by Emily Hahn
Later the Chinese were periodically disturbed by rumors that Wang was going to take us over. It worried us, because Wang’s gang had a bad reputation and each of us, me included, could remember plenty of enemies in the group, people who would like to take revenge on us for our former criticism of their policy. That blow never fell, though. I dare say there was a lot of argument in Tokyo about it, between Wang’s champions and the many Japanese who didn’t even pretend to have China’s interests at heart. It was lucky for me they didn’t decide to give Hong Kong back. Too many of the Nanking crowd knew my Candid Comment record.
Though Japan didn’t need a consul any more, trained diplomats like Mr. Kimura were immediately given plenty of new work to do. Kimura was one of the Japanese I had known before Pearl Harbor. He had dined once with Charles and Cooper and me, at the Tokyo Hotel, and after dinner, happy with scotch, he had danced a solo Black Bottom, barefooted on the tatami. He and I had sung old American college songs. I wondered just how he would greet me now.
Kimura was embarrassed and anxious to show good will, but scared. He fluttered around me and studied the card with perplexity. “Who gave this to you?” he demanded. Then, lowering his voice, although we were all alone in the office, he said, “Is Boxer all right? I heard — ”
I was as casual as possible, and no more polite than I had ever been. How could I bow and scrape to a man like Kimura, a man who used American slang and who had been drunk with me? I couldn’t.
“Boxer’s better,” I said. “I think he’s been taken to Bowen Road. Would you be allowed to visit him, do you think?”
“Perhaps, later. The Army … very difficult, you know. Sorry. Sorry Boxer was wounded. Now this pass. It says you have a Chinese husband. I did not know that, Miss Hahn. It shows … interesting possibilities.”
“He’s in Shanghai,” I said.
“You have never been divorced?”
“No. Will I be interned?”
“No,” said Mr. Kimura with commendable promptness. “No, you will not be interned. I ought to know; I drew up this new law myself.” Wondering, we stared at each other with a wild surmise. “It is very strange, ha-ha-ha,” said Mr. Kimura.
A belated squeamishness overtook me and I made one good try to save my political honor. “Mr. Kimura, you know me.”
Mr. Kimura bowed his head.
“You know I’m an American. Everyone knows that. I have an American passport; you know that too.”
“I know.”
“According to American law this Chinese marriage does not make me Chinese.”
“According to Japanese law,” he said, “it does.”
“And you know that’s Boxer’s baby, don’t you?”
“Of course. Your — uh — private life does not alter the law. You will not be interned, Miss Hahn. Indeed, you cannot be interned. We are ejecting all Chinese subjects from the internment camp.”
Staggering a little, I left his office. I now had another bigger card, much cleaner and with lots more red seals, to take over to the Foreign Affairs Department.
A French national, Mr. Walsh from the jewelry store, walked with me through the streets, which were much more crowded now than they had been in the evening of the day before. They were so crowded that we had to take to the middle of the street to make any time at all. The Chinese were all looking shabby, pinched, and frightened. I saw my tailor walking with his wife and children, his face covered with sticking plaster. I wondered if he would speak to me. According to Alec’s letters, many of his old Chinese friends had refused to hail him when they saw him at the window of the internment hotel. They were afraid of the Japanese, said Alec. I had argued this out with myself and decided that they could not be blamed, but of course my heart was a little sore anyway. It needn’t have been. My tailor waved to me and smiled, and stuck his chin up. A moment later I bumped into Harold Lee, wearing a battered long gown and looking like any poor white-collar worker. He kissed me, right there in the street. Then I was surrounded by old friends, and we all shook hands over and over, and wiped our eyes, and talked fast. Hubert Chen, whose family had been so offended when Charles and I turned up late and merry at their Christmas Eve party, stood there for a long time, saying:
“If you see Bob Ward” (one of the American consuls) “tell him I’m so sorry that I can’t do anything for him. The Japanese watch us all the time. It’s very dangerous. If I meet Bob on the street I won’t dare talk to him. I hope he understands. We don’t dare talk to Americans.”
“But you’re talking to me. …”
“Oh well.” I’ve never figured that one out, but I think he meant that women didn’t count. It was quite true. For some reason the Japanese never did suspect women as readily as they did men, and I suppose I do know the reason really: they look down on us, on our intelligence as well as our general value, and so they don’t pay us the compliment of being afraid of us in any way at all. It was convenient just at that time, however, and I’m not complaining of their attitude.
Walsh and I resumed our journey. “Have you your marriage certificate?” he demanded. He knew the man I was going to interview, and had volunteered to help.
I said, “No, I haven’t any papers at all. They’re in Shanghai.”
“But how can you expect to prove this marriage? I don’t think they will accept your word.”
“Well, I don’t know. We might write to Sinmay. …”
Walsh wrinkled his brow. “Write?” He shrugged. “That takes months under these conditions. I doubt that the letter would get through at all, Have you nothing, no word of witnesses, or — ”
“Maybe I can find somebody,” I said. I turned around and studied the crowd as it shoved and pushed and shambled past us, in front of the American Express office. What followed sounds incredible. That is the trouble with real life: you can’t write it down as fiction because it is so impossible. I’ve known that happen a dozen times. You will have to believe me because this is the truth. I reached into that thick-pressed crowd and plucked out by the arm one Freddie Kwai, a student from Shanghai and a nephew of Sinmay’s.
“Hello, Freddie. Will you come with me to the Foreign Affairs Office and bear me out when I tell them that I’m your auntie? I’m getting a Chinese pass as Sinmay’s wife.”
“Sure thing,” said Freddie with a cheerful grin, “if you don’t tell ’em I was a Volunteer.”
It all went smooth as butter. Freddie signed a statement, and I gave the official the two photos of myself I knew they wanted — Japanese occupation calls for an enormous number of passport photographs; they put photographs on everything — and I received in return a beautiful big receipt telling me to come back tomorrow and get my new passport.
Then Freddie shook hands with me and went away. When I next heard of him he had got out into Free China.
I went home and put my American passport into a clean envelope in the bottom drawer of the desk. Then I started out for Bowen Road Hospital, wondering if I would find Charles.
Emergency conditions can do wonders with the human frame. I had been running down the hill and up again, not stopping to count the number of trips I made in one day, but my shoes were beginning to wear out. Of course I was much thinner now, and that must have made it easier for me. I was feeling fairly cocky. Still, I wasn’t cocky enough to think I could get to the hospital alone. The road that led to it was winding and deserted and heavily wooded. Nemazee volunteered to accompany me; he had a friend in hospital, he said, and he wanted to visit this man anyway. Oh yes, he said, visitors were still being allowed. There was no sentry at the gate as yet, or anyway, there hadn’t been the day before. Nemazee’s house was a clearing ground for prison-camp news.
The few houses on Bowen Road were gutted and gloomy. A dead man lay near the road; a pitifully skinny man he was, with a few rags on his body and a black beard. We saw no wound, and decided he had died of hunger.
The hospital was an old, rambling red brick house, with wide verandas on all three floors. One
reached it by walking up a long, winding ramp, and the walking wounded crowded around to watch us as we came up. I saw a lot of people I knew, and I asked Wiseman, who was walking about on his artificial leg, “Is Charles here?”
“Certainly he’s here. What the hell are you doing, wandering around loose?”
“It’s a long story. Where’s Charles?”
I found him on the ground floor in a tiny cubicle. He was lying in bed, and he opened his eyes wide and grinned when I came in.
“Don’t tell me you got by with that disgraceful notion!”
Triumphantly I handed him my receipt. He studied it with grim interest. “Mmmmm … yes,” he said at last. “You may have chosen wisely, after all. I hear that conditions in Stanley are bad. But, Mickey, how will you manage? What about money? What about gas, and electricity, and shoes for Carola?”
“I thought I could get a job.”
He looked doubtful.
“Charles, in circumstances like this, what sort of job would it be all right for me to have? You see, there aren’t any jobs just now except with Japanese. If I could teach English, would that be all right? Or write for a paper, if it’s not political? Not that I see any signs of a chance, but later on it may be possible. I hear that a Swede has already got a job like that with some paper. They’re carrying on with that English sheet of theirs.”
“Well, Mickey, I’m not sure. It seems to me that a population like this has got to make out somehow. We’ve let them down, and now that we’ve surrendered, I suppose they are to be excused for trying to make their livings. After all, civilians must manage regardless. I think you can teach or write, if you keep away from controversial subjects. Anyway, that’s my interpretation of the code. Of course a fellow like this beggar Kotewall, who couldn’t wait to yell, ‘Banzai,’ at the conquerors — well, that’s different. What have you got in that box?”
I put a cardboard case down on his table. “It’s my jewels, all but a ring and a pin I gave away instead of money. I think for the next few days they’ll be safer here, Charles. Do you mind?”
“No, but they’re not particularly safe here either. People steal things around here too, though I believe it’s more in the line of food and tobacco that they’re interested. It you want to take the risk … Look. I still have my money. You’d better take it.”
We divided it and I carried sixty dollars home with me. Petro had thrown some money at me, the day he ran out of the hospital, which had helped us all out. I still had some of that. I had continued to hoard my two hundred-dollar notes, watching the fluctuating market value of big notes like a hawk. I was beginning to feel quite wealthy. I was also feeling grave about the war situation, but not at all hopeless. Bataan was still holding out, and that helped our morale a lot.
Charles had said:
“The Nips had better get along to Australia and finish that job, if they know what’s good for them. That’s what I would do in their place; forget all this nonsense about India and go for Australia. Whoever holds Australia will win the Pacific war in the end. I don’t see how they can hope to hold out otherwise. But it’s going to be a long pull.”
I had a pretty good picture of the setup at hospital. The officers in charge lived in the private houses surrounding the building, and a regular garrison group had been moved into a sort of barracks just down the hill, on a bluff overlooking the harbor. The hospital itself was very lightly guarded, but no attempts had been made to escape. Most of the patients were too ill to have such ambitious ideas, and the Japanese probably banked on that. Charles scoffed at me when I asked him if he were hungry.
“We have plenty here,” he said, “a rough puh-lenty. But if you have any chocolate at home that you don’t need, I wouldn’t say no.”
I met Tony on my way out, and we had a talk. “Charles isn’t doing well,” he said bluntly. “Not at all well. He isn’t picking up as he should; he doesn’t eat. No sick man could eat this muck.”
“He said he didn’t want anything but chocolate.”
“He’s trying to compensate for protein. He doesn’t know. … Look here, you can probably find brains in the market, calves’ brains. The Chinese don’t eat them as a rule, and you may be able to get some. Cook those up and bring them in. Or soup, beef broth or something like that. Something with strength in it. I don’t suppose you can buy Bovril?”
Probably the humble milk bottle of soup that I brought next day was the very beginning of the great parcel-day organization which was to spring up later, all through the camps, all over the Colony.
“You know, Reeny,” I said that night, “it isn’t too horrible, is it? I mean, I’m glad I didn’t kill myself, after all. It may hurt a lot, but it’s interesting. You’ve got to admit that, it’s interesting.”
“Oh well, if my man were alive, over at Bowen Road, I’d feel that way myself,” said Irene. “No. I didn’t mean it. I do feel that way too. I get awfully impatient with Mother for crying all the time. I’m damned if I’ll cry. It would give those little beasts too much satisfaction. We’ll pull through, Mickey, I’ve made up my mind. But — oh dear, just once I would like to go to bed feeling that my stomach is full.”
“And that’s no lie.” We sat there brooding. “The stomach shrinks in time,” I suggested hopefully. “I think you people get more to eat than I do, over at Hilda’s. She’s a very careful housekeeper, and she doesn’t eat much herself. She doesn’t understand. We had lettuce for lunch, just lettuce.”
“No bread?”
“No, we ate our bread for breakfast.”
“We have plenty of bread. I baked it myself. We have some flour.”
“Um.”
Irene brought out a cupcake affair, made without sugar, and insisted that I eat it. May, the amah, looking on, made a grimace intended for a smile. “Miss Hahn very lucky,” she said. “Eats over at Mrs. Selwyn-Clarke’s house, then comes home and eats here. Very lucky.”
I glowered at the woman, who must have had a tapeworm considering the way she devoured food. She left the room and went in to Carola.
“If she weren’t so good with the baby,” I said, “I’d — ”
“Oh, May. She’s pretty bad. Well, Mickey, do you think it’s all right now about your pass?”
I said cautiously, “For a while. But someday somebody’s going to catch up with me, I think. Let’s not be too confident.”
That day came very soon.
Chapter 47
The old people, Father and Mother, suddenly decided that they shouldn’t impose on me any more. They went back to Kowloon to live with another daughter, Daisy, where room was made by shoving more people together in a now familiar fashion, and putting up cots. Irene and Phyllis stayed on with me. It was more fun and they felt they had better chances to find work if they remained in Hong Kong.
Getting from the island to Kowloon was not now as hazardous as it had been at first. The ferry was running, and it you didn’t mind being thoroughly and lasciviously searched by Indian guards at the ticket booth you could get through. We did mind, though; none of us three went over to the mainland until we couldn’t help ourselves. There was plenty of searching to undergo anyway; often the Japanese threw a cordon around some downtown district and searched everyone who was caught inside the barrier. (One of them liked Irene so much he went over her twice.) A house-to-house search for enemies and arms was also under way, but it would take a long time for the search party to reach May Road, and we had no enemies or arms, so we tried not to worry. There were disquieting stories, though, that the search party had a way of picking up whatever items they liked the look of, as they went through the houses.
It is hopeless to attempt to give a detailed picture of conditions. Every five minutes brought a new alarm and at least once a day the alarm turned out to be genuine. We lived in a state of suspended terror, and we learned to dread any knock on the door. Matters that seem small when I look back were grave threats then to our lives. Small things — the fact that the Japanese were going to
collect money for water, for example, and would cut it off if payment didn’t come promptly — made us thoroughly miserable. We saw our children dying of typhoid or cholera. We didn’t have our war legs yet. We hadn’t learned to put off our worries until the moment came to grapple with them; it saves a lot of energy to do that.
By nature and training I was less subject to panic than were the refugees in the two buildings that made up our community. All the others, crowded in as they were, sleeping on the floor in rows, in naked, looted flats, upstairs and down, all of them were dramatic, emotional, whipped, scared people. They were Eurasians, Indians, Chinese, even a few European refugees from Czechoslovakia and Denmark. They had quantities of children. They lived on whatever money they had brought with them, but they hated to use it, and they fell eagerly on an extremely meager allowance of food which Selwyn had begun to supply from the hospital leftovers; on alternate days it was possible to get a slice of bread for each person in our two houses, and a half-pint of milk for each child less than five years old. Mixed in with these really needy “volunteer dependents” were a few people who had money but who wanted to save it.
One of these, of mixed blood, part Annamite, I think, learned quickly how to fawn on the Japanese. Pretty soon she was getting more confidence in herself, and she began to cheer up considerably. She was in charge of the rations, the bread and milk; other women started reporting their suspicions of her to Selwyn, alleging that she was stealing the supplies or holding back on her enemies in order to feed her friends. Everyone was quick to accuse everyone else of this sort of thing. Selwyn was livid with rage when he found this out, though her friends had been innocent of any intention to graft in accepting them. There were incredible instances of petty theft and meanness. A British doctor who had been kept out of internment as a member of the Health Department was living with his Eurasian mistress about a mile away. We noticed that he always turned up on distributing days, for half a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk. Since he wasn’t exactly a volunteer dependent, Duggie Valentine looked into the matter and discovered that this man actually made rounds every day, to three centers like this one, and in each station took a tax of bread and milk. None of the British could do anything about it because he was getting on well with the Japanese.