China to Me

  There, though, I can’t generalize. There were some outstanding exceptions. Besides, there was always a small faction of people from Peking, and Peking dwellers were civilized. The whole situation was changing in 1935 when I arrived; it was already getting much, much better everywhere, save, perhaps, in the stately columns of my newspaper. I don’t wish to carp too much at the North-China. I liked the whole atmosphere of the paper very much indeed, because it made me feel that I was near the more colorful parts of the British Empire: Hong Kong and Singapore and Ceylon and all that.

  My letters home show a sudden change after Helen went away. No longer did I bubble for pages about seeing the races from Sir Victor’s (Sir Victor Sassoon was our local millionaire) box at the club. My preoccupation with clothes vanished. Now I seemed to spend more time doing things that sounded austere, although they weren’t really. I visited Chinese schools and gave courtesy lectures; I inspected new little factories so that I could write them up; I looked at Russian painters’ pictures, which were mostly pretty bad in my opinion. The reason for all of this was Sinmay, my Chinese friend. I have written about him already so many times, in so many guises — for Sinmay is inexhaustible and has a phase for any occasion — that I shan’t attempt to describe him here. I saw him almost every day, sooner or later, mostly later. Time meant nothing whatever to him.

  Sinmay and his immediate family lived down in Yangtzepoo, across the Soochow Creek and some miles farther along the river near the Japanese shipping wharves. In selecting this district he had gone against custom, as most of the well-to-do Shanghai Chinese preferred the newer houses or smart “modern” apartments out near the city limits of the International Settlement. He said himself that he had moved out there so that he would stay at home and work instead of being tempted to go out too much, but the result was merely that he used more time and gasoline driving his long brown Nash up to the middle of town where the tempting bookshops were. I have often envied him his knowledge of the city. I know it pretty well myself by this time, but every brick in every shop front seemed to have its history for Sinmay. Part of the reason for this was that he had been born in Shanghai and had grown up happily there, running as wild as he liked. The real reason, I think, was that he was overwhelmingly curious. He had a mind like a child’s, or a puppy’s, or an old-fashioned novelist’s, prying into everything and weaving stories around whatever caught his attention.

  I never knew what he was going to talk about. He had a wide acquaintance in the town and spent a good deal of time meeting his friends in restaurants and caring with them. In China you can always eat; there is some appropriate sort of food for any time of the day. Besides breakfast and lunch and dinner — the Shanghai Chinese eat those meals as we do, though the Cantonese have only two large ones, at eleven and four — you can have your elevenses at any hour of the morning: boiled or fried noodles with ham or tiny shrimps or shreds of chicken. Or you can eat sweet almond broth. For afternoon snacks there are endless sorts of sweet or salty cakes stuffed with ground beans or minced pork or chopped greens. Sinmay always said that he liked “coolie food” best, plain dishes of bean sprouts and salt fish and ordinary cabbage and that sort of thing, but he loved knowing all there is to know about food. He would tell long stories about this dish or that, talking first in Chinese to his friends, who liked listening as much as I did, and then remembering suddenly that I didn’t understand him and doing a quick interpretation.

  I was bored, often, during these restaurant parties, until I began later to understand a little of the language. Nothing can be more tiresome than sitting for a long time while other people talk in a strange tongue. When, to add to the boredom of it, you are really uncomfortable, the procedure calls for un-American patience, and those restaurants were painfully uncomfortable. Any Chinese restaurant is, I firmly believe.

  Why have the Chinese never learned how to make good chairs to sit in? They can boast all they like about their centuries of civilization, and Dr. Ferguson and his cohorts can tell me as much as they wish of Chinese paintings and bronzes, and I myself grow lyrical over their food, but how, how, how can they have gone all these thousands of years sitting on stiff, slippery, shallow, spindly chairs? When I look at loving drawings of the ancient gardens of Soochow my bottom recalls the cold, inadequate comfort of those keglike porcelain stools where the sages sit while they regale their souls with the deliberate symmetry of tamed nature. Even when the Chinese try to make decent chairs they can’t do it. I have been in many a foreign-style Chinese house with knives and forks at dinner, and framed oil paintings, and Axminster carpets. In vain: there is always something wrong with the chairs. The overstuffed ones are imitation and are too short, so that when you lean back there is nowhere for your head and neck.

  There were compensations, or I could never have gone on as long as I did. In the end I was used to it and forgot to grumble. Sinmay always had another story, and if I waited long enough he would remember to talk English, and then for a time it was the other guests who were bored because they could not understand. Little by little, because of all the Chinese people I met, and all their histories which I heard, I was able to see through new windows. It was not so much that I found a new world with Sinmay and his family, but I went with them around to the back of the scenes and peered out at the same old world through a glow of strange-colored footlights. It was fresh and wonderful that way.

  At first I didn’t know how much I was getting. I thought it was amusing and even valuable for my job; my feature stories were more fun to write nowadays, and probably they made better reading too. I was left to make my own choice of subjects and I certainly strayed outside the conventional circle of hitherto approved features in my selection. I also discovered that the Shanghai Europeans and Americans were less dull than I had supposed: scarcely one of them was not discussed by the Chinese sooner or later. For me it was like looking at them all over again, with my previous impressions violently superseded.

  Something else was happening, though; something which would have alarmed me if I had known about it. Until I came to China I had always been a determined “artiste.” I don’t mean by that that I had undue faith in my talents as a writer or something: only that according to my philosophy all people like myself, who lived or attempted to live by some applied practical form of “self-expression,” were justified in avoiding the mechanics of government. I don’t know now why I was so firm about this prohibition, which seems idiotic when I write it down. I permitted myself the pleasures of abstract philosophy in other directions: I had read Plato and even Butler. Modern society, however, I wished to leave severely alone whenever it entered the Senate chamber. Studied as ethnology, yes: as a trained scientist I was not above doing papers on the governing customs and conventions of African tribes, and I could be lured into discussions of public morality, but I balked at taking an interest in statecraft.

  “I’ve never voted,” I used to say proudly. Only low, self-seeking people went into politics, I said. Englishwomen who insisted on talking about elections simply terrified me. The only government I would admit worthy of my notice was that of Soviet Russia — not that I really knew anything about it, but “artistes” everywhere approved of Russia, so I did too.

  Now if I had stayed in England or America I would have been shaken out of my snootiness by Herr Hitler in good time. Sinmay and his friends quite unconsciously saved Hitler the trouble of educating at least one American. Sinmay was an individualist and took no practical action about his country’s government, but he was also a Chinese, a young one whose whole life had been mixed up in civil wars. He had heard his father’s cronies talking palace gossip before he himself could talk plainly. The Revolution was within his memory. His classmates went on strike to show their sympathy for this political party or that as our students go to football games. It happened to be his pose to be an exquisite, to claim indifference to the present government in Nanking, but we all knew that he was only playing. Even the old men in China who pretend to care
only for the fighting prowess of their battling crickets — even they keep their shrewd old ears to the ground when trouble is brewing in the government.

  So it was a full life I had back in those years of 1935 and 1936. My days were crowded. I would wake up reluctantly in that hideous little flat, eat breakfast in the darkness of the dining room, served by a lackluster boy I had inherited along with the green and the silver, and hasten to the office. Usually my day’s assignment could be polished off in the morning. It might be an interview with some retiring magnate (the local name for a successful businessman was taipan and I’ll probably use it from now on) or perhaps a swimming pool was being opened by an advertising club. Or I might dream up a piece myself, about a Chinese drugstore that hung cages of real Indo-Chinese sloths around to attract trade. As long as I had a column that wasn’t news, so that our readers would not be distressed by having to think, it was all right. I could write it up in the office or at home.

  Luncheon might be one of any number of amusements. Maybe Bernardine had invited me out to her red-and-black flat to help entertain a visiting millionairess from the States. Or perhaps she had corralled Mei Lan-fang for a meal, which would be a really ultra affair in that case. Instead I might meet a girl for lunch at the Cathay, with drinks first in the lounge; that meant we would pick up men and make a party of it. Once and only once Sinmay called for me in the North-China office: his pale face and long gown caused such excitement among the mild British reporters that he became self-conscious and after that made me meet him out in the Bund.

  There were numbers of ways to waste time at the lunch hour. Sometimes I just didn’t eat out at all but gobbled something on rice at home and then walked out to look in shop windows or to go to the tailor. I was in that happy state of the newcomer who is not yet blasé about little pottery horses in groups of eight, or miniature nearly-jade screens. I brought home dozens of little fancy boxes with these things in cotton wool.

  Then at night, a dinner party or an evening of talk at Sinmay’s house, or a movie, or reading in bed, I was very happy, even though I began to smell war in the air. There were Japanese across the creek, waiting. I began to know it, but I was happy.

  Chapter 3

  If you were told how cheaply we did all the amusing things with which we filled our lives in Shanghai you would either call me a liar or resolve to go there as soon as the war is over. During the last two hungry years I have sometimes remembered and gasped at those monthly bills and what they represented. What I didn’t know at that time was that the whole giddy structure rested on rice. Rice, in 1935, was so cheap that as far as we Caucasians were concerned it didn’t cost anything. The Chinese had a different idea of it, but I’m talking about us ignorants. Cheap rice means cheap labor. Cheap labor in a vast city like Shanghai means cheap production: furniture and housework and clothing and green stuff. In placid ignorance I sat on top of a heap of underfed coolies. I didn’t run into debt; on the contrary, I was living easily, just within my means, and at length I decided to take a daring step and give up my job, planning thereafter to live on whatever I made at free-lancing for American publications.

  If by any chance I give an impression of being a practical and businesslike woman, do not believe it: it is false. That decision is a case in point. I can never let well alone if it involves a regular existence. Once upon a time I had a job in an office. There was nothing the matter with it. It was well paid, considering it was my first; it had a future. I could when I liked swing my weight around a bit, and had the right to dictate letters to a stenographer. There was, however, a great drawback to that job: I had to be at the office at nine o’clock and could not leave in the afternoon until five. It is remarkable that I held out at it for a year. It was as if I had made a resolution to give propriety one good chance; with a year of conventional endeavor behind me I ignored it thereafter with a clear conscience. The North-China work should have suited me: there was none of this time-clock nonsense about it and I was certainly not being pushed or exploited. But it was, you see, a regular job with a regular pay check, and evidently I couldn’t bear that. We seldom understand our own motives. Perhaps my ego doesn’t like having a boss. At any rate my argument in giving up the job was specious, since I didn’t do any better for myself as a free lance. To be sure I did no worse, but my letters home show after this a familiar state of mind. I seem to have been slightly worried about money all my life. Over and over I come across this phrase: “If I could afford it, I would …” or, “Wait until next month and I’ll know if I am in the clear.”

  I am not happy-go-lucky: I hate feeling queasy like that. Yet I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the choice, although it was not always necessary even for leisure to write what I like. For Shanghai it made a lot of difference, though, to have liberty. I took on two or three classes in Chinese colleges, teaching English literature and grammar; I like teaching when the program is not too full, and my Chinese friends always did that sort of thing. A more important freedom was that which made it possible to travel. The shortest trip you took out of Shanghai was the motor drive to Ming Hong, where the Europeans played with small sailing craft and kept a club as a center for houseboats. China is still a nation of canals, and with boats we used to wander a long way into the country. Some of the English used their boats to go shooting from. A greater number of people were not so ambitious, but stayed at anchor the year round and treated their little yachts like stationary shacks, miniature drinking clubs. They would spend the summer week ends out on the water, playing bridge and visiting from one boat to another for drinks. It was all agreeable if you liked people, and I did. There were different flavors to sample in these groups.

  Hungjao Road was another good place for languid visiting. The wealthier people lived out there and kept gardens and horses and gave garden parties. I loved garden parties. I could wear long dresses and wide-brimmed hats for them, and be photographed.

  All these gatherings were hotbeds of a certain kind of political conversation. Some of the taipans were not stupid when they discussed China: the more successful the man the more likelihood of his having brains. It was usually the middleman who drove me nuts: the man with a good salary out there, who wouldn’t have made so high a grade in America. He was the one who talked a little too loud, ate a little too much, and knew nothing. He was the one whose voice could be heard upraised in familiar plaint against the recalcitrant Chinese who refused to help him make his money: “Don’t they want to make progress? I tell you, the Japs are much more wide-awake. Let me tell you, it would be a good thing for this country if the Japs would move in on ’em. They know their onions. They know what it’s all about. These damned Chinese — ”

  By the way, it should here be mentioned that people in the Far East seldom call the Chinese Chinamen, and never, never, never call them Chinks. Not since I left America have I heard them called Chinks. Perhaps once upon a time it was so: it is not unlikely, for the Mandarin word for “Chinese person” is chung kuo jen. Spoken quickly, it sounds like “Chinkoren.” However the practice began, anyway, it hasn’t been continued.

  When I wasn’t teaching or visiting people I was having visitors to that famous flat. One of them was Anna von Schubert, an Estonian lady whose husband made so much money in business that they lived in Hungjao Road and kept horses and did all those things. Anna was something different from most of the taipans’ wives in that she painted — painted with a grim but inspired passion which left room for almost nothing else in her life. She gave me a rush, the aim of which was to capture the beautiful Sinmay as a model. For as long as she could bear it she called on me in Kiangse Road, but the colors of my walls and my cushions made her shudder.

  “How can you live here?” she would demand tragically. “You cannot live here; you cannot do good work. No, you cannot. I am so sorry for you. Why do you do it? It is not poverty, for to live in beauty costs nothing in China. Why, why, my dear Mickey?”

  I would say patiently, “Because I
don’t care, Anna. I don’t pay attention to my surroundings. I really don’t. I don’t bother.”

  “But one cannot ignore the surroundings. These bad colors must sink in: they are destructive to your soul; they hurt your work. It must be so. No, I cannot come to see you here any more, my dear Mickey. You must come to my house. When is that Mr. Zau calling on you?”

  Then there were the younger men of the different nations’ consular and legation staffs. Six or seven of the unmarried ones and I dined together every Monday evening, taking turns as host. The rule was that we were not to go out or make merry; the evening was to be quiet and talky, a rarity in Shanghai, and the guests were always to go home by eleven at the latest. It worked out well until the group unfortunately developed a name: the Monday Night Club. This title attracted public attention. People wondered what we did with ourselves and why we didn’t go to the movies or otherwise kill the evening hours. Then somebody made the suggestion that we were having Orgies. After a couple of years the club became more of a nuisance than a pleasure, what with other people trying to get into it, and it fell away into oblivion.

  Sinmay liked my flat. He didn’t mind its ugliness because he thought most foreign-style houses ugly anyway; perhaps he even considered the metallic bamboo forest “modern” and thus praiseworthy. What he liked about it was that it was in the middle of town and made an excellent stamping ground for himself, a place to meet friends and to talk, and to use the phone. He brought his friends in for everything but meals. I could never understand why he ate there so seldom, though once in a while he and his favorite brother did stay to lunch. This brother, Huan, had been educated in Paris and spoke French; he was handsome and fat and sweet and not very bright. He is a guerrilla general now and a good one. In those days he was just a nice boy without any work, but he was honest, and he liked to laugh, and it was he who confessed that Chinese people never got enough to eat when they lunched with me.