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Chapter 12D
The Missing Peking Man
. . . . .

One Saturday morning I went to George Company to check in, and the duty clerk informed me that I had made corporal. That called for a celebration, but before I could give it more thought, he informed me that Gunny Wesley wanted to see me. He said his orders were explicit, that I was to meet the gunny in his staff quarters as soon as I arrived. He then gave me directions how to get there. I was certain Gunny was going to confront me about Katarina. He was very keen on her that Sunday. Katarina told me he had called her several times but each time she had rebuffed him. It was a month or more now that I had been seeing her regularly. Gunny knew about us.

I found his room and knocked. A minute passed before he opened the door. When he did, he stepped to one side to let me enter. On a low table in the center of the room were papers in disarray with a briefcase and a few books placed on top of them. Standing in front of the table was a young lieutenant who rose to his feet when I entered. The delay in opening the door had obviously been due to their covering up the papers. I needed only one glance at the officer to know he was another G-2 gumshoe. “Lt. Barker from G-2,” Gunny said. I was right.

What kind of trouble was I in now? Was Katarina a spy, a Soviet spy? Maybe it was Melanowski. He had defected. But what did Gunny have to do with all this? Was he under fire too, or was he part of these snoops? All kinds of thoughts raced through my head. When Lt. Barker said I could call him Henry I didn’t like the way it was going. Enlisted men don’t call officers by their first names.

“I’m from Washington,” Barker said. “I’m here to investigate a matter and maybe you can help.” I breathed a bit easier. “First, let me ask, you know the students, is there any indication of unrest?”

“Unrest, I don’t know what you mean. What is it you exactly want from me?” I asked bluntly and to the point. I hated these surreptitious approaches.

“What the students are talking about. We feel an uprising is coming.”

“The students are always uprising about something or someone. They don’t like Americans if that is what you mean.” “Do they ever talk about the Marines and our duties here?” the man from G-2 asked.

“Always. They want to know why we are guarding ourselves from them,” I replied.

“That’s all?” he asked, disappointed.

“We talk mostly about the American way of life versus the Chinese. We talk about writers and poets,” I replied. “But they are always critical of our way of government.”

“What do you tell them?” Gunny asked. All he had to do was ask that one question and I knew immediately his duties with George Company Headquarters were not simply to act as liaison between a couple American students and company headquarters. He was far too bright and knowledgeable for that. I did wonder about his reasons for my inviting students to the picnic. He wanted to get to know them, and now I knew it wasn’t that he just wanted to meet girls. He wasn’t a girl chaser. But what was he?

“Did anyone ever mention anything about Marines guarding the trains?” the lieutenant asked.

“You mean the coal trains?” I asked. The lieutenant nodded and I continued. “I don’t remember any such discussion.” I wondered what the students had to do with train guards. “That’s a relief,” Lt. Barker said to Gunny.

“What’s a relief?” I asked.

The two men looked at each other. “He might as well know,” Gunny said to the man from G-2. “He might be able to tell us if the students are aware.” He then turned to face me. “Coal is being shipped from Peking to Chingwantao near the harbor of Tiensin. It’s shipped in closed compartments. Marine guards take over guarding the trains once the boxcars are outside the city. The only problem is, is it really coal shipments we are guarding? The boxcars are sealed and locked shut when we get them.”

“If it’s not coal, what is it?” I asked.

“Loot,” Lt. Barker spoke up. “Chiang K’ai-shek is looting the city, stripping its treasures and sending them all to Formosa.”

This wasn’t anything new, and I told them so. Train guards knew the difference between open coal cars and sealed boxcars. The only thing that puzzled me now was Formosa, an island off the southern coast of China. One of the students I knew was from Formosa. It was a mountainous island with some aborigine tribes and nothing more. It had nine automobiles and not a hundred miles of paved roads. The Portuguese discovered the island 400 years ago and called it Formosa, or Beautiful Island. The Japanese took it over and now the Nationalist Chinese had it back. The rumor we had was that Chiang K’ai-shek was withdrawing from the mainland and regrouping on the island to prepare for an invasion of the mainland. But this was only rumor.

“Guards know it, but do the Chinese people know it? Do the Communists know it?” Gunny asked, more of a statement than a question.

“They are pretty stupid if they don’t,” I replied.

“You’re right, but if they find out and acknowledge it, it’s going to get a lot of Marines killed. At Chingwantao the train arrived from Peking the other day and the guards woke up the next morning and found the Commies had their artillery trained on them. They were given 36 hours to pack up and get out. The Commies are sure to stop all the trains now. If what Chiang is doing gets known, it can erupt into an international incident.”

“The students haven’t mentioned it yet,” I said again.

“They will sooner or later. We are abetting a thief, a criminal. He is not only fleecing the American government but we are helping him steal from his own people. There’s a good reason for calling Chiang K’ai-shek by his name Cash My Check. Madam Chiang addresses a joint session of congress and woos Americans into giving them more money.” “There’s something else,” Gunny said. “There’s another investigation going on.”

“Did you ever hear of the name Sinathropus Pekinensis?” Lt. Barker butted in.

“Can’t say I have,” I said. What did they expect? I had a couple months of schooling, and that was only Chinese, and maybe I read a few books, and yet they were treating me like a scholar. How was I to know what sinta pepis-I couldn’t even pronounce it-was?

“Sinathropus Pekinensis is also known as Peking Man.”

That, of course, I knew-Peking Man. Everyone at the university talked about the discovery. The Anthropology Department had been deeply involved in the project. I told them that I had heard about the Peking Man, but there wasn’t much more I could tell them.

“What about a U.S. Marine named Gerald Valentine?” Gunny asked.

“Again, negative. Never heard of him,” I replied.

“Valentine was rescued from a Japanese POW camp near here in September 1945. We got him out just before the Russians came. He returned home, was discharged, and the next thing we know he is in London, lodged somewhere near Russell Square. He had changed his name, and he wants two million dollars.”

I was intrigued now. I accepted a cigarette Lt. Barker handed me and listened to his story. According to him, the discovery of the fossil bones of Peking Man was the most important discovery to the 20th century. The fossils were uncovered in a limestone hill near Peking in 1926. The hill, in fact, contained the largest collection of prehistoric fossils ever discovered, the fragments of more than 40 skeletons. The number and variety of the bones would have made it possible to reconstruct how Peking Man must have looked, and could provide an important link in man’s evolution. But now they were gone.

For fifteen years anthropologists flocked to Peking to study the bones. Then in 1941, as Japanese troops advanced on Peking, the bones were handed over to the commander of the US Marine garrison, Detachment D, at the United States Embassy, packed in military footlockers, and prepared for shipment to the United States for safekeeping.

But within hours, before the footlockers could be moved, Pearl Harbor was bombed and Japan and the U.S. were at war. The Marines surrendered to the Japanese and went off to POW camps and the footlockers with their priceless contents disappeared. The Marines were released from POW camps in

1945, and among them was Valentine.

“The whereabouts of Valentine is unknown,” Lt. Barker said, “but if he could be found, one of the most intriguing anthropological mysteries of our age could be solved.” He waited for me to say something, but there was nothing I could say. “There’s more than money involved, however,” he continued. “This is becoming a major factor in furthering the growing rift between Red China and the United States.”

“The Chinese believe that the US has taken the bones and for some reason will not give them back,” Gunny’ said. “Washington is anxious to prove that this is not so.”

“What does this have to do with me?” I asked. I had already been adding things up in my mind. Marines become involved in intrigue every place they go. The old song is so right, “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” they fought off revolutions and gained republics for the dispossessed. They battled in places like Nicaragua, and they came to China to protect Americans during the Boxer Rebellion, and became involved in a revolution and helped found a republic. We came to guard coal trains and ammunition dumps and find we are searching for old bones and helping a new warlord steal his country’s treasures. We Marines complain constantly, and we love it.

“I don’t know what we can find, but I have been instructed to go take a look at the site, a kind of unofficial report. I need an interpreter, and a Chinese might think we are up to something evil. We have elected you to come along.”

“I’m still in school,” I said. I really didn’t care if l missed classes, but I was concerned about Ming-Lee. She could arrive any day and I had to be in Peking when she arrived.

“Two or three days, five at the most, and that’s all,” Gunny said. “We will follow along the Great Wall and then tum to the southeast to reach Zhoukoudian Township.”

The Great Wall again! How could I not go? I accepted. We would leave the following morning. No time to waste. I went back to my hostel to pack, and at the deck I found a package from Tsingtao. It was from Stevenson. I hastily opened it. Inside, neatly folded, was a green skivvy shirt, the standard GI issue undershirt. I wondered what it was all about until I lifted it up, and there on both sleeves were sewn two corporal chevrons. A green skivvy shirt with two dress corporal chevrons. I would keep that shirt forever. I called Bon Yee up to my room and gave him my uniform to have chevrons sewed on it too, including my khaki shirt. I only wore the uniform on weekends when I checked in, but now I felt like wearing it to school. But that wouldn’t do. Only a few students knew I was in the Marines and it was best to keep it that way. It’s a proud day when a Marine makes corporal but I had to keep my pride to myself. Gunny was at the front door to pick me up the next morning at 0600. He had the Jeep with jerry cans filled with fuel, an ice chest with beer and food he brought from the company mess. A corporal driver from Motor Pool sat behind the driver’s wheel. “This is Joe,” Gunny said and we set out to find the trail of the bones of the missing man.

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Chapter 12C
White Russian Refugees

I enjoyed listening to the many stories Katarina had to tell. She told how her mother, three aunts, and grandparents escaped from Russia and fled to Manchuria in 1915. They had a small family farm in Harbin, Manchuria. They left Manchuria around 1930 and leased the farm to another White Russian family.

The family traveled from Harbin to Shanghai aboard a coastal steamship. She was eight years old at the time.

“Why did you leave Manchuria?” I asked. “A farm doesn’t sound too bad.”

“The farm was not like your American farms. We had three or four milk cows, chickens and ducks, but no crops. Why did we leave? The Japanese had Manchuria then.”

She told how they were little more than prisoners under the Japanese, and she had horror stories about how the Japanese conducted human experiments on the Russians living there. I asked about her father; he had died in the revolution. In Shanghai her mother met a China Marine and they married in 1931. The following year she gave birth to a son at St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital. Until Pearl Harbor, the family lived together in a three-bedroom apartment. “It was a quite huge apartment in the French Concession, at Route Vallon, a block off Avenue Joffre,” Katarina said. “They called them ‘key’ apartments. A person put up a large amount of cash as a down payment and made a lease for ten years. But we never had ten years.”

Despite her stepfather being an American, Shanghai for expatriate White Russians was not easy. Life for them was uncertain. Her aunts worked in candy stores, bakeries and small upscale clothing and fur stores. “We called the clothing shops salons. Many White Russian women were seamstresses and hairdressers.”

“What happened then?” I asked.

“The Marines left Shanghai before Pearl Harbor. They knew something was coming. There was tension and a lot of Japanese army on the streets. My mother and stepfather were married but their marriage was unauthorized. They kept the apartment but he bad to live at the Marine barracks. One night my stepfather and two Marines stopped by, and they spent all night burning papers in the fireplace. When Pearl Harbor broke out the Japanese confiscated all radios and the British and American men and women were sent to camps at Pootung and Lungbwa. My mother and brother were able to flee on an American ship. Wives of American Servicemen and their dependents who were caught, with the help of the Red Cross, were detained in a camp. The camp, since it was all wives and small children, was not all that bad as compared to the camps that the British and American civilians were in.”

Katarina spoke about her aunts with great affection. “They were very beautiful women. At the time of our arrival in Shanghai they were in their late twenties or very early thirties. They were very kind to their mother and to each other and to me and my little brother, as well as their elderly grandparents. Their warmth, I believe, came from their joining each other for survival; being stateless is very frightening. Before the war my middle aunt saw quite often a very successful film producer who asked her to marry him and go to the United States. She did not even consider this possibility as she had fallen very much in love with an American sailor. The film producer left for America after asking again and receiving another refusal. The sailor did not return. My aunt believes he did not survive the war, but of course it could be that he just chose to not return.”

She told me about her other aunts. “My oldest aunt fell in love and went steadily with an officer in the Flying Tigers, however, he left for home and left her due to the fact that he had a wife at home. Both my aunts are still in Shanghai. They said they would stay even if the Communists take over. They are tired of running. My grandma just went back to Manchuria to try to locate her sons who went from Manchuria to fight the Germans. She feels with her age that she will be safe. But we haven’t heard. I came to Peking to further my studies. I want to be more than a seamstress.”

It was understandable why I had a warm feeling for Katarina. When you got to know the White Russians you felt sorry for them. I recall one Sunday afternoon visiting the Thieves Market near Hattaman Street. I was at one street-side shop studying the vast assortment of pocket watches the shopkeeper had. I was contemplating buying one that gave not only the time of day but the phases of the moon as well, when a voice in English came from behind. “Sir, sir,” it said. “Can you help?” I knew immediately it was not an Asian voice. I turned to see towering over me a giant of a man, perhaps six five or six. It was cold and he wore a long tattered military overcoat. I first noticed his hands, swathed in dirty bandages. I raised my eyes and there stood a White Russian man whom I would guess was in his early thirties. His eyes were the bluest eyes I had ever seen. His hair was blonde and long and shabby. I then saw it, the left side of his face. I stood back aghast, dumfounded. The flesh on the side of his face was eaten with leprosy. My first reaction was to mutter some stupid words. “No thank you,” I said and turned to my pocket watches. But the sight of that face remained, and when I turned he was vanishing in the crowd down an alley. China had millions of lepers. They were everywhere. Just before I saw the White Russian I saw another man, Chinese, in rags being led by a boy holding on to a stick. His face was completely gone, and his teeth showed like that of a skeleton. He was eating rice that some charitable person had placed in his bowl, and be was using his hand to hold the rice in his mouth. His hand was lacking fingers. It was a terrible sight, but what I had just experienced with the White Russian was far more moving. I questioned my own thoughts. Was not a leper, a leper? Did it matter who it was? I suddenly realized we were foreigners in an alien land. It bothered us to see other foreigners suffering and helpless. We foreigners could never be Chinese. We would always remain white people to them and to each other. I could understand my empathy now towards Katarina. I did like Ming-Lee, very much, but it was Katarina that I felt sorry for. Was this being prejudiced? I hardly knew the meaning of the word, but I was aware that the feeling I had for Katarina was different. Suddenly I couldn’t wait until I saw Ming-Lee again. What was taking her so long to arrange her trip to Peking?

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Chapter 12B
Face-to-Face with a Dowager Eunuch

There was a bit of the daredevil in Katarina which I liked. I remember one time I was at Forbidden City with Su Fung and we saw a few old men sitting on a bench in front of the temple sunning themselves. I asked who they were and she said they were the last of the court eunuchs. “You mean some of them are still alive?” I asked in astonishment. Immediately “There are many, many,” she explained. “I remember hearing only recently about one old man who lives behind the walls. His name is Sun Yaoting.”

“I would love to meet him,” I said. “Can’t we go and find him?”

“That would be impossible,” she snapped. “Eunuchs are from the past. The practice was outlawed. I am sorry that I even mentioned it to you.”

With Katarina it was the opposite. When we were visiting the Forbidden City I casually mentioned that the old men out front were eunuchs. She was as surprised as I the first time I heard it. I then remembered the old man that Sui Ying mentioned. I even remembered his name-Sun Yaoting.

“Let’s see if we can find him,” she suggested.

“I would like nothing better,” I said. “When do you want to go?”

“Now, right now,” she replied.

At a cluttered tiny office in the rear of the temple we approached a shaven-headed monk writing in a ledger with a quill which he dipped into a cup of black ink. I asked in my best Mandarin where we might find Sun Yaoting. He didn’t answer, nor did he even bother to look up from his desk. “He’s a eunuch,” Katarina said, and upon hearing a female voice, the monk looked up.

“I know who he is,” he said after studying us for a moment, “and you are not the first to ask about him.” I thought for sure he would ask why we wanted to see the eunuch but he didn’t. He willingly told us the room number and pointed out the direction. Katarina insisted that we go back out into the street to where we saw vendors selling their wares. One vendor was roasting chestnuts over a brazier. She bought a bag of roasted nuts and we returned to the temple. As we started down the corridor looking for his room number above the doors, I told Katarina what I knew about eunuchs from the Dowager Empress that I had heard about the USS Napa, the same stories I had told the guys when we were under the lifeboat. “You know it’s a pretty bloody operation,” I said. “They use a round knife and with one whack they cut everything off.” I remembered some of the details and told her that at the end of the Ming Dynasty there were more than 70,000 eunuchs in the palace, possibly 100,000 throughout the empire. When China banned eunuchs in 1912, there were only 470 left. “That was only 35 years ago, and some of them must be alive today.”

We found Sun Yaoting’s room and knocked. The door creaked open and there in the dim light, clad in a saffron-colored robe, stood a wrinkled old man. I told him we would like to talk to him, and when Katarina handed him the bag of chestnuts, he bid us to enter.

The room was sparse, more like a cell, with only a cot for a bed, a small writing table and a single chair. The walls were whitewashed and a musty dampness permeated the room. The only air came from a small barred window high up on the outer wall. Katarina and I sat on the edge of the cot. There was a long moment of silence, and finally I asked if he minded us intruding. I explained I had never met a eunuch before. This amused him and he smiled, causing his face to wrinkle even more; he seemed to take pleasure that we had singled him out. “Yes, I was ten when I became a servant to the emperor,” he said in Mandarin. His voice was high-pitched and not like any I had heard before. It was almost comical and had the circumstance been different, I could have chuckled. But he was serious.

“And what year was that?” I asked.

He didn’t answer questions directly, but replied in a way that made it sound like he was programmed what to say. I guess he had a long time to think them out. “My father did it himself using only hot chili sauce as a local anesthetic,” he said. “I remember quite well him taking a curved knife to my genitals and with one whack they were gone, penis, testicles, all gone. All to make me eligible for service in the Forbidden City, home of the Imperial family.”

As a eunuch he was trusted to enter the inner courtyards of the palace, where the women of the imperial family and harem lived. Other men, including officials, military guards and even the emperor’s male relatives, were often required to leave the palace grounds at night.

“And what year was it that you had the operation?” I asked again.

“I received 20 Yuan a month salary, which was a lot of money in those days, and had to do very little for it.” I then asked what was court life like, changing the subject. “One year after my operation, the republican revolution came and ended the empire.”

I knew the revolution came in 1911. Quick calculation and I placed him at 45 or 46. I couldn’t believe it. My father was about the same age and he was filled with life, even planning on starting an electrical appliance and repair shop when I got out of the Corps. I tried hard to picture this withered old man at 45, housed in a simple room at the rear of an old Buddhist temple, a far cry from the days when he lived in splendor in the Imperial Place.

Sun Yaoting went on to tell his story and I had no need to interrupt him again. He explained that after the revolution and when the Empress was exiled, he served with the court of the last emperor Pu Yi for eight years. He waited upon Empress Wang Rong, Pu Yi’s wife. He told how some eunuchs before the revolution had great power and wealth, and they lived freely among the concubines, not only dining with them but bathing with them as well. Sun believed he was heading for great things, too, except that the revolution suddenly changed the rules. It all ended in 1924 when Feng Yuxlang, the converted Christian warlord, who baptized his army with a fire hose, threw the former emperor and everyone else out of the palace.

Surprisingly Sun Yaoting had no regrets about his being forced to become a eunuch. He explained that traditionally a eunuch preserved his genitals in a jar to insure that they would eventually be buried with him, in the belief that this would guarantee his reincarnation as a “full” man. He kept his family jewels not in a jar but in a small leather bag around his neck. Maybe he was still a eunuch, dedicated to the cause, but I watched him eyeing Katarina seated in his room, with her legs exposed. The spirit was still there. I tried to imagine this 45-year-old man, as a young boy, living in a Chinese harem, maybe sitting in a bathing pool with a bevy of young naked Chinese dolls. There was so much more I wanted to ask him, but some things are best left to the imagination.

Katarina was also helpful in the hutongs. In the afternoons when it was warm, I saw old Chinese women sitting on benches in front of their mud houses. They kept themselves busy conversing with other women. Gossiping, no doubt. Many of these women had bound feet and I was curious about this ancient Chinese tradition. I had seen a few old women in Tsingtao with bound feet, including the old woman who sold her services the first night in the compound when we arrived. Katarina didn’t mind sitting down with the women and talking with them, something my Chinese student friends would never do. One old lady, with only a few of her teeth left, and those were stained black, explained the process to us. “When a young girl’s feet are being bound, the pain is something terrible,” she said. “Their skin is inflamed and the flesh decomposes, smeared with blood. At this time they moan and cry, and can neither eat in daytime nor sleep at night for the pain, and they develop all kinds of sickness.”

“Why would any girl submit to this kind of torture?” I asked.

Through her rotted teeth she smiled and said, “To make us look beautiful. Girls cannot be beautiful without small feet!” “Of course,” I said and she beamed. A strange custom indeed. Chinese men once regarded girls who had disfigured feet and walked with a kind of tortured gait as beautiful!

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Chapter 12A
Kat-tar-rina, The Russian Girl

The moment I stepped out of the Jeep at Badaling and saw the Great Wall of China looming up before me, I thought about my father and my Uncle George. For two years they had been constructing a stone wall back home on our farm, and with all their effort and time spent it was no more than a 100 feet along. And here was a wall, 3,000 miles long, and not three feet high but 30 feet high, and 25 feet wide. I couldn’t help wondering bow the Chinese had done it. Every stone that went into that wall on the farm back home was placed there with an argument. “What are you doing? That doesn’t fit there,” followed by, “It’s better than the one you have.” How many centuries would it have taken my father and my uncle to build the Great Wall of China?

I only wished they could have been with me, but then maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. They would have argued why the wall went up that hill to the left and not to the right where it appeared to be less hilly. I could hear them, ‘That’s why they put it there where it is, for defense.”

When we arrived in our caravan at 0800 at the university that Sunday morning, I was very pleased to see the Russian girl waiting for us. My doubts were quickly forgotten. She looked radiant, in her high boots and coat that fell just below her knees. She carried her fur muff and wore a huge black-fur hat. Gunny was seated behind the driver’s wheel of the leading 4×4 weapons carrier, and the moment he saw her, he motioned for her to sit in front. She slid in next to him. She introduced herself. “My name is Katarina,” she said in her Russian accent, just like they speak in the movies. She pronounced it Kat-tar-rina. It sounded great the way she said it.

“Kat-tar-rina,” Gunny said, mimicking her. “I’m Gunny Wesley.” I knew the gunny all these months and it was the first time that I’d heard his name. We simply called him “the gunny from George Company.” Names in the Marines are never important when referring to staff NCO’s. Sometimes the names we gave them couldn’t be spoken in polite company.

I slid into the front seat next to Katarina. Gilbert and two other Marines sat behind. We immediately caught the full aroma of her perfume. The air became saturated with the scent, strong and overpowering. Gunny Wesley wasted no time commenting on its fragrance. “That’s great perfume,” he said, and in the same breath he wanted to know its name, where she got it and was it her favorite perfume. He was trying hard to win her favor and he was succeeding. He kept the conversation lively for the next three hours, cracking jokes and making small talk, until we reached Badaling.

We parked the vehicles, with one Marine left behind to guard, while Gilbert, the other Marines and I ran ahead and climbed the ramparts to the first tower. Gunny followed up the rear helping Katarina along by holding her arm. The wind blew strong and it was bitter cold, but it was invigorating. We waited for Gunny and Katarina to catch up, and then Gunny gave us a dissertation on the wall and its construction. He continued to baffle me with how much he knew about Chinese history. He was knowledgeable, and sometimes witty. “The Chinese wanted to keep out the Tartars,” he said, “so they built this wall 30 feet high, 25 feet wide, and 3,000 miles long. Now they want to keep out the white man, who conquered them in two opium wars, so they created an ideology, and called it communism.”

We found protection from the wind below the first tower and here Gunny had the Marines set up the picnic area. They spread out the food and opened an ice chest containing cold beer. While they were setting up, Gunny told us more about the wall, how 300,000 soldiers labored to build the wall for twenty years during the Qin Dynasty. “They also used donkeys to carry baskets of lime up the mountains, and bricks were tied to the horns of goats, which they lured up the mountains.”

It was a fun day at the Great Wall of China, but I had to admit I was rather perturbed that Gunny had taken over Katarina and had monopolized her completely from the moment be saw her that morning until he took her home that night. I was even more upset that he dropped me off at my hostel first. He was pulling rank, but in a way I couldn’t blame him. I had been rather innocuous and had little to contribute to the party. I rationalized my behavior by remembering that Ming-Lee was coming to Peking and I didn’t want to butterfly around. But on Monday in my classroom the situation changed. Katarina was cheerful and sat down next to me. She had never done that before.

“You should have come with us,” she said, placing her hand on my arm. “We went dancing at the Tivoli.”

Why was she telling me this? I acknowledged that I heard her and let it pass. But she continued.

“Gunny’s quite a charmer,” she said. “He’s fun.” “You like him then?”

“As a friend, yes.”

“I think he likes you.”

“Yes, I could feel that. That’s why I had to be careful.” “Careful,” I replied. I wanted to say something about her going dancing with him but held back.

“Yes, I didn’t want to give him a wrong impression.” The teacher entered the room and she returned to her seat in the rear, but before leaving she asked to have coffee after school. I agreed, but without Gunny I said under my breath.

Katarina took me to a Russian bakery off Hattaman Street. The delightful smell of baked bread greeted us before we even saw the shop. In the bay window facing the street were shelves with loaves of bread and rolls, sprinkled with white powder, stacked one atop another. As we pushed open the door a bell above the door went ting-a-ling announcing our arrival. An attendant came running and greeted us. Along one wall were four postage-stamp size tables. We draped out coats over the backs of our chairs and warmed our hands over a charcoal brazier that the attendant hastily placed before us. The attendant was a huge Russian woman. She was dressed all in white, with a white apron and a white babushka covering her hair. Bits of gray hair showed beneath. She and Katarina spoke together in Russian. It was obvious they knew one another.

“She does a good business,” Katarina said after the woman went to get our coffee.

“I didn’t think Chinese would like Western bread,” I replied.

“Do you know how many Russians there are in Peking?” she asked, raising her voice.

“I have no idea.”

“What do you know about the Russians?” I could see she was defensive about her lot as a White Russian.

“That they beat the Germans, that Stalin is in charge, and they want all of Manchuria,” I replied.

“You see, you think all Russians are the same. We Russians in China are Belorussians, or as you call us, White Russians.” I didn’t care to have a lecture, especially when I knew nothing of the subject. I often wondered about all the White Russians I saw in Tsingtao but never delved deeper into their past, until now. I had more reading coming up while burning the midnight oil. We changed the subject to the Americans living in Peking. After the second coffee we parted, each taking a pedicab our own way, with an agreement to have coffee together later in the week. I had a feeling she didn’t want it to end but I had things to do, like checking out a book on Russian history from the library.

When I was studying with Mrs. Murray, I couldn’t quite understand why she was so concerned about the Russians taking over Port Arthur in Manchuria when the war ended-weren’t they our allies-but I began to understand as I read my history. The agony of the White Russians began in 1918 when the revolutionary Bolsheviks put a bullet into the head of the Tzar Nicholas II and then into his wife, their five children and the family dog, thus ending the reign of the Romanovs. The Boyars, the landed gentry, the aristocracy-all White Russians-were forced to flee from their mother Russia. But since the new government had made peace with the Kaiser in the West, they had to tum to the East-to China.

The White Russians, although they never integrated fully into Chinese society, made China their home for the next thirty years, but now the Red flag was casting a shadow of doom upon them. In the beginning, however, when they first fled from Russia, they were received with open arms in China. Among their ranks were many well-trained military officers who held positions in the Chinese army as instructors while others obtained fairly high ranks. Many became government servants, advisors and teachers.

“You did well in China,” I said to Katarina the next time we sat down to coffee.

“You mean our parents did. The second generation, my generation, doesn’t have the schooling nor the training as our people did before us. We had to shift, and began opening up restaurants, bars and clubs.”

“You can never go back to Russia?” I asked.

“Never. If Chairman Mao takes over in China, this time there is no place to go.”

My relationship with Katarina became warmer each time we met, almost without my being aware of it. We met just about every day now after class, and if we didn’t have coffee and the weather permitted, we went for long walks. Sometimes we took short bus trips. We enjoyed visiting the Imperial Summer Palace and went several times. Within the palace was a lake, and upon the still waters was a magnificent boat, constructed of solid marble. Naturally, it didn’t float. I remember reading the story aboard the USS Napa, from the book I got from the library on Guam. It told how in 1911 when the Empress of China was hounded by her advisers to build a powerful navy, she obliged them. She sank, literally, the entire treasure’s purse into a marble boat. The first time we held hands was crossing a street, and soon we began walking arm in arm-to keep warm, we said. Since we were both foreigners, the Chinese did not frown upon our actions. In fact, the Chinese hardly even noticed us. As we drank coffee and tea, and walked through the parks, Katarina spoke a great deal about the plight of White Russians in China. When I learned she was three years older than I was-she was going on 21-I was a bit disappointed, but after a while that didn’t matter. I liked her company even if she was older.

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Chapter 11c
Mamma Georgia

Mamma Georgia’s place stood out from all the other buildings on the street. It was the only wooden structure, and badly in need of repair. It appeared never to have been painted. Melanowski began making excuses as he pulled a ring attached to a cord that hung from the door. “Mamma Georgia said if she fixes up the place, they’d raise the rent,” he said.

I listened but I couldn’t hear any sound from beyond the door. Melanowski pulled the cord the second time. “Perhaps no one’s home,” I remarked.

“They’re home,” he assured me.

Sure enough, there came the sound of wooden clogs, and the door opened partly. Through the crack, I could see a girl standing there, a mere child not yet in her teens. The sight was sickening. Young girls working as chamber maids in whore• houses. What could be more disgusting? Melanowski saw the look on my face. “Mamma Georgia adopted her,” he said.

Yea, sure, I thought. Same old story, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

I was quite surprised that the small courtyard was rather clean and tidy, with plants in dragon-carved urns along the walkway. Nor did the place have that discomforting odor that the bordellos like Ping-Pong Willies in Tsingtao had.

The girl led us to another inner door and stepped aside. Melanowski took over and led the way down a long hallway with a white tiled floor to a reception room at the end. Here was Mamma Georgia, seated in a polished, hardwood Empress’ chair. With her hands crossed over her protruding belly, she sat there like a grand lady of the Chinese court preparing to pass judgment. She attempted to get up, but I bade her to remain seated, and it was probably well that I did. She was so heavy-set I doubted she could even stand, and if she did, it would have to be with great effort. In a heavy Southern black accent she asked me to be seated. She called for a servant girl to bring us tea, and even when she spoke Chinese, there was no mistaking she was from the Deep South. How the Chinese understood her was beyond me. I thanked her and sat down. I was really curious now and wondered how I would approach the question about her past.

“I understand you worked for a Marine colonel.” I began, cautiously.

“I shu did,” she replied, “and he shu wuz a hard-up somna-beech.” She began laughing. Her laugh was gruff, hardened no doubt from years of smoking cheap Chinese cigarettes, which I saw on the table next to her. She had to wipe the tears from her eyes before she could continue. It was evident from the start she was going to enjoy telling me her story, probably the same one she told over and over to every Marine and sailor who came to her establishment. She poured me tea and said, “I knowd you come ta talk at me, an I knowd you ain’t commin to get laid.”

“You’re right, Mamma George,” I said. “I’m leaving that up to my friend here.” With that she burst into laughter again and I had to wait until she dried her eyes once more before I could continue. “How long did you work for the colonel?”

“Until hiz misses done fired me when she catched us.”

“Caught you what?” I asked.

“You sur is a young fellar who don’t know nottin much.

Fur bein his lover, dat’s what.”

It was too hard to believe. As I sat there in the room listening to Mamma Georgia, I could not imagine her as the lover of a Marine colonel, or the lover of anyone for that matter. She had grown grossly fat over the years. And in all probability she hadn’t bathed in years. She certainly didn’t hesitate to talk about her past, as sordid as it was. “Ah used to be quite sexy when Ah wuz fo’teen an f’teen,” she explained.

“You mean the colonel was banging you when you were fourteen?” I asked.

“Wuz he evah! Ah wuz the bes’ lay he evah had. He use ta come git a nooner ever’ day, while hiz wife wuz boozin’ it up at da club.”

She stopped talking often, coughing and laughing at the same time. She’d stop coughing when she lit a cigarette, and then she’d continue the conversation. I found myself laughing too, also into tears.

“How long did this go on with the colonel?” I asked.

“Til one aftahnoon when da kernel’s wife come back a da house. She wuz already drunk as the Lord, too many Mints for lunch, and come draggin’ da kernel’s driver wif her up a da bedroom. He wuz a frightened, pimpil-faced Iil bastud. Don’t know what da hell she ever seed in him. Dey wuz haf undress by da time they enter da room, an’ der we wuz, buck-ass neked on da floor. Da kernel had dis crazy idea dat if we doodit on da floor-not on da bed-den it wun’t madder for sum reason. Ah didn’t mind. Ah didn’t have ta make up da bed. It wuz one of dem ole poster beds da kennel wife shipped all da way fum At-lanta. Come on oxen carts most da way fum Tientsin.”

“Okay, okay, Mamma Georgia,” I pleaded, “never mind the poster bed, what happened then?”

“Da kernel ‘sploded. Dat poor frigg’n private, standin’ der, ready ta take out his pekker. Beatrice-da’s da kernel’s wife-she begin defendin’ him. ‘What you expect!’ she screamed, ‘you wid da nanny.’ Der won’t much da kernel could do ’bout da driver. He made corporal a cupple month latah, and den go transferred.”

“And you, Mamma Georgia, what happened to you?”

“Ah had ta go, bu Ah won’t gonna go back to Jawja. Da kernel fix me all up wif da room. He nevah do me afta dat.”

“Never?”

“Nevah. Had too meny white boys doin’ me aftah dat. Dos Suttern white boys couldn’t get da black stuff back home, so dey come heah.”

Mamma Georgia went on to tell me how she later opened her own house and managed to remain in China, as an oppressed black woman during the Japanese occupation. “Da Japs wan’ white wimmen,” she said, “an’ der wur enuf white Russian wimmen ’round ta set up a gud bizness.”

Mamma Georgia liked Melanowski; I could see she mothered him. It wasn’t all business with her and him. She knew he was falling for Monique, and if things got too serious, she might lose one of her best money earners. But she also had a soft spot for Monique. I gathered this when she came into the room and we were introduced. I was shocked. She was beautiful, with all the fine features of an Oriental lass combined with the best qualities of her French father. I had the feeling that if Melanowski carried her off, it would be a Godsend. But I guess deep down Mamma Georgia knew that would never happen, unless he stayed in China, and that was another kettle of worms.

I knew, of course, that Melanowski was already entertaining this crazy idea. I stayed to have dinner with them, and after the meal he mentioned about getting a job with UNRA, but when I pointed out he had no engineering background or technical skills, he thought about working for one of the other foreign companies. “Come on, Ski,” I insisted, “once you start talking like that, they’ll ship your ass right back to the States. No one gets a discharge here.”

“You have to help me,” he said when I was leaving. I made him promise he’d attend class and we would try to work things out. I caught a pedicab back to Hostel No. 3, and was so deep in thought, wondering how this was all this going to end, that the driver had to shake me twice to tell me we bad arrived. The clerk at the desk handed me my room key and a telegram from Tsingtao. I waited until I got in my room to open it. It was from Ming-Lee. She was making plans to come to Peking for a visit and was very excited. I was hoping now that the Russian girl wouldn’t show up on Sunday morning. The last thing I wanted was complications like the other guys had. Probably the next thing I would hear was that Stevenson was planning on getting married. Maybe even Ruker. That’s what happens when they send Marines to foreign lands. The women fall in love with them. I remembered the pat phrase Ruker threw out every time someone asked him about his love life. He would sound out: “I am handsome, strong, good looking, easy to get along with, a good dancer, boxer, swimmer, track man, weight lifter, a Marine, and all the women like me. What do you expect?” Sometimes I think he actually believed it. That’s what the Marine Corps taught us anyway. We were the best. But we were also learning we were vulnerable.

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Chapter 11b
THAT WHITE RUSSIAN WOMAN

At school the next day I passed word around that the Marines from George Company were having a picnic Sunday at the Great Wall, and anyone who wanted to go was invited. No one accepted the offer. I had a feeling a few of the girls might have wanted to go, but custom kept them from accepting. It wouldn’t be proper for a Chinese girl from a good university to be seen driving around in an open vehicle with a bunch of foreign men, especially Marines. They all knew and envied the foreign community with their fine parties at the embassies and legations, the parties where everyone dressed in their best and danced the night through to the music of 15-piece orchestras. They knew about the champagne that flowed and the gourmet food that was served, and they longed to be part of the fun, but they could not accept any invitations. I hated to disappoint the gunny. I had the feeling he only invited me because I knew a lot of female students at the university, but it did little good by my “just” knowing them. I was feeling rather glum, sitting at my desk in class with my nose in my books when a hand tapped me on the shoulder. “I would like to go,” the voice said. I looked up and couldn’t believe my eyes. My pulse missed a couple beats. It was the Russian girl. “I would like to go,” she repeated, “if you still have room.”

I had planned exactly what I would say to her if we met. I would be suave, charming in every way, and I would say clever things that would make her laugh, and she would tell me that I was very amusing, not at all like the other men she knew in Peking. What came from my lips was nothing like this. “Yea, sure,” I grunted, “Yea, I guess we have room.” I mumbled. When she wanted to know where we should meet, I said we would meet her in front of the university Sunday morning at eight. She thanked me, and then lingered for a moment. I was numb for words. She said good-bye and left. I wanted to yell after her as she was leaving the room, to say something nice, but it was too late. I cursed myself. I could face a banzai charge but not a pretty girl. Thank goodness none of the guys were around.

I didn’t see her in class the rest of the week and wondered if she would even turn up on Sunday. I went to George Company to check in on Saturday morning and there they were, Melanowski and Gilbert. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys,” I said. I mentioned the coming picnic and Gilbert was keen on going but Melanowski had other plans.

“I heard about your plans,” I said. “You’ve got a girl.”

“Yea, and I don’t want any shit from you,” he said, and without waiting for my response he continued his tirade. “I wanta marry her. So don’t give me any crap, not from you nor from nobody. I wanna marry her.”

“Hey, buddy, hold on,” I said and backed off. He was hot under the collar and with his temper there was no telling what he might do. I got him off to the side, away from the Company office. He was talking loud and didn’t care who heard him. “Hey, Ski, this is me, remember, your buddy,” I began. “Now what are you talking about? Do you know?”

“Hell yea, I know what I am talking about. What do you think, that I’m crazy too?”

“I don’t think anything like that, and you know it. But you can’t get married when you are in the Marine Corps and you know that.”

“I’m getting out,” he said.

“You can’t get out. You know damn well you can’t get a discharge here. You have to go back to the States for that.”

“Who said anything about a discharge?”

“What are you talking about? If it’s what I’m thinking, I don’t even want to hear it.”

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I’m getting out and I’m going to marry that girl.”

“You are saying you’ll desert.” “Call it anything you want.” “They can shoot you for that.” “They have to catch me first.”

He was far worse than I had thought. It was impossible to reason with him in his present state of mind. The best I could do was listen to him. He explained the girl that he was in love with was half-French and half-Chinese. She started working for Mamma Georgia six months before Melanowski met her. He wanted me to meet her and to talk to Mamma Georgia. He wanted to take me there right away. I agreed, but first I had to find the gunny and tell him we had to pick up someone at the university at eight the next morning. “A great looking Russian girl,” I boasted. He beamed. I then set out with Melanowski to Mamma Georgia’s place.

After we were away from headquarters and walking for a few minutes, I attempted to appeal to his senses once again. “Look, she’s different I told you,” he quickly said.

“For gawd’s sake, Ski, how many times have I heard that, ‘she’s different.’ They are all different.” I expected him to fire back at me in a tirade of four-letter words, but he didn’t. The fact that he didn’t made me realize something was not the same. Melanowski was one guy who couldn’t speak without using the four-letter “F” word. It was his vocabulary, his seven parts of speech; it was his nouns and his pronouns, his adjectives and his adverbs. He interjected his thoughts with the “F” word. Had he been a religious man, he could not have said his prayers without using the “F” word.

As we walked along toward Mamma Georgia’s, every now and then I’d glance over at him. I couldn’t help it but I felt sorry for him. It was that same kind of pathetic sorrow you felt when a favorite hunting dog gets lame and you know he wouldn’t get better. Melanowski should be back in Minnesota, I thought, and not in a back alley in Peking. He was a mill worker, not a pursuer of Chinese women 12,000 miles away from the mills. He was out of place, a big clumsy kid, with big hands and big feet. His father had emigrated from Poland and settled in Minnesota. Like his father, he was a steelworker. His idea of success was overtime at the mill. To be prosperous meant to have a potbelly. He didn’t mind the Polack jokes tossed his way. You might say, he even encouraged them. The jokes made him the center of attention, which he liked. Everyone riffled him, and ridiculed him, and yet they all liked him at the same time. Finally, I asked him, “Who’s this Mamma George?”

“Hey,” he said, stopped and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“You’ll like her.”

“No, why should I know her?”

“Holy bell,” he said. “I thought everyone knowed Mamma Georgia.” It took him a bit of hemming and hawing but he finally told me about Mamma Georgia. I was dumbfounded. Shocked, in fact. Mamma Georgia was a black woman, and she ran a whorehouse. Before he told me who she was, I thought she might be a dance hall owner or maybe a barkeeper, but not the madam of a whorehouse. And who was this girl he was in love with? Certainly not her partner. I wished I hadn’t agreed to go with him to meet her.

He tried to explain the best he could, in the mildest manner possible, all about Mamma Georgia. He said she had been a nanny for the two daughters of Col. Willard Scott and his wife Beatrice. The Scotts arrived in China just before the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in 1908. I read all about the Boxer Rebellion in the book I got at the library on Guam. Around the turn of the century, Tsu Hsi, the Empress Dowager of the Ch’ing Dynasty, was hoping to close China to foreigners. America wanted an “Open Door” policy in China that would guarantee equal trading rights for all and prevent one nation from discriminating against another within its sphere. A secret society, which foreigners called “Boxers,” refused to~ cooperate and in the early months of 1900, thousands of Boxers roamed the countryside. They attacked Christian missions, slaughtering foreign missionaries and Chinese converts. Then they moved toward the cities, attracting more and more followers as they came.

In Peking, foreign diplomats, their families and staff, lived in a compound just outside the Forbidden City’s walls in the heart of the city. Working together, they threw up hasty defenses, and with a small force of military personnel, they faced some 20,000 Boxers on a rampage. For almost two months, the foreigners withstood fierce attacks and bombardment. Things began to look hopeless. Seventy-six defenders lay dead, and many more were wounded. Ammunition, food, and medical supplies were almost gone.

An international relief force of soldiers and sailors from eight countries was summoned but they did little good. The United States, eager to rescue its ministers and American personnel, sent a contingent of 2,500 US Marines to the rescue. The Marines landed at Tientsin and fought their way to Peking and defeated the Boxers. Col. Scott, his wife and daughters, and their black nanny from Georgia, where among those whom the Marines saved. Evidently Mrs. Scott was a gregarious Southern woman who spent her time socializing, and in the restricted society that Peking had to offer, this meant endless hours at the officers’ club with the other officers’ wives. And like most of the other women, she was heavy on the bottle. Taking pride in being from the state of Georgia, she favored Mint Juleps. As a result of her socializing, she, of course, neglected her home life, but Mamma Georgia took care of things at home, plus a few other things. That’s about all that Melanowski knew. “If you want to know more, you’ll have to ask her yourself,” he said. I doubted she would ever tell me the complete story, but I thought I would try. It had to be interesting.

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Chapter 11a
Intellectual Competition

Life in Peking wasn’t all studies. I did much wandering around town on my own. Anyone who liked walls would have loved Peking. We lived behind walls. There was the massive, 12-meter thick outer wall that everyone had to pass through when they entered the city. Then there was a second wall which enclosed the Tartar City, and within that a third wall around the Imperial City. And in the very center of all these walls was another wall; it enclosed the grandest site of them all-Forbidden City.

There were still other walls, like the Whispering Wall of China, a true masterpiece of masonry. You could stand with your ear to the wall and talk to a friend a half mile away. Well, almost. A place I liked to visit was the Temple of Heaven, and it too had a wall around it. In the very center of the marble courtyard was a circular stone and when you stood there, you could hear your own echo while no one else could.

At the university, however, things were not going well with my history and literature classes. The idea behind my attending these classes was not so much for me to study Chinese history and literature as it was for me to practice speaking Chinese. When students in these classes learned that I spoke English, they were very anxious to converse with me. It was the only chance they had to practice their English. As a result, they were learning English and I wasn’t practicing my Chinese. There weren’t many foreigners who spoke Chinese, other than the White Russians, and that was only because of necessity. French used to be the international language, and now it was English. I tried to reason why few Americans speak foreign languages, and the only reason I could come up with was Americans and Englishmen simply refuse to be bothered with another tongue. And why should they? Everyone else is determined to speak English. I guess we can just blame it on laziness.

Nevertheless, I was enjoying meeting all the Chinese students and conversing with them. However, I had to know where to draw the line. Some students wanted to argue and debate issues, and with them I had to be careful. They knew more about politics, governments and economic systems, but I was learning. The more time I spent in Peking, the better equipped I would be to meet with Mrs. Djung and her daughters. In the meantime, students wanted to debate with me and arguments erupted, like the time I mentioned that I had explored the hutongs by myself.

To the students, the hutongs were a forbidden area. I didn’t agree. The fact was in less than a month of living within the walls of Peking, I had learned my way around the city along Hattaman Street and gradually I had spread out into the maze of these back alleys called hutongs. “You can’t go into the hutongs alone,” Su Fung said to me when she heard that I had been there. The other students agreed.

“Why, ’cause I’ll get lost?” I asked.

“No, because it’s unsafe. The hutongs are Peking’s underworld. Anything can happen.”

Like all Chinese, Su Fung and most other students had their opinions, but none of them had been to the hutongs. “You are voicing only what you have heard,” I said. “Why don’t you come with me and see for yourself?”

This is where the argument started. “Why do you want to go to the hutongs?” they asked.

Like Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, I replied, “Because it’s there.”

The students could not accept my premise- because it’s there. “That’s the trouble with you Americans, you want to be the first to do something because no one else has done it. What is your purpose?”

“Because we are adventurers. We like to explore.”

“The Chinese were the first explorers. You must have heard of Admiral Cheng Ho?”

I was traveling on a narrow ledge. I couldn’t admit I knew little about their great naval hero. I said I would take up the discussion later, and hurried back to Hostel No. 3 to my history books. I hastily looked up in the index “explorations,” “fleets,” “China Seas.” Under “fleets” there was an interesting note. In 1907, US President Teddy Roosevelt sent his “Great White Fleet” around the world in a display of American might. It seems even back then they wanted to impress the Japanese. And what a fleet that was-sixteen battle ships, and 14,000 crewmembers. Wow! The fleet visited every important port in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, from Manila to Singapore and then on to Ceylon and India. Even in World War II there was not another fleet like it on the high seas.

I then came to “Chinese fleets.” There was his name, sure enough, Admiral Cheng Ho. In 1407, some 500 years before Teddy Roosevelt’s time, he set out from Canton with 62 ships and 3 7 ,000 men. He had aboard his command ship the daughter of the Emperor of China, and her 500 handmaidens, to be presented to the Sultan of Malacca for her hand in marriage. It mentioned that Admiral Cheng Ho was a Three-Jeweled Eunuch. No wonder he had everything below his belt cut off. With 500 young virgins aboard his ship, the Emperor didn’t want to take chances. That was what you call service to the Emperor.

“Yeah, I know all about Cheng Ho,” I remarked to the literature class the next day during break. “But remember, he was on an expedition for trade, backed by a rich and powerful government. I am talking about individual adventurers.” I wanted to make some wise comment about the admiral being castrated but didn’t know how defensive they might be about their cultural heritage. There were in Peking many eunuchs still alive, living within the walls of the Forbidden City. Like the subject of bound feet, this was a sore spot with students.

They would hardly agree with me. They kept pounding away with questions, and it was times like this that I wished I had Stevenson helping me out. They wanted to know why Westerners wanted to scale the peaks of the tallest mountains in the world and dive to the deepest depths of the seas. Why Westerners set off in small boats to sail around the world. It wasn’t that they were ignorant of the facts. They knew about Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world, and they even knew the name of his tiny boat Spray.

But I was making some progress. “Okay,” Su Fung said. “I’ll go to the hutongs with you, won’t we Mae Chu?”

It was bitter cold the Sunday morning we set out. The biting wind swept down from the Gobi and brought clouds of dust which made the day as dark as twilight. But this didn’t matter I explained; even in a dust storm we couldn’t get lost. There was always a wall to follow. The only traffic we had to avoid were bicycles and pedestrians. The girls were amazed. No, they were charmed. This was their town and they knew nothing about the hutongs. What excitement for them to walk through these crooked, narrow streets and meandering alleys that had no order or direction. We discovered a maze of narrow lanes, with timeworn doors, sagging lintels, shutters hanging on bent hinges, with light filtering down in shades of yellow. The shops were tiny, cubbyholes in walls. Food stalls had counters with space for only three or four stools. The food they served was inviting, freshly-made djow-dzes and noodles rolled and cut before our very eyes. The delicious smells were wild and daring, and we couldn’t resist a bowl of noodles here and a sweetmeat there. Where was the horror of the hutongs that everyone talked about? Here was the heart and soul of the city. Indeed, what horror was this, little old ladies, sitting by the wayside warming themselves in the sun that managed to break through the clouds. What harm were they, the old women of Peking, in somber dark clothing, with gold teeth that flashed when they smiled, bouncing their grandchildren and their great grandchildren on their knees. Some of these older women had bound feet. I found myself sitting with them, talking to them. They laughed and threw up their arms when I spoke Chinese to them. “This foreign devil speaks our language,” one lao taitai said and they all picked it up and joined in the laughter. It was the funniest thing she could have said. Su Fung and Mae Chu were astounded at my audacity, and I was happy that I could be showing them another side of Peking.

Before the week was out I went to Hostel No. 1 to find Melanowski but he was out for the evening. When I got back to my place, the gunny sergeant from George Company was there waiting for me. He announced he was arranging a field trip with beer and barbecue to the Great Wall the coming Sunday and had a couple Motor Pool vehicles lined up. Did I want to go? Did I ever. I had wanted to see the Great Wall ever since I heard my Uncle George talking about it back on the farm in Pennsylvania. He and my father were putting up a stone wall, and they argued about how much manpower it would take to construct a wall two thousand miles long. After our trip Sunday, I could write home and tell them all about the Great Wall. “We have plenty of room,” the gunny said, snapping me back to the present. “Bring along some of your student friends.”

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Chapter 10c
Foreign Classmates, Russian Girl

Often times such simple questions provoked deep thought. When I returned to my room and was alone I pondered over them. I began feeling empty inside. Were they, perhaps, not right? Why were we so different in the West? The more I got to know the Chinese, the more I came to realize that our thought patterns are not alike. When using deductive reasoning, we don’t come to the same conclusions, not from a universal to a particular. Was this what Mrs. Djung was talking about when I was more interested in stuffing myself with djow-dzes than listening to their reasoning? Maybe I was being misled by Lin Yu-tang. At the library I began arming myself with both Chinese and Western philosophy books and these I would devour at night. Reading these books did not make life for me any easier, only more complicated. I desperately wanted to know the Chinese mind, but I soon realized to know their minds, I would have to cast away Western thoughts and ideas and think only like they do. The question was how to do that, but I would need more time than I had to find the answer. I found myself, when I was alone in my room and confused, standing in front of the mirror, slanting my eyes with my fingers, wondering why I had to look so different and be so different from everyone else. Was this what it meant by being in the minority.

Not all the students were Chinese. Some came from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and from Tibet and Mongolia; others from Turkmenistan and Assam, and from many places I had never heard before. They came from faraway exotic lands, all speaking their strange tongues and dialects, bringing with them their customs and habits. They too were here to study Mandarin Chinese.

There were a few Europeans, mostly White Russians. They were the easiest to recognize, as they stood out from everyone else. I enjoyed watching them, for I had never seen an ethnic group quite like them before. They were outcasts in China, and yet they gave the appearance of having a social status far above anyone else. In Tsingtao they owned and operated bars and restaurants and had all sorts of clothing shops. There was a bordello that boasted having all White Russian women, six of them. Other than what I saw of them, I knew little about them. I saw them around the university but didn’t think of them one way or another, until in my history class I took notice of one of the fairest women I had seen in all my stay in China. She was White Russian, and there was no mistaking about that. Who was she?

It was about my second week in class that I first saw her. It was probably because she sat in the rear, and when the class ended she was out the door before anyone else. On this particular day, at the end of the class, she had to bring a paper to the teacher in front of the room. She had to pass right by my desk. Her beauty was startling. She had the whitest skin I had ever seen on a human being. There’s the expression, “as white as snow,” but she was whiter than that.

She was elegant. She could make a man gasp. She wore high leather boots, almost up to her knees, and had draped over her shoulders a fine coat with thick fur around the collar and fur on the fringe at the bottom. She had a matching fur muffler, which hung from a cord around her neck. She laid the paper on the desk, said nothing to the teacher, and as she walked past to leave the room she put on a big fur hat. Her movements were graceful and deliberate. That image of her lingered long after she had gone. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The next day I went to class early and took a seat farther towards the back, but she did not show that day. Once or twice after that I got fleeting glimpses of her but could never get close to begin a conversation. I was determined to meet her.

On the morning of my first Saturday in Peking I was preparing to go to George Company at the British Legation to check in when the gunny sergeant who first brought me to Hostel No. 3 appeared in the lobby. I didn’t even know his name, and then remembered be didn’t tell me. “Today’s a holiday and the office is closed,” he said. “Thought I’d come and check you in and save you a trip.” I was excited to see him, and had many questions to ask. He bad a bottle of White Horse and asked if we could go into the restaurant and drink there. He saw me looking at the bottle. “Don’t worry,” he said, “real stuff.” The Scotch was the first booze I had had in weeks. It tasted great and after two drinks my head was floating.

Melanowski and Gilbert were doing fine, he said. Both were still in school, staying in another hostel. We could all meet up next Saturday and he would show us the town. He asked if there was anything I needed, and as he was leaving he said, “Good reports about you. Keep it up.”

The following Saturday he kept his word. When I went to check in, be was waiting. Gilbert was there too. Melanowski had checked in but was gone. The gunny took us to lunch in the mess hall, my first American meal, and that evening we went with a couple of other Marines to Wagonlits Hotel for an evening meal. We then did the town. Bars, dance halls, cabarets-it wasn’t much different than Tsingtao. I could sense that Gilbert was not much into it, and neither was I. We made excuses and bowed out early. The gunny offered to drive us back to our quarters but we insisted we could take pedicabs.

We each called our own pedicab, and as I was climbing into mine, Gilbert said, “Melanowski is in some kind of trouble. He’s missed more classes than he’s gone to. It has something to do with some girl.”

“He’ll get over it,” I said

“Not him,” he replied. “He’s been talking about deserting.”

This was serious. I told Gilbert I would talk to him. We parted company, agreeing to meet next Saturday. On my way home I wondered about the Russian girl. Who was she? I decided to cable Ming-Lee to ask her to come to Peking.

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Chapter 10b
WE DO EVERYTHING BACKWARDS

This was an early version of Shangri-La. I went to the library and checked out James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and spent the whole night in my room, under a cover, reading it. Dawn was breaking when I finished. Back in class we continued with “Peach Blossom Spring.” The villagers were surprised by the fisherman’s arrival but were pleased to converse with him. They tell him that their ancestors fled tyrants centuries before; and they have been hidden from the world of wars and suffering and know nothing of the outside world; nor do they wish to rejoin it. The fisherman is treated by the farmers as an honored guest, and is feasted with all the fruits of their harvest and their finest wine.

When the fisherman describes to them the violent and turbulent world he comes from, they shake their heads and sigh. For several days, he lives among them, spellbound by their good will and guileless ways. He watches in admiration, as the people follow neither kings nor calendars but only the natural rhythm of nature. He senses a happiness and contentment among the villagers that does not exist in the outside.

Excited by his discovery, the fisherman requests permission to leave. The villagers allow him to go, asking that he not spread word of their existence. The fisherman leaves, but despite his promise, he carefully marks his route and reports what he saw to officials. The officials quickly enlist others to return with him but to his amazement his markings have mysteriously disappeared and, try as he might, the fisherman can never again find Peach Blossom Spring. All subsequent attempts to find the valley have ended in failure. If I could convince Stevenson, we could get a Jeep and look for Peach Blossom Spring. I couldn’t wait until I saw him to tell him about my plan.

We all need dreams, and that was mine. In the meantime, aside from formal classes, we had to attend Chinese functions three evenings a week. We had many choices-Chinese films, Sing-Song cabarets, teahouses, or Chinese operas. I went to my first movie with Su Fung, Mae Chu and two of their male friends.

The Chinese films were dreadful and it took real perseverance to sit through them for two or three hours. Actors overacted and overdramatized. When they cried, it wasn’t simple tears they shed; it was wailing and hollering and falling to the floor, and rolling into a ball in a fetal position, and pounding the floor with closed fists. Actors didn’t walk; they floated. They didn’t die simple deaths; they stretched the agony into twenty-minute scenes in which actors and actresses miraculously came to life only to die again, and not once or twice, but perhaps a half dozen times. Staging was totally without ingenuity. Two actors talking and shot close up may have an open vista for a background, with a snow-capped mountain range in the far distance, and in the next shot they are in the studio and the background is a white sheet on a wall. To make things worse, the director didn’t bother to have the creases taken out of the sheet.

The Sing-Song cabaret I didn’t mind, for my friend Roger in Tsingtao had taught me the finer intricacies of the show. Still, they were enjoyable only for the first ten minutes. Like in Tsingtao, the singers were always women accompanied by classical Chinese music, which was mainly one-string violins and gongs. The female vocalists were highly skilled. The audience, always well dressed, sat around tiny tables drinking pots of tea, eating sunflower seeds. After several sessions I was still unable to understand a single word they sang, but I did develop a liking for tea and a dislike for sunflower seeds.

Chinese students at the university were not friendly. They looked upon foreigners with suspicion. Aside from Su Fung and Mae Chu I was able to befriend a few older male students. Chinese women for the most part kept their ground and were unapproachable. I had the feeling they wanted to be friendly, but they appeared too afraid to do so. As a result, they became defensive, and even vindictive. I tried to be nice to them but always felt slighted. Nevertheless, they were lovely, and very feminine. I loved their narrow bodies and slender limbs. Their hands were fine and delicate. Asian women had charm, but the most striking thing about them was their eyes. When a Western man falls in Jove with an Asian woman, I think it’s because of their eyes. I never tired of looking at their eyes. Ming-Lee had lovely eyes. They were as striking as any Oriental eyes that I had seen. It was the first thing I noticed about her.

When my Chinese became more proficient I was able to engage in more conversations with the students, and at these times women could be drawn into the circle. They became more argumentative than the men. I could feel a revolution brewing in all of them. One Chinese woman student who irked me was Lee Ann. She had a chip on her shoulder and was ready to attack me for the most trivial thing. Her English was excellent, for she grew up in London where her parents were in the Chinese foreign service. When the war ended, they returned to Peking. She obviously didn’t want to be in Peking, but now that she was, she defended her position vehemently. She was a cad, a snob, and what we in the Marines call “a spoiled brat.” Nevertheless I liked her. I liked her for her arrogance, and with her I knew where I stood, at the opposite pole. I could depend upon her being straightforward. You may not like them, but these are the most dependable people, no beating around the bush with them.

Lee Ann was a revolutionary at heart, but the country was still run by the Kuomintang, and one had to be cautious. Chinese women, who for centuries groaned under the weight of the male-dominated Confucian doctrine, nurtured promises that generated from the revolutionary movement. I couldn’t escape Lee Ann’s wrath on this subject. She was quick to bring up British colonial relationships with China, especially with Chinese women. The Opium Wars were hashed and rehashed every chance she found to bring them up. It took a great deal of effort for me, burning the midnight oil, reading up on the subject, to prepare myself to meet her head-on the next day. Her pet peeve regarded the employment contracts British males had to sign before they took up their new posts in the Far East. Essentially these contracts stated that British men were not allowed to marry Chinese women, nor were they allowed to have Chinese women living with them. They could not even take Chinese women as guests into their messes. Lee Ann constantly reminded me about the sign at the entrance of the Bund in Shanghai, the promenade where all the foreigners gathered before the war, which read: CHINESE AND DOGS NOT ALLOWED.

Not all the students were as sophisticated as Lee Ann. To most of them I was a novelty. If l had rolled up my sleeves for any reason, they wanted to touch the hair on my arms. Often, when they thought I wasn’t looking, they made funny gestures with their fingers, indicating my long nose, and would laugh about it. With these students, conversations were usually a waste of time. I learned nothing from them.

I never tired of sitting in the teahouses conversing with them. Once they got to know me, they besieged me with endless questions. At first I thought they were being facetious, but I soon realized they were dead serious. One student asked, “In the West, why do you do everything backwards?”

“Backwards! Like what?” I asked.

“You read a book from the wrong end first.”

I couldn’t argue this point. Chinese were writing books long before the Egyptians were using cuneiform. Which then was the right way to begin a book? I had to pass. To have said otherwise I would have made a fool of myself. The front of a book to us is the back of the book to them.

Another student asked: “How can you tell one foreigner from another? You all look alike.”

So all Westerners look alike. That was interesting. How many times has it been said in the West that all Asians look alike? Before I came to China, I couldn’t tell Chinese apart from Japanese. Now I could. It was queer to find myself on the opposite side of the fence. There were other questions I couldn’t answer either, like why do we put titles-Mr., Miss, and Mrs.- before names rather than after them, and why do we make excuses when we really mean no? “My father has a shop,” one girl said, “and every time a foreigner comes in and admires something, and then changes his mind, he says, ‘I’ll be back.’ Why does he have to lie and say he’ll be back when he doesn’t mean it.” I never thought about it before, and I couldn’t answer her.

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Chapter 10a
Student’s Life

Monday morning at last, and my first day of school. I quit school in the 9th grade because I bated school. I hated verbs and adjectives and who cared what the Amendments to the Constitution were. What good would the history of Ancient Greece and Rome do me if l was going to work in an electrical goods shop with my father. If l could add and subtract why did I need algebra and geometry? So I quit school and soon after joined the Marines because I wanted to get away, far, far away. I was far away now, about as far as I could go, but the irony was I was back in school. And what was so strange about it all was that I was looking forward to it.

It was Monday morning, and again I was aware that someone was in my room. As I suspected it was Bon Yee, the room boy. Like the day before, he had placed warm bricks at the foot of my bed. Peeking out from the top of my blankets I watched him go over to the washstand and place a bowl of hot tea on the counter. When he saw that I was awake, he reminded me breakfast was ready. Why protest? This was obviously going to be the routine.

I really didn’t like someone entering my room when I was still asleep, but on the other hand the warm bricks at my feet and the bowl of tea did make a difference. I scrambled out of bed, and with my feet on the bricks and my cover wrapped around me I drank my tea. This too I could see was going to become a habit. Hot tea and not hot coffee in the morning. Outside my window the wind howled, and with the wind came dust from the Gobi Desert. Dust began to collect on the windowsill and some seeped in under the pane. It took courage to dress. I didn’t bother with my wrap-around-Chinese trousers and instead put on my winter greens, and over this went the heavy woolen sweater they had given me. The fur-lined boots were a blessing. It was miserable shaving in frigid water, and it brought back to mind when Marsden had me shave under my bunk at the Strand. Could this be Marsden ‘s revenge?

The dining room was not much of an improvement over my room; it wasn’t any warmer. I didn’t get as many stares as I did the day before and I felt more comfortable. I ate my bowl of congee in silence, slipped into my quilted jacket that smelled like a dead goat, and went out into the street. My spirits were lifted when I found my pedicab driver waiting for me. That solved one worry, finding my way to the university.

The university was a grey-stone building with a long winding pathway that led to the main entrance. It was the toughest walk I ever had to make. My only salvation was hope that I would run into Melanowski and Gilbert, and perhaps some of the other Marines in the program, but the only white faces I encountered were a couple of women, and I assumed they were White Russians.

The corridor inside the building was a mad scramble of confused students. I expected someone to blow a whistle and it would all end, but no whistle blew and no bell rang. Where could Melanowski and Gilbert be? I then saw a face I recognized, Dr. Wren. I managed to push through the crowd to reach him. “Dr. Wren, Dr. Wren,” I called.

Dr. Wren turned when be heard his name called. As I approached, he stood firm, and with a calm but stern voice, he said in quiet Mandarin, “Are you addressing me?”

“Yes, sir, I am,” I replied in Mandarin, surprised that the words came so easily.

“Then, guest of my country,” he said sarcastically, “do not address me in English.” I understood completely what he said, but I did not appreciate it. I was trying to form the words to answer him, and at the same time wondered if l told him to go to hell and walked out could I be court martialed, when to my complete surprise he took me by the arm and led me down the corridor to a classroom. He dropped my arm, pointed to the room and without a further word was gone. I stepped through the door and entered another world. I cursed and asked myself why did I ever volunteer to study Chinese? I didn’t like this one bit. Would my teacher be another miserable old bastard like Dr. Wren?

Relief came when I saw a half dozen other white faces already in their seats, and judging by their haircuts they too were Marines. Before I could say a word of greeting; one man put his fingers up to his lips. “Nishi hao ma?” he said, and it was immediately apparent he and the others were already indoctrinated. We were only allowed to speak to one another in Chinese, as Dr. Wren had warned. The professor stood at the head of the class in the front of the room, and he seemed pleased. He was a young man, with a pleasant smile, and I liked him from the start. This wasn’t going to be too bad, and I hoped I wouldn’t be wrong.

“Qing, ni gaosu tamen, ni shi hao,” the teacher said to me-“Tell them how are you.”

And so on this cold winter morning in Peking my study of Chinese began. There were eight Marines and several other non-Chinese in my class, all eager to learn the language. At the end of the class each Marine disappeared while I was talking to the teacher and it wasn’t until the second day we were able to converse, in Chinese of course. Marines came from Tiensin and Shanghai. There were two more language classes of foreign students, and I surmised that Melanowski and Gilbert were in these.

Aside from spoken Chinese, we had to learn writing as well. By learning characters it also helped with the spoken word. I soon discovered what made Chinese calligraphy particularly interesting was the composition in these characters. Chinese characters are formed from the oldest, originally pictographic, elements. When I recognized the character for water, I could easily see when another stroke was added to that same character, it would then change the meaning but it would still be related in some way to water-ice, beverage, snow and the likes. In my room one night I began copying characters for practice, and the next day proudly showed them to my teacher, and discovered they were all wrong. I learned strokes must be delicately balanced against each other and must be made in a precise manner. It wasn’t as easy as I thought.

Aside from two hours of Chinese language classes each day, I was required to attend other classes-Chinese history and Chinese literature. The idea was that the more I was exposed to spoken Chinese the quicker I would learn the language. Students in these classes were of mixed nationalities, including a very pretty White Russian girl I saw sauntering around the class rooms. But most of the students were Chinese, male and female, and to them their studies were a serious matter. The majority were in their late teens, but a few were in their middle and late 20s. Su Fung was 26. She was rather plain, with thick glasses, and very bright. She was from Shanghai and sat next to me in my literature class. Her friend Mae Chu was 25. We broke the rule about speaking only in Chinese during a break when we were in the courtyard.

Both Su Fung and Mae Chu spoke very good English and I was able to gain a lot from our friendship. Both girls’ parents were teachers. They spoke English but they were very naive, as most Chinese students were. I tried joking with them but that proved to be impossible. In our literature class we were studying Chinese poetry and under discussion was T’ao Yuan-ming, a poet from the 4th century. I had to admit I had never heard of him. “You mean you never heard of him?” Su Fung said. “He has had a tremendous impact on generations of Chinese poetry and fiction. He was one of China’s most beloved poets.”

“No,” I repeated, “I haven’t heard of him.” I don’t know how they expected me to know about a Chinese poet from the 4th century. “Have you heard of Robert Frost?” I asked in my defense. I didn’t know much about Robert Frost, except that he was a famous American poet.

“Oh. Robert Frost, yes-‘The Mending Wall.’ T’ao Yuan-ming was before his time, of course, but his poems on beauty and awareness of nature have been compared to those of Robert Frost.” Without intending to do it, Su Fung called my bluff. I was more careful in my discussion with them the next time. I knew nothing about T’ao Yuan-ming, but that was soon to change. In our next literature class we began reading “Peach Blossom Spring.” I didn’t understand all the words but the sounds and rhythms were melodic, especially when the teacher read the poem in Mandarin Chinese. Of all Chinese dialects, Mandarin is the most beautiful. Maybe the Chinese could never in a thousand years develop an atomic bomb within the scope of their language, but they could write beautiful poetry. Su Fung sat next to me in class and translated some of the lines, and when I went back to my room at night I read “Peach Blossom Spring” from a translation I borrowed from the library. The story was beautiful and it captured my imagination. I kept imagining Peach Blossom Valley where the action took place, and even pictured myself coming back one day and searching for a lost valley. In the poem, T’ao describes how a fisherman sailing along an uncharted stream comes upon a radiantly beautiful peach orchard where, “Falling petals fluttered in colored profusion.” Entranced by the orchard’s loveliness, the fisherman explored further and found a narrow passage in a mountain cliff. He entered the passage and suddenly emerged into a land of beauty and mystery, an idyllic community where no one grows old.

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