Eve of a Hundred Midnights (3 page)

Before school started, many members of the Pacific Area Exchange's 1936–1937 class traveled to China together by way of Japan. Mel didn't join them. Perhaps hoping to transform their lingering grief about losing baby Marilyn into positive energy, Mel's mother and stepfather offered to send him on a once-in-a-lifetime grand tour of the globe and readily funded the adventure. With their assistance, Mel bought a $500 around-the-world ticket that covered a berth on a boat from New York to London and on to Paris. It also paid for lodging in each city, and stays in Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. Included as well was space on another ship. That vessel crossed the Mediterranean, stopped in Malta, sailed through the Suez Canal to Yemen, and proceeded through India, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), and Singapore. Finally, Mel continued to Hong Kong and Canton. Additional expenses along the way totaled $600.

A Stanford friend—a fellow Angeleno and
Daily
hand named John Kline—joined Mel for the journey. They crossed the Atlantic on a steamer packed with 600 other students, most from schools such as Duke, Harvard, Smith, and Princeton. Mel, who usually took pride in how he dressed, felt uncomfortable around the Easterners.

“I feel like a tramp in my finest duds,” he admitted.

Mel was happy to check off castles, museums, cathedrals, and other standard tourist landmarks, but he also took note of a world becoming unsettled: shipyards operating at all hours building warships in England, German agents trying to recruit Nazis on street corners in Switzerland, and swarms of Fascist police and military all over the Italian streets. While Mel witnessed these scenes, fighting was breaking out between Spain's leftist Republican government and the right-wing nationalists led by Francisco Franco.

“Affairs in Europe are in an awful tangle,” wrote Mel, who also encountered groups of refugees driven out by the Spanish Civil War on his journey. “It will be impossible to put off another war with all the arming & animosities now brewing.”

Mel was not optimistic about the prospects for world peace.

“Yes sir, they are all waiting for the explosion over here,” he added.

As Mel's voyage progressed from Europe through the Middle East and on to East Asia, he clamored for opportunities to experience local culture, the less touristy the better. These experiences included watching a Malaysian wedding, visiting a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence where vultures fed on corpses, and seeing moonlight filter through cocoa palms in Singapore.

“The people I guess made it nice for us, but the tropics and Orient get a hold on you,” he wrote on the second-to-last leg of his trip. “Really, as much as I would like to be home, something is already anchored out here. It's just plain fascinating, that's all.”

Finally, Mel arrived in Canton right on his twentieth birthday: September 11, 1936. At Lingnan, he and the other American students—twenty-three men and nine women—were required to live with Chinese roommates (each woman in the program had two roommates) and eat at least one meal per day in the university's dining halls.

Beyond the pastoral island that housed Lingnan was a noisy harbor. A few months into his year at the school, Mel sat in an open dorm room window, listening to silence fall over the nearby port. He began a letter to his mother and stepfather:

The clatter of wooden shoes and the high pitched jabber of foreign voices has finally ceased. Even the village drums have quit their mighty rattle—in a word, it is now exactly one a.m. and the most glorious Oriental moon imaginable is rising. Its light makes visible the aged salt junks and square rigged whalers on the sluggish river. All this I can see from the window as I sit and write you tonight.

Canton was one of the five “treaty ports” at which Western governments carved out essentially sovereign “extraterritorial” settlements from Chinese territory. It was a cauldron of political ferment in the early twentieth century. Here Sun Yat-sen—considered by Communists and Nationalists alike the father of modern China—began his revolutionary work. But Lingnan, accessible only by boat from Canton, was largely isolated from the surrounding turmoil.

Still, Lingnan's campus—with its palm-shaded brick dorms and vines creeping across walkways—was not hermetic. With the river's mouth just beyond campus, Mel could see waters packed with subsistence fishers, crowded sampans steered by large wooden rudders, cargo boats, and all manner of other craft. Countless thousands of destitute people, known as “those born on the waters” (Sui Seung Yan) and considered ethnically distinct from China's Han majority, worked and survived on the river. In the letter Mel wrote that night while sitting in his dorm window, he noted that local residents made the equivalent of only about 31 U.S. cents each to spend on food every month.

“The river people, a distinct tribe, have a hard life,” he wrote. “I've noticed how hard they work. Women row, and children start before they can walk and few have slept on land.”

Not all of Mel's letters contemplated social issues. Some dripped with privileged Western arrogance about the squalid conditions in China. Others glowed with wide-eyed wonder at the places he saw and even a touch of compassion for the people he met. Some brimmed with warm love for his family. Others bristled with the kind of filial griping that parents have endured through the ages.

The epistolary Melville Jacoby was at different moments a know-it-all, a brash adventurer, an insecure student, a casual—
even aloof—lad, and a charming flirt who frequently wrote about this or that date he had arranged.

Mel also wrote frequently about the friendships he was developing at Lingnan. He quickly bonded with his Chinese roommate, Chan Ka Yik, and Chan's best friend, Ching Ta-Min (who went by the Westernized name George Ching), who lived across the hall with a Harvard student named Hugh Deane.

“I tried to take them to see Chinese things,” George later recalled. “Things that they don't have [in America].”

One day, for example, George took Mel and some other American students for an exotic dinner.

“The first course was snake soup,” George remembered. “I tried it first, and said, ‘Ah, very delicious,' so I convinced them to try it.”

Two or three of the exchange students still refused. George insisted.

“Try a little bit,” he said. “You come to China, I want to show you something that's good.”

The Americans brought the soup to their lips hesitantly. As they took tiny sips, looks of surprised pleasure washed across their faces.

“They finished the whole thing, and later they ordered two more,” George said.

Mel wasn't quite as enthusiastic when he wrote home about the meal.

“Roommate and a Chinese friend took me in last night for a snake dinner,” Mel wrote. “Considered a real delicacy and is very costly over here. Suffered through five courses of the reptile and felt the effects last night. Some food, snakes.”

In addition to this kind of culinary adventure, George and
Ka Yik were able to expose their American roommates and friends to Chinese experiences that might otherwise have been inaccessible. Both young men came from influential families. Until shortly before the semester started, George's father had been the mayor of Canton. George had been born in Berkeley, California, while his father studied at the University of California.

Ka Yik's father was a wealthy landowner. His brother was a high-ranking military officer who advised Pai Chung-hsi (Bai Chongxi). A onetime rival of China's Nationalist leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), Pai became one of the Generalissimo's key strategists. In the southwestern province of Kwangsi (Guangxi), Ka Yik's family owned vast tracts of agricultural property that his father administered from a sprawling home just east of Jintian
^*
village.

With their Chinese roommates as guides, Mel and a handful of other Americans shared many adventures in and around Canton. Through a complicated series of trades and purchases involving a camera, a chair, bicycles, a blanket, and a subscription to
Time,
Mel obtained a year-old motorcycle that he hoped would help him explore farther afield. He hoped to see the China beyond Lingnan's cloistered campus. Meanwhile, as the school year progressed he started paying more and more attention to the saber-rattling between China and Japan, the shake-ups in China's fragile national government, and other increasingly chaotic political and international events. Other students, among them Hugh Deane, also took notice.

“For most of the American students at Lingnan, the experience was a superficial adventure,” Deane wrote after describing how some of Lingnan's Chinese students wanted Chiang's Kuomintang (Guomindang) Party to focus less on Communists and more on Japan, which had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and continued to threaten other parts of northern China. “We shopped for ivory and jade, visited Macao [Macau] for a bit of sin, and monasteries in the Kwantung [Guangdong] mountains for climbing and an exotic change. We accepted the misery around us, bargained with rickshaw pullers whose life expectancy was five years. But a few were caught up by the struggle going on in China, tried to understand it, and became involved in one way or another.”

Mel, Hugh noted, was among those few.

Early that December, when Mel scrawled his letter from his moonlit dorm, China and Japan were racing toward war, and he wondered if, instead of staying at Lingnan after winter break, it made more sense for him to leave the school. Some classmates decided to drop out of the program to explore Asia. Mel criticized them at first, but reconsidered around the holidays. While he liked Lingnan, he felt that its academic offerings were limited and wondered whether he might be better served exploring other parts of China. He wanted to stop in Peiping (Beijing) and “see it before the Japanese [wreck] it,” visit Japan itself, and perhaps even travel across Russia.

“I'm far from a Bolshevik, but I do believe Russia is worth looking into and really seeing what's what,” he said.

Whatever Mel decided about the school year, he made one clear assertion about his future.

“As for me writing anything for publication, I don't want to ever do that,” Mel wrote. “So please get that out of your mind. There are hundreds of other people here in the Orient from the
States who see just what I see and most of them have written about it. Why should I contribute a little more trash?”

In the middle of December, Chiang Kai-shek traveled to Sian (Xi'an) to confer with Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang)—also known as “the Young Marshal.” The Young Marshal had inherited control of Manchuria after Japanese agents assassinated his father. But he was forced out after Japan invaded Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. The Young Marshal continued to direct his armies against Japan's forces in Manchuria until 1935, when Chiang's government instructed him to back off and instead focus on the Communist forces gathered at the inland city of Yenan (Yan'an), west of Sian.

A year earlier the Communists had arrived in Yenan at the end of their “Long March,” a grueling, nearly 4,000-mile flight from power centers in Canton and Shanghai. Though it began with 100,000 troops and support personnel, only a few thousand marchers survived the yearlong trek across dozens of rivers and mountain ranges while beset by government attacks and starvation. After reaching Yenan, Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) consolidated his power as the Communists' leader and his party cast the heroics of the march as one of its key foundational sagas.

Chiang had wanted the Young Marshal to help fight the Communists, but Chang, who still saw Japan as the greatest threat, devised a scheme to make that country the Chinese government's priority. On the pretext of discussing military strategy, the Young Marshal invited the Generalissimo to Sian. When Chiang arrived, forces loyal to the Young Marshal detained the Generalissimo and put him under house arrest in a
nearby villa. The kidnapper spent the next two weeks trying to compel his captive to commit to a “United Front” with the Communists against Japan.

“News flash, twenty hours old, but important enough to cause a war if one suspects it's true,” Mel wrote of the Sian incident to his mother and stepfather just before Christmas 1936.

“It would be a good time with the English so busy for the [Japanese] to strike,” Mel wrote. The Sian incident began on December 12, 1936. The day before, Great Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson.

News of Chiang Kai-shek's detainment spread through a shocked China. Rumors abounded. Had he been handed over to the Japanese as a prisoner? Had the Young Marshal engineered a coup? Kuomintang officials quickly spun the story. The message reaching Mel and others in Canton, for example, was that the Young Marshal had “sold out” to the Japanese.

“We think that Chiang Kai-shek is dead now, but even if he isn't, this move has lost him so much face that it will be a long time, if ever, before he regains the place he lost in the eyes of the people,” Mel told his parents.