Eve of a Hundred Midnights (9 page)

“Few foreigners desert Chungking without wanting to return,” Mel wrote. “The set formula is to tell friends in Hong Kong what a hell-hole they are missing, and then to rush right back on the next plane loaded with only thirty pounds of clothes and bare essentials.”

Chungking was simultaneously brand-new and decrepit. Fast becoming the “most bombed” city in the world, it was also the epicenter of the country for any serious journalist. Outside of Mel's work at the publicity bureau, Mel began to use the contacts he'd developed before leaving California to pitch reporting with his own name on it. He also acquired a Contax Model II camera, which he brought with him everywhere he went, shooting photos whenever he got a chance. He even sold some photographs to the Associated Press (AP). And after the
Los Angeles Times
published his article about Shanghai's Jewish community, he arranged to write more features, like one about the selection of the Dalai Lama for
This World,
the Sunday magazine of the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

In California, Shirlee, Mel's girlfriend from Stanford, had been keeping in regular contact with his mother. The two swapped news from Mel and tried to interpret what his brief, sometimes cryptic telegrams meant. (They spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out the meaning of his cable address, “SINOCOM,” which simply stood for “Chinese [Sino] Communications.”) One thing, however, was readily apparent to them: the letters Mel sent from Chungking had a far happier tone than anything he'd written from Shanghai.

This may have had much to do with the community Mel had found at Chungking's Press Hostel. If Chungking was wartime
China's center of gravity, Mel and many other journalists in the city found theirs in the Press Hostel, a thin-walled structure of mud, bamboo, plaster, and stone that before the war had been a middle school.

After the government moved to Chungking, Holly Tong convinced H. H. Kung—possibly China's richest man, its finance minister, and Madame Chiang's brother-in-law—to finance $10,000 in upgrades to the school so that foreign reporters could live and work there. It was cheap and uncomfortable—water for baths had to be carried up by porters, and there wasn't much of it—but it quickly felt like home.

Built into a small, grassy bowl between two ridges spanning the peninsula that gave shape to central Chungking, the hostel was within walking distance of key Kuomintang facilities and foreign embassies being built in the surrounding hills and valleys (though more were constructed in districts across the city's two rivers). Holly's own residence was near the Press Hostel, as were his offices and the studio of China's Central Broadcasting Service (which also had facilities elsewhere).

Mel lived in a small room with two large windows and whitewashed mud walls. He slept on a small metal cot with a hard, half-inch-thick mattress. There were a couple of end tables, a small desk with a lamp, some chairs, a dresser, and a washbasin. A forever-damp carpet covered part of the cement floor.

There was also an office that Mel shared with Maurice “Mo” Votaw, another Mizzou grad, who was on hiatus from teaching at a journalism school in Shanghai. Gaunt, with slightly receding, wavy brown hair and a mustache, Mo played a somewhat avuncular role for Mel and the other young journalists who haunted the Press Hostel.

“If you are a correspondent you live at the Chungking Press Hostel,” Mel wrote. “It's almost like being back in a college dormitory. Meals, because of the 25-1 exchange in operation, cost you about two American dollars a month. You know, or at least think you do, more about everyone else's business than your own. Family problems nine thousand miles back in America are Press Hostel problems. Try and keep the contents of a letter secret, and your name is mud.”

As they ate, slept, and suffered raids together, the other journalists came to feel far closer than mere colleagues. To Mel, the people he met at the Press Hostel—among them Till Durdin and his wife Peggy; Israel Epstein; Mel's old Lingnan friend Hugh Deane; the prickly, misogynistic Jack Belden; and the
woman Belden pursued, Betty Graham (another former Lingnan exchange student who in turn had an unrequited crush on Mel)—became an extended family. Yes, the Chungking press gang competed for scoops—indeed, foreign reporters came and went with shifting assignments and shifting fortunes—and of course bitterness and heartbreak occasionally crept into Press Hostel affairs, but everyone who lived there shared a bond.

There were often light moments at the Press Hostel: pickup basketball games and volleyball with Ministry of Information officials or local kids in the dirt courtyard; the excitement of chocolate bars and whiskey when someone returned from a trip to Hong Kong; the time Mel sat fully naked—though strategically covered—in the hostel's bath and someone snapped his somewhat miffed picture.

Denizens of the press hostel loved welcoming returning or newly arriving correspondents with long, late-running parties. When Randall Gould came in early March, Mel and another friend set up a large dinner for him.

“Put on a pretty good feed and lots of rice wine—twenty-four pewter jugs to be exact,” Mel wrote.

Those jugs were hoisted by twenty-three extremely colorful guests, who together represented the sort of cosmopolis that Chungking had cultivated. Among Mel's invitees were a Polish woman who worked for the League of Nations and was the Chinese war minister's mistress; an American writer named Helen Foster Snow (aka Nym Wales), who helped organize the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives movement and was married to the author Edgar Snow; Peggy Durdin; an unidentified Bank of China advisor; and Theodore H. White,
Time
's correspondent.

“What a group we got here, too,” Mel said. “Our press hostel houses enough characters, but when we join the crowd from the Chungking Hostel [a private lodging house where many
foreigners lived] then the fun begins—someone someday will write a book on Chungking society.”

The day after the party, Gould borrowed an office car, and he and Mel drove into the countryside around Chungking. Fruit trees were beginning to flower, and Mel found the blooms a welcome relief from three months of the city's gray skies. The two reporters took a dip at a hot springs resort, shot photos, and visited far-flung government offices that had been scattered to avoid concentrated disruptions from air raids, which gave them a sense of how the government was responding to the constant attacks.

“It was quite a break for me to go along as gasoline is one dollar gold per gallon and people don't use cars too much,” Mel noted.

Usually, the diversions were less adventurous. Once, someone at the Press Hostel got ahold of a full Japanese uniform, complete with weapons. They proceeded to dress
Time
correspondent Theodore H. White in the getup. When he had the full uniform on, “Teddy” grinned widely, a rifle in one hand, a pistol in another, a helmet on, and a Japanese flag sticking out of the sleeve of his long field coat.

The hostel felt like the center of an Edenic world, despite the horrors beyond the palm trees surrounding the hostel's grounds. It was an era that Teddy, a quick-tongued Harvard grad, later recalled as “those days in Chungking, under the bombs, when life was so fresh and everyone was so good and all things were so simple.”

Among the friends Mel made at the Press Hostel, Teddy may have been the closest. The pair's friendship began right at the beginning of 1940, when
Time
magazine hired Teddy to work as its Far East correspondent and Mel took over Teddy's previous
job at the publicity bureau. They bonded in early January, after taking a crowded bus with Votaw to the center of Chungking for a night out eating Cantonese food and theater-hopping between a Chinese movie they couldn't understand and a bunch of ancient, badly censored American newsreels.

Teddy and Mel were an unusual pair. Smirking Mel was tall and athletic, with soulful eyes and thick hair. Broad-grinning Teddy was short and slightly rounder, bespectacled, and balding. The former was an only child and the darling of a wealthy California family; the latter had lived leanly with his mother and several siblings in Boston. Mel was often quiet; Teddy was loquacious when his passions were aroused.

But both came from families with Jewish heritage, and each had a father who perished at a young age. Both men loved China immensely, but loved journalism even more. Each was brilliant in his own way. They were, as the author Peter Rand wrote, “soul mates” of a sort.

The men became fast friends as the war progressed.

“I don't know how, if ever, words can recapture the joys and happiness of deep, living friendship,” Teddy later told the Durdins. “We carry so much around of our friends. It never leaves; it is the heat of Chungking, or the nights when the Japanese were raiding, or the restaurants and the good food; or the talking, most of all the talking.”

Humidity suffocated Chungking. Mosquitoes infested Chungking. Buses' charcoal exhaust choked Chungking. Parties in Chungking flowed with roast duck, scallion pancakes, and rice wine as Japanese rebels, German Communists, and American military attachés mingled with adventure-seekers, mercenaries, and bohemians from the world's farthest corners. Outside these bacchanals, Chungking's cacophonous streets crawled
with beggars peddling broken tools and decrepit clothing and stinking of unwashed mothers trying to feed children defecating in the gutters.

For much of the year, heat enveloped Chungking, even in the middle of the night. The thick, sultry air was as ever present as the noise. Silence was a concept so foreign in this pop-up capital that the word could have been cut from dictionary pages and never missed.

Air raid season finally arrived as the weather cleared, and that brought the worst noise by far: the wail of air raid sirens. These were always swiftly followed by the urgent murmur of citizens rushing to dugout shelters. Then came the faraway drone of approaching bombers that climbed to a roar. This sound ebbed to a brief, eerie quiet, which, in turn, flowed away as deceptively distant blasts thudded above hundreds of feet of stone, “like suction cups plopping against water.”

During attacks, the city's residents did what they could to play it cool. On these days, while approaching planes were still distant, Chungkingers watched the skies with detached interest. The attacks had become routine, and the underground shelters a part of daily life. Young lovers stole away in the darkness to kiss. Cooks prepped lunch boxes. Bureaucrats read the newspaper.

Such normalcy, if you could call it that, was possible because of an elaborate warning system. Spies near Japanese airfields reported bomber squadrons taking off to officials in Chungking. Local officials, in turn, estimated when the attacking sorties would arrive. While sirens sounded, a series of red paper warning lamps were hoisted onto poles atop the hills so that residents could gauge how long they had to get to one of the many shelters. When the first ball went up, they had two hours before the attack; the second came when the planes were within
one hundred miles; the final was raised just before the planes arrived.

Chungking's air defense system had created what superficially seemed like an orderly response to the raids, but those raids carved stark, deadly realities out of the city's resilient facade. After every bombing, residents emerged from the shelters to horrific scenes. Rickshaw drivers and
bang-bang
men—local porters who carried heavy loads up Chungking's countless stone steps—lay mangled in the street, their bamboo carrying poles and baskets scattered around them. Women's bodies were sprawled in roadways, bloodied skirts splayed in the dirt. Flattened buses smoldered. Flaming buildings burned. Smoke rolled into the sky and sank again into the city's many valleys.