No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  “Like coolies,” Agnes said, but the interpreter did not understand.

  He took her to a horse sale where Mongols from the Gobi Desert met to race their ponies. Agnes watched a buyer and seller strike a deal. They inserted their hands into each other’s sleeves and pressed out a number without speaking.

  “Price secret,” said the interpreter.

  Beggars stood, sat, lay in the streets. Agnes forced herself to look at the women who carried their dirty babies tucked in the fronts of their padded jackets. “Give!” they cried. They made her think of her defeated mother.

  She pushed herself hard, walking by day, pounding out articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung by night. In the early morning hours she would crawl into bed beside the interpreter and go through motions of love that she craved but did not feel. Soon after daylight broke she hurried out to cable her article, for she needed both money and confirmation of her writing from the German editor.

  “Send more character sketches,” he cabled back. “Forget Japanese in Manchuria.”

  She cabled back: “Article on Japanese aggression sent Monday.”

  Not only had she seen Japanese military swaggering down the streets of Harbin, but she had met a newspaper reporter from Vladivostock who told her the Russians were building airfields and underground shelters, and widening the gauge of all railroad tracks to accommodate military equipment. They expected war with Japan.

  “Japan a threat in Asia,” she cabled her editor again. “Print article,” but he did not comply.

  Insomniac, bothered by a stubborn cough, she went to bed, but sleeping powders could not silence the beggars’ cries outside her window.

  Her interpreter brought food and a rumor from the Consulate. “British say Miss Smedley no travel in China. Wrong papers.”

  Agnes roused herself from bed and began to pack. “An American passport isn’t good enough for the British,” she said, swaying on the bedroom floor. “We’re leaving for Mukden.”

  “Every Chinese run sometime,” the interpreter said, and steadied her with his fine-boned hand.

  In Mukden they had to run again. “You run so fast as Chinese,” he said.

  Agnes tried to explain that, because of her work with Indian nationalists, she was a defendant, an absent defendant, in a trial taking place in India; that the British were afraid she might incite the Indian Sikhs in the treaty ports of China to political action.

  “We run together,” the interpreter said cheerfully, and reseated his frameless glasses on his small nose.

  Eluding British agents in Manchuria, they fled to Beijing, Nanjing, and finally Shanghai. In the French Concession, Agnes met a German woman, a reporter from China Weekly News, who offered to share her apartment. Agnes and the interpreter moved in immediately. While Agnes shopped for food, he found a bottle of creme de menthe in a cupboard and drank it down. The landlady had discovered him on the floor having a foaming green seizure and called for help. When Agnes returned, a massive Russian doctor sat in the living room waiting for payment. Agnes paid, but that night she slept on the sofa. The next day she terminated the interpreter and went looking for another, finding an attractive man whom she liked; Agnes had swung as forcibly into sexuality as she had once forcibly denied it.

  She moved from room to room, apartment to apartment, outmaneuvering the Shanghai police, who took their orders from Britain. Fanning Indian nationalism, reinforcing the subcontinent’s drive for independence, she gave speeches to small groups of Sikhs in secret meeting places—”red heads,” the Chinese called them because they wore official red turbans as they directed traffic from kiosks in the streets. She made contacts and friends, amused some people, offended others. She began to see her articles in print.

  At the German bookstore on Soochow Creek, she met European leftists who lived in Shanghai.

  “I’m Agnes Smedley,” she told the man who introduced himself as Richard Johnson. “I’m a writer. What are you doing in China?”

  But Mr. Johnson did not answer directly. They strolled along the water that smelled of fish and stagnant shore line and cook smoke from hundreds of junks tied to pilings and to each other. The name “Johnson” and his accent, which was hard to locate—Russian? German?—made Agnes disbelieve him. He was handsome, a rugged Nordic type with a strong, craggy face and, she was sure, plenty of craggy experience. He invited her to dinner and helped her into a rickshaw that an aged coolie pulled to the curb. The crowds, the shouts, the shuffle of a thousand wheels and a thousand sandals constituted a prolonged and dreamy traffic through which their rickshaw moved.

  “What are your plans in China?” he asked when they were seated in a small restaurant on Nanjing Street in the International Settlement. He offered her a cigarette and they dipped their heads to the same flame.

  Agnes blew out a cloud of smoke and reverted to her tough manner. “I told you. I’m a reporter. I write.”

  “You’re American.”

  “A citizen of the world,” she said. “I’m a freelance revolutionary.”

  Richard Johnson looked amused. Agnes assessed his handsomeness, confidence. She thought he was an agent for one faction or another in politically splintered Shanghai. They rested their cigarettes in the ashtray and wiped their chopsticks on linen napkins.

  “What are you writing?” he asked.

  “An article about a peasant woman in Manchuria.”

  Richard Johnson picked a shred of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and looked at her through smoke while she described an old woman in Mukden who fell on the ice. A crowd had gathered, laughing at the spread legs and bound stumps of feet.

  “She cursed them,” Agnes said, and half-closed her eyes as she quoted from the article. “She cursed the assembled men, all their ancestors back to the thousandth generation, and all the brats they would bring into the world in the future. She cursed them individually and collectively, up and down and around and about. She cursed systematically and thoroughly, working them over inch by inch.”

  “You have a good style,” Richard Johnson said. The waitress set a plate in front of them. He offered her a preserved duck’s egg in gelatin. “Are there other American writers in Shanghai?”

  “If there are, I don’t know them. I prefer the Chinese. Out here most foreigners are one-hundred percent boobs and all are one-hundred-fifty percent imperialists.”

  After dinner he took her home by rickshaw, their feet resting side by side on the carpeted footrest. Mounted oil lamps illuminated the shoulders and elbows of the coolie running between bamboo shafts.

  “May I see you again?” he asked.

  “How about tonight?”

  Mr. Johnson showed no surprise, but followed her up to her room. He hung his coat on a hook beside Agnes’.

  She poured them both a shot of whiskey, took a swallow from one of the glasses, and set it down hard.

  “Jesus Christ!” she screamed, and averted her eyes from the wastebasket.

  Richard Johnson bumped against the table, sending both whiskey glasses to the floor, and caught Agnes just before she fell. They gripped each other and stared into the wastebasket at the bloody face of an Indian Sikh.

  “God! Christ!” Agnes wailed. Richard Johnson swore in German. Agnes moved toward the door and ran for the bathroom down the hall. When she returned, Johnson was standing by the wastebasket with another drink, his complexion greenish. Agnes knelt and began to pick up broken glass from the pool of spilled whiskey.

  “Who … ”

  Agnes gagged. “I don’t know.” She got up from the floor, carefully holding the handful of broken glass, and started for the wastebasket. When she realized what she had been about to do, she backed up and laid the fragments in a tidy pile on the table.

  “It’s a message to mind my own business.” She knelt again and mopped up the whiskey with a towel.

  “A message,” Johnson said drily. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to send a letter?”

  Shocked by his humor, Agnes sat back on her hee
ls.

  “A letter,” Johnson repeated. He peered into the wastebasket. “Dear Miss Smedley … “

  Agnes began to laugh. She got down on all fours and crawled toward the severed head. “This is to inform you,” she said and, with face averted, squeezed the towel out over the wastebasket.

  “Only in Shanghai … “ said Johnson. Agnes got to her feet, hung the towel on a hook, and tottered back to stand by Johnson who had lit a cigarette. He offered her a drag. They sat down on the edge of the bed, traded the cigarette back and forth, and grew silent, as if being watched.

  “The British Secret Service aren’t the only ones I’ve upset,” Agnes whispered. There might as well have been a third person in the room who shouldn’t hear what they were saying. “Indian nationalists are a volatile lot.”

  Johnson stood and grasped the wastebasket. Holding it out from his body, he walked to the door.

  “My speeches have stirred them up,” Agnes continued. “I criticized their methods. I told them they’re out of touch with India. There’s been a violent argument and they’ve deposited the loser in my wastebasket.”

  Johnson put his hand on the doorknob and looked down at the head. “I’m going to remove it,” he said, sounding tentative.

  “It’s already been removed,” said Agnes. Johnson came back and fell onto the edge of the bed where he and Agnes leaned against each other, giggling, unstrung.

  “Indians are an emotional—” Agnes began, but she was interrupted by Richard Johnson pulling her down onto the bed, followed by whispers, laughter, more whispers.

  While he went to the light switch by the door, Agnes pulled off her sweater and slacks. Johnson looked into the wastebasket, shrugged, clicked off the light, and made his way back to the bed where he undressed and slid beneath the feather ticking Agnes lifted for him.

  Far from inhibiting them, the head in the wastebasket made sex free and lusty. They laughed. They groaned. Over the next few hours Agnes fell in love with this Richard Johnson. Fell in love with the deep voice, the tender chuckle that cracked as it reached a higher register. Fell in love with the guffaw lurking at the edge of what she thought was his spy mentality. The horse laugh at the center of fatalism.

  Had she known he was Richard Sorge, not Richard Johnson, she wouldn’t have cared. What she loved was the way they talked as equals, she a working journalist, he a working—Agnes wasn’t sure what. He said he was a correspondent for European newspapers, but he wasn’t specific. Spies in Shanghai were as thick on the ground as slugs after a rain. He was a spy, she thought. That suited her fine. A revolutionary who had no doubt left a comfortable position in a European university—for he seemed intellectual as well as a man of action—to come out here and help build a new and better world.

  That night, while this man who called himself Richard Johnson slept, Agnes crept out of bed, dressed, and walked to the wastebasket. Turning her face from the meaty smell, she opened the door and glided down the hall. Because informers often lounged around the entrance to her section of the building, she climbed the half-flight of steps to the flat roof, crossed it, and re-entered an adjacent wing. She exited at ground level, moved quickly along the street, turned a corner, and ducked into a lane where she emptied the basket onto a pile of rocks and debris in the dark corner of a construction site. She returned to her room.

  “Where did you take it?” Richard Johnson asked.

  How alert he was, she thought. Even when wakened from sleep, he chose the right language of all his probable languages: English. He’d known immediately where he was and he’d known exactly why she’d left.

  “I would have taken it out for you,” he added. She undressed again and lay close to him. When he turned and put his face next to hers, waves of tenderness washed through her. He kissed her deeply. Eroticism carried them outside themselves and this time there was no laughter.

  The next day they walked along the waterfront together. “Do you know any Japanese in Shanghai?” he asked. “Japanese who speak English?”

  “Certainly,” Agnes said. “Ozaki Hotsumi is translating my novel.” She described Daughter of Earth, its American and German editions, the depiction of her childhood on a Missouri tenant farm, the adolescent years in Rockefeller mining camps. She veered away from her own experience to talk about child laborers in Shanghai matchworks who slept in the factory and lived on millet gruel and salt. About landlords who collected taxes from peasant farmers years in advance. She talked about a China that few Westerners knew, then fell silent as they stopped to look at the British, German, French gun boats lying at anchor in Huangpu Harbor, ready to quell any uprising that might threaten foreign investments.

  “Ozaki will interest you,” she resumed, taking a cigarette from her shoulder bag. Richard Sorge struck a match for her. “He questions his government’s actions”—she inhaled—”but he’s not political. Yet.” She knew Richard’s politics. They had talked all night. Richard was German. He distrusted his own country, he’d told her. After fighting in World War I, he’d come to hate fatuous idealism. He was a Marxist.

  Agnes watched him as they strolled between the harbor and the ornate, foreign-style buildings that lined the Bund: Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation; Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China; Chase Banks of New York; Jardine & Matheson’s; Sassoon’s, inheritor of the East India Company trade. Richard carried his leonine head high, and limped from a war wound. He was disillusioned.

  “I believe no national leaders,” he said.

  The next day she introduced him to Ozaki. She went to a locksmith for extra keys so the two men could meet in her apartment, away from the eyes of British, Germans, Russians, Chinese, Americans. She shared their view that Japanese aggression was a greater danger to China than Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. Sometimes she joined them. Usually, however, they met alone.

  24

  Shanghai 1931

  In wintertime Song Qingling worked at a small desk in what had been her husband’s second-story study, but when the Shanghai spring arrived she moved to the adjoining sun porch. Even when her husband, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, was alive, she had preferred the sun porch. She liked the light. She liked looking down on her peonies and begonias as the breeze through the open windows played across her skin.

  The American woman would be coming soon to help with the correspondence that accumulated each day. Song Qingling hardly knew what to say to letter-writers from around the world who paid homage to Sun Yat-sen. She missed her husband’s leadership in political matters, not to mention the love that had illuminated her life briefly, then left a kind of darkness which, after the raw grief passed, puzzled her.

  She moved gently, loyally, a little mechanically, from task to task. Her sister, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, begged her, then tried to intimidate her into joining the right-wing branch of the party that had strayed so far from her husband’s original principles. But her sister could not persuade her nor could the Generalissimo imprison her. Her international prestige protected her from her brother-in-law’s political thugs.

  The door to the street opened and closed. She heard running steps on the stairs. Did the American woman never walk? Whether climbing or covering level ground, she seemed always in a hurry. And such light skin. The eyes were stunning, wide and blue-gray, but the forehead was too large, too white, and the hair was too thin. Of course, the writing and typing skills, the loyalty to China and to the revolution, proved over and over again so very useful. Nevertheless—

  Song Qingling braced herself for Agnes Smedley.

  “Song Qingling!” Agnes exclaimed as she rushed onto the sun porch. Song Qingling recoiled ever so slightly.

  Agnes, for her part, made a conscious effort to control herself. She refrained from taking Madame Sun Yat-sen’s hand. Trying to explain away Madame’s coolness, she told herself that the Chinese were indirect—subtle. Since Madame was a woman of great distinction, Agnes should not mind her aloofness; since her own busy, productive life now overflowed with purpose
and adventure, she should not mind being snubbed.

  She reeled from happiness to happiness. From Richard at night, to fact-finding excursions during the day, to evenings pounding out articles on her typewriter. Every week she picked up paychecks at the American Express office, money from German, American, Indian, Chinese publications. When converted to 1930s yuan, her income was comfortable. She had wealthy Western friends, and although she felt guilty riding through the International Settlement in coolie-drawn rickshaws, rich dinners were pleasant. Singsong girls ran through songs from Chinese opera in a fascinating screech. Storytellers clapped their bamboo sticks, and charcoal braziers glowed under heated wine. She drank good liquor and smoked good cigarettes.

  Until she met Richard Sorge, she’d had affairs, European, American, Chinese, to stave off loneliness and fill the night with something that approximated love. Now she had Richard. The mystery at the center of his personality made him so desirable that she sometimes could not bear the hours between dinner and bedtime when she waited for him to come to her. Occasionally she worried that she loved him too much. She was not accustomed to such happiness. She also knew that nothing in Shanghai—nothing in all of China— would last in its present form. Why, then, should the intimacy between Richard and herself last? And so she was able to fall back on impending unhappiness that, in an odd sort of way, made happiness acceptable.

  “I have invited a friend for tea this afternoon.” Madame’s English was fluent and accurate. “Her name is Ding Ling. I want you to meet her. She is a writer.”

  Agnes tried not to sound enthusiastic and American. “I am familiar with her work,” she said coolly.

  The young woman arrived late in the afternoon. “I am Ding Ling!” she exclaimed in a most un-Chinese manner. Madame Sun Yat-sen, so reserved with Agnes, held Ding Ling’s hand. “I know of you! You are Agnes Smedley, China’s friend! I will take you to meet Lu Xun!”

  Agnes offered an exclamation of her own: “Lu Xun!” She would have liked to take Ding Ling’s other hand, but the look on Madame’s face stopped her.