Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘Yes?’ said Hu.

  ‘You like talking to people, lots of different people, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I do.’

  ‘Just look at you on your march from Shanghai with the mill girls and whores and soldiers, you enjoyed that, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I did, I loved that,’ agreed Hu.

  ‘Bet you never stopped talking,’ said Li. ‘Just look at you here, you never stop chattering and joking with the soldiers.’

  ‘Oh, I love soldiers,’ said Hu.

  ‘I heard that,’ said a soldier whose leg they were plastering.

  ‘You behave yourself,’ said Hu, and they all laughed.

  ‘Well,’ said Li, ‘the thing is, Feng is soon going upriver, to Chungking, so he can properly organize all the cooperatives and businesses and industries they’re starting up there. One job he will not be able to do – and he will miss it – is meeting all the refugees as they arrive at the camps, talking to them, vetting them, observing them. I think you’d be very good at that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You like meeting people. You are sharp, You’re funny, you’re humane. You have an instinct for people. The upset, the unusual, the good, the ungood. You could stand at the gate.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘I’ll tell Madame Chiang about your decision. I suspect you will spot many things on the gate which could be helpful to her. I hope she’ll still listen to you.’

  Meanwhile a keen young politician had spent twenty minutes trying to persuade Spider Girl to support his party So far she was unconvinced. But she had got him helping to roll bandages.

  *

  Peter Fleming was pretending to write an article for The Spectator magazine on ‘The Ancient and Honourable Sport of Chinese Duck Fighting’, but mainly he was trying to eavesdrop on a conversation on the table to his left at the Last Ditch Press Club. The Last Ditch Club had been founded by journalists based in Wuhan. Journalists who all swore that they would be the last journalist to leave Wuhan before the Japanese arrived. It was rowdy, drunken and situated on the second floor above a popular restaurant, Rosie’s.

  Six days had passed since the announcement of China’s victory at Taierzhuang.

  At the bar to the left of Fleming, well into their drink, sat Agnes Smedley, Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood, all trying to pick up the youthful and nervous young Quaker George Hogg. Hogg was only interested in talking about cooperatives. Fortunately the New Zealander Rewi Alley, an expert on cooperatives, turned up at this moment and Hogg was able to have an intelligent conversation with him.

  Peter Fleming, seated in an armchair in the centre of the room, sipped on a dry martini with a twist of lemon in it.

  The conversation he was trying to listen in to, at the large table to his left, was being conducted raucously by two Russians and an American. The table was covered in maps of the Taierzhuang battlefield. They were poring over them; the American Colonel Evans Carlson was taking down notes of what Colonels Vasily Chuikov and Georgy Zhukov were telling him. They were all military observers.

  Colonels Chuikov and Zhukov had just returned from the Taierzhuang battlefield where they had spent two days exhaustively debriefing an already exhausted Li Zongren on the extraordinary tactics and strategies he had improvised in the battle. As the Russians spoke Carlson kept on whistling and whispering ‘Oh boy! Oh boy!’

  Peter Fleming wished he could see the maps which they were discussing with such enthusiasm. Fleming didn’t like Russians, but he disliked Americans even more. So he wasn’t best pleased when Agnes Smedley, having given up in the chase for George Hogg, decided to hit on him.

  ‘So Peter,’ she slurred, ‘what are you doing in Wuhan?’

  Agnes had just written four different articles for the Manchester Guardian, the News Chronicle, The Nation and one for a Chicago Daily News friend who was sick, analyzing in detail not only the victory itself but an accurate and prescient forecast of just how it would alter the entire geo-strategic balance of the region (and even the world). Having finished this Herculean task she had now hit the bottle.

  ‘I am writing a report for The Times on the military and political consequences of the Battle of Taierzhuang on China and its contiguous nations,’ replied an icy Fleming.

  ‘But you don’t know anything about those sorts of things,’ said Agnes, ‘you’re a travel writer.’

  ‘I am not a travel writer. I know all about it,’ replied a piqued Peter. ‘As a member of the Fleming banking family, closely associated with Jardine Matheson, we’ve been in Hong Kong for a hundred years, so I know everything there is to know about China.’

  ‘You know all about opium smuggling,’ retorted Agnes, who was starting to enjoy the fisticuffs. ‘Incidentally, how’s that article you’re writing on duck fighting coming on?’

  ‘I’m not writing an article on duck fighting,’ ground Fleming, surreptitiously hiding the article he was writing on duck fighting.

  ‘I hear they hunt ducks on horseback in England.’

  A couple of other hacks drifted over to enjoy the free entertainment.

  ‘So is it the ducks on horseback or the hunters?’

  Fleming was silently cursing Smedley, as she was drowning out the military information from the next table and he was instinctively repulsed by the uncouth advances of an American woman with the build of an ageing pugilist. He preferred fragile, delicately boned women like his wife Celia Johnson – star of the silver screen and BBC Home Service.

  ‘Go away,’ stated Fleming flatly.

  ‘Who’s going to make me, limey?’ responded Agnes, advancing on him fists raised before tripping over the carpet and falling flat on her face.

  Fleming turned his ear again to the table on his left, but by now the military attachés had finished their analyses and were rolling up their maps.

  ‘Gee,’ said Evans Carlson, ‘wait til FDR hears of this. It’s going to change his whole view of China.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Fleming to himself. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

  Her two supporters were dragging Agnes back to the bar in the hopes of reviving her for Round Two.

  *

  The wedding negotiations have been concluded. They lasted quite some time and involved the presence of not only myself but a rather heavily built lawyer from the Chinese Communist Party.

  This will be how the wedding proceeds.

  Firstly, the happy couple are to be solemnly married. Since both parties to the marriage are ardent revolutionaries, the ceremony will be conducted in the offices of the Communist Party of China, with various officials, including Chou En-lai and the heavily built lawyer, present, as well as myself.

  The bride, Mr Guo Morou, will then proceed with Mr Chou En-lai, myself and the heavily built lawyer to a Grand Unity political rally to be held on the Bund on the afternoon before the elections are due to be held, where Mr Guo Morou, in an ‘extremely impassioned fashion’, will address the crowds, will speak ‘with inspiration and conviction’ of supporting the Communist Party of China, the Nationalist Party of China, and all the other political parties standing in the next day’s election. He must emphasize over and over again the importance of unity among the Chinese peoples, he must praise the glorious victory of our soldiers at Taierzhuang, and again and again he must state that the heroic Chinese people can only win this war if they selflessly sacrifice themselves and commit all their energies and intelligence towards the victory.

  After this rally is concluded Mr Guo Morou will willingly attend a reception of influential citizens where, attended by Mr Chou En-lai of the Chinese Communist Party and a senior member of the Nationalist Party of China, yet to be appointed, he will spend at least three hours socializing with those present and repeatedly emphasizing the virtues of unity, self-sacrifice, a positive mental attitude in the nation’s conflict with the barbarian Japanese, and the need for individuals to donate large sums of money towards the war effort.

  Although at this stage of the weddi
ng process Mr Guo would still be accompanied by Messrs Chou En-lai, a senior member of the Chinese Nationalist Party, yet to be appointed, and the heavily built lawyer, I had successfully managed to excuse myself from it by arguing that, with none of her family present, I should in fact be acting in loco parentis on behalf of Miss Yu, now Mrs Guo, and should accompany her to the lavish bridal suite hired by Mr Guo, where she and I would prepare for the arrival of Mr Guo. Once Mr Guo arrived, I would stay in a side room to the bridal suite, in case my presence be requested by either party at any time during the night.

  The first part of the agreement, the actual wedding ceremony, works reasonably well. As the lengthy clauses and sub-clauses to the wedding contract are read aloud, Mr Guo stares with great intensity at Miss Yu while Miss Yu looks elsewhere.

  But things get interesting as we walk towards the great rally upon the Bund.

  All through the negotiations Guo Morou showed little or no interest in the rally, and it was with an air of indifference, if not downright hostility, that he agreed to all the clauses and sub-clauses enforcing him to speak with inspiration and conviction and passion to all those attending the rally.

  But as we approach the back of the speakers’ platform, it becomes obvious that the numbers of those attending the rally are enormous. They are greeting every statement and sentence of every speaker with roars and huzzahs of approval. Even the speaker for the ‘Let’s Get Back to the Good Old Days of the Emperor’ party is receiving cheers.

  Guo Morou starts to twitch like an aged warhorse hearing the sounds of distant battle. The muscles in his shoulders and arms pull and ripple as though preparing for much swinging and windmilling of his arms. The muscles in his jaws and face rictus in preparation.

  ‘There are a lot of people here,’ he whispers to Chou En-lai.

  ‘There are indeed,’ agrees Chou. ‘They have come from everywhere to listen to you.’

  ‘You think that’s true?’ answers Guo.

  ‘I am certain of it,’ says the deft Chou. ‘No one can equal the great Guo Morou. All the people of China wait to hear you.’

  ‘I can do it again,’ says Guo, mainly to himself, ‘just like in the old days. I can speak to the people. I can speak for the people.’

  After that there is no holding him back. He positively bounds onto the stage. He looks at the audience. A small man, he suddenly grows big. He starts to speak. For a few seconds he stumbles and misfires, emits a few croaks, but then he remembers and his voice starts to soar, his body strengthen and relax, so that when he gets to sad bits it weakens and sags, when he gets to strong, fiery passages, like steel it stiffens and strikes. He defeats a thousand Japanese armies on stage. He rescues a million helpless refugees. His pure Han voice – commanding, arrogant, absolute – sings and spans out across all the silent ocean of peasants and sailors and civil servants and coolies from every province of China. They understand him! His flawless Han accent. Even in the most difficult, complex pieces of Marxist dialectic they all listen.

  I watch and listen. Even though I know him to be a sham and a mountebank I start to get swept away in his floods of rhetoric. How I start to hate the Japanese! Well, I hate them anyhow. They’ve quite likely murdered my wife and mother and children. Look what they’ve done to my country! But now I really hate them! He allows me to feel good – really good – about hating them. I love myself for hating them. For feeling murderous. I could rise up right now and seize a bayonet and… The crowd has gone crazy. And now he starts to go on about the glories of China. Its poets, its artists, its soldiers and statesmen – the greatest civilization on earth, the greatest country on earth!!! There is nothing we cannot achieve! We are now going to go out there and…!!!! Everyone out there must sacrifice themself and…!!!!

  And with that I think of little Yu Liqun, sitting there all alone in her hotel, her bridal suite, preparing herself…

  As the wedding contract stipulates I attend Mr Guo and Chou En-lai and the now-appointed member of the Nationalist Party and the heavily built lawyer to the post-speech reception tent where Guo the oratorical sensation – I really must stop this snide literary bitchiness – disappears into a scrum of adoring and gobsmacked grandees bombarding him with drinks and flattery. Guo Morou has been reborn. Chou En-lai gives me a wry smile.

  I hurry to the hotel.

  Yu Liqun, or Guo Liqun as I must now call her, appears quite calm. She has prepared herself. She asks me about the meeting. I give a restrained description of it. She sees through me.

  ‘You liked it, didn’t you? He did some shameless rabble-rousing. He even got you all roused up.’

  She laughs. We both laugh.

  ‘That is good,’ she says. ‘If the Chinese people get all worked up to fight the barbarians, then it means my wedding is worthwhile.’

  ‘Are you ready?’ I ask.

  ‘For tonight? Perfectly.’

  There is a slight wobble to her voice.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to do something,’ I say, ‘before he arrives?’

  ‘Do you play cards?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, I do. Very badly.’

  ‘Well I play them very badly too. So let’s play cards.’

  So we play cards. As neither of us really know how to play we both make up our own rules, and thus makes the game much more interesting and disputatious.

  One hour passes. Two hours pass.

  I order tea and, as it’s a Western hotel, cake.

  As I turn back from ordering the food on the phone, I see a small tear escape her eye.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I’m terribly sorry. Look…’

  ‘Please,’ she says over me, ‘I don’t want any sympathy. That is the last thing I need. I am an adult. In fact, you helped me become an adult. We are at war. War and sacrifice go together. Someday, as a result, we will build a better world.’

  The cards seem to have finished.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I ask.

  She thinks.

  ‘You’re a writer. Why don’t you read me one of your books?’

  My mind flips rapidly through my work. ‘Crescent Moon’ – the story of an innocent girl slowly forced into prostitution and an early death – no! Rickshaw Boy – a tale of a once optimistic hero similarly succumbing to fate – again inappropriate! I really must write more cheerful books! Then I realize I don’t have any copies of them on me anyhow. I look around. The hotel, in order to flatter their guests that they are intelligent, sports a shelf of leather-bound Western literary classics. I look at them. Jane Austen? No – she’s far too hard-headed and aware of the sacrifices necessary to life. Charles Dickens? Yes! I’ve never been a great fan – far too sugary and sentimental – but for tonight…!

  I choose A Tale of Two Cities, translating it as I read. We both sink into a sea of sentimentality.

  Another hour passes.

  Then another.

  I look at her.

  ‘I know, she says. ‘He’s late. According to our contract he is at least two hours late.’

  We talk in a desultory fashion for another hour, then another. All the time she is getting more and more upset.

  ‘Perhaps…’ I say.

  Suddenly there is a crash. The door flies open.

  Guo Morou stands there. Or at least he sags against the doorpost. He has a soppy beatific smile on his face. He looks at us.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, as though he’s never seen us before. As though this isn’t his bride…

  ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘they loved me. They really loved me. I thought I was old, past it, that they’d laugh at me, not listen to what I said. But I had them eating out of my hand. Out of my fucking hand. I am so happy.’

  And with that he proceeds, very slowly, still smiling beatifically, to wander in a not particularly straight line through the room and out through the door into the bridal bedchamber.

  There is silence.

  We look at each other.

  ‘I think,’ I say hesitantly, ‘I should be going. To my
room.’

  ‘You stay right there,’ she says.

  She walks over to the door and quietly enters the bridal chamber.

  Another silence.

  Equally quietly, she tiptoes out of the bridal chamber, shutting the door softly behind her.

  She looks at me.

  ‘Fast asleep. Flat out. Face down on the bridal bed.’

  We look at each other.

  ‘I don’t know whether to scream or cheer.’

  I start to move.

  ‘Don’t you dare go,’ she says. ‘If ever a bride needed a friend it is now.’

  ‘Shall I order some food?’ I ask.

  ‘Brilliant. And order the best French wine. That old bastard can pay for it.’

  I order it on the phone. I add in five packets of Senior Service.

  ‘Well,’ she says when I’ve put the phone down, ‘I’m getting very bored with Dickens. How about some more card playing.’

  And so, with the sated groom’s snores echoing from next door, amid happy insults and name-calling, we resume our random games of cards.

  *

  It was Hu’s third day on the gate. Already she was relaxing into the job. A steady flow of endlessly different people came towards her.

  Some of them were distressed.

  ‘My family needs food. Already three of them have died from starvation.

  ‘Over there, friend. See – there is a kitchen. You can eat what you want – but don’t eat too much. It could upset your stomachs.’

  ‘That is wise advice. Thank you.’

  ‘And come back here when you have fed. I will direct you to your new homes.’

  Some of them were irritated.

  ‘Five times. Five times we have been misdirected in this damn city. Everyone who lives in cities are crooks. Where are these homes?’

  ‘Ah, I believe you are from Jiangsu Province? You have had a long journey.’

  ‘We cannot understand what people are saying here.’

  ‘I too am from Jiangsu. My family and ancestors come from Kaixiangong Village…’

  ‘Ah, that is a good village. My mother came from there.’

  ‘You walk along this street here, and you take the third turning on the left. In that street everyone is from Jiangsu, so they will understand what you are saying and they will show you where you are to live.’