was fighting mad at the Army for surrendering, and then tearful, and then mad again. She walked over with a swing of her fine figure and stared out at the countryside beneath the veranda. “There they are,” she said suddenly. “Japs. Little beasts. Swarming all over.”

  I went and stood next to her and looked. It was true. They were on the roads outside the hospital and inside the grounds; little misshapen gnomes they looked like, dirty and shabby and grinning and busy. They were carrying things into the flat buildings, the doctors’ and nurses’ quarters. The roads were choked with Jap trucks. The lovely country was covered with Japs. It had happened at last. After running away from their bombs in Nanking and Nantao in 1937, after running the gantlet dozens of times in Shanghai, after escaping them for a year by ducking into Chungking ground, I had been caught. Now. With Carola, and Charles wounded in hospital.

  I had seen Japanese armies before. I saw the Victory March in Shanghai. My stomach felt queasy, and I knew we would have to face it now or I would begin to be really afraid. I picked up my bag.

  “Come on,” I said to Veronica. “Let’s go.”

  Charles, watching me out of the door, smiled a little. He must have been afraid too.

  That morning, though we were busy with Christmas junketing, I had seen a truck drive up with a lot of white girls in it, mostly in A.N.S. uniform. I didn’t see them close up, but I remembered later having wondered where they came from. Three of them had climbed down out of the back of the lorry in a weary, hopeless way, and they had linked arms and walked into the hospital clinging to each other. Now at the door when I met Susie and Sophie and the others I heard about it.

  “We’re walking,” they explained to me. “Mother doesn’t dare bring the car because the Japs will snaffle it. They’re taking cars wherever they see them. Those girls who were brought back today are in a bad way. They were caught in Happy Valley in a first-aid post.”

  “Why?” I asked stupidly. “What happened?”

  Susie stared at me and said, “Rape.”

  I said to myself, “Nonsense. It doesn’t really happen.” I also said, “Rape is impossible. Unless, of course, you use a sandbag or a bayonet.” I said to myself, “I won’t be taken in by horror stories. No, no, no; I’ll hold on to myself.” I said, “If I am raped I won’t care. It won’t be my fault. It will mean nothing; it is like being wounded. Charles would agree with me.”

  Just then, as we left the hospital grounds a few yards from the gate, two Japanese came along. One was a private and the other, since he was carrying a sword, must have been an officer. The private hailed us “Oy!” We pretended first not to hear; he yelled louder, angrily. We stopped. My eyes met Susie’s. She sat down suddenly on a rock.

  The officer grinned and walked off so he couldn’t see us. The private approached us at a run and motioned that he wanted to look at our arms. It was our wrist watches he wanted, not our virtue. The relief of it made me shaky in the knees. What’s more, he missed my watch; I wear it on the right wrist and he didn’t look for it there, under my leather jacket. As he took the watches from the others Susie found the nerve to say, “You have one already.” She touched it lightly. “Shame!” said Susie banteringly.

  The private grinned awkwardly. He hung his head and grinned like a naughty schoolboy, showing his great teeth like battered tombstones. But he took the watches. Then he let us go on. He stank; I was aware of that.

  We found Japanese all over the house. They had taken complete possession of the upper house, and three officers had elected to live in Mother Weill’s living room. Mother Weill was everywhere all at once, talking Japanese in a broken way that was still effective, arguing, giving orders to her servants, working away like a machine. We had no time to repine. She rushed at us like a whirlwind and shoved us indoors, out of sight of the licentious soldiery, up the back stairs to the bedrooms. The officers seemed to be all right, she whispered. We were to stay out of sight. Yes, Carola was safe.

  “They’re to stay a few days,” Mrs. Weill explained. “It’s a good thing I can talk to them; they’re not too bad. One of them took Chrissie Angus’ wrist watch, but he gave her a tin of peas in exchange.”

  Mrs. Angus, a venerable lady of sixty-five, sent us into hysterical giggles by reporting that one of the soldiers had made advances to her. It was the truth. He had pointed to a couch and then made an unmistakable gesture. Mrs. Angus was the only female in all our crowd who had been approached disrespectfully. “It’s my figure gets ’em,” she said.

  We screamed with laughter, until Mrs. Weill made us desist. We must whisper, she said, and not attract attention until they were gone away.

  One of the most awkward features about this irruption of the Army into our house was that Alec had just come home the day before. With his regiment, he had been ambushed in a house on the Ridge near Repulse Bay. He and a friend had broken for freedom, swum the bay, walked several miles along a gravel road in their bare feet, and finally got home. Alec was obviously of military age and the family went to great pains to keep him under cover. As long as the Japs had only women to deal with, as long as they kept sober, they were not likely to get very ugly. We kept Alec wrapped in cotton wool. And through it all Mrs. Weill, her face alight with the effort of battle, striding about the house like a little lioness, kept talking. We owe our safety in those days to her.

  You don’t know what you think about rape until you are caught in a war, and in those days following Christmas I made up my mind what I would always say to people, forever after. I know what the public thinks. I saw them after the last war when they listened to stories about it. When you talk about “atrocities” that is the first thing you think of. There is a horror about it, and there is also a fascination; people get a kick out of the subject, of course. Their eyes glisten when they hear of rape, and it’s always the first question I am asked, now t
hat I’m back in America: “Did you have any — uh — Trouble?” It’s a double attraction to the human mind; sex is always fascinating, and sex by violence is doubly so. The second attraction is linked up with the first. We seem to have a sort of race jealousy that is manifested in our lynchings and in the special interest people always show in the sex behavior of other races. For example, when young Belgians go down to the Congo on contract they talk about nothing on the way down on the ship but the black girls they are going to sleep with. It’s the first thing they do when they arrive at the first port: they dash for a brothel. That behavior isn’t limited to the Belgians, either: look at our own tourists when they land in Shanghai, if you doubt me. “Is it true about Chinese girls?”

  I’m no psychiatrist and I won’t try to explain this phenomenon. There it is, a very strong force in human behavior. Well, that is why you are always so interested in stories of rape by the Japanese. That is why the Nanking atrocities seemed so special. It’s all tangled up in your mind; you get a kick out of it while you are being righteously horrified. Until the war, you stimulated yourself with fantastic stories about the sex behavior of the other races. I remember being amused because I heard such big tales about Negroes and their sexual powers when I went to Africa, and then when I got to China I heard the same tales exactly, only this time it was about the Chinese. I was even more amused when Chinese I knew well began to tell me the same old bogy stories, this time about the whites. You would be surprised if you knew what tremendous things the Chinese think you white men capable of.

  All this preamble is just an attempt to understand Japanese behavior, an attempt which always floors me sooner or later. I don’t understand the Japanese very well. But I think that they too are prey to this wishful thinking, and so when they run amuck in China those things happen. And there is another element in this calculated mass rape that they go in for: they know that it is the quickest, surest way to humiliate a community. I think that they rape almost as a religious duty, a sacrifice to the God of Victory, a symbol of their triumphant power.

  My suggestions to alleviate the misery caused by war rape are not very practical. They would take too long to put into effect. I want us to lift the guilt burden from the minds of the victims. To do this we would have to uproot centuries of diametrically opposed ideas. We would have to bring up our daughters not to fear rape with the superstitious terror with which we have always instilled them. We would have to teach them that rape is simply a physical hazard, one of the penalties of war which might possibly happen to anyone. Do you think it could be done? If so, a lot of miserable little girls would be much happier, and I have never seen why they should have been made miserable in the first place, aside from the misery that naturally accompanies rape on a virgin. I realize that I am trying to go against nature. We don’t scare the girls deliberately; we are scared ourselves, and we just pass it on. But my idea ought to be tried out. Really, it ought. I saw the women in Hong Kong and I know. I was infuriated by the unnecessary suffering we cause ourselves.

  Once and for all, no, I wasn’t. Mother Weill took care of us well during the most dangerous period, while the Japanese were jubilant and reckless and drunk. It is an old Army custom in Japan that when the troops enter a city they are given three days in which they can do whatever they like. That’s when the worst things happen. In Nanking it was such a tremendous affair that the men got out of hand and wouldn’t calm down after three days, but in Hong Kong they were comparatively well-behaved. I’m not saying they all behaved like perfect gentlemen, because they didn’t, but they were nothing like the Nanking troops. I dare say they were better-behaved, number for number, than our troops are going to be when they walk into Tokyo. There were isolated cases; I know of one family where the Japs butchered every man in the house, although nobody offered any resistance to their entry. I know that many Chinese women were raped. Most of the British women escaped this indignity. Either the men were being held in — the Japs certainly did have in mind an idea of showing those snooty British that they could be gentlemen too — or they just preferred Chinese women to British, a preference most people could understand, I should think. Anyway, the Chinese suffered a lot more than we did. I am deliberately not giving any details about rape on white women. A report would not be nice for the women. But at any rate none of them died, and I think they’re all all right now.

  After the first three days the Japs did settle down to some extent, though the streets of the Colony couldn’t yet have been any picnic to walk in. Charles warned me about New Year’s Day. “They get pretty drunk, and they take another three days off,” he explained. “Yes, they use our date for it.” We were still following our schedule, though now we walked to hospital and back again, in groups of at least three. I never made any attempt to leave that beaten path. The quiet Pokfulam roads were full of squatty, duck-bottomed soldiers, carrying furniture back and forth between houses that they had commandeered for their officers. There were great heaps of tins and cases of food lying here and there, British supplies looted from government warehouses, probably. We saw an incredible amount of waste going on. Soldiers would open tins of bully beef with their bayonets, take a bite or two, and throw the rest into the mud. They chopped down trees for firewood, or furniture, or anything handy. They took every house they could find except the hospital itself; our officers saved Mother Weill’s lower house from being commandeered. Veronica and I finally got our things out of her house by getting atabrine for one of the soldiers who lived there and whom we found quaking with a malarial chill, lying in his boots on Veronica’s satin quilt and wearing my green jersey pajamas over his filthy uniform. They had tethered a lot of horses in the garden. The troops urinated everywhere, in the house mostly, on the floor. That was probably symbolic too.

  The doctors and nursing staff of the Queen Mary at last lost their smug feeling of immunity. You could see this loss in their eyes as they pattered about the corridors on their errands; they looked enraged and yet stunned with indignant surprise. They? They, pushed out of their comfortable flats which they had always felt were their own exclusive property? They, angels and such of mercy, treated just like ordinary people? They, crowded now on cots in dormitories like refugees? What was the world coming to? Wasn’t there an international law?

  Margaret Watson was definitely chastened. She had gone back to her flat at last, after the troops were moved on, and a grinning little ape of a guard showed her around the rooms. In the living room they had selected her best doilies of Swatow linen and placed them about the fireplace in a semicircle, and then had gone to the trouble of defecating on each linen square. The soldier was careful to point this out to her.

  “He smiled,” said Margaret, her brown eyes limpidly puzzled. “I just can’t understand that mentality.”

  “Can’t you?” I replied.

  Chapter 42

  The british troops that weren’t killed or wounded were being rounded up and put into temporary camp while the Jap authorities made up their minds what to do with this victory. We waited in hushed fear to see what would happen to the hospitals; for the time being they were leaving the Hong Kong institutions alone. I believe they had already taken over the mainland companion piece to the Queen Mary, the Kowloon Hospital, for themselves, but I’m not sure about that.

  Over in my apartment, though I didn’t know it, a girl named Irene Fincher was struggling under an enormous weight of catastrophe. She, with her baby Frances, aged about ten months, and her sister Phyllis and her baby Bryan, aged a year and a bit, and her old mother and father, the Gittinses, had been hurried from their homes in Kowloon on the day the Japanese marched in. It was her husband, Ernie Fincher, who took them to the ferry in their own car; he was in a hurry to get back into the war and the whole thing was a tremendous rush. At the ferry he saw his family out of the car and then on the spot turned it over to a wrecking crew to be smashed before the Japs could get it. “Close your eyes,” he advised his wife. Irene closed her eyes and heard a smash,
and then she boarded the boat. She never saw Ernie again.

  Phyllis’ husband was lost too. The girls had been brought up in the typical Hong Kong manner, spoiled and petted all their lives, in more luxury than our upper classes ever knew, a luxury that is based on human labor and cannot be substituted by any kind of American labor-saving gadget. Suddenly they were dumped into my flat with a lot of other refugees, and they had to shift for themselves. One thing that saved them some grief was that Gordon King, who had delivered Irene’s baby and was a friend of her family’s, came to see them and brought with him all the powdered milk and baby food that he was able to buy at the last minute, anywhere in town, and any brand. He carried this variegated lot of tins into the Gittins family, looking around at my flat with a queer grin.

  “It’s Miss Hahn’s place,” said Irene nervously.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Will she mind?”

  “No,” said Gordon King. “You’ll be all right here. Even if anyone tries to turn you out, just sit tight. She won’t, though.”

  Having done what he considered his duty by his patients, he left them and went back to his hospital at the university.

  Ah King went in one day to get some clothes, and brought me back a note from Irene, but I couldn’t read her signature. I could only make out that a lot of people were there, and Ah King rather thought they were Portuguese because they spoke such good Chinese. If that puzzles you, I had better explain that there were something like ten thousand people from Macau living in Hong Kong then. Macau is an infinitesimal Portuguese possession four hours by boat from the Crown Colony. It used to be a famous place for fantan, adultery, and easily procured passports from Lisbon. The Hong Kong Portuguese are really “Maccanese” — a mixture of Chinese, ancient Latin, and Japanese or Malay. The Gittinses weren’t Maccanese; they were straight British and Danish mixed with Chinese, but Ah King, like the British authorities, didn’t make much distinction. The Gittinses did, though.