by Marlene Lee
“I would be most pleased,” she carefully rephrased.
Madame began speaking in rapid Chinese, too rapid to be understood by a foreigner. Agnes walked to the windows, a row of clear eyes for looking out on the world. but she put her back to them and turned inward to watch Madame assume the role of a mother. Ding Ling, the child, a dancing, brilliant flame, was arguing, so sure of Madame’s love that she could actually thrust her muscular little body forward and point a finger near Madame’s nose. Though Agnes was cold and shivering, Ding Ling was just warming up, trying, perhaps, to persuade Madame that the American should be allowed to meet Lu Xun, China’s foremost writer. Sticking up, maybe, for the American who, though useful, was still a foreigner after all, and would always be.
Agnes looked for a chair and sat down, struggling there on Madame’s sun porch to locate her own identity. And she tried to remember her own value, to recall it as a fact; she could not count on Ding Ling’s natural, easy confidence.
Ding Ling stepped back and looked proud. She had won the argument. “Where do you live?” she asked.
Agnes stood up from the chair. “Rue Dubail.”
“May I have tea with you today?”
Agnes looked at Madame’s tea service.
“After tea with Madame, of course,” Ding Ling said. She ran her fingers through her short haircut and smiled suddenly. “Two teas in one day!”
The following week they walked together to Lu Xun’s birthday banquet. Agnes talked with brilliance and humor, wooing Ding Ling’s friendship, wanting more than anything to be part of China’s circle of left-wing intellectuals. It helped that she was an American reporter, a Westerner in a country where the avant-garde admired Western above all else. Swinging along the streets of Shanghai, dodging knife-sharpeners, rag-collectors, humans of all ages and nationalities, she listened to Ding Ling praise Flaubert.
Entering an alley where a rickshaw repairman had set up shop in the entrance of a building and women washed vegetables in tin tubs at the edges of the pavement, Ding Ling stopped talking. Walking around an old woman with bound feet who held her little grandchild under the knees, swing-style, while the baby dropped a turd through the split in its pants, Ding Ling looked left, then right, and made brief eye contact with a lean young man in a shadowed doorway. She motioned for Agnes to follow her into a restaurant owned, she explained, by a Dutchman who could be trusted.
They entered the restaurant’s kitchen, darting around stoves, past cooks and cooks’ helpers whose thick black hair was gathered up under white hats. Avoiding a rack of hanging, gamey-smelling ducks, they entered the dining room. Together, in step, they reached the far end of the Western-style room and stopped in front of the head table.
“Here is the American writer Agnes Smedley,” Ding Ling said. Agnes looked into the quick, black eyes of a small man, handsome, charismatic, and, she learned later, tubercular.
“I’m not a real writer,” she protested. Then, looking into the face of China’s conscience, she cringed at her disclaimer. Without speaking, he penetrated her self-criticism. He saw her hypocrisy and made her see it, too.
She loathed herself for the apology. She was a good writer. She knew that. Why had she claimed she wasn’t? She could knock out an article with a minimum of fuss; knew how to take shorthand notes and organize them quickly; understood the thrust of a piece before she began; could execute it swiftly. In contrast to the dry and difficult years in Germany, there was never a month now that she didn’t have several articles in print somewhere in China, India, Germany, England, or the United States.
What she’d meant to tell Lu Xun was that she wasn’t satisfied with herself. She wasn’t the writer she wanted to be. A real writer was someone with talent and at least one other thing: time. Time to plan and write a book. Book-length was what she wanted.
“I admire your work,” she said simply.
The man before her was one of the few Chinese who, even before Sun Yat-sen’s revolution of 1911, had understood his country in a new way. After looking hard at China’s passivity and corruption, he’d looked equally hard at his own flaws, sacrificed his anonymity, then written about the rottenness he found. He’d electrified and infuriated his countrymen by the metaphors he chose for China: cannibals feeding on each other in Diary of a Mad Man. A stupid and pathetic peasant in The Story of Ah Q.
Before the banquet was served, several people at the head table stood and described prison conditions for left-wing artists. Ozaki Hotsumi came to sit at Ding Ling’s table where he translated the Chinese for Agnes. She took out her notebook and wrote verbatim in flashing shorthand. She didn’t have to be told why she was here: to report actual conditions in China to the West. She would write not only about the speeches, but about the lookouts in the alley, about the banquet guests whose wary eyes scanned the room for strangers who might be spies, about Chinese City, the section of Shanghai a few streets away where thousands of the poor crowded together, angry and restless. Prodded by revolutionary workers, they were beginning to stir and awaken from centuries-old sleep.
Someone stood and talked about the soviet in Jiangxi where revolutionaries named Mao Zedong and Zhu De had confiscated land from the landlords. Agnes had to ask Ozaki how to write their names in English. Wherever their ragged Red Army marched, it was said, they picked up recruits. Agnes wrote furiously until the last speaker sat down. While waiters brought chicken, duck’s belly, steamed fish, green vegetables, beer, and rice from the kitchen, she sketched out a paragraph that conveyed the risks these left-wing intellectual guerrillas, as they called themselves, incurred in Chiang Kai-shek’s China, risks from which her reputation as an American reporter protected her.
She put down her pen and picked up chopsticks. Reporting was a tame business. The people sitting all around her could lose their lives rejecting the remnants of old China—old China was not going to die alone, it was going to take many Chinese with it. But it would leave an American newspaper reporter safe.
At the head table, Lu Xun picked at his food. Agnes braced her notebook on her lap and described the handsome, suffering man: black hair that stood up from his head in a brush cut. Cream-colored silk gown with Mandarin collar. She described the vivacious company and the sudden silences that fell on the room when a door opened. Beside her, Ding Ling ate heartily and argued with Ozaki about the potential for war between Japan and China. Outside, a sudden Shanghai storm hit: The rain tore apart peonies and camellias in the parks. Aralias thrashed in the light from street lamps and threw tormented shadows onto wet, black streets.
When the dinner ended Ding Ling leaned toward Agnes. “Come with me,” she whispered.
At the entrance to the alley she and Agnes, the novelist Mao Dun, and Lu Xun himself split up into separate taxis to be driven through the rain and dropped off in lanes near Shan Yin Lu, Lu Xun’s street. From separate directions they slipped into the semi-foreign-style house at Number 9. A servant opened the door and led them to a ceramic bowl of heated wine in the Western-style parlor. Lu Xun sat in an armchair drinking and listening to the rain.
“I am too stimulated to sleep,” he said in Chinese. His wife and son had already gone to bed. Agnes saw that his forehead was pale and moist, his face drawn. The silk gown may have fitted his neck and shoulders at one time, but now it hung loosely. He was over-stimulated, he repeated, and needed to lie down. They followed him upstairs to his study where he gestured for them to sit in the high-backed rattan chairs that flanked his desk while he reclined against pillows on the bed.
“There is much you can tell the West,” he said to Agnes in German, their common language. He crossed his hands on his silk gown. The clipped nails formed light ovals against his dark fingers. Pausing to translate into Chinese for Ding Ling and Mao Dun, he described the Kuomintang’s literary censorship that extended to anything remotely resembling events in China.
“Carmen, for instance,” Ding Ling said, taking up the subject. “When Don Jose stabs Carmen, she speaks words which remin
d the censors of the split between themselves and the Communists, and they cancel the production.”
Agnes was the only one who laughed at the paranoia. To cover the insensitivity, she pulled out her notebook.
Lu Xun lifted his head from the pillows. “You must let the West know of these things,” he said, speaking again in German. “China requires help.” He lay back on the pillows. His black eyes did not leave Agnes’ face. “Many things must be translated. Your book, for instance, must be translated into Chinese.”
“Daughter of Earth translated into Chinese?” She had never considered that her unheroic life might be of interest to anyone in Asia. She had not believed Dr. Naef in Berlin who said Agnes’ writing would hold the attention of the world—hold attention for a moment, Agnes recalled. Perhaps this was the moment.
“It shows the necessary struggle of the poor,” Lu Xun continued. “And it shows democracy to be more fertile than feudalism. Writers, cultural guerrillas, must bring this message before the people again and again until it is understood.” His eyes moved to Ding Ling’s face. “Ding Ling understands the importance of Europe and America for Asia.”
“If my book is to be translated into Chinese,” Agnes said, “Ding Ling’s stories must be translated into English.”
“Nothing like Miss Sophia’s Diary has ever been written by a Chinese author,” Lu Xun said. He motioned for someone to get Ding Ling’s collection of stories from a pile of books stacked on the bureau. He began to read.
“When I think that in this precious, beautiful form I adore, there resides such a cheap, ordinary soul, and that for no apparent reason I’ve gotten intimate with him several times (but nothing even approaching what he gets at his brothel)! When I think about how his lips brushed my hair, I’m so overwhelmed with regret I nearly break down. Don’t I offer myself to him for his pleasure the same as any whore?”
Ding Ling’s color was high as she listened to her words read by Lu Xun. Agnes keenly felt the boldness of her writing.
“When they are feeling bad,” Lu Xun continued reading, “talented women these days can write poems about ‘how depressed I am,’ ‘Oh, the tragic sufferings of my heart,’ and so on. I’m not gifted that way. I find I’m incapable of exploiting a poetic situation … I should make myself good with either a pen or a gun …
“I’ve lowered myself into a dominion of suffering worse than death. All for that man’s soft hair and red lips …
“It was the chivalric European medieval knights I was dreaming about. It’s still not a bad comparison; anyone who looks at Ling Jishi can see it, though he also preserves his own special Eastern gentleness. God took all the other good qualities and lavished them on him. Why couldn’t God make him intelligent?”
Lu Xun stopped reading and held the place with one finger. “A woman’s honest thoughts,” he remarked in the silence. “The exploited. We must translate Miss Sophia’s Diary. We must translate Daughter of Earth. We must translate”—here he looked at Mao Dun—“your fine work, Rainbow. Art, in the end, will be a most effective weapon against …” He relapsed into silence and stared at a small, rectangular fish tank on his desk. A single cat fish moved slowly through the water.
Agnes broke the silence. “And you. What are you writing?” She asked the question in a journalist’s mode. She never went long without thinking how her daily experience in China could be written up for publication. But Lu Xun did not answer as he would for an interview. Keeping his eyes on the fish, he spoke personally.
“I have long wanted to write a novel as you have,” he said, “a novel drawn from my own life.” Agnes was surprised at the regret in his voice, this finest of modern writers. She would have thought he was satisfied with his work. She leaned her head against the high rattan backrest and half-closed her eyes.
“My life is a symbol of modern China,” he said. “There is a great deal I can say about my country indirectly through a life story such as my own. I know the details, and I can write it accurately and fully.” He paused. “Of course, one is always trying to understand and capture the elusive self, even if for only a moment.” He shifted on the pillows. “But I do not have time now,” he added softly. “I must bring forward younger writers, writers who will have great influence on the future of China.” Slowly he reached toward the bedside table and pulled his ashtray closer. A matchbox holder was permanently affixed to the saucer.
As she watched Lu Xun strike a flame with his small, deft hand, Agnes felt a return of the desire that attacked her from time to time: to write a novel. Perhaps here in China she could begin. She glanced about the room with dreamy, speculative eyes. Although she had no specific plot or characters in mind, the setting was all around her.
Late that night she returned to her room and recapitulated the evening for Richard Sorge who lay propped against a pillow, not unlike the position Lu Xun had assumed, and smoked while he listened.
“I don’t understand Chinese as well as I should,” Agnes said when she’d run out of descriptions. “I’m not Chinese. I’m not exactly American, either. Not anymore.”
Sorge ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I thought you were a citizen of the world. A freelance revolutionary.” His sarcasm caught her by surprise.
“I am a citizen of the world, though sometimes …” She trailed off, stung.
He turned away. “All of us wonder where is our home,” he said, his English more accented than usual. She lay down beside him. Home? He was a revolutionary. So was she. Revolutionaries have no home.
The next day he moved his few things out of her room after announcing that he had found someone else, someone in addition to his wife whom Agnes had already known about. But if she believed in freedom between men and women, love when you love, love whomever you love, leave when it is over, why did she feel so dreadful when he left? She’d embarrassed herself by crying. She thought she could get over any man, yet she moped through the next weeks as if she believed in eternal love between two people. She was as jealous of the other woman as if she believed in sexual loyalty or—God forbid—matrimony.
She went through the motions of her life, writing articles, typing correspondence for Madame Sun Yat-sen, even putting on a long, Chinese-style gown and going to a garden party for George Bernard Shaw held at Madame’s house.
Ding Ling, who knew Shaw’s plays, talked at length with the great Irishman. Agnes talked to him, too, without enthusiasm.
“Who are you?” he asked. “What are you doing in this part of the world?”
“Helping the Chinese,” she said.
Shaw looked disappointed. “All Americans are missionaries.”
“I am far from a missionary, I assure you,” Agnes said. “I am a Marxist and I am fighting Fascism. It is as great a danger in the East as in the West.” The fragrance of burning punk, a stick of finely ground, scented wood used against mosquitoes, wafted between them.
“I am fond of Heartbreak House,” she said in a neutral tone. “It is my favorite of your plays.”
“And mine,” said Shaw.
“You remind me of Captain Shotover,” she said. In his eyes Agnes read agreement. She thought she saw in him the contemplation of death. He seemed uncertain how to take her, and turned aside. Her eyes fell on Lu Xun, sunlight and breeze playing across his silk gown. She crossed the lawn toward him, consciously moving away from Shaw and the West.
Gradually, like an inevitable sequence of events, China tightened its hold on Agnes, narrowed her choices, and would see to it that she, like the Chinese she had come to live with, could not avoid suffering.
Because of money and political disputes, her relationship with the Frankfurter Zeitung was concluded as surely as her affair with Richard Sorge. There were other newspapers, but there were no other Richard Sorges. She did not rush to replace him. Her life quieted, her libido stilled, as if conserving energy for something not yet known.
One evening Ding Ling knocked on her door in the French Concession, darted inside, and closed
the door quickly behind her.
“They have executed seven members of the League of Left Wing Writers!” she whispered, white-faced.
Agnes passed a hand over her own wide forehead. “Lu Xun?”
“They did not dare kill him.”
The two women hugged each other, swaying back and forth. The swaying was new to Agnes. She was more accustomed to handshakes, grips, impulsive hugs, sexual positions, than to this timeless movement which does not alleviate grief but deepens it and helps make it bearable.
“You’re in danger,” Agnes suddenly said, lifting her head and pulling away. Ding Ling stared, seeming not to comprehend. “You must leave Shanghai at once.”
Ding Ling scanned the room with wild eyes. She seemed her true age now, ten years younger than Agnes. “Where shall I go?”
“Xi’an,” Agnes said without hesitation.
“I can’t leave Lu Xun and Mao Dun and Madame—”
“You must leave them, and at once. It can be done.” Agnes looked into Ding Ling’s pale, frightened face and felt maternal. “We will all be escaping to the Northwest before we’re through. I tell you this as an objective foreigner.”
“I don’t know how to live in such times.” Ding Ling sounded childlike. “My mother did not have to run.”
“Your mother’s feet were bound,” Agnes said. “She couldn’t run. Stay here with me. Do not return to your flat.”
In the early evening, alone, Agnes went to Ding Ling’s apartment building. Two heavy-set Chinese loitered on the opposite side of the lane. She walked on. Stopping at the door of an acquaintance, she instructed him to create a diversion while she entered Ding Ling’s building. She stuffed a few items of the young woman’s clothing into a cloth sack hidden under her jacket, then stepped into a pair of trousers she’d brought with her. She looped a sash around the waist and rolled the cuffs. With her short haircut dampened and slicked back, she waited for darkness and the return to her apartment and Ding Ling.