Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  There can no longer be any question. [She read aloud again] The Communists have entered Korea in force. China is, once again, at war with the Western world, just as she fought that world in the nineteenth century almost without a break from the First Opium War in 1839 until the Boxers’ siege of the Legation Quarter in Peking in 1900. China lost all those wars.

  Today, China appears united against the Westerners for the first time. Perhaps the Korean conflict will make men again proud to be Chinese. My “infallible” soothsayer, Silver Seventh Brother, cannot predict the outcome, since he set off eighteen years ago to explore the occult realms in his own person. But this time the outcome must be quite different.

  “He didn’t get very far.” Charles was disappointed. “I want to know about the early days. You’re the literary one. You read it. I’m off to the club.”

  Mary raised an interrogative eyebrow.

  “Yes, the Hong Kong Club,” her husband laughed. “It seems Sir Charles and Lady Sekloong aren’t wogs, but, perhaps, worthy of membership. I don’t know whether to accept. But it won’t hurt to drop in and toast the Old Gentleman. Want to come along?”

  “Certainly not,” Mary replied acerbically. “I have no wish to spend my declining years with those drunkards.”

  Charles chuckled and closed the door. Mary again took up the blue-leather book to read her father-in-law’s final judgments on the past half-decade.

  Victory in August 1945 was indelibly marred for me by two events.

  The impatient Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and revived my fear of a war of extermination between Caucasians and Orientals. I had thought that danger quashed when Asiatics and Westerners took up arms together against Japan’s ambitions. But the wanton use of the fearful new weapon when the Japanese were already on their knees may have begun the Great Racial War. The fighting that began a week ago in Korea could be the first engagement of an all-eclipsing war that lasts a generation.

  The second event still fills me with vast, inconsolable sorrow. Jonathan Sekloong, my namesake and heir, died in the crash of a transport aircraft. I sometimes think he was the best of the Sekloongs, neither as ruthless as I was compelled to be nor obstructively resentful as were Charles and Harry in their youth. Jonnie could have carried on my work far better than … others.…

  Unshed tears pricked Mary’s eyelids. She turned the page, unable to read Sir Jonathan’s lament for her eldest son, and she resolved that Charles must not see those words. Already battered by his father’s death, his self-confidence could not withstand his father’s slighting assessment.

  They made me a baronet in June 1946 [she read], the first—probably the last—Chinese baronet, though the Sassoons got the hereditary title decades ago. I’m too old for such tushery, but it should please Charles. He will be Sir Charles when I die, and Mary will be Lady Sekloong. Perhaps now she’ll declare a truce in her war against the British Establishment, but I doubt it. Mary can no more stop fighting than I can.

  Mary smiled at Sir Jonathan’s back-handed praise. No, she reaffirmed her resolve, Charles must not read his father’s book.

  I told the Governor I couldn’t accept the baronetcy unless Mosing Way got a knighthood. “A collaborator?” the Governor objected. “No more a collaborator than I,” was my reply. “Mosing saved thousands by pretending to collaborate. To heal the breach between British and Chinese you must get him his knighthood.” The Governor finally said: “If you insist, I’ll get it through London somehow. I heard you drove a hard bargain.” Then we could get on with putting the pieces of Hong Kong together.

  I didn’t tell the Governor I knew he’d already asked Whitehall about Mosing’s knighthood—and been put off. No point in showing all my cards. Thomas got me that information.

  Poor Thomas was stricken when the Generalissimo made him Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. One day he was a lieutenant general and Chiang Kai-shek’s chief military secretary. The next, he was a full general and bundled off to London. After twenty years, the brilliant Generalissimo woke one morning to realize that his trusted aide’s brother was a Communist. The great man thereupon sent Thomas abroad to “avoid embarrassment.”

  Thomas was well out of it. He did not see the final stages of the Nationalists’ blundering, stupidity, avarice, and malice that destroyed their regime. Ironically, James was moved from Communist headquarters about the same time. Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-chi, and Chou En-lai feared another explosion of temper like James’s shouting match with Thomas in Chungking in late 1944. They sent him to serve under his former battalion commander Lin Piao in building up the “Manchurian People’s Revolutionary Armies.” That force was, in the end, to determine the fate of the country.

  Lady Sekloong stared into the blackness of the garden. She had not known that James was among the first Communist generals to enter the vital northeastern provinces called Manchuria, which had been heavily industrialized by the Japanese during their fourteen-year-long occupation. Sir Jonathan had not shown all his cards even to his family. How, she wondered, had her impulsive third son felt when his Russian allies turned over Japanese arms to the Chinese Communists, but simultaneously looted Manchuria of industrial equipment worth two billion dollars?

  She lit a cigarette and drew the smoke into her lungs with conscious pleasure. Hesitant for years after it had become not merely respectable but normal for ladies to smoke, Mary had finally acquired the habit from the Americans in Chungking. But she felt daring each time she lit one of the six cigarettes she allowed herself each day. She was, after all, a Victorian, and she had never wholly cast off the attitudes of that era. She had grown up during the reign of the great Queen, who epitomized a complacent age that believed mankind had solved all its fundamental problems, that further great change was unlikely, and that whatever change did occur must be beneficial.

  Who, she wondered, was more foolish? Was it her own contemporaries, who had believed the future of mankind was fixed by divine providence and that its course lay ever forward? Was it moderns like her son James, who believed assuredly that force could impel mankind onto a new course decreed by “historical necessity” as revealed by “scientific Marxism-Leninism”? Those moderns, too, were totally dedicated to the illusion of progress.

  The obvious fact that the Communists and the Nationalists could never be reconciled escaped the well-meaning Americans. [She read Sir Jonathan’s precise calligraphy.] American military and economic intervention, exacerbated by naive American diplomacy, prolonged China’s agony. The Americans transported half a million Nationalist soldiers to Manchuria, where they were promptly encircled by Lin Piao’s Revolutionary Armies. Forty thousand American troops landed in North China to hold cities and railroads for the Nationalists. Hundreds of millions of American dollars were wasted to prop the Nationalists’ worthless currency and for aid projects that singularly failed to improve the people’s welfare.

  The American special envoy, General George Marshall, perhaps a great soldier, was a mediocre statesman who never understood China. With one hand he supported the Nationalists; with the other he undermined the Nationalists by forcing them to talk peace with the Communists.

  The Americans did enrich thousands of corrupt officials and provide employment for tens of thousands of drivers, cooks, houseboys, merchants, pimps, bartenders, gangsters, and prostitutes. They also maintained in sumptuous state a multitude of otherwise unemployable American officers and civilians. The dour people of Peking called Marshall’s Truce Headquarters the Temple of the Thousand Sleeping Colonels. Bumbling American intervention in China from 1945 to 1948 virtually assured that the United States would come into conflict with the Korean Communists in 1950—and probably fight the Chinese Communists as well.

  Mary marveled at the Old Gentleman’s prescience. Writing in July 1950, he had foreseen the entry of the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” into the Korean War in November of the year. She flipped through his recounting of the complex alteration of battles and negotiations that h
ad been the Second Chinese Civil War of 1946 to 1949. Only a year later, the innumerable conferences, the million-strong armies’ maneuvers, the noble sentiments, and the tawdry realities—all seemed as mustily remote as Waterloo.

  All that really mattered was the Nationalists’ final retreat, which recapitulated in greatly accelerated tempo their withdrawal before the Japanese, who had also marched out of Manchuria. The Communists completed in four years the conquest of all China that had evaded the Japanese from 1931 to 1945. The Communist high-tide swept across the vast land hailed by a war-weary people to whom Mao Tse-tung promised not Communism, but New Democracy under a “coalition” government. The Nationalists had already withdrawn into permanent exile on the island of Taiwan on October 1, 1949, when Mao stood on the red-brick Gate of Heavenly Peace facing south like the Emperors to proclaim the People’s Republic of China.

  “Today,” he had declaimed, “the Chinese people stand erect!”

  The future was murky, though the ostensibly coalition government could obviously not endure long. Could, Mary wondered, the cool realism of her old acquaintance Chou En-lai, Premier and Foreign Minister of the Central People’s Government, restrain the visionary zealot she had met just once, Chairman Mao Tse-tung of the People’s Republic of China?

  Even the Chairman’s abounding vitality appeared temporarily depleted by more than two decades of struggle since the split between Nationalists and Communists at Shanghai in April 1927. The first measures of the new government bore Chou En-lai’s stamp; they had been conciliatory, almost mild. But a second wave of pitiful refugees was telling of the brutal “land reform” that was exterminating the rural bourgeoisie. The Chinese Communists were, moreover, plunging into the Korean conflict, effectively mortgaging their future to the Russians and fixing Sino-American enmity by that intervention. The United Nations’ Armies under General Douglas MacArthur were streaming up the Korean Peninsula to threaten Manchuria, China’s industrial heartland. Committing the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” to the forward defense of Manchuria by engaging MacArthur in Korea was, therefore, strategically sound and perhaps unavoidable. Committing major Chinese forces to Korea was probably necessary, but, she wondered, was it wise?

  Lady Mary sighed and lit another cigarette. Drawn to a passage that expressed Sir Jonathan’s concern for the family, she was surprised by his candor and amused by his male vanity.

  It is good, as Confucius observed, to contemplate the thickets of one’s descendants. I sired a large and diverse progeny, nineteen children of my own loins. In turn, Lillian’s two sons, Gregory and Sydney, who call themselves Sek, begot a considerable progeny. But my greatest love was given to Lucinda’s children: Matilda, Charles, and Harry.

  Matilda, who was cowed by the exuberant masculinity of her brothers and her father, gave me only one grandchild after marrying the German pianist called Hans Biederstein in 1923. All my inquiries could only establish that she had “disappeared” during the War, presumably to a concentration camp. Her son Johann is the guru (Strange term!) of the Munich “oceanic impressionists” who smear their naked bodies with pigment and roll upon vast canvases.

  Harry’s line ended with his only son’s execution just before he himself was assassinated. I was appalled by Harry’s desertion to the Japanese, but I cannot forgive his murderers. They were, I suspect, the Communists.

  And Charles—Charles and Mary? Charles has, during the past two decades, almost become the man I always hoped he would be. His maturing was retarded by his wife’s strong will—perhaps, too, by myself. But today, their children and grandchildren are the chief line of the House of Sekloong. They might have been more amenable, more biddable and malleable if they had had another mother. But they would certainly have been far less spirited.

  Mary smiled and read on.

  However, I was counting my children. The Jade Concubine gave me two sons and one daughter; the Ruby Concubine three sons and one daughter. I promised the Pearl Concubine I would not interfere in the lives of her three lovely daughters after I gave them lavish marriage-portions.

  For the rest: To my certain knowledge five children by good and generous ladies. They are not of the mainstream of the continuing life of the House of Sekloong.

  The mainstream is the descendants of Charles and Mary. My view expanding with my resources, I envisioned the House of Sekloong spanning two antipathetic worlds, Asia and the West. Born of both worlds and rooted firmly in both, those descendants would, I believed, heal antagonisms and engender cooperation between those worlds.

  Perhaps I erred. Instead of feeling themselves completely at home in either world, may they not feel alienated from both? Have I been too generous with my grandchildren, as I was not with my own children? Mary hinted incessantly that the stern Chinese patriarch was outmoded. Perhaps I yielded too readily. Instead of uniting the two worlds may not my descendants, corrupted by adulation and notoriety, become decadent, Western-oriented cosmopolitans lacking roots in either world? The riches I labored to amass now, in the final twilight of my life, appear to menace the descendants for whom I built my House.

  She smiled at the self-willed autocrat’s illusion of his own amenability. But her smile faded, and her own eyes looked inward. Charles and she often discussed her own forebodings. He assured her that the stock was sound, and he cautioned against dominating their children as his father had dominated himself.

  Wearying of self-revelation, Sir Jonathan had abruptly returned to his second theme. She read again the final paragraph, which expressed his fears for a China once more at war with a united West and ended: My “infallible” soothsayer, Silver Seventh Brother, cannot predict the outcome, since he set off eighteen years ago to explore the occult realms in his own person. But this time the outcome must be quite different.

  Mary’s immediate concern was more personal, the well-being of her own descendants. But the future of China and the fate of the family were inseparably intertwined, as the Old Gentleman had observed. She would herself state the broader issue differently: “The Chinese are self-isolated, and their inherent pride transcends arrogance. Can they ever exist in harmony—much less cooperate—with the Westerners who have repeatedly intruded upon them and humiliated them? Can they possibly live in peace with the outside world?”

  The clash of the new political forces that had risen during the past three decades made those questions urgent. Her grandson George Parker might at that moment be meeting her son James and his son Cheng-wu in Korea in battle, just as James had confronted his brother Thomas in China itself. The family’s survival was interlocked with the great issues.

  Inspired by Sir Jonathan’s self-revelation, Mary explored the circumstances that had shaped her own existence. She was ruthlessly candid, since it would be unpardonably foolish to delude herself. Her thoughts were couched in the third person, as if she were objectively reviewing the life of another woman.

  Mary Osgood Sekloong felt herself an exile for much of her life. She regarded the Chinese race almost as disdainfully as did other Britons when she was young a half-century ago. Her conviction of superiority, reinforced by proximity, nurtured condescending distaste. She yearned for England and instilled the same yearning in her sons and daughters. China and the Chinese were the backdrop to her riches and privileges; they were not the matrix of her life.

  Mary was but half-aware of those feelings until her daughter Charlotte married a Chinese, Manfei Way, in 1924. Before that time, she told herself she was only being mischievous when she encouraged her daughters to nag their father: “Daddy, why can’t we go and live in England?” But she fought Charlotte’s marriage, and she did not mourn when Manfei was murdered. Only later did she reproach herself that her own irresponsibility had led to Charlotte’s becoming a gilded demi-mondaine in Paris.

  Distressing experiences nurtured Mary Sekloong’s fear of the Chinese. Held to ransom in the North and surviving the carnage of the Canton Commune in the South, she learned to despise the Chinese for their cruelty toward
each other and for their inability to live together in peace. The corruption, squalor, and misery of Chungking during World War II reinforced her prejudices. Returning to Hong Kong after the war, she learned that many Cantonese had behaved almost as badly as had the brutal Japanese. Her contempt crystallized diamond-hard during the Civil War. She concluded that the Chinese could neither halt their fratricidal warfare nor subordinate their insane pride to the reality of many nation-states. They still believed that China was Tien-hsia, “all that lies under Heaven.” They remained immutably convinced that the ancient Chinese civilization was infinitely superior to all other civilizations.

  Again the capital of an assertive China after the Communist victory, imperial Peking had reiterated that conviction of unique Chinese superiority. The Communists had adopted the European ideology called Marxism-Leninism—and immediately begun adapting its doctrines to the eternal Chinese pattern, just as Confucianism had transformed and ingested Buddhism. No more than the Confucian Mandarins could acknowledge equals among the “outside barbarians” could the Communist Mandarins acknowledge equals among either “foreign friends” or “imperialist enemies.”

  Believing the Chinese incapable of altering their perception of non-Chinese, Mary was almost as rigidly fixed in her own view of the Chinese. She acknowledged that reality and stubbed out her third cigarette. She had always resisted identification with the Chinese through the family. But she was too old to change. Another visit to Europe or the United States was long overdue. If it were not for Charles’s unbreakable attachment to the Colony, she would insist that they quit Hong Kong permanently. Though she could leave neither Charles nor Hong Kong, she knew she wanted to go home. At seventy, the prospect of death was no longer a remote abstraction. She had lived fifty years in China, but she wanted to die in England.

  Sir Jonathan had disposed of his property meticulously. Trust funds insured that Sarah and Opal would never want, while Thomas, Charlotte, and James were given 5 percent nonvoting interests in J. Sekloong and Sons. Smaller trusts provided “reasonable competences” for the Old Gentleman’s great-grandchildren—“Not so large that they will be tempted to spend their days in idleness!” After bequests to servants and other dependents, all remaining property went to Charles and Mary as joint-legatees controlling J. Sekloong and Sons.