China to Me (62 page)

Reeny and I found that Needa's office was a good place to visit. Needa had come safely through the war by virtue of the fact that he spoke a little Japanese, remembered from the first years of his life when his Japanese mother took him to Japan. Also, he reminded me that before he married his English wife, who had left him later and taken the baby home to Daddy and Mother in Shanghai, he had spent time every year in his home town, Tsingtao, where Japanese was spoken. Needa was now in a state of trembling hope and even occasional exaltation. He was as poor as the rest of us, but he felt that he had a chance to make something of his brokerage firm. Remember, between winning the races that had made him famous and popular among racegoers, he had been a commodity broker, like many of the other “gentleman jockeys.” He had preferred his business to his avocation of riding, all along. Now, though the Japanese were trying to carry on with the races and were offering inducements to the jockeys to come back, Needa resolved to be a broker instead. He hated his reputation as a jockey. He had an idea firmly fixed in his head that it was rather shameful to be a jockey, but socially very respectable and solid to be a broker — well, no, not a broker, but a merchant. Needa, he would have us know, was a merchant. We didn't laugh at him. There was something convincing about him, in spite of his well-known genial manners and his sudden loud laugh. The only drawback to Needa's company, heartening as it was and in spite of his generosity, was that he adored the Japanese.

He raved about them. So far he had met only private soldiers with whom he had dealt at Repulse Bay, during those ticklish hours when all the civilians had been arrested and marched off to Kowloon. Needa had been a blessing then, saving the civilians from worse indignities because of his knowledge of Japanese speech. Some of the soldiers looked him up again and gave him presents of looted food, tinned stuff and such, and then he began finding watches for them to buy, and little by little the Army and Navy knew him and liked him. They were bound to like him, he liked them so much. Suddenly, you see, that Japanese blood of his which had meant so much misery, which had kept him feeling sore and inferior all his life, which had lost him his beloved wife and baby — suddenly it was a damned good thing to have after all. Suddenly his Japanese brothers were conquerors, on top of the world, courted and triumphant. What an awakening for a Eurasian! Needa was drunk with joy and gratitude. He had been liberated.

Still, he was the Needa we had always known, and it was confusing and painful for us to hear him on that subject. At first he tried to control himself in deference to our feelings, but after a while he rationalized it and then he was comfortable again. Reeny had lost her husband? It was a rotten shame, but it was the fault of those terrible British and Ernie's own wrongheaded loyalty to them. Why had Ernie, an Asiatic, taken up arms against brother Asiatics on behalf of those cheating Britons? (And the British had taken his wife away too, hadn't they? She, a Briton, had scorned him, hadn't she? Now he'd show ‘em all.)

As for me, that was different too. Needa had always had a fondness for me. He now decided that it was all for my good; Charles had betrayed me, he thought. Not that he knew the fellow, but what sort of guy would get a girl into a fix like that? Given time, he would have run out on her anyway, said Needa to himself. Mickey really loved Asia; Mickey could now adopt the new Asia, and Asia would adopt her, because she had been betrayed and abandoned by her own people. She would have a special place in the new Asia; he, Needa, would help. Everybody in the end would be happy, all the happier without those British. (And yet some of them were decent fellows, and Needa shamefacedly sent them food when he had it, and when nobody was looking.)

So Reeny and I called in at Needa's office every day, and if he had food he would share it with us, with loud denials of our protests. Sometimes if we fell into the old discussion of ways and means he would look at our drawn faces, and he would frown, not liking the wrinkles in our foreheads.

“Oh, don't worry,” he would say, impatiently standing up and moving about at unnecessary tasks. He slammed drawers open and shut, snatching out samples of this and that, things he was trying to sell, things he was succeeding in selling, in larger and larger quantity. “Look, are the kids getting the bellyache? I got a patent medicine here that will fix that. Sure, go on, take the bottle; I got six dozen more.” When Japanese came in we ran out.

It was not Needa who introduced us to the first Japanese we met socially. The introduction looked accidental in a way, but it wasn't. Kung, the interpreter who had spoken to Reeny at the gendarmerie, dropped in on us one evening, just when things looked at their worst. We were all in the living room, sitting about with the babies. The furniture was full of drying baby napkins, because it was raining and we couldn't hang them outside. Kung stood in the middle of all this, looking around with slightly wrinkled nose. A man who has lived among the amenities of civilization for a few months would naturally view our poverty with pitying distaste, and he was a model of fashion himself, even to the slight bulge under the right arm where he wore his revolver.

Mr. Kung wanted to know if Irene and I would consider teaching English to a couple of very gentlemanly, scholarly, serious gendarmes. He was emphatic about those adjectives. There would be no funny stuff, he assured Reeny. We said that we would indeed. He addressed all his remarks to Irene and often it looked as if he meant that she alone was to take the job, but always at the end I found myself carelessly but definitely included. So the next day we went to the place he had indicated, a club over a barbershop. We had polished our shoes and done our faces, and Reeny had brushed my hair, and we felt very nervous.

The club was something like Chinese clubs I have seen before, with a big room full of tables and chairs, a little bar, an attempt at decoration in the stained-glass style, and a ceiling fan. There were other rooms in the back, of course, and the inevitable giggling tarts, in black dresses, peeking in at us from the doorway. We saw no signs of dilapidation, no broken glass or shell holes, and it was a queer feeling. Almost every interior in Hong Kong carried some sign of the war these days, but not this one. Mr. Kung ordered sliced pineapple and beer for us, and after a little while his first friend arrived.

“This is Mr. Nakazawa,” said Kung.

I almost said, “But he's no Jap!” Then I remembered Matsumoto and other Chinese-looking Japanese I had seen, and held my peace. Nakazawa was a slim, reasonably tall man in business clothes, with a fine thin face and a little mustache. He looked cruel and clever and not very healthy. He spoke perfectly good English, quickly, and all the time he talked he was sizing us up, and suddenly I saw the light. This, I knew, was more investigation, following on my interview with Noma. Mr. Nakazawa was making arrangements briskly with Reeny, talking about his friend Yoshida, who really couldn't speak English; they two would come next day for a lesson at our house. They would pay us — no, he didn't use the word “pay”: now that we had met him, be indicated, we need worry no more about anything. He and Yoshida would give us whatever we wanted. He brought out a notebook and asked Reeny what, to begin with, they should send up. …

It was quite a moment, but Reeny didn't seem at all at a loss. She was prompt with her replies. We wanted sugar, flour, rice, fruit, meat, everything. Nakazawa gravely nodded and wrote it all down. Then he sent us home in a car.

We discussed him agitatedly all the way home, in low tones so the driver wouldn't hear us. Irene's point of view, naturally, was not quite mine. She was not so suspicious to begin with; she thought that Nakazawa might be just what Kung said he was, a wealthy young man with a tender heart and a love for languages. But even she couldn't believe that he would be able to give us the food he had promised. Neither of us even talked about the propriety of accepting food from an enemy. I have discovered since I came home that people raise their eyebrows at such an attitude, but I am pretty sure that nobody in occupied territory would. In fact I just choke up and get mad if you talk about it, and wish that you could have a month of Japanese Hong Kong for the good of your soul, and also for your information.

Well, the food arrived. So did Nakazawa, in uniform and sword, and so did his pal Yoshida. They had a lot of coolies to carry it up, and it was an incredible sight. The whole neighborhood crowded to look. We gained tremendous face under these unnatural circumstances; that afternoon when I met one of the Eurasian boys who was acting as guard for the Japanese he was positively respectful to me, obviously under the impression that I was now being Kept by a gendarme lover. I will put your mind at rest at the risk of disappointing you; during the month that we saw Nakazawa every day and got food from him, and afterward, when he was satisfied with his investigation and didn't give us any more food or come around very often, neither he nor Yoshida made passes at any of us.

Ah King was told to cook up some of the food for the gendarmes, who invited themselves for dinner. (Reeny always grudged giving them any of the food back. She said that in the end there wasn't much left over for us, but she exaggerated. For a while we had plenty of food.) That first meal was definitely uncomfortable, though Nakazawa — Chick, as we called him — kept chattering to avoid pauses. He talked smoothly, like any well-bred conqueror, and I admired his method of attack. He kept at the girls, rubbing it in that they owed their sufferings to England, and artfully playing up any latent pride they had in their Chinese blood. That took a bit of doing, after the lives they had led as despised Eurasians, but Chick did it, and well. If all the Japanese had been as clever as Chick the population would be in love with the New Order today, but I never met another one like him, not anywhere even among the diplomats, who should have been able to beat a mere gendarme at that game.

In the end, though, he overtalked himself. He was human too. The fact that he was the cynosure of so many pairs of feminine eyes acted like wine on him, and he began to boast.

“I have killed, alone, fourteen men,” he said. “I, though I was not a professional soldier. All Japanese can kill men. Look at me, playboy, who before the war owned forty cabarets in Tokyo, yet I have campaigned in China like a veteran. That is why I have been given this good job here. In Canton I have a shop for selling gramophone records and cameras and all the girls in the shop are Chinese girls of good family. I think we must start a business here. I will open a teashop for you. You girls can manage it and be hostesses.”

All of a sudden it must have slapped the girls in the face, despite all his siren song at the beginning. He was boasting about having killed men. Their husbands were dead, killed by Japanese, and here sat a Japanese, boasting of it. And on top of that he wanted them to be hostesses in a teashop. And on top of that he had said admiringly of Phyllis that she looked exactly like a Japanese girl. … Irene ran from the table and went to bed in the back room, pleading that she felt very ill.

The next month was the queerest, surely, that we will ever spend in our three lives. I remember floods of talk; optimistic, propagandist chatter from Chick, foolish, distracted words from Auntie, hysterical outbursts mingled with reasonable advice from Reeny. Chick had in his mind not one but many little policies and projects. He was a mercurial bloke, brimming over with ambition and ideals for his country. He wanted to keep an eye on me. He wanted to spread Japanese propaganda among the Eurasians. He wanted to see what sort of foreign company we were keeping; he wanted, indeed, to know what we did every minute of the day, and he succeeded. He gave two or three big sukiyaki parties in our flat, cooking the stuff deftly on the floor of the living room, and he commanded us, in the politest terms, to invite all our white friends. Those were mostly Norwegians, and Nemazee; they came eagerly because sukiyaki meant meat — beef, pork, chicken. He watched these Norwegians, and talked with them, and asked us all question after question. As for me …

As soon as I had a chance, following my resolved policy, I brought out all my photographs and showed them to the two gendarmes, just as if it were an ordinary polite gesture. Most of the photos were groups in Chungking. They pondered them long and silently. Yoshida studied a picture of the Generalissimo for about five minutes before he said in disappointed tones, “But isn't he very ill, almost dead?”

“Not at all,” I said. “He's very well.”

Yoshida looked again at the picture and then turned to one of Mme. Sun and asked more questions like that. I had never realized before that they did believe their own propaganda. Yet after all, don't we all?

I'm tempted to write a whole book just about Chick and Yoshida, but of course I can't. It wouldn't interest you as much as it did me, anyway. I had very little else to think about, and under the circumstances everything about them was of agonizing interest to me. Here at last, I told myself, was the essence of the enemy, the driving force, the cause of all the catastrophe. If only I have the wisdom to read this riddle! What a satisfaction it would be to know what crushes me, even though I am hopelessly crushed in the end!

Perhaps I wasn't completely wrong in thinking that, but I was too hopeful of finding a simple solution to Japan's problem. Japan is not to be summed up in one man, or two, or twenty, even though they do run so much to type. Japan, indeed, can't even be summed up in one government. Chick left me no wiser than he found me. My attitude toward the Japanese was rapidly becoming one of wary, wondering curiosity, and there it remains until this day. I must admit that I also feel maternal toward some of them, perhaps because I have mothered so many anthropoids with just the same quick changes of temper, the same emotional instability. I have not said that for a joke. I don't think apes particularly funny, you know; they're very like us, that's all. But the Japanese often aren't, and I tried not to forget it.