Eve of a Hundred Midnights

by Bill Lascher

  Mel nearly fainted upon receiving such support from Marshall, though he knew a stable job wasn’t guaranteed.

  “It means that when I land in China, I am on my own,” he wrote. “I will have the task of doing my best to interpret a force which is taking a toll of several thousand lives daily. Perhaps I won’t do a good job. I don’t know.”

  On top of Marshall’s support and the letters he received from the Institute for Pacific Relations members, Mel was asked by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Paul Smith to send him feature articles from China for This World, the Chronicle’s Sunday magazine. If big news broke, Smith said the paper would also turn to him as its correspondent in Asia.

  Mel knew this was a tremendous opportunity. Still, he had to improve his Chinese in the few weeks left before he left California. His old friend George Ching, who lived in San Francisco, offered to tutor him. To help Mel meet more easily with Ching, Jonathan Rice, a friend from the Stanford Daily who also lived in the city with a number of other Stanford friends, invited Mel to room with him.

  A few days after Mel made his presentation at the exposition, he wrote his mother with news about the commitment from the Chronicle. It was August 31, 1939, and probably not the best day for Mel to tout his ability to predict the news.

  “Still looks like no war in Europe today,” he wrote.

  The next day Hitler invaded Poland.

  Because of the outbreak of war in Europe, few people recall more positive events that were happening at the same time, like the Golden Gate exposition or the IPR’s lobbying for pan-Pacific cooperation. Perhaps, as Mel wrote on the eve of his return to China, such optimistic initiatives had simply run their course. The world had changed for the worse, and it was Mel’s job as a journalist to acknowledge that reality, though he argued that a journalist’s commitment to accurate reporting could help achieve peace.

  “World conditions point to troubled years ahead,” Mel wrote.

  No matter which way you turn, revolution, civil war, world war it all means people dying and suffering. It is the primary task of the correspondent to portray a real picture of what he sees before him. Yet it is his job to serve his own group best. That is the job I want to tackle. A job which means success if just one iota of misunderstanding is righted. It means that the world is just that much closer to harmonious living.

  Mel’s first stop in China was a place rife with misunderstanding: China’s great international metropolis, Shanghai.

  After his crash course in Chinese with George Ching, Mel left for China in the third week of October 1939. Crossing the Pacific aboard the SS President Coolidge, he stopped in Hawaii, switched ships in Kobe, Japan, and even encountered friends from Lingnan during the journey. On the boat from Japan, Mel also made a crucial contact: Randall Gould, the charismatic editor of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury and one of Shanghai’s most influential journalists. Gould offered to introduce Mel around Shanghai and help him get acclimated in the city.

  After arriving in Shanghai on November 7, Mel rented a room at the swanky $2-a-night Park Hotel (complete with three meals), which was next to a horse-racing track in the heart of Shanghai. This was far too expensive for Mel, and the guttural shouting of German guests in the hotel ordering around bellhops only increased his unease. Unfortunately for Mel, more affordable rooms were booked, so he needed to find either paying work or other lodging. In fact, he needed both if he was going to stay. Shanghai was not only a far more expensive place to live than elsewhere in China, it felt culturally isolated from the rest of the country. Recent events were also making it a decidedly less comfortable place to live.

  Shanghai had long been a hub for expatriates, in part because foreign governments had enjoyed extraterritorial powers in the city for decades. Not only did these powers leave Shanghai under the control of a council made up of foreign officials, but foreign residents were subject to their own countries’ laws, not China’s.

  “But if you aren’t British or French or American or if your country hasn’t got enough gunboats it isn’t so international,” Mel wrote, referring to the many foreigners who came to Shanghai but were not nationals of countries that enjoyed extraterritorial powers. Paradoxically, among the most disenfranchised populations in Shanghai were Chinese nationals. And though Shanghai maintained much of its international identity when Mel arrived in 1939, in the two years since the Battle of Shanghai, Japan had consolidated power there and grown increasingly belligerent toward both the Chinese and Westerners.

  “The Western world is being squeezed out of China,” Mel wrote. “Their last opening wedges—the foreign concessions—are fastly becoming subject to Japanese pressure.”

  Even as the Japanese took over, Mel found Shanghai society distastefully out of touch. When he went to exchange money at the American Express office, the bright blue travel pamphlets inside always seemed disconcerting to him, especially when a stretch of cold nights hit Shanghai and he saw humanitarian workers piling the bodies of Chinese laborers who had frozen to death into their trucks. Shanghai, the people in it, and the way the local Chinese were treated strained Mel’s patience to the point of anger. He said as much in one form or another in most of his letters.

  “I hate to see the beggars (I’ll see millions more),” he wrote. “I hate to see the rich kids in the cabarets, I hate to see the refugees, I hate to see the lousy foreigners in Packards and minks. Lots of money is being made now on the market and in business—but the Chinese peasant is taking it on the proverbial chin.”

  Shanghai wasn’t the only place where Japan had increased its influence in China. At the end of 1937, Japan had attacked Nanking, then China’s capital, opening an unimaginably dark chapter in world history. For three weeks, Japanese forces committed acts as horrific as any others in the twentieth century’s grim gallery of atrocities. Between 20,000 and 300,000 civilians were killed in Nanking, while thousands of women, perhaps even tens of thousands, were raped.*

  Many journalists bore witness, including a New York Times reporter named Tillman Durdin. Reporting from Nanking in 1937, Durdin observed citywide looting, summary executions, enslavement of able-bodied men, rapes, and other crimes. In one of his most shocking accounts, Durdin said he saw 300 men lined up against a wall and shot.

  After Japan conquered Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s government retreated to Chungking, a distant, hilly city to the southwest. Meanwhile, a former ally of Chiang’s, Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jingwei), made a separate peace with Japan. Wang set up a collaborationist government, the Reorganized National Government of China. It claimed to represent all of China, but in reality it controlled only the Japanese-occupied portions of the country and was subject to the occupiers’ dictates.

  Wang’s underlings set up a network of spies and secret police in Shanghai’s International Settlement and the French Concession. Often coordinating their work with Japan’s secret agents and frequently enlisting the help of Shanghai’s expansive criminal underground, these agents operated out of nightmarish 76 Jessfield Road—a feared house that Wang’s enforcers used for beatings, flagellation, electrocution, and other torture.

  Early in 1939, the Kuomintang government in free China had infiltrated Shanghai’s police network and assassinated a string of high-profile collaborators. Wang’s shadowy alliance of criminals and secret police retaliated by cracking down in the city. This crackdown included threatening Shanghai’s press corps.

  Though the United States had not yet entered the war, such threats weren’t new to American journalists in Shanghai, as the writer Paul French detailed in his Through the Looking Glass.

  “Things went from bad to worse to deadly,” French noted. Reuters reporter James Cox was murdered at a police station, and the New York Times’s Hallett Abend—whom Mel would soon meet—was assaulted at Shanghai’s longtime press gathering point, the Broadway Mansions. Gould, the journalist whom Mel met just before arriving in Shanghai, was one of Japan’s frequent targets. As a result of numerous attempts on his life, Gou
ld took many security precautions, like keeping heavily armed bodyguards outside his office and traveling everywhere in an armored car. Mel wasn’t terribly convinced about the usefulness of such precautions.

  “The gunmen still get their newsmen,” Mel wrote of the reinforced concrete guard booths and the “tanks” he saw outside of newspaper offices.

  If Mel was at all frightened by the threats to journalists, he didn’t say so in his letters. It’s unlikely that he was. Instead, with Gould helping him make connections, Mel spent the better part of every day in Shanghai walking between news organizations to chat up editors, bureau chiefs, and correspondents.

  He also spent considerable time with Abend, a Stanford alum who, as likely the highest-paid foreign correspondent in Asia at the time, was also an avid art collector. A longtime stringer for the New York Times, he invited Mel to lunch at his apartment after a referral from Gould. Over “an A-1 lunch,” Abend showed off a collection of Chinese art worth thousands of dollars. Mel bought some silk paintings from a dealer whom Abend regularly brought to his apartment, but he was most eager to discuss the correspondent’s work. Aside from contributing to the Times, Abend regularly wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications.

  Aside from Abend and Gould, Shanghai’s journalism community was dominated by what Mordechai Rozanski later dubbed the “Missouri Mafia,” an influential cadre of reporters who’d studied at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. This midwestern school didn’t just send a number of journalists to China—its faculty and administrators stayed intimately involved in graduates’ activities in Asia even after they finished their schooling. Many journalists with ties to “Mizzou” also worked at Yenching University in Peiping, whose journalism department Mel had visited in 1937.

  Only four days after arriving in Shanghai, Mel met a Chinese-born Missouri “Mafioso” named Woo Kya-Tang (Wu Giadang). Woo wined and dined Mel, urging him to work for the China Press, where Woo was managing editor. Even though Mel refused a job at the China Press, Woo, who had close ties with the Kuomintang, offered to work as Mel’s agent. Mel also fielded offers to work at another paper, the Shanghai Press, and with the British news wire Reuters. But what Mel really wanted to do was get out of Shanghai and into free China.

  To learn more about the mechanics of the news business, Mel tagged along at press conferences and watched how statements from Japanese, British, French, and American officials turned into headlines. He even once accompanied some reporters on a boat as they tried to intercept the visiting American ambassador for questions before he slipped past in the crowded waters of the Whangpoo (Huangpu) River.

  “It’s rather interesting hearing and seeing how the news actually breaks and finds its way into America,” Mel wrote after one Japanese press conference.

  While Mel scrounged for work in Shanghai, he wrote a biting essay contrasting Shanghai’s selling points—its beauty, its modernity, its wealth, its internationalism—with the realities of municipal corruption, gunfights that the press never mentioned if Chinese were the victims, and tourists who marveled at Western-style buildings and gawked at the rickshaw drivers who tried to find them prostitutes.

  In this essay, which was never published, Mel also skewered the sizable segment of Shanghai’s international community whose members casually slung anti-Semitic slurs and stereotypes about the thousands of people who lived across Wàibáidù Qiáo—the Garden Bridge—a 105-meter-long steel truss bridge over the Suzhou Channel, in Shanghai’s Hongkew (Hongkou) district. Over the previous year, 17,000 Jewish emigrés forced out of Europe had found a home in Shanghai. World leaders had turned their backs on the thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazis. Conditions in Hongkew were cramped, however, and resembled the Jewish ghettoes many of its residents had left behind in Europe.

  Mel did publish another piece. In it, his first bylined story from China—though he wrote under the pen name Mel Jack—Mel described walking through a crowded Shanghai neighborhood when he suddenly heard a little girl shouting in German.

  “A few blocks more and I saw buildings displaying signs in German,” he reported in the two-page feature for the Los Angeles Times’s Sunday magazine. “Delicatessens offering Yiddish foods, small markets, tailor shops, radio repairmen and dentists all offered their wares and services.”

  Only a year earlier, Mel wrote, Shanghai had been home to only seventy Jewish residents, but as other ports around the world slammed their doors it fast became the last place accepting Jewish refugees. That welcome didn’t last; by December 1939, Shanghai had begun to “pull in her welcome sign.”

  In his feature, Mel lusciously described every nuance of life in the vibrant, but strained, Jewish refugee community. “It looks hopeless,” Mel wrote to his parents, describing the Jews’ plight and the article while he was still trying to sell the piece. Aside from the hopelessness of these refugees’ situation, Mel was fascinated by how strenuously they identified themselves, not just as Jews, but as Germans or Czechs or Austrians.

  “How strange that nationalism was still fostered among people sent from their own countries,” he pondered. “Could they get along living together in Shanghai? Could they make a living? If not, where can they go?”

  Shortly after arriving, through Woo and his other contacts, Mel was referred to one of the most influential Missouri “Mafiosos” then working in China: Hollington Tong (Dong Xianguang). As vice minister of the publicity bureau, “Holly,” as friends called him, was also an influential member of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. Mel, who’d admired a speech Holly gave on the Central Broadcasting Service (CBS) right after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937, soon learned that Holly was the architect of much of free China’s propaganda. His office wrote the government-sponsored news dispatches that were sent to wire services and newsrooms; after a government shake-up, it was also about to set up shortwave broadcasts from XGOY, the government-run radio station known as “the Voice of China.”

  Woo told Mel that the government was looking for someone to organize the operation at XGOY and write publicity as well. The job would put Mel in contact with some of the most important people in China and let him see the day-today workings of the Chinese government from a perspective available only to a few. The job, which was Mel’s if he wanted it, would give him a reason to leave Shanghai and move to Chungking, where the action was and where he could embed himself among a small but dedicated community of reporters.

  “That’s just the place I’ve been aiming at so all would be quite well should it turn out right,” Mel said.

  However, many of the journalists Mel had befriended in Shanghai warned him not to take the job. They thought the propaganda elements of it would kill Mel’s dream of working for newspapers in the future. Others disagreed that it was a bad idea. Even though the position involved writing propaganda and paid poorly, the capital’s allure—and the allure of being in free China—was difficult to resist. Besides, Mel hoped, a propaganda job didn’t have to be permanent. Moreover, if he took the job, he’d end up in daily contact with the Kuomintang’s inner circle and other high-profile sources. As Mel weighed the access and excitement of working in Chungking against the possibility of being permanently marked as a propagandist, the decision was made easier by the exhausting day-to-day life of Shanghai.

  By Thanksgiving, when Gould and his third wife had Mel over for Thanksgiving dinner, he realized that he’d befriended more or less every American journalist in Shanghai. Regardless of what decision Mel made, they were all confident in his future.

  “All seem quite anxious and convinced that I’ll land something soon,” he said. All of them, he added, had advice about each of his potential jobs.

  “I’m darn choosey,” he admitted. His other options included Woo’s newspaper (Mel gave him some informal advice on how to improve it), an offer from Reuters that Mel thought would also be propaganda-heavy, just in favor of the British, and waiting to see whether something concrete turned up with the United P
ress. He’d become familiar with the syndicate’s Far East manager, so he felt confident about being offered a job, but it could still be a while.

  Ten days later, Tong’s office asked Mel again about the position in Chungking. At that point, Mel’s biggest sticking point was the contract that the publicity bureau was asking him to sign. He wanted to be able to leave if a real journalism opportunity appeared. This was quite possible, especially because Mel expected the reporters he’d met in Shanghai to regularly circulate through Chungking, allowing him to maintain the network he’d developed. Finally, Tong’s office relented and agreed to hire Mel without a contract.

  “I am more than glad now to be about to do something no matter what the compensation,” he wrote. “At least it’s a living—and an interesting one.”

  Chapter 3

  THE VOICE OF CHINA

  Mel began his journey to Chungking on December 10, 1939. It would be a long trip. First he took a boat to Hong Kong, then a flight from there to the Kuomintang’s capital. During the long voyage, Mel reflected on the complexities of the war in China and beyond.

  His previous visit to China and now these first six weeks back there had helped convince Mel that the world was in the state it was because so many people were unable to look beyond their own situation. He insisted that if people paid more attention to the rest of the world, Hitler wouldn’t have been on the march, Japan would have been kept from expanding into China, and labor disputes wouldn’t be as hostile as they were in the United States. Mel also made it clear that he thought the situation in Asia was even more consequential for the world’s future than the war in Europe.