Travels with Myself and Another (8 page)

We must have become almost Chinese by then, capable of brute endurance. Except for one stationary hour when the steamer broke down, we were towed up the North River more slowly than walking while the steamer stopped everywhere to disgorge and engorge passengers. At ten o’clock on the second morning we climbed out of the sampan at Shaokwan. We had been on the river for forty-three hours.

We thanked the boy soldiers and tipped them which created some happiness for a change. Our officers escorted us to the station where we asked them not to wait; we might be there for hours and were drained dry of compliments. I wanted to kiss Mr Ma, having come to see him as a fool of God, but knew he would be shocked so contented myself with shaking hands and smiling until my face hurt. At last we were alone in our first class compartment, leaning on the window ledge to observe the crowd. Farther up the platform a band of laughing, chatty, light-hearted lepers was waving goodbye to a travelling leper friend.

I said, “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear another minute or another sight.”

“So far,” U.C. said, quietly studying the genial group, “we’ve still got our noses.”

The first class compartment was coated with cinders, the floor a mat of fruit peels and cigarette butts. In a rage I roamed the train until I found the porter, a blank embittered youth in khaki shorts and sandals. Writing to my mother: “I forced the train boy to make some pretence of cleaning our compartment. All cleaning in China is done with a damp rag. The rag is dark grey from dirt and smells so putrid that you have to leave wherever it’s being used. If anything was not already filthy and germ-laden, it would be after the passage of the rag. There was nothing to eat. We bought oranges and hardboiled eggs (both safe) at a station. The country suddenly became beautiful as did the weather. It was very hot in the train. The blue and brown mountains were good to see. Without enough food, no drink except boiled water, with dirty lumpy itchy plush seats, and cinders in our eyes, it was still the most comfortable day we have had. That trip lasted 25 hours and covered not quite 400 miles.”

I had seen another Caucasian board the train at Shaokwan and made a bet with U.C.

“Bet you twenty dollars Chinese he comes from St Louis.”

“Why?”

“I think it’s a law. When you get to the worst farthest places, the stranger has come from St Louis.”

“Done.”

I moved along the unsteady train until I saw the man, reading alone in his cindery compartment. I asked if he was American. Yes. Did he come from St Louis? He looked only slightly surprised and said Yes. I said thank you and left and collected twenty Chinese dollars.

U.C. thought about that. Hours later he said, “Maybe it’s something you catch from the water. Maybe it’s not your fault.” Since I too come from St Louis.

In Kweilin, U.C.’s superhuman resignation wore out, he lost his temper. He stamped around the room, kicking what little there was to kick, shouting, “The sons of bitches, the worthless shits, the motherfuckers, the
bastards.”
Twelfth Army HQ had some means of communication with Kweilin which in turn could signal Hongkong. U.C. had sent a message days before to Kweilin asking them to relay it to Hongkong: a request for CNAC to pick us up in Kweilin. The Kweilin people had not bothered to do anything.

Kweilin was not on the scheduled CNAC route; it was only a stop to load or unload freight. In Hongkong we had arranged to be called for on a freight flight. The weather changed back to normal, solid rain blowing in a gale. Kweilin nestled among extraordinary mountains, sharp, pointed, pyramidal mountains, furred by trees, unlike any I have seen anywhere else, beautiful and romantic, when you could see them rising through cloud. They were no consolation and hazardous terrain for landing aircraft. We were well and truly stuck in the Palace Hotel, Kweilin.

And stuck in the most severe squalor to date. Mashed bedbugs on the walls, bedbugs creeping over the board beds, peering from the wood floor. Bedbugs smell apart from their bite. Two bamboo chairs, a small table, a kerosene lamp, a bowl of dirty water without spittoon for emptying it. Down the corridor, a fine modern porcelain toilet in a cement cubicle but not geared to modern plumbing; the bowl overflowed across the floor. The sight was more appalling than the stench though the stench was superlative. I flung Keatings Powder everywhere until our room looked as if it had been hit by a powdered-mustard cyclone. We argued as to whether sleeping on the floor was safer than on the board beds.

I cannot imagine how we passed those days, clinging to the remnants of sanity. U.C. did say once that if only he had a target pistol he could shoot the bedbugs; they were slow but small and therefore a sporting shot. I think he tried to make a slingshot but must have failed. He beat them down with a shoe. I wrote a long yowling letter to my mother. “China has cured me. I never want to travel again. The hardships (truly beyond belief) would be bearable but the boredom is not . . . Perhaps, before this war, when foreigners lived in luxury on little money in restricted European areas, they had a nice time. But that life as I saw it in Hongkong is as dull as any country club. The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share.” My mother knew me well; she had received my cries from the pit over the years; I daresay she read this letter with amusement and sympathy for U.C. who had to endure me as well as the glamorous Orient.

At last the CNAC plane arrived, packed with cargo. The cargo was bales of handsome paper money, millions and millions of dollars, manufactured for the Republic of China in Britain and Hongkong. This money was worth the paper it was printed on. We sat on the bales, yelling with laughter at the pilot’s jokes. The joy to be back among our own kind. I am certain that the barrier between the races—white, black, brown, yellow—is not only due to colour prejudice and the dissimilarity of customs and values. It is largely due to boredom, the real killer in human relations. We do not laugh at the same jokes. We bore each other sick. Later, whenever I saw the Chinese laughing together I said, translate please, quick, quick, to get the joke. On hearing the translation, I hid behind a bewildered smile. What on earth were the chumps laughing at?

From the riverbed airstrip to the city of Chungking on the high bluff above, you toiled up a precipice of steps. I don’t know how we reached the dreamed-of loaned house. The front door opened into the sitting room. U.C. took one look at that room and one whiff of the air and walked into the bedroom where he laughed so hard he had to lie down. I sat on a chair, turned to stone. The sitting room was furnished with fidgety little varnished tables and Grand Rapids grey plush armchairs and sofas, tricked out in crocheted doilies for head-rests. The doilies were black from greasy dirt, but some were hidden by the lustrous hair of three young Chinese thugs. The thugs lolled on chairs and sofas and did not trouble to rise or speak as we entered. They stared at us through lizard eyes. They wore sharp striped suiting and pointed shoes. They had evidently been using our quarters: beneath the cheap pink satin bedspread, the sheets and pillow cases bore the dark stains of their hair oil. In the bathroom, another fine imported porcelain toilet overflowed on the tile floor.

U.C. had laughed himself to a standstill. He rose and straightened his clothes. “Well, I guess I’ll go out and see what the boys in the corner saloon are drinking. What’ll you do?”

I planned to go mad. “Stare at the wall.”

Someone, not me, I was past any effort at self-preservation, must have cleaned the bathroom and changed the bed linen. Two pails of water provided
le confort moderne.
You lifted off the cistern top and poured in water which then thrillingly flushed the toilet; the other pail was for washing in the bowl. I stood in the bathtub and gave myself a daily shower with a teacup.

The thugs remained in the sitting room.

“Who
are
they?” I asked U.C.

“Probably Whatchumacallit’s bodyguard, seconded to spy on us. Nobody passed them the word that we’re the Representatives of Righteousness and Peace.”

We stayed in Chungking for several weeks but the place returns to me only in flashes. It was never meant to be a capital city, its sole advantage being that the Japanese couldn’t reach it. I see it as grey, shapeless, muddy, a collection of drab cement buildings and poverty shacks, the best feature a lively market. The Japanese bombed when they wished though not while we were there. The citizens fled to caves as air raid shelters; 396 had lately been killed by suffocation and stampeding feet when a bomb closed the mouth of such a cave. Crowds of thin cotton-clad expressionless people swarmed in the streets. Lepers abounded. They were beggars and forgivably spiteful; you hurried to find money in your purse; if not quick enough, they touched your shrinking skin.

U.C. was in fine spirits; I was not. He found entertaining company, all vanished from my memory, and doubtless Embassy whisky. I think he had got the hang of China by then and was, as they say, adjusted. He went off by air to Chengtu, a top secret area in the north where tens of thousands of Chinese peasants were chopping away mountains with hand shovels and spreading the earth in basketloads to make a tremendous landing field for Flying Fortresses. U.C. said it must have looked like that when the slaves built the Pyramids. The good humour of the peasants touched him; they sang at their work; they competed by villages, their pennants flying; the day’s best team set off firecrackers at night in a victory celebration. Given more time and without me around, groaning and sighing steadily, U.C. might have developed into a happy Old China Hand. He did not value cleanliness far above godliness like me, and wasn’t reduced to despair by all the manifestations of disease. He saw the Chinese as people, while I saw them as a mass of downtrodden valiant doomed humanity. Long ago, annoyed by the way I left convivial gatherings before anyone else, U.C. declared as dogma, “M. loves humanity but can’t stand people.” The truth was that in China I could hardly stand anything.

Dr Kung, the Finance Minister, took an avuncular shine to me and presented me with a big box of chocolates from which he had eaten his favourites and a red satin Chinese dress, embroidered in yellow and purple flowers. U.C. said that was no uncle’s dress, it looked like the latest model they were wearing in the Chungking whorehouses. Dr Kung also organized a feast, placing me at his right. With his chopsticks, he selected choice morsels to put in my bowl: sea slugs, bits of black rubber with creepers, thousand-year eggs, oily black outside with blood-red yolks. U.C., unimportant in the middle of the table, had a wonderful time at that luncheon party. He watched me as I grew pale and babbled that everything was too delicious but I couldn’t eat another mouthful, no really I can’t, Dr Kung (desperately coy), you wouldn’t want me to get so fat I couldn’t wear my lovely red dress.

At a party somewhere, I met Madame Kung. She reminded me of stout rich vulgar matrons in Miami Beach hotels. The CNAC pilots were down on her for demanding that they offload passengers to make room for her trunks, whenever she flew to Hongkong. She was good at clothes; I remember her dress as one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. It was the classical Chinese model, never bettered anywhere, of black velvet. The little buttons that close these gowns from collar to knee are usually made of silk braid; hers were button-size diamonds. She said she had ruby and emerald buttons too. Sapphires were out because they didn’t really show. I can’t have been suffering too much or I would remember more.

Two visits stand out with rare clarity though I didn’t know at the time how exceptional they were. The Generalissimo and Madame Chiang invited us to lunch, an intimate foursome. The Generalissimo wanted to hear news of the Canton front. Their house was modest, also furnished by Grand Rapids including doilies but clean and thug-free. Display in Chungking was useless. Madame Chiang did not stint herself when abroad, once taking a whole floor at the Waldorf. Madame Chiang, still a beauty and a famous vamp, was charming to U.C. and civil to me. Madame Chiang translated. U.C. and I agreed that the Generalissimo understood English as well as we did. He was thin, straight-backed, impeccable in a plain grey uniform and looked embalmed. I didn’t take to him but felt rather sorry for him; he had no teeth. Reporting this later to an American Embassy wallah, he exclaimed over the honour showered on us; it was the highest compliment to be received by the Generalissimo with his teeth out.

I have been fascinated to find careless, casual notes on that luncheon conversation. As I reconstruct it, the Generalissimo asked U.C. what he thought of some articles that had appeared in the western press about the Chinese Communists; neither of us had read them and anyway had no opinions. The Generalissimo then went on to state that the Communists were “skilful propagandists without much fighting ability. The C.P. doesn’t possess military strength and the government has no need to resort to force against them. If the C.P. tries to create trouble, injurious to the war, the government would use little measures to deal with them as disciplinary questions arose. The Fourth Route Army incident in China was very insignificant. Intensive C.P. propaganda in the U.S. made America believe the C.P. was necessary to the war of resistance. On the contrary, the C.P. was hampering the Chinese army.”

He repeated this, according to my notes, in various ways, four separate times. Madame Chiang then said she got letters from the U.S. saying the Kuomintang (Chiang’s) armies fired at the backs of the Fourth Route Army (Mao’s men) while it was withdrawing according to orders; the Generalissimo said this was not true, his soldiers never fired on the Fourth Route Army and the Communists disarmed Kuomintang forces whenever possible, to get more weapons and territory. Madame Chiang said, “We are not trying to crush them.”

If U.C. understood this talk, he didn’t mention it to me. I would have been bored but I expected powerful political people to be boring; it comes from no one interrupting or arguing or telling them to shut up. The more powerful the more boring. With thirty-five years’ hindsight, I see that the Chiangs were pumping propaganda into us, as effective as pouring water in sand. We had no idea of what was really going on in China, nor that the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang, to whom power was all, feared the Chinese Communists not the Japanese. They were not fools. The Japanese would disappear some day; historically the Japanese were like an attack of boils. The true threat to the Chiangs’ power lay in the people of China and therefore in the Communists who lived among and led the people. I didn’t need political expertise to decide, in a few hours, that these two stony rulers could care nothing for the miserable hordes of their people and in turn their people had no reason to love them. An overlord class and tens of millions of expendable slaves was how China looked to me. War wasn’t excuse enough for the terrible wretchedness of the people.