Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

by Carl Crow

  We were a strangely assorted lot of foreign devils - of all ages and estates. One group consisted of American tourists who had come to China for a holiday trip. One member of their party had been killed in the Palace Hotel. Nightclub entertainers were obviously of little value to themselves or to anyone else in a war-torn city and all of them had left. We had enough tap dancers, crooners, and minstrels to put on a complete old-fashioned vaudeville program. There were two complete Filipino orchestras. It was not until I got on board that I realized that in spite of the newly acclaimed commonwealth and the promise of an early independence, the Filipinos are still the little brown nephews of Uncle Sam, on whom they can lean in time of trouble. They leaned rather heavily this time, for practically the entire Filipino community of Shanghai was evacuated to Manila. They were going home and were quite happy about it.

  Most of the passengers on the destroyer with me were Filipinos, representing at least a half-dozen different tribes, and a few fat and prosperous-looking mestizos. The nauseating odor of coconut oil with which Filipinos anoint their hair was stronger than the machine-shop odor of the ship. There was a large number of squalling Filipino babies, and soon another odor gained the ascendancy, for Filipino babies behaved as babies always will, and there are no clean diapers on an American destroyer.

  But it didn’t matter. For the moment we were as one, and I was the brother of the toothless Filipino crone who sat beside me and smoked a big black cigar. Near me was a charming Southern woman, the widow of an old friend of mine. She accepted a cigarette from a Negro piano player. A millionaire tourist from Chicago sat on a pile of luggage with one of Shanghai’s well-known beachcombers, and the two found a great deal to talk about. Ours was the democracy and brotherhood of common disaster and Walt Whitman would have loved it.

  On the ship there were children everywhere, the youngest being a baby who had been born on the tender coming from the jetty. One little girl’s thoughtful mother had taken the precaution of writing her name and address on a piece of adhesive tape and pasting it on her wrist. She wore it like a precious bracelet and was the envy of all the other children. A missionary lady from upcountry tied her three small children together tandem fashion, feeling that while an individual child might be lost, it would be difficult to misplace a parcel of three of them. A new and serious problem presented itself as soon as the children were all safely aboard. They were all China-bred and had left behind them their amahs, or Chinese nurses, who on the China Coast relieve mothers of the routine labors connected with raising their own children. Inexperienced mothers who had never as much as given a baby a bath were now put to the necessity of doing everything that an amah could do, and found themselves helplessly incompetent. Even a diaper was something of a mystery to them. Many who never before anticipated a contingency like this had received last-minute instructions from the amah. One young mother forgot what the amah had told her and put in the food the boric acid intended for the baby’s eyes. She knew there was something wrong when the milk curdled. Older women who had raised babies without benefit of amahs were in great demand for technical advice. If there had been forty stewardesses instead of four, they would all have been over-worked.

  I wonder how women managed to go through ordeals like this before the age of cosmetics? They arrived on the boat sweaty, tired, and bedraggled, thoroughly dispirited, feeling even worse than they looked, which was bad enough. The first thing they did was to unpack their beauty kits. With cold cream, lipstick, face powder, and rouge they were soon on the deck again, fresh and smiling and ready to face bravely any problem that the world might offer. How handicapped we men were: our only help came from the milder stimulant of whisky!

  Our arrival threw a lot of extra work on the white stewards who would have been on their homeward journey to San Francisco but for the fact that the boat had been sent back to Manila with us. They not only resented the extra work involved in taking care of us, but were keenly conscious of the fact that most of us had little or no money and that, therefore, tips would be meager. They greeted us with surly looks and did no more for us than was absolutely necessary.

  On board the boat stories of war experiences soon became taboo. We had all had narrow escapes, had all suffered material and spiritual losses, had all had enough dangerous thrills for a lifetime, and we were bored by the terrors and thrills of others. Mostly we talked politics - the grim politics of war - and speculated on the outcome of the fighting around Shanghai. A gray-haired missionary lady who had spent the greater part of her lifetime in China tried to tell me what she thought about the policy of the Japanese, but was sadly handicapped by her evangelical vocabulary. I was sorely tempted to come to her aid with some good Texas profanity, for I knew she was thinking thoughts her faith would not allow her to express. We made conscious and determined efforts to forget our experiences but not everyone was successful. One of my friends jumped overboard at night. He had wealth, an assured position, and was the head of a wonderful family. Why did he do it? Why could some of us not have helped him? These are questions which will never be answered. All we know is that he was one of us one night and that the next morning his bed was empty.

  With comfort and security the democracy of our distress disappeared. First-class passengers ostentatiously banded together and did not invite second-class to join their card games. Second-class passengers were patronizing toward third. Some ladies had ignored the rules limiting the amount of baggage allowed to a refugee and had smuggled trunks full of clothing aboard the ship. They paraded new gowns wickedly in front of their sisters who had played the game and fled from Shanghai with only the legally allowed suitcase. Less than a week before, all the useless conventions of life had been destroyed and now we were restoring them as if they constituted a precious heritage.

  But we cannot rebuild the past. Shanghai was a city which the newcomer often found repelling in the strangeness of its sights and sounds and the absence of the conventional human contacts of the homeland. But after a brief residence all except the incurably provincial learned to attune themselves to the cheerful, friendly, cosmopolitan life of the city and were fascinated by it. After a prolonged residence there life in other places becomes drab and monotonous. We cursed the place because it is the conventional thing to do, but we loved it and we would not willingly live elsewhere. So we say now that we are going back as soon as the trouble is over with. But we know that the Shanghai which was our home is no more. Good friends of many nationalities are broken and bankrupt and scattered to the four corners of the earth. Many will never return. The Shanghai which we left behind as refugees is a city which will live only in memories.

  The era of the foreign devil is ended.