China to Me (42 page)

Cooper the poet. He looked just like one; he was young enough not to mind that. He was about twenty-five; he had a long, sorrowful face and a deep Irish voice, and he really didn't give much of a damn about anything but words. He was fluent in Icelandic and Swedish, “and so,” as Charles would say blithely, “he was sent to Singapore.” Now he was in Hong Kong, as a sort of exchange for Alf Bennett, who was going south soon. Cooper was also getting pretty good in Cantonese and Japanese. Already he knew more Chinese characters than I did. He wrote poetry and jingles, pottered about with his languages, did a lot of mysterious work for Charles's office, and looked exceedingly pained, not to say dignified, when Charles accused him of being a genius. He had a house way out in Shatin near the bishop's house where Agnes Smedley was staying, and he ran a fantastically old Rolls-Royce which used too much gasoline.

In October of that year came the Chinese Moon Festival. On one night the moon was biggest of all the year round, and Cooper gave a moon-gazing party and invited some of the Chinese intelligentsia, Charles and me. The house in Shatin was glaringly new, white stucco, a Chinese country villa built on foreign lines. Cooper had rented it from a Chinese, without noticing that the plaster was still damp, and though he had been in it for some weeks it still looked unoccupied. We had a Chinese dinner that was rankly bad, and Charles criticized Cooper loudly all through the meal for having had the cheek to do such a thing when he was inviting Chinese guests. Cooper didn't seem to care, even when he committed the gaffe of serving the rice wine unheated. We all howled lustily at that, and made the servant take it out and warm it up. I remember — I remember a Siamese kitten on the table, wandering about and eating what it wanted. I remember how we sat in the garden afterward and looked obediently, according to tradition, at the great orange moon that hung like a stage prop or a ripe fig in the sky. I talked about poetry with Chuan Tsen-kuo; for many happy years in China, by that time, I had talked about poetry with Chuan Tsen-kuo. I remember that I was feeling warm and quiet because I had written a poem to hand to Charles after dinner, where he read it in the light of the moon.

In mirrors, lakes, and in a lover's eyes

We seek our lonely being, and this is love;

This and this only. Poetry and flowers,

Music and moons, the sweet swift face of hows

At night, all frame self-portraits, all are lies,

The tissue of that famous velvet glove.

Narcissus died of self-desire, not knowing

The secret of our love, the vital breath.

We needs must live upon each other, growing

On that rejection, self-reflection glowing

In lovers' eyes, or love must come to death.

Then must I die? In fright my blood is flowing.

Within your eyes law fails, the word's untrue.

I cannot see myself, but only you.

Then, walking back along the Shatin road in the white dust, in the white light, the green night, we strode swiftly down the hill ahead of the others, crunch, crunch, crunch in the silence, saying nothing.

Chapter 33

Christmas was riotous that year. Charles and I always invited everybody to our parties, and accepted practically all the invitations that came along. Later Charles usually grew more sober about the outside parties, but he never regretted or reneged on his own — or on mine. One time he stampeded my flat with the entire personnel of a large drunken stag cocktail party, at eleven in the evening. For Christmas Eve we blithely made three dates, which we didn't discover until it was time to sort things out and compare notes.

Never mind. We decided to do them all, pausing only to settle on one house for dinner, so that we could notify the other hostesses in time.

“If you don't mind,” I said hesitantly, “I thought we might eat dinner at Vi Chan's. I'll tell you why. I know Vi is sort of fantastic, but I'm fond of her sister Anne. Now Anne has gone and divorced her husband and married Hubert Chen, which shocks all the old-fashioned people in her set, and she feels her position. If you and I went there to dinner —”

“I can't keep track of all these Asiatic scandals,” said Charles amiably. “It's okay by me, baby. I don't see just why we should make her feel any more acceptable socially, but —”

“Just so she won't feel everybody is letting her down,” I said sentimentally.

We started out on Christmas Eve with the best of intentions, as you can see. I was still doing my face, the amah dithering around behind my chair, when Charles came stamping in with Cooper in close attendance.

“I brought old Snooper in for a drink,” he announced, and he called Ah King and ordered old-fashioneds. “We have time for one or two.” Everyone, as usual, was in the bedroom while I finished my toilette. Everyone always is. Sometimes I wonder, a little fretfully, why. I think I inherit the tendency from Sinmay's household. After one old-fashioned Billie Lee dropped in to leave her Christmas gift, and Charles wouldn't let her go again. We had another one all around. Charles wouldn't let anybody go by that time. He wouldn't even let me go to Vi's house. By nine or ten o'clock he had decided that we could take Cooper and Billie with us to Vi's.

“Of course there'll be room,” he scoffed. “You can always add another bowl of rice to a Chinese dinner, can't you? Old Vi'll be glad to have Snooper and Billie.”

“Of course,” I said cheerfully. It all seemed perfectly logical. So there we were; me in long black lace, Charles in his mess jacket, Cooper in filthy tweeds, and Billie still dressed for the office, trooping into an absolutely frigid Chinese drawing room, hours after dinner should have been served.

Vi Chan has always taken her position merrily, but seriously au fond. Somebody else will have to write her story because I haven't the room here, but it must be done. I dare not say how old she is, but she doesn't look it. With an entire family (and in Cantonese circles that is saying something) she had managed, for years, to live on the forbidden Peak territory in a huge house which looked surprised at itself, and with reason. There was a swimming pool, a tennis court, a Victorian-British exterior, and then you stepped indoors, into a mass of teakwood and Chinese screens and this and that, with Vi waiting to greet you all dressed up, usually in Western evening dress, and always with a large bright flower in her hair. Usually there were Westerners at her parties, with a large preponderance of American Navy men. Tonight, though, she had evidently planned just the one thing I would never expect of Vi, a small intime affair. And, boy, was she mad!

Chinese dinners take place at seven at the latest. They are planned with an eye to the size of the table, too. You have tables for eight, tables for six, tables for four, but you can't very well have tables for more than twelve, because then the circle is so large that the guests on the diameter can't reach to the dishes with their chopsticks. If you want more than twelve you just set another table and dish your food out twice. Vi had planned a table of six. And there we were, with two extra strangers, and a couple of hours late in the bargain.

If it had been me I wouldn't have noticed, because I am an American barbarian; Vi was near enough to being a similar character to be all right on her own, but there was that complication of Anne and Hubert, who were sensitive anyway. The family elected to feel insulted. And so, save for Charles's happy and oblivious chatter, the meal progressed in stately silence. Billie was quiet as always, sitting there showing her dimples and unaware anything was wrong, and Cooper had sunk, as usual, into a philological coma. It wasn't the jolliest Christmas dinner I have ever eaten. We got out before midnight and traveled on to the next place, where we thawed out.

The evening ended at a typical bright young colonial party, with discreet flirtations everywhere, sleek, beautiful women and dashing young men in uniform, all being incredibly childish, so it seemed to me, and playing charades. I can't romp the way they do. Or maybe I can. I put up a pretty good imitation that winter. I used to work hard at it in a quiet way. At the beginning of my Hong Kong residence it was never comfortable when I went to one of those parties, for anybody. Only the outstanding bad hats, the people known unfavorably as “crackers” or “intelligent” or something like that, were at ease with me. The others, the pretty blonde girls, the gallant young men, had a way of backing into corners and staring at me rather like rabbits at a tigress. But all that passed, because they were kindly young people really, and bored, and because the British are easier and more tolerant of eccentricity than are most people, and because, anyway, I had begun to develop an assurance that was to come in handy. We played our charades, we drank at the funny little bar, we giggled, we saw Christmas in. Half the men I remember that night, horsing around, are dead, and the girls are standing in line at Stanley with cup in hand, waiting for a handout of thin rice stew. Does that sound banal? It isn't. It hits me sometimes like a slap in the face. It has no implications; I'm not moved to philosophy when this happens, but there it is. It dazes me.

It shouldn't amaze me as much as all that. Charles, standing behind his barbed-wire fence in Argyle Camp, is not being dazed; I'm sure of it. He kept telling me in his off-guard moments. There was one afternoon when he dropped in after a walk. Sometimes when he had the time after work he would change his clothes and go striding up to the Peak and down again at a pace nobody else could keep up, and he stopped in on the road down for a glass of beer. One evening he said: “You'd better go away. If you're having a baby you won't be able to run very fast, will you?”

“Run from what?”

“The theory is that it would be the maddened populace, before ever the Japanese got in. Personally I believe that if the Sikhs were first there wouldn't be much left of any of you, even for the Chinese. But that's only my own idea.” He added, as he always added, “But it's entirely up to you of course. …”

I said impatiently, “Darling, the whole world's going to hell anyway. Suppose I go now; it may catch me wherever I am. Let's take whatever time we have left right here. I like Hong Kong.”

He looked at his beer and said, “All right. It's up to you.”

“Did you read,” I asked brightly, “in that book of yours — Rowlandson — about the British and what they did to the Indians after the massacre of the Englishwomen, during the revolution? They made them lick up the blood in the roads.”

“Yes,” said Charles, “I read it.”

On Saturday afternoon we would go to the Dogs' Home and take the gibbons out into the country and let them play. It was a long way from home, though, and we couldn't well afford the time entailed in getting the car across on the ferry to Kowloon. My flat had the usual Hong Kong veranda, and I decided to fence it in with chicken wire and take the gibbons home. Charles was amazingly amenable to the whole thing. He liked them. He always said that he wouldn't have them in his own house for a million pounds, but he liked them at my flat.

Familiar trouble started immediately. Now and then one of them would get out and roam around the neighborhood, scaring people. When we went to the bathing beaches it wasn't so bad, because nobody but ourselves went swimming in the winter and we had the place to play around in without interference most of the rime. I must admit that there was rather a contretemps on New Year's Day. It was cold and foggy, but we packed a lunch basket with picnic food nevertheless, and took the gibbons and Cooper out to Middle Beach. Unfortunately a Chinese party was going on in one of the shacks on the hillside, and Mills was attracted by the noise and gaiety, and he went up to investigate.

I suppose I didn't realize that Mills was getting to be quite a big boy. He weighed about thirty pounds and stood as tall as a six-year-old, and when you're not used to gibbons it might be a little startling to have one drop playfully on your shoulders as you're taking a quiet walk by the sea. I mean, I can realize that now. At the time I was just intolerant, I suppose. That afternoon, for example, I considered it definitely unreasonable of the Chinese party to object to Mills's presence in their house, or, to be absolutely factual, on their roof peeking in here and there. I watched with impatient disdain when the party closed the doors and the windows and then sat there in what must have been a very stuffy bungalow, screaming for help.

“Oh, go and get him,” I snapped at Cooper. “Tell him lunch is ready. Those idiots. … Really, the Chinese have no talent for animals, have they?”

Charles ate a whole tomato sandwich at a gulp. “I,” he said, “have nothing to do with this at all. I wash my hands of it. Go and get him, Snooper.”

Cooper said mournfully, “I don't see why it's always me.” But he started up the hill toward that vociferous bungalow. Mills, on the roof, yawned and scratched himself under the left armpit. We lay out in the pale sunlight, comfortable on the sand, and waited.

“Who do you suppose keeps those awful monkeys?” asked Charles lazily.

After a while the yapping on the hillside stopped, and a while later Mills loped up to me, saying, “Oop, oop.”

“They were angry,” reported Cooper. “One of them yelled, ‘Your monkey is trying to rape these girls!' I borrowed a leaf from your book, Mickey, and replied with all the dignity I could muster, ‘It's not a monkey, it's an ape.' ”

“What utter rot,” I snorted. “Did they look at him? Anybody who could be raped by Mills rapes awful easy.”

“The Chinese are going away,” said Charles.

“Let them,” I said. “We don't want 'em, do we, Mills?”

“Junior is lost,” said Cooper dispassionately.

It took us two hours to find Junior.

It was on the cards that Charles should go to Singapore. He had had a narrow escape once about Christmas time, but the general decided at the last minute to put the trip off. Charles for his own secret reasons was to go down to Singapore and consult with the military authorities there. We learned about it definitely in February; he was to go in March.