by Emily Hahn
“You want us to starve,” repeated Reeny, “so we won’t bother you any more. Well, I won’t starve! I won’t starve! I won’t!”
“It is getting late,” said Oda. He looked at her with amused admiration, and bowed good night. Imamura shook hands hastily and trotted out after his chief.
Chapter 53
The red cross had been set up at last, and a Mr. Zindel was put in charge. Mr. Zindel, who had lived in Hong Kong for years, was an anxiously honest gentleman, very conscientious, but with something of that trustful quality which made Chamberlain such an easy mark for Hitler. Aware that he had no official position with the Japanese, he behaved like a man with no official position. When he had collected a store of medicine, for example, to present to Bowen Road Hospital, and when he went up to hand it over to the authorities, they chased him away with the curt remark that they didn’t need British medicine for their prisoners; they had plenty of medicine of their own. This was not true and Mr. Zindel knew it was not true, but he went away without demur. With the Japanese you have to demur, but it took him a long time to find it out. He was not permitted to visit any of the military camps. He wrung his hands and sat in his office, and hired more people (Swiss) to do the paper work that mounted and mounted.
The camp for enlisted men, Shamsuipo, was being punished for something or other, and for months no parcels were allowed. This hit them hard, for nearly all the Volunteers, being local men, depended on their families for food to help out their starvation diet. Although we weren’t supposed to know about it, we did: so many men were suffering from beriberi and other symptoms of malnutrition, burning feet and blindness, that at one time fifty per cent of them could not stand up. The Japs had begun to call on them for labor and some of the women in town learned that at certain times of the day these workers would be marched through the streets to the airport of Kai Tak, where they were set to enlarging the field. The women stood on the street corners to see them go by. Always at the end of the day some of them had to be carried back on stretchers.
The Red Cross supplies that came with the first exchange ship helped out a lot. We knew how welcome they were at Stanley, and we could imagine what they meant to the camps. The specially packed parcels which were distributed at Christmas were made up of lovingly wrapped but infinitesimal tins.
None of the hardships were the fault of our local Red Cross, nor of Mr. Zindel. He did the best he could, and he learned to do better, but the task was probably beyond the powers of any Swiss. In the first heat of criticism I wanted him to resign. I thought that a quiet protest like that would do some good by calling attention of Red Cross headquarters in Tokyo to the situation. But all his compatriots when I said this looked very much startled.
“Such an action, I am sure, has never occurred to him. He is a good man, and at least he can try to do something. If he were to resign there would be nothing.”
The Swiss man in charge of all the Far East Red Cross was one Egle, of Shanghai. He came down to Hong Kong to inspect the office when it was under way, and Oda invited me out to dinner to meet him. The dinner was to be at the Grips, and on that evening we were visited by a pouring summer thunderstorm, so I paddled down the hill in wooden clogs, like any amah, and carried my shoes. I was drenched when I arrived; the color of my dress had run; I had been shabby when I started out and now I was a mess. It didn’t improve my spirits when I got there to see that there was another girl on the party, though I was fond of her. It was Mitzi Glover, the Shanghai Russian who had been one of the most beautiful girls in the prewar Grips of a Saturday night. Mitzi had landed a job as sort of hostess-manager for the Japanese who was now trying to make a go of the hotel. She lived there, had her meals there, and ultimately married Gatri, the Swiss hotel chef, thus in one master stroke acquiring a man she loved, a neutral passport, and a fair certainty of eating until the end of the war. I hand it to Mitzi. … But that evening I could find it in my heart to wish she hadn’t chosen to put on a stunning red chiffon evening dress.
The rest of the guests were men, subordinates of Oda in the Foreign Affairs office. I knew them all as an old lag knows the police in the station where he goes to report every week. There was also Egle, the great man, head of the Red Cross.
Oda is one of those unusual Japanese who can drink. He gave me two martinis immediately so that I could catch up with the rest of the party. Egle talked a lot. He said many pretty things about Japan, and he raved about the way the Japanese were governing in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. He also spoke appreciatively of the German community in Shanghai. Now and then, perhaps to reassure me of his heart of gold beneath all this diplomacy, he would wink at me. I hated his guts.
I hated his guts and I drank quickly to forget him. I hadn’t had anything to drink in quantity since before Pearl Harbor, and I had lost the knack. Also I had been undernourished for a long time. We had a lot of wine with dinner; Oda knew how to give a foreign dinner and he spread himself. It was on government funds anyway.
Maybe, too, my nerves were near breaking point. Just that week the gendarmes had scared me again by suggesting I go away. They were is the middle of a drive to “repatriate” the Chinese, i.e., to get them out of town and out of sight, where it would not be necessary to bring in food to feed them. These drives came along at short intervals and while they lasted nobody was secure. Trucks rolled around the streets and their drivers stopped now and then to wait while gendarmes rounded up beggars and anyone else who didn’t look wealthy enough to make trouble; these people were then carted down to the water front, loaded on junks, and “repatriated.” Sometimes they were dumped out in the country, and sometimes — well, we didn’t know.
Naturally the gendarmes couldn’t send me out of town like that, but still I was one more mouth to supply and in the routine course of events it was their duty to ship me off to be someone else’s headache. “Why not go back to Shanghai, your native place?” asked Mr. Yokayama. “Why not go back to your husband?” The Shanghai authorities would have to ship in rice for one more person in that case, of course, but that would be up to the Shanghai authorities.
“Mr. Yokayama,” I said, “I have Boxer’s baby.”
“Yes?” said Yokayama. “Yes, I know.”
“Well,” I said, “if you were me, and if you had a Chinese husband, and if you had Boxer’s baby, would you go back to your Chinese husband carrying Boxer’s baby?”
Mr. Yokayama scratched his head and admitted that I had something there. But still, he had scared me. Life, I felt, was bloody. The full-course dinner did not cheer me up. And I drank more wine, and more wine, and talked about life with Mr. Kawaminami, on my left. I didn’t talk to a man on my right: that was Egle.
I woke in the morning with a terrible sense of guilt. I usually do when I’ve had too much to drink. But this time it was overpowering. Somehow I felt that I must call up Oda right away, right away. Something awful had happened. I knew that, but I didn’t know what.
Dragging my feet, dressed in whatever I had first picked up, I climbed the hill to the house of the neutrals, where I was permitted to use the phone if I didn’t say anything incriminating. I called Oda.
“Oh, good morning,” he said. He sounded icy.
“I believe I forgot to thank you for the party,” I said in as sprightly a tone as I could manage.
“Did you? Yes, you did,” said Oda. Then there was one of those pauses. I was scared stiff. For God’s sake, what had happened? Didn’t I know any better than to go out and get that drunk with Japanese? Anything could have happened; my imagination began to boggle right away.
“Mr. Oda,” I said desperately, “how did I get home? I mean, when I woke up this morning I was at home. That’s something to go on, isn’t it? I mean — ”
“Home? I brought you home,” said Mr. Oda. “With Mr. Mayajima and Mr. Kawaminami. In my car.” He stopped, coiled for the spring. “You slapped me,” said Mr. Oda.
“What?”
“You — slapped — me.”
“No!”
“Yes.” Was that a chuckle? I shall never know. It may have been, but on the other hand it may not have been. You never knew with Oda.
“Why did I slap you?” I asked, capitulating. I was curious.
“I don’t really know,” he said crisply. “But I think it was probably that you had a subconscious desire to slap a Japanese.”
I got down the hill all right, but I was talking to myself. “Out of the whole lot of them, you would pick the chief of Foreign Affairs, Mickey Hahn. You couldn’t have done better. Well, yes, there might have been an improvement. It could have been a gendarme.” I stopped on the last landing before I reached the house, gripping the rail for support. “Oh no,” I decided, reaching the climax of my monologue. “No. Not even I would ever get that drunk.”
Chapter 54
The chinese had reinstated a sort of Underground. They were in practice for it, because there had been an active trade in smuggling people across the border into Hong Kong long before Pearl Harbor, when the British authorities were trying to stop immigration from occupied Canton. It was an open secret that Hong Kong’s official census fell almost half a million below the actual number of inhabitants in 1940. Now the smuggling had begun again, but it worked both ways. People crept into town without the required permits to enter, they lived there without the necessary permit to stay, and they crept out again without getting permission to do so. The Japanese tried to stop it by means of searching and surprise raids, but as fast as they put it down in one spot it would pop up again at another.
In this way people often received messages from the interior, by word of mouth and even by letter. Letters, of course, were very dangerous. I knew people who corresponded with Free China in that way, but I never did it myself, and nobody sent me letters from outside either. I hoped they wouldn’t. I sweated for fear they would, because when such a letter was found by the gendarmes they had a way of reading it, copying it, letting it go through and then, when they had collected enough evidence, pouncing on all the parties concerned.
Just the same, I picked up news through other people who were more daring than I, and so did Reeny. One day she came home in wild excitement because she had encountered an old woman, a friend of her mother’s, who had just come in from Free China. She told Reeny enough about conditions in the interior to hearten her and to give her the audacious idea of herself escaping to friendly territory.
If she found work inside the old people could follow. That woman said it would be feasible even for the old people. But Irene would have to go first. She would have to get a permit to go to Kwangchowwan, the French colony; from Kwangchowwan one rode by sedan chair, or walked, to Kweilin in China.
“I’ll have to take Frances, of course. This woman says there’s plenty of milk inside. Think of it — plenty of milk! And so many of our friends that you would think Kweilin was a part of Hong Kong. They say more than four hundred of our boys got away after the surrender and marched into China. They say there’s a British major from here, at a post quite near by. Perhaps I could get more definite news of Ernie, even. Oh, I don’t suppose Ernie could be alive; if he were he’d have got in touch with me, but still …”
For days and nights we talked it over and planned this way and that way. Then there came a piece of news that simplified matters. Maya Rodeivitch, the Polish girl from Chungking, was still in town, disconsolate now that the Americans were all gone. I sent her with a card to Ogura, that champion of all white ladies in distress; he found her a Japanese pupil to whom she taught German. Maya had made another friend, De Roux, manager of the Banque d’Indo-Chine. She told me that he was well worth knowing, and one day when we had spent some hours in the street where looted books were sold by weight we dragged our baskets into the bank and had a talk with him. De Roux was so shy that I had never seen him around at parties before the war. He was very nice, however, when you got to know him. Forced to abandon his Peak house, he had fixed up a flat on top of the bank building, and later he introduced me there to Sir Vandeleur Grayburn of the Hong Kong Bank and Lady Grayburn, who sometimes dropped in on De Roux to take baths and to forget the Sun Hwa Hotel for a few minutes.
De Roux often said of himself that he was a born uncle. Certainly Carola thought so. He was one of the kindest people I have ever known, and all of us have lots to thank him for. At that time he was busy advising Maya as to her future actions; he urged her to get out of town while it was still possible. Maya got her permit reasonably quickly. It took only two months, almost record time for the Hong Kong gendarmes, who were so busy urging people to get out of town that they had no time to make it possible to leave.
As a Eurasian, Irene was able to get a similar permit. Only enemy nationals had to stay in Hong Kong under surveillance. Paul de Roux even thought that I would be able to put it over, by virtue of my Chinese passport, but I knew I wouldn’t. One slight attempt to get away to Free China and I would land in jail: I knew it. Besides, though I couldn’t convince him of this, I still felt that I should stay. “I could have gone in the Gripsholm if I wanted,” I said. “But who else would send food to Charles?”
“Why, anybody.”
“But who? There was no money to leave for that. Things were still awfully tight. Oh, I know it’s easier now, but that was four months ago; it would have been impossible to make arrangements.”
“I see. Yes, that is different. Yes, naturally you would want to remain even now. But these two girls can go without hesitation.”
Maya and Irene decided to join forces. At Kwangchowwan they would have to join a larger party anyway; that was the method by which most of the refugees got through without being molested by bandits en route. For some weeks Irene collected things to take in, until I was moved to secret laughter. Irene had vowed ever since I met her that never again would she collect things. She had seen her house and everything in it lost. She wanted to travel light for the rest of her life. She was cured of the desire, inherited from her Chinese ancestors, to own things and more things. She said this often.
But now, as every day brought her nearer to the great adventure, she forgot her pious resolutions. She had never gone into rural China and she thought of it as a desert to which she must bring all the amenities of civilization. She didn’t have much, but with the earnest help of her mother and sisters she managed to collect a truly awe-inspiring heap of clothes and tins and things. “With a baby you have to take a lot,” she explained at intervals.
“But, Reeny, have you thought what a lot of trouble and expense you’ll have, carrying all this stuff through no man’s land?”
“I won’t be able to get a thing inside,” she argued. “Not a thing. And look what happened to us before. I didn’t regret anything I brought over from Kowloon, not anything; I was only sorry I hadn’t brought more.”
She picked up another giant duffel bag and started to pack it.
Everyone knew that the last hurdle, and the highest of all, was the dock of embarkation. It was there that the authorities, the ubiquitous gendarmes, scanned your papers for the last time and picked up your rice ticket, that document which meant so much to the inhabitants of Hong Kong. It was there that your luggage and perhaps you yourself were searched thoroughly for articles that must not be taken out of town, and for papers of any sort. We had heard from many sources that the searching was terrible, because it was left to the far from tender mercies of the coolies who carried your bags. The thing to do, said our advisers, was to slip the chief coolie a good tip as you walked onto the dock; then it would be all right.
I was there, and so was Paul de Roux in Maya’s honor, and so were about a dozen Gittins relatives.
Irene, wearing slacks and a broad-brimmed straw coolie hat, carried the heavy baby slung on her back. She looked very small and young to be going off into the blue with such a responsibility. The searching, in spite of a large wad of yen duly slipped to the chief coolie, was really an outrage. With loud cries to each other, coolies fell on the luggage and tore it to pieces, pour
ing everything out on the filthy boards of the dock. There was no pretense at searching; it was sheer malicious vandalism. When they had turned everything out and had picked up odd bits that they liked the looks of, they abandoned the whole matter and left Reeny to pack up again as best she could. It was a hopeless job, for the giant knapsacks had been impossible to pack properly to begin with. Odd shoes of the baby’s and clean underwear, dress hangers and cooking pots, tinned milk and wadded gowns lay spread out where passers-by stepped on them. We gathered it together as well as we could, and Reeny, prey to the tearing claws of nostalgia, rage, shame, and fear, put it all away doggedly, tears dropping into the bags before she tied them up again. During the entire proceedings an elegant gendarme, his white-gloved hands resting on his knees, questioned an Indian peddler a few feet away from us, not deigning to drop a word to the coolies.
“But really, it is a shame, you know. A shame,” muttered Paul.
A little fellow named Eddie Elias, who had helped Maya get ready, hung about waiting to wave good-by to her. Eddie had a strong sense of drama. After the girls had walked on board where we could not follow them, and had gone into the saloon, so that the door smothered even Frances’ howls, Eddie walked up close to the boat, closer than we dared go, and stared into the saloon porthole fixedly. He seemed to be watching something that alarmed him. The rest of us were in a mood to be alarmed, for it was always a tense moment, that embarkation. Now was the time the gendarmes often swooped down on a suspect and put him into jail. Many of their arrests were made at that moment, just when a malefactor thought he was safe at last and on his way to freedom. Paul and I stared at each other when we saw Eddie’s face. Then, as he turned and hurried back to us, we were more alarmed than ever.
“Something’s wrong,” gasped Eddie. “A party of gendarmes just went on board. One of them spoke to Maya. They’re looking at papers of some sort. They’ve taken the girls into another cabin. …”