China to Me (12 page)

The guerrillas were our chief topic of conversation during that period. Sinmay's brother Huan had joined a band of them which operated around Soochow. It was just the sort of thing he was good at; he hadn't found much to his taste in the life of Shanghai after he came back from Paris, but now he enjoyed himself thoroughly. Intrigue, exercise, authority — for Huan quickly became a general in the ragged regiment he joined — it was all better than the lazy, boring life to which he had been condemned by family exigency.

Before Huan joined the Army he had become involved in a silly romance with a maidservant in his father's house. It was the sort of thing that always happened to the Zaus when they were bored. It was complicated. A little penniless cousin in the house was in love with him and couldn't see any way of getting him, first because the family wouldn't consider such a disadvantageous marriage for the boy and second because Huan didn't care for her. She was a pathetic child, fifteen years old, badly treated by her stepmother and probably ill balanced. Huan was sorry for her and he tried to protect her from her stepmother's beatings, but when he began to discover her huddled on his bed of an evening when he wanted to turn in, he knew something would have to be done to stop it. He stayed away from home for a few days, down at Sinmay's, and the girl promptly took poison. They had to call in a doctor and use a stomach pump.

This was serious. Father bestirred himself, which he seldom did, and a reform was instituted. The little cousin went down to the country, to another household. Huan came home and found himself the seducer of a small maidservant of the house. He was so tired of it all that he immediately went out and married her. The wicked stepmother was pleased about this, because Father was angry and cast his erring son out of his house, and Huan, as next in line to Sinmay (who had been adopted out of the family by a rich childless uncle according to Chinese custom), was the heir apparent. Huan didn't care much. There wouldn't be much estate left to be done out of, anyway. He set up housekeeping in a dreary little bed-sitting-room with the maidservant wife, and when he had the chance to join up he grabbed at it: being a guerrilla chief was much more fun than that. His wife went back to his father's house and, it must be admitted, held her own against the stepmother as Huan's timid little cousin would never have been able to do. Such family quarrels usually blow over sooner or later, in China. In another few years it would be forgiven the girl that she had been a servant.

Officially Huan was out in the country from now on and should not have dared set foot within the city limits because there was a price on his head. In actuality he dropped in on the town fairly often, both for business and pleasure. He bought arms in Shanghai and took them upriver with him. Palms were greased all the way along, Chinese and Japanese palms both. It went smoothly as possible. Huan made the most of these visits, going to dancehalls and eating a lot and doing himself well. He even called on his wife once in a while, but she was having a baby and didn't go out with him much. One effect of his new career was that I was drawn into the middle of the crazy picture. Huan introduced Sinmay to many of his colleagues who lived in the little towns along the Soochow Road, and they decided to use my house for their purposes.

Sinmay's family now lived near me in another one of the cottages that occupied a compound on Avenue Joffre near the city limits. His own house couldn't be used for their idea because he was a Chinese tenant. Foreigners were neutrals, which was an enormous advantage. So they set up their radio station in the back bedroom of my second floor, confident of safety from police raids. It was a transmitter, the first I had ever seen close to, and although I never did learn what exactly it was used for, I knew it was in direct communication with Chungking. This, however, didn't necessarily mean the government. When we hear about Chinese guerrillas in America we are apt to think of them as one body, but we are wrong. There are many guerrillas and many leaders, and many ideologies behind the different bands. They have this in common, that each band accuses all the others of being mere bandits, but that is all they agree on. Huan's group was quarreling vigorously with another party that disputed his right to police the countryside near Shanghai. There was so much trouble over this petty argument that Sinmay reverted to his prewar philosophy and tried to wash his hands of the dirty politics he had stumbled into. He couldn't resist the game for long, though. It was all too exciting. So he maintained a watchful sovereignty over my back bedroom and the transmitter there.

The people who took care of the transmitter and who knew how to operate it were two young men and a girl. They all wore the blue dress of the farmer or laborer, which made them rather conspicuous going in and out of the house in Avenue Joffre; for this reason they didn't go out very much, but slept in the room and sent to restaurants for noodles whenever they felt hungry. It seems odd even to me that I should have permitted the transmitter to be operated like that, knowing nothing about it. I even had to take their word for it that they were in communication with Chungking. But I didn't want to seem intrusive, and I trusted Sinmay's politics, whatever I thought of his business acumen.

The thing was embarrassing, though. It made a noise, and sometimes people noticed it. One afternoon Malcolm Smythe, the police deputy commissioner, dropped in unexpectedly and had a drink downstairs. Suddenly he looked around curiously, his nose twitching. “Is your radio on?” he demanded. “I have the strangest feeling that somebody's broadcasting on a short wave or something. There it is again. Do you hear it?”

Yes, I did, all too plainly. Gaaak, gak, gakgakgak, gaaaaak. … I turned on the radio to drown it out and went upstairs as soon as I could to give them warning.

“Funny thing about these radios,” Malcolm continued when I came downstairs again. “The Japs swear that we're harboring transmitters in the Settlement, you know, and in the French Concession too. I wouldn't be at all surprised, but how can we catch them at it? The Japs are trying to find them out by some triangulation process, but it can't find a transmitter accurately; the best they can do is locate it within a block's area. And of course in Shanghai a block holds a thousand people, easily. You can't arrest that number of Chinese just for investigation. I suppose the Japs would if they had their way, but we won't kick up all that hell for anyone, let alone Hirohito.”

He seemed gloomy that day and out of sorts, and I wasn't surprised. The Shanghai police had a hell of a job those last few years.

Malcolm's visits and my report on the Japanese complaints frightened my new tenants. They lost their confidence in my immunity, and after a month or two they packed up their transmitter and went somewhere else. They told me that they did this every so often so that the Japs couldn't catch up on them. So they disappeared, the three young people in blue, and left the back bedroom to what was to be a long procession of roomers.

The first tenant after the departure of the transmitter club was Jean. I have written a whole book about Jean which a publisher is holding even now, waiting, he says, for the end of the war, “when people will be willing to face realities.” This sounds very grim, which Jean herself was not, but I suppose her life could be described by that adjective. At least it was grim in spots. I had met her before. There was a man in town, a wealthy broker, who was eccentric and who loved Jean very much in his eccentric way. He called on me abruptly one day long before the war and said that he wanted to introduce me to a young woman who was stranded in the city without friends. “She has picked up a few men acquaintances around town — you know how it is,” he said, “but she doesn't know any girls. If you could introduce her …”

Obligingly I had a tea party and invited Jean, sight unseen, to meet a couple of girls. It was not a success. Jean was extraordinarily pretty and she looked just like the others in the way she dressed, but there was a something in her manner that made me look at her twice. She wasn't at all easy in her mind. She kept moving around in her chair, and her accent was false and strained. And she seemed sulky, too; when the broker called to get her and asked her heartily how she had enjoyed the tea party, she seemed definitely sulky.

The broker, whom she called Deedee, took us both out to dinner, to a Japanese house. (This, I should explain, was in 1936.) The woman who served the dinner in her house was a well-known character among people who went in for Japanese massage; she was called “Buffalo San” even in the Shanghai telephone directory. She was an enormously fat creature and she took liberties with Deedee, and seemed to know Jean pretty well too. What surprised me more than anything about the evening, which ended with Buffalo San's giving us a massage all round, was that Jean spoke fluent Japanese. In fact, though I didn't know much about it, her Japanese sounded like a specially elegant kind. It was certainly complicated and prettier to hear than Buffalo's. But Deedee had told me that Jean came from South Africa and had been in the East a very short time. The whole thing was odd.

I saw her next during the hostilities, after the early curfew was lifted. She was dancing one evening at Farren's, with one of the visiting journalists, and she looked at me from under the brim of her excellently tailored hat as if she were not at all sure I would recognize her. I did, though.

Suddenly, soon after the transmitter left my bed and board, I heard of her again. Deedee phoned to tell me that poor little Jean had tried to commit suicide. “Things were just too much for her,” he said sorrowfully. “They often are. It's living alone that does it; she begins to imagine that people are talking about her. I wonder if she could come and talk to you? It might cheer her up.”

I still don't quite know why Deedee depended on me for this delicate job. He didn't know me well at all. Of course he was eccentric, and I am a writer, and people always assume that writers are easier than other people to approach for peculiar jobs. Or there may be another, more personal reason. I can put it in several ways. I could say, for example, that I am a sympathetic and receptive person and so people rush to me for help and advice, but this is not really true. I am not sympathetic: I am detached and hard, compared to most professional listeners. But I am receptive. I am a gossip, a good one. I like people and their activities. Therefore the persons who meet me, unless they are unusually reserved and resentful of prying, feel that there will be some reaction to their individual acts, the act each of us puts on for the external world. Tacitly I pledge myself to listen and watch. I give promise of being a good audience, and so — I get dragged into things. I could add to this summary, but Somerset Maugham said it all before me much better than I could. He pointed out that many troublesome people hope, secretly and shamedly, that they will be “put into books,” and they hang around writers with the same half-terrified anticipation that women feel with psychoanalysts. Their egos are titillated. But this doesn't prevent them howling loudly when they think they have inspired something in print, in fiction. I said before that I like people, but I don't like that sort very much. If they have any chances at all of identifying themselves with a character in a story they keep a marked copy of the offending fiction to show their friends, they advertise it everywhere, and they talk wildly of outraged hospitality, libel suits, and plagiarism. Any writer knows what I mean, and anyone who isn't a writer can find out, not from me but from the Old Maestro, Maugham.

Am I claiming, you ask, never to use living people as models in my writing? Oh no. I use people. I use myself, which means that I use everything I find in my brain — experiences, impressions, memories, reading matter by other writers — everything, including the people who surround me and impinge on my awareness. Sometimes I am asked, “Do you think it's nice of you?” and I reply honestly, “I don't know. It isn't a question in my mind of being nice or not nice. I can't help it any more than I can help breathing. I am not apologizing or defending myself: there it is. I do it and I will always do it as long as I write, and it's no use trying to bring in the ethical aspects of writing. People who mind should stay away from writers. I think that they do, on the whole. People who don't mind but say they do will go on talking to me, and they are happy, so I don't worry about them.”

I see that I am only recapitulating Maugham's statements; I can't help it, I suppose. It lies too near my heart to be dismissed lightly. Let me go on repeating him for a moment, then. I do not use people photographically or phonographically, setting down fact by fact what I see happen to them or what I hear them say. If I were to do this I would be inexcusable indeed: I would be dull, and a bad writer. I can't even tell a story as it happened even when I'm trying to. Unconsciously I add a bit of emphasis there, and cut out an obtrusive, unimportant detail here, and round the thing out until it is a well-turned anecdote instead of a true story. This makes people angry, and they call me a liar. I suppose you could call it that. But I just can't help it.

Jean was a liar too, but she was a different sort, much less common. She just loved lying for its own sake. She probably lied to me the day she came to tell me her sad story, but perhaps not. You never knew with Jean when the mood would take her to spin tales. The tale she recounted that afternoon over the coffee cups was a simple and pathetic little one, and I think it was true.

For many reasons which are easily understood, Jean was afraid of most women. The prostitutes she knew didn't frighten her, but they weren't good friends. They were too much out for themselves. Also Deedee didn't like her knowing them; he was afraid they would try to keep her from going straight and he was probably right, because, said Jean, there weren't enough girls in the business now, the war kept new ones from coming to China, and a lot of madames were eager to persuade her to work for them. Deedee wanted Jean to keep away from that crowd. She didn't, as he pointed out, need the money any more; he was looking after her. It was time that Jean made other friends, from a different social circle. Deedee wanted her to be a good girl, and happy.