Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘Our great problem is not money, finance – though we don’t have that much of it. It is essentially knowledge. We can make laws, we can pour money into projects, but we really have no way of knowing whether such actions will have practical effects. Whether they will actually result in building houses and factories and guns and wealth. Are they helping ordinary people to get on with their lives, get wealthier? Are they helping our soldiers on the battlefield? We don’t know. Because we don’t know how ordinary people work. How they think. What they feel. If they are going to do what we want them to do, or if they want to do it in a totally different way, and if so if we can reach a practical compromise. That’s why we need you, Hu Lan-shih.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘We have a committee in our government. An important committee. Where most of these progressive plans to get things moving, to reform things, are put forwards, discussed, and then passed if we think they will work. But the truth is that no one on this committee has the least idea how their plans and theories are going to go down with the very people who have to implement them, carry them out. The everyday people of China. That is where you come in. You will understand how people think, what their reaction is likely to be to what is being proposed. Whether they will carry it out? If not, why, and how can we modify them so that people will carry them out? You will be able to advise this committee on what is likely to be practical, and what isn’t and why. From what I heard about you on your march, you were able to present workable solutions to problems, you were able to negotiate with all sorts of different people, you were able to conciliate – very rare skills in China today. I am asking you to become a member of this committee…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘…so that you can advise on what people will put up with and what they won’t. How they can be favourably presented. And on what ideas you yourself have about what must be done and how they might be implemented.’

  ‘Madame Chiang,’ Hu interrupted, ‘ – and I apologize for interrupting you – but I do not think that I am in any way suited for this sort of work.’

  ‘And I do not think,’ rejoined the Generalissimo’s wife, ‘that you have the least idea how precisely dire this country’s situation currently is.’

  ‘I do,’ said Hu, blushing, ‘I certainly do. I know exactly how dire it is. Not only as far as the war is concerned, but in a thousand other ways. Having worked all my life in a Shanghai cotton mill I know precisely how dire things are.’

  ‘Which is exactly why you are needed. I know how bad things are. You know how bad things are. But most of the people in our government haven’t the slightest idea. They think it’s all a game. “When things get really bad we’ll do a deal with the Japanese,” they say.’

  Madame Chiang gave a snort. A ladylike snort, albeit, but definitely a snort.

  ‘We will do a deal with the Japanese over my dead body. My and my sisters’ dead bodies. I know, Hu, you are a socialist. I am not a socialist. You may well disapprove of my husband’s government. But whatever our politics we are both Chinese. Chinese patriots. We need you.’

  ‘But Madame Chiang,’ stuttered Hu, ‘I am not…’

  Chiang interrupted her. ‘I know exactly who you are. I looked you up in the files of my husband’s secret police. You were a trade unionist. You are quite used to negotiating in a hostile environment…’

  ‘A very hostile environment.’

  ‘Committee life is not at all alien to you. And I’ll bet, nice as you are, you know how to get your way.’

  The two stared at each other.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ cried Madame Chiang theatrically. ‘Get down on my knees and beg you? I’d ladder my stockings. I have another very important meeting in’ – she checked her watch – ‘exactly twenty minutes. Are you expecting me to turn up to it in laddered stockings?’

  The two women looked at each other. Then burst out laughing. Madame Chiang took that as assent.

  ‘Hu, I apologize for addressing you in this brutal and manipulative fashion. In normal times we could have spoken to each other in a humane and courteous way.’

  ‘In normal times,’ said Hu, ‘we would not have talked to each other at all.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Chiang. ‘But this is a war. Hu, I would be very grateful if you could start work the day after tomorrow. I will brief the senior official of the committee that you are coming, that you are to be treated as a full equal, and if there are any difficulties he is to report them to me. He will fully brief you on the documents and policies coming before the committee. If you have any problems access me immediately through my office.’

  She glanced at her watch again.

  ‘I must be going.’

  She shook Hu’s hand.

  ‘Thank you again,’ she said, even though Hu had not assented.

  She turned and shook Spider Girl’s hand.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to have met you, Wild Pear Blossom,’ she said.

  She departed, trailing clouds of exotic Parisian perfume.

  Spider Girl rubbed and smelt her hand. She’d never shaken hands before. She thought it rather indecent.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Hu.

  ‘I think you should have asked for a lot of money,’ said Spider Girl.

  Hu sighed. All this had happened because she’d met Li on the Bund and told her her story and Li had spoken to Shi Liang who’d talked to Madame Chiang.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Spider Girl, ‘the golden staircase opens before you.’

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ said Hu.

  *

  Hu and Spider Girl walked slowly along the Bund back to their apartment.

  One of the first acts of this new government of China – the new unity government of Nationalists and Communists – was the almost total abolition of press censorship. Each side wished to show how liberal and progressive it was. Only sensitive military information was censored.

  The result was an efflorescence of news sheets and newspapers and pamphlets espousing every sort of weird and wonderful idea. Extreme Confucianists advocated a return to being ruled by an emperor – even though the present emperor was a Japanese puppet ruling in Manchukuo. Anarchists advocated being ruled by no one. There were free love newspapers, syndicalist newspapers, communist and nationalist and capitalist and socialist and Seventh Day Adventist newspapers – all being flogged vociferously on The Bund by their supporters. Newspapers were pasted on walls, and people read them aloud to those who couldn’t read. Spontaneous debates and disagreements and shouting matches broke out, lifelong friendships were formed or broken in front of these walls, children picked pockets. In the first few weeks of press freedom the numbers of debaters were few, but by now whole crowds were forming, orators were orating, people flocking for entertainment and information and ideas. Policemen looked in the other direction – or listened keenly to debates while looking in the other direction. There was a hunger in the air. Suddenly everybody, Babel-like, had an opinion. People were even demanding elections!

  Hu Lan-shih and Spider Girl ignored all this. Having just been steamrollered by Madame Chiang, Hu was feeling a bit disassociated.

  ‘That woman’s far too powerful,’ opined the powerful Spider Girl. ‘Her husband should beat her more often.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Hu, ‘I liked it on the road, with all the soldiers. Meeting new people all the time, laughing, learning things, helping people, solving their problems. And I like being with you all here in Wuhan, in our apartment, coming out on the Bund, binding the poor soldiers’ wounds, trying to comfort them. But sitting on a government committee? With all these high-class people, all educated, so they’re really intelligent, talking about all these things I don’t know the slightest thing about…?’

  ‘Depends on what they’re paying you,’ said Spider Girl. ‘I’d sit on it – no problem.’

  Actually, Hu reflected, Spider Girl would probably be excellent on a committee. She’d put up with no nonsense, cut through waffle and d
ouble-talk, and get things done even if it meant holding a knife to the throat of some particularly irritating mandarin. Hu giggled. Her mood improved. Madame Chiang wanted her to do it. She’d give it a try!

  Spider Girl was staring at a bookstall. The bookseller, who also sold newspapers, was shouting: ‘I bring you news from all the war fronts, from Shantung and Hopeh, from northern Shansi, from Canton in the far south of our great China. I also sell books. Lots of books.’

  Spider Girl was staring at the books. She and Old Man Chen were the only people in their village who could read, and they had read only newspapers.

  ‘Hu,’ she said, ‘I’ve never read a book. What sort of book should I read?’

  ‘What things interest you?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking, all these high-class sorts of people we’ve been meeting lately, people who think and use long words, what sort of things do they read?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hu, ‘all sort of things.’

  ‘Then what should I read?’

  ‘Well…’ said Hu.

  Hu, thanks to her trade union library, was quite well read in progressive areas. She thought the Bible and Karl Marx might be a bit obscure for Spider Girl, but just before leaving Shanghai Hu had read Lao She’s acclaimed new novel Rickshaw Boy. She bought it for Spider Girl.

  That evening, as she lay in bed, Spider Girl started to read Rickshaw Boy. She didn’t get very far. Somehow she couldn’t arouse any enthusiasm for the hero’s eternal laments and existential angst. It also had very long sentences. By the time you finished the end of a sentence you’d forgotten what the start of it was about. Spider Girl preferred action. So she put down Lao She and picked up a garish Shanghai detective novel she’d stolen off the bookstall while Hu was busy buying Rickshaw Boy. She’d been attracted by its wonderfully lurid cover – a glamorous scantily clad woman with a knife in her hand standing over a trilby-hatted man lying on the floor with large amounts of blood flowing out of him. Spider Girl licked her rather hairy upper lip and started to read.

  For one night she did not think of her father.

  8

  When the Japanese invaded China in the late summer of 1937, in Sichuan – a remote mountainous province in the south-west of China – a warlord and his men were so incensed that all, officers and men, spontaneously swore an oath to drive the Japanese dogs out of their country.

  This was their oath:

  ‘We shall fight to the last drop of our blood to regain our lost territories. We shall survive if we succeed. We shall perish if we fail. If we die, we die for a righteous cause.’

  The warlord promptly telegraphed Chiang Kai-shek to inform him that he and his men wished to fight the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek was delighted. He immediately promoted the warlord to the rank of full general. His raggle-taggle band was overnight renamed the 22nd Chinese Army Group.

  In truth these soldiers were in a terrible state – poorly armed, largely untrained, undisciplined. They either wore straw sandals or walked barefoot, instead of helmets they had large round straw hats and they carried paper umbrellas to ward off sun and rain and artillery shells. They were irregularly paid and poorly fed so many used opium to deaden their hunger. They were armed with a completely random collection of weapons. Some carried spears and broadswords, others 200-year-old blunderbusses and 100-year-old flintlocks. Their main weapon was the Type 79 rifle, a poor Sichuan copy of the Type 89 rifle, which was itself a poor Chinese copy of the fifty-year-old German Gewehr 88 rifle. The Type 79 rifles were made of inferior steel and their barrels would start to warp when heated by repeated firing. The ammunition was of low quality and unreliable and misfirings would often cause the breech to jam. The 22nds had no artillery, no anti-tank guns, only a few locally made inferior machine guns and some ancient pistols with a predilection for jamming when you pulled the trigger. Such weaponry was great for overawing peasants but useless against the Japanese.

  So Chiang Kai-shek ordered that first the 22nd should march north to Xian, where they would be re-equipped with modern weapons and proper uniforms. Then they would be redeployed to the first battle front that needed them.

  The intrepid 22nds set off for Xian with courage in their hearts and a spring to their sandal-clad feet. The only trouble was that Xian was 400 miles to the north and situated on the other side of several formidable mountain ranges. In addition, winter was setting in and they were wearing only paper-thin summer garments. Ignoring all this they marched through the mountains using the network of the 2,000-year-old Shu highways. As they approached Xian they suddenly saw some strange-looking troops deployed ahead of them. Since none of them, including their ‘general’, had ever set foot outside Sichuan, none of them had ever seen modern Chinese military uniforms and therefore assumed these troops ahead of them were the loathsome Japanese. They immediately attacked.

  It was some time before they realized their mistake and the general of the opposing force descended upon our brave 22nds with hearty oaths and mighty threats, but before this misunderstanding could escalate any further the Japanese themselves turned up and started attacking both groups who, unable to immediately rally themselves, were together thrown back in confusion.

  In this chaotic retreat the 22nd, quite fortuitously, lucked upon a very large and unguarded Chinese warehouse that happened to be jam-packed with the latest and best Chinese weaponry. What should they do? Well, they didn’t spend too much time debating this particular moral quandary. The 22nd had originally been recruited from local bandits and criminals – both men and officers – so without too much prevaricating they took all they could carry and, because the Japanese were fast arriving, scarpered. Retreating at speed, they again by chance ran into the Chinese unit they had previously attacked. Their general again became apoplectic. That was his weaponry! But before things could once more get out of hand the Japanese arrived and the 22nd disappeared into the night.

  But the outraged Chinese general did not leave things at that. He wrote an incensed letter about the appalling and unsoldierly behaviour of the Sichuan ‘troops’ to Chiang Kai-shek himself. ‘These southern bandits and deplorables are besmirching the honour of our illustrious Chinese armed forces. They must be expelled immediately from our ranks.’ To make matters worse, Chiang Kai-shek just happened to be a close friend of this particular general, who was one of the many incompetent generals Chiang Kai-shek kept about him to keep himself in power. So Chiang Kai-shek wrote a stinging letter to the general of the 22nd ordering him to march his rabble back to Sichuan and disband themselves.

  Fortunately for the 22nd, the Generalissimo’s order passed through the competent hands of General Bai Chongxi, who, since the execution of General Han Fuju, had gained control of running the war. Bai happened to know that while his friend General Li Zongren was busy assembling and organizing some of China’s top troops to defend Taierzhuang, he was desperately in need of some stopgap troops to delay the swift advance of Japanese General Rensuke Isogai’s 10th Division on Taierzhuang, even for a few hours.

  These ‘deplorable’ Sichuan troops seemed to precisely fit the bill.

  He phoned Li Zongren.

  ‘Li, I have some Sichuan troops who might be of use to you. You could deploy them around Tengxian, hold up Rensuke for a day or two.’

  ‘I need all the time I can get. What are they like?’

  ‘Awful. Still wearing straw helmets and straw sandals.’

  Both men guffawed.

  ‘Men of straw, eh?’ continued Li. ‘Did not Zhuge Liang himself use straw dummies at the Battle of the Red Cliffs to fool the evil Cao Cao?’

  ‘Indeed. And it worked.’

  ‘Then I’ll have these straw men. Send them to Tengxian. They will die, but they will die gloriously.’

  And so was the fate of the 22nd decided.

  These ‘Deplorables’ approached Wuhan from the west. They crossed the Han River on ferries and landed on the Bund. In a snowstorm they lay down on the cobbles and, finding shelter as they could, fell asleep.
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  It was here that Wei, the Shaanxi farmer who had lost all his family except for Spider Girl and wished to sacrifice his own life in fighting the Japanese, was recruited into the 22nd. Agnes Smedley – to whom Wei had sold Spider Girl – knew a medical orderly who was friends with an officer in the 22nd. The medical orderly took Wei to meet the officer. The officer accepted Wei and got him to swear what had by now become the Deplorables’ official oath:

  ‘I shall fight to the last drop of my blood to regain our lost territories. I shall survive if we succeed. I shall perish if we fail. If I die, I die for a righteous cause.’

  He then ordered Wei to lie down on the cobbles and sleep. Wei covered himself with a discarded newspaper and lay down. The thought that he was now in the army and could fight comforted him and he fell swiftly into an easy sleep.

  *

  The next morning Wei awoke in the midst of the platoon in which the officer had placed him. The men grumbled and rubbed their cold limbs as they got up, went and pissed and shat over the edge of the quay into the river. Some lit their opium pipes to alleviate the cold or the shaking chills of malaria. Others set off to steal food from the market stalls, but by far their most successful food thief was a small dog named Greedy. The platoon would give him the instruction to steal food and with a lurcher-like leer he would slope off into the market to do his soldierly duty. If he was successful, and he invariably was, then Greedy was given the best cut and the rest was divvied up among the men. In a platoon full of thieves, Greedy was universally lauded as the greatest.

  There was one difficulty with all this. As the platoon chatted and scratched and bitched among themselves, Wei came to realize that he hardly understood a word they were saying. They spoke an obscure Sichuan dialect that sounded like frail finches twittering in the bushes. He spoke in a deep Shaanxi accent. When they made comments or issued instructions to him he simply couldn’t understand them. He became the butt of quite a lot of jokes and banter, but Wei ignored it and kept his counsel. An answer to this difficulty was finally reached when the corporal returned from his foray with a lot of fruit and nuts and some boiled rabbit. The corporal – known as Boss Eyes because he had boss eyes – had spent some time in Beijing working as a porter and thus had some understanding of northern dialects. As he was passing Wei some of the food he had stolen they discovered they had words which they mutually understood and this started a conversation. Wei told him the story of his family’s retreat to Wuhan, and when Boss Eyes related this to the rest of the platoon it brought sympathetic murmurs and grunts. A soldier known as Creaky Door – because of his croaky throat – then related to Wei, through Boss Eyes the corporal, the story of the 22nd’s patriotic outburst in Sichuan and their journey to Wuhan. Over the next few days Wei picked up some of the platoon’s words and they learnt some of his, and within a week they were conversing easily.