China to Me

by Emily Hahn

  Naturally I didn’t like them very much. And they were suspicious of me and treated me as a favorite subject for aspiring young spies who wanted to get along in the world. After Chick appeared they all let up. Millie did try to push in on the party, because she thought it was just an ordinary affaire and that I had caught a prize, but Chick soon called her off.

  That was one good turn he did me, and there were others. I am grateful to the gendarmerie for assigning me to Chick. I might have drawn an ordinary policeman, and that would have been bad. I’m sure it was Charles’s reputation that helped me. When the authorities finally decided to take over Tregunter Mansions for their own uses it was Yoshida and Chick who moved us to another house down in Kennedy Road. Moving was a tremendous affair, and we couldn’t possibly have paid the hire of coolies, let alone trucks. Yoshida paid them, in rice, and provided a lorry — and then after we moved in, all innocent and thinking it was all right, the Army came along and told us to move right out again. That was an awful business; an angry man in boots stamped in at ten in the evening and told us to get right out. Well, we yelled for Chick, and Chick phoned Noma, and Noma fixed it, though he did say sourly that if I had been in Stanley this need never have happened.

  Unfortunately, after a month Chick decided that I was really harmless, and even rather a nice girl, and so he dropped me, and we got no more food from the gendarme kitchen. Soon after that he was edged out of Hong Kong altogether. The expulsion was due to some matter of his selling government oil for his own purposes; Chick said Yoshida had connived at his downfall, and Yoshida had been triumphant. Yoshida, he said, had always been jealous of his, Chick’s, influence with Noma.

  When I next heard of Chick he was in Canton, trying to get a monopoly on the city’s cabaret business, and also he owned two department stores. He was a smoothie all right, and not the sort of man I would like to see my daughter too chummy with, but for a gendarme, you must admit, he was not so bad. I should like, someday, to be able to give him food, when he’s starving in prison. I told him so.

  Chapter 50

  Concurrently with this gendarme-geisha existence, we were becoming acquainted with a few civilians. After the hospital doors were closed to me I put into action an idea I had been holding for some time, and I went downtown to call on the chief of the Domei office. (Domei, you may remember, is the official Jap news agency, and my friend Matsumoto in Shanghai had been the chief there.) Nowadays it was getting safe to walk alone, though accidents still happened sometimes. Hilda had been held up and searched by a young hoodlum one day, near our house, but she wasn’t carrying any money.

  “Of all the impertinence,” she said when she told me about it. I can’t help loving the British.

  So I went to see Mr. Ogura alone. I found a small curly-headed man who laughed nervously in lieu of words when he couldn’t think of the correct English, but who, when he did talk, usually said something worth hearing. He was a civilized chap. He had a sense of humor and a sense of shame; he didn’t like the war, though he never said so. We discovered a bond between us immediately. Before Pearl Harbor he and his wife had often gone to see my gibbons in their cage and had fed them. (My last gibbon, by the way, died during the hostilities, of starvation. The coolie ran away and left him locked up in his own room.) Now Ogura’s wife was home in Japan; she had had a girl baby the day before Carola was born, and Ogura had never seen his child. So he liked Carola. Also Ogura knew Charles by reputation and admired his books. He tried hard to help me. He said that be would cable Matsumoto and ask if there was any way in which I could do some non-political work.

  He lied. It was the first time I knew a Japanese to tell a tactful and well-meaning lie. He told me he had cabled Shigei Matsumoto, but he hadn’t really. He told me next day that he had received a reply and that he would do his best to find me a job, and in the meantime did I need anything? He put his hand in his pocket tentatively.

  No, I said, I didn’t need anything, thanks. Except — it’s the first and only time I did beg from a Japanese — could he give me some sugar or tell me where to get some? I had none for Carola’s milk, and there was none to be had in the market. Reeny, Phyllis, and I pooled all our resources, but I didn’t tell him that. He might have boggled at the idea of feeding three babies. Ogura immediately gave me the office tea-hour supply of sugar, a pound box which still had about half a pound in it.

  He did get me a job, teaching English to another newspaperman. It didn’t pay much, but it helped. Anything helped.

  We come now to another crisis. Before Pearl Harbor the Japanese I knew best through Charles (he had dined with us three times) was the young consul, Oda. Like most men in the consular service he had been to America as a student for at least a year, spoke English fluently, and looked less uncouth to us than did most of his compatriots. Oda had been transferred from the Hong Kong office long before the war. Now, we read in the paper, he was back in a new capacity; he was chief of the Foreign Affairs Department.

  It was just after the Nakazawa period that Ogura told me Mr. Oda wanted to see me. I was startled and dismayed, and resolved to do nothing about it until I had to. Maybe, I reasoned, he would forget about me. I was afraid of more investigations.

  One day, however, he telephoned me. (We had not yet moved.) “Miss Hahn? I think you will remember me. I met you with Boxer. This is Oda.”

  “Oh yes. How are you?”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “I heard you were back in town,” I said idiotically, trying to stave off whatever was coming.

  “I heard you were too,” he said dryly. “Miss Hahn, what is your nationality?”

  There it was. Still, if I had passed muster with the all-powerful gendarmes …

  “Chinese — now,” I said.

  “What do you mean by Chinese now?” he inquired sternly.

  I said in desperation, “Well, Mr. Oda, you know what I mean. I’m American, but after the war I — well, there was that marriage, and — “

  “Never mind then. I am calling you because there is on foot a plan to repatriate some of the Americans,” said Oda.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. People to be included in this exchange are diplomats, members of the consular department, and newspapermen. Your name has been included. I did not know you were a newspaperwoman.”

  “Oh yes, I am.”

  “Well, you are to be repatriated, Miss Hahn: congratulations. But if you have not been in Stanley first, like the other Americans, there is likely to be a question raised as to your nationality. So I suggest you enter Stanley now, and in a few weeks you will be on your way to America.” He sounded pleased.

  “You mean I must go to Stanley?”

  “It you wish to be repatriated, yes.”

  “But if I don’t wish to be repatriated I can stay out of Stanley?”

  “Why — uh — yes, I suppose so.” Mr. Oda sounded surprised.

  “Then I don’t want to be repatriated,” I said flatly.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Oda, do you know what Stanley is like? Can you promise me there will ever be a repatriation, honestly? I might be caught out there for life. Unless you insist. I’ll never do it, never. I have a baby.”

  There was a long silence. At last he said, “Don’t make up your mind yet.”

  “But — “

  “Come and talk it over,” said Oda. “Our offices are in the Peninsula Hotel — the Toa, as it is called now. Are you afraid to come to Kowloon?”

  “Oh no. I’ll bring my girl friend.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow. Think it over.”

  I wouldn’t think it over. My mind had made itself up on the second. I was trembling as I hung up the receiver.

  The faithful Irene came along, though she hated going to Kowloon. Everything she saw there reminded her of her lost home. Even the people she met made the experience painful — the Indian at whose shop they had always bought cloth, and the barber who always cut the Gittins hair. Today we didn’t have to go f
ar, however; the Toa Hotel (Peninsula to you) is near the ferry station. When we came in to the lobby we found that it had been fitted up like a fortress rather than a hotel. There were guards everywhere with bayonets, and we were questioned a lot before being given little tags of green cloth to pin on our chests. Decked with these tags, we were allowed upstairs, to the sacred office of the Foreign Affairs Department.

  Oda, at the end of a long emergency desk full of busy workers, was looking plump but older, dressed in khaki uniform. He stood up and shook hands quite as if I were still somebody respectable instead of being just a woman. Most officials did not, because this was Japanese territory now.

  We went over the same ground we had covered on the phone. Oda seemed to feel that it made no difference to his side whether I departed or not. It didn’t even matter if I went to Stanley or not. He wasn’t at all au courant with what had happened to me; he knew only what Kimura must have written down in his records about my legal standing as a Chinese. When I told him again that I didn’t want to take my baby into camp he sat up.

  “A baby? You said so, but I — “

  “Why, yes. Didn’t you know? Boxer’s baby.”

  Oda sat back in his chair and opened his eyes wide. He looked frightened. When he spoke his voice was hushed yet stern.

  “Do the gendarmes know about this?” he demanded.

  I giggled. I couldn’t help it. Irene and I eagerly told him about Chick, and the interview with Noma, and all the rest of it. Gradually Mr. Oda caught his breath again. If the dreaded gendarmes already had me under observation his responsibility was much lightened. He would inquire on his own, naturally, to make sure, but the whole thing was easier now, and he didn’t care so much; he could relax.

  At last he sighed and said, “Well, if that’s what you think about it there is no more to say.”

  “After all,” I said, “you can’t promise that this repatriation is going to take place definitely, anyway.”

  “No, I can’t,” he admitted. “By the way, Miss Hahn, do you know why you are on the list?”

  “Well, no. I suppose, though, that if all newspaper people — “

  He shook his head. “No. You were put on the list later, specially, by cable.” He seemed impressed. “They have cabled from Tokyo. Do you know anybody important in Tokyo?”

  “Only Matsumoto.”

  “It could not be Matsumoto. Think hard. Don’t you know someone else in Tokyo?”

  “No.”

  Again he shook his head. It was the first hint I had of what was going on in the world outside on my behalf, but I didn’t read it correctly. He misled me. Because he thought this urgent demand to send me away came from his own government I thought so too. I couldn’t imagine why it was so. Actually the cabled order must have been the first faint echo of the hell my sister Helen was raising over here with the State Department, but I had no way of knowing that. I was beginning to think I had never had a sister Helen, or any other family. I had been cut off for four months now; it was the end of March. They had been quite full four months, too. Naturally I wasn’t taking much stock in my family’s power to help me, by this time.

  “Well …,” Oda said. We stood up and shook hands all around. “My office is moving to the other side next week,” he said. “I shall be living in Robinson Road. I will come to call on you when I have time. And how” — he dropped his voice in a way which I was beginning to recognize — “how is Boxer?”

  I told him as much as I knew.

  “I have tried to get permission to see him,” Oda said. “I think I shall be able to see him shortly. Do you wish me to inform him of this decision you have made?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He remained standing until we had left the office.

  We have no telephone in the new house, and no prospect of ever getting one. It was wiser, we discovered, not to have one even if we had been able to pay for it, because all telephone wires were tapped. Ogura therefore sent a message to me through my new pupil, a news agency man:

  “Matsumoto will be in town tomorrow. Come to the office if you wish to see him, at three-thirty. He arrives by boat from Canton.”

  I was there. I was intensely curious to see Shigei after all this time; I had last encountered him by accident in Hong Kong during the month of early spring that I had come down from Chungking, and our interview then, in the hotel lobby with everyone glaring at us, had been uncomfortable and full of awkward silences.

  When he did come in, big and important, surrounded by little Japs like tugs, he was so surprised at seeing me that he stopped short at the door. Then he asked me to go upstairs to Ogura’s private offices, and soon he came in, smooth and silent and impassive, wondering, very likely, what the hell he was to say to this embarrassing reminder of his past. For Shigei was a great man now, and full of triumph in his own right, not only as the cousin of Konoye. If he had ever been sincere in his pacifism and in all the criticism of the militarists that he had expressed in Shanghai, it was forgotten now. Perhaps not quite forgotten, or he would not have looked a little foolish, as he did now, when I spoke.

  “Well, Shigei,” I said. “Here we are. Fancy meeting you here!”

  “I could not believe it,” he said solemnly. “When I last saw you, in the spring of ‘40, I thought I would never see you again. I knew what was going to happen. All this time I assumed you were still in Chungking. I could not believe it, seeing you. What … why … ?”

  “You remember Sinmay.” Yes, Shigei did. I told him what I had done. He was slow to grasp it, and very, very much surprised when I was finished. Then I waited for him to say something about the war, but still he talked about mutual acquaintances, and Charles, and other subjects. At last I said: “Well, Shigei?” again, and he capitulated.

  “Mickey,” he said, smiling, his whole face suddenly pink, “we are living, just now, in the most interesting period of history. Think of it, Mickey, the most interesting period in the world’s history.”

  “What happens in the end, Shigei?”

  He didn’t answer. He sat there smiling, seeing visions. …

  “Do you remember,” I said, “a conversation we had once in Shanghai, after Nanking, about the fait accompli? It seems more relevant now than it did then.”

  No, Shigei had forgotten. I looked at my watch. It was getting late and he was busy. He was a very important man in the New Order.

  “But what is this I hear about your child?” he asked.

  “Yes. I have a baby.”

  “I inquired for Major Boxer as I got off the boat. I am sorry he was wounded. If I had the time … How does it happen that you have had this child? You did not know Boxer in Shanghai, did you?”

  “No. The child? I wanted it and he wanted it, so we had it.”

  “You are a nicer girl now than before,” said Shigei. “Tell me, can I do anything for you?”

  I looked at him curiously, saying, “I’m all right, thanks.”

  “Because,” he said, “as it happens, the new Governor is a very old and good friend of mine.”

  “Just ask Ogura to keep a protective eye on me, then, if you would. It ever I am in danger of being interned, perhaps he would appeal to you.”

  “I think you will be all right if, as you say, the gendarmes don’t mind. … But look, Mickey; I shall be in charge of all my offices from now on. I will travel constantly between Tokyo and Singapore; I shall be able to see you. …”

  “Traveling will be interesting for you,” I said. “I must go home. It’s dangerous for me to stay downtown after dark.”

  He insisted on sending me up the hill in his car, but when we were out of sight of his office I stopped the car and walked home. I didn’t know why myself.

  In 1943 Ogura told me that Shigei was dying in Tokyo of some mysterious complaint, that his wife would not permit anyone in to see him, and that the end couldn’t be far off. Whatever he died of, it was not the pangs of conscience.

  Chapter 51

  Almost the
entire Health Department was still outside of Stanley, in actuality working away under Selwyn’s direction, though the Japanese managed to satisfy their own pride by calling the British “advisers” and keeping a few of their own men in the office for show. Colonel Nguchi, the medical officer who had befriended Selwyn, turned out to be a wonderfully lucky accident for us. It seems that he had been one of a party sent by Tokyo, a few years before the war, to Hong Kong on a polite tour of inspection of British methods of hygiene. At that time he had been so much impressed by Selwyn’s elaborately formal politeness, in comparison with the usual British offhand manners that he as an Oriental had already encountered, that he made a vow to himself. “Here for once is an Englishman of true courtesy,” he said. All his inferiority complex contributed to the pleasure he felt in Selwyn’s attitude. “If ever I have the chance,” he thought, “I will repay him for his politeness.”

  It was on his urgent representation to the higher military authorities that Selwyn still retained his position, but that position was always precarious. Selwyn was up against the swollen suspicions of the entire Japanese crowd, the hatred they felt for Englishmen, and the resentment of the gendarmes, who were always jealously watchful of their powers and who felt that Nguchi, a mere medical military man, was trying to put something over on them. The gendarmes were for the most part totally uneducated thugs, whose only aim in life was to get as much for themselves as possible, in the quickest time they could. Nguchi was no Sunday-school teacher, but he did have a vague desire to keep the city healthy. The gendarmes didn’t give a damn about the city’s health. They hated the city, they hated the Chinese, they hated the British, and they were not fond of the Army and the Navy; they were jealous of their power though they themselves were in the saddle. The Army and Navy, they felt, were a constant threat to their authority. Everything was a threat to their authority.