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Chapter 9d
Life in Peking

Hostel No. 3 was located in a quiet residential section of the city. It was a grand old stone building with high ceiling hallways and long corridors. It was probably fashionable around the tum of the century. The receptionists at the front desk were waiting and handed me my key=-Room 249. The room boy, a young lad about fifteen named Bon Yee, took the key, whisked my seabag from me and bid me follow him. There was no elevator and we walked up carpeted steps to the second floor. Yee opened the door, stepped aside and let me enter. It was the most depressing sight I had ever looked upon. To one side was a single bed with a lumpy quilted covering of different shaped patches sewed one over top the other, and across the room against the wall was a washstand with a porcelain basin and pitcher with rabbit-ear handles next to it. There was no water faucet and no plumbing, only a bucket under the washstand for collecting water. There was but one light, a naked bulb suspended from the ceiling. The light switch was a dangling cord that you had to pull to turn the light on or off. The window was the worst thing about the room. Although it was large with glass panes, it was so yellow and stained with age that very little light entered the room, and what did made the room appear even more dreary. I don’t think the window opened, and if it did, rags stuffed around the window would fall out. The rag across the sill was brown with dust. The whole room in fact was dust-covered.

Yee placed my seabag on the floor, and then explained that the communal WC was down the hall. He smiled proudly as he pulled the cord to show that the light worked and pointed to a towel hanging by the washstand. I could see that he was pleased to show me the room, and rather than disappoint him I nodded my approval. He beamed even more. By his standards, of course, I was getting five-star accommodation. But no sooner had he left than I realized something else about the room. It was unheated. I took my coat off and had to put it on again after only a few minutes.

On my table next to the bed, I placed my three Lin Yu-tang books, the Dowager Empress, the old Spoken Chinese text from Guam and my most recent acquisition, a history of the city, titled Peking. I laid down on the bed, my mind wandering, and studied the room, my new home for the months to come I was following a crack across the ceiling when there came a knock at the door. It was Yee again. He was carting a bundle of clothes. He laid them piece by piece on the bed: heavy-duty wool sweaters, two of them; two pair of Chinese trousers, the wrap around kind that require a belt or sash to hold them up; a quilted parka with enormous pockets; a muffler as long as I was tall with a golden dragon spitting out fire embroidered along one edge; and a pair of soft-leather boots with fur lining.

I was surprised that they fit, although a bit snug. The most prized possession was a fore-and-aft lambskin hat. I would be well clothed, thanks to the Chinese Nationalist Government, and thanks to the US Government for giving lend-lease to Chiang K’ai-shek so that he had the money to spend. I didn’t really know which government to thank, so I thanked Yee and decided to let him sort it out. As he was leaving he said dinner was at 20:00.

In my resplendent new wardrobe I marched into the dining room, and immediately wanted to do an about face and leave. There was not another white face in the room. The steward saw me, came running, and as he escorted me to my table, everyone stopped eating and heads turned to see who this foreigner, this foreign devil, might be. I was on parade. I felt ridiculous, even stupid, in my dress and wished I had stayed in uniform. It was the most uncomfortable feeling I had ever had, and my thoughts went to poor Melanowski. He had to be in torture, about the same time, or else he was very hungry.

Servants in much worn white jackets loafed around with napkins over their arms. There were more servants than diners. Two rows of four-bladed fans hung from the ceiling in long shafts, but none were turning. Everything about the place was shabby, the tablecloths and napkins, the chipped plates and the cutlery with no two pieces the same, and yet, there was a pride that the Chinese displayed that couldn’t be denied. It was almost humorous, and could have been a comedy had they not been so serious. Everything they did was done in earnest seriousness. They performed well, as if they were in the Court of the Queen of England and the dinner guests were all dukes and duchesses. The food was western, or an attempt to be western. It was awful.

I finished my dinner and lingered over a cigarette, and then another one. I dreaded returning to my room, to the cold and the loneliness, and considered taking a walk but then I remembered the weather. I returned to my room, climbed into bed, and tried to read, but with the light bulb directly overhead shining down in my eyes, it was impossible. My first duty the next day would be to buy an extension. I yanked on the cord and the light went out. I pulled the cover over my head, and with the fur parka over the top of the bed, and with my trousers, shirt and socks on, I still froze. I thought I would never get used to the cold.

The light filtered through the window the next morning and I awoke slowly, wondering if this was real or was I dreaming. I even imagined someone was in the room, but when I heard the shuffling I knew it was not imagination. I turned to find Yee standing by the washstand. He was placing a bowl with a lid on top on the table. I hadn’t noticed but he had already placed hot bricks at the foot of the bed. When he saw me stir, he said breakfast was being served in the dining room.

With my fur parka draped over my shoulders, I put my feet on the warm bricks and the cold didn’t seem so bad. I went to the wash stand assuming the bowl with hot water was for shaving, but when I removed the top, I saw tea leaves floating on the top. I returned to the bed, sat down and while drinking my tea, I read some from Peking. The more I read about Genghis Khan, the more I was fascinated with this man, a Tartar invader from Mongolia. He and his heirs ruled China for several hundred years. I was anxious to read how they were expelled from China but if l didn’t hurry breakfast would be over. It wouldn’t have mattered much had I missed it. No fruit juice; no bacon and eggs; no toast and butter. Not even coffee, only tea. Instead we had congee, a thick rice soup with a few vegetables floating on top, and more tea. Life was taking on many changes for me, and I found it all rather amusing.

I had the day all to myself. I didn’t feel like reading, but what would I do? In the Marines we were always surrounded with buddies and were never alone. This was different. If I knew where Melanowski and Gilbert were, I could meet up with them. But, of course, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t mind even putting up with Melanowski’s grumbling. I tried to imagine what Stevenson would be doing in Tsingtao. He was one guy who wouldn’t be bored. He was probably taking Judy to a movie on the base. Maybe Roger was taking Judy to the base to meet Stevenson. What would we do without Roger? No more thinking about Tsingtao; I decided to go for a walk.

I bundled up in my parka and put on my leather fur-lined boots and made my way to Tiananmen Square by following the map in my Peking book. The wind came sharp, and even with my parka pulled up tightly around my neck the cold still got through.

A few snow flurries filled the air, and when I looked out over the square there was not a soul to be seen. How remarkable, I thought. Here I was standing in front of one of the world’s best-known landmarks and I had it all to myself, completely. No Genghis and a hundred thousand Tartar horsemen raping and pillaging, no US Marines in the Boxer Rebellion defending the foreign legations, no Dowager Empress leaving the Forbidden City for her last time, no Japanese conquerors riding white stallions as I had seen in LIFE, no more Generalissimo Chiang K’ai-shek and his parade of warlords and their troops showing their strength to the Eighth Route Regulars. The only echo now was my leather boots on the cobblestones of empty Tiananmen Square. How alone could I possibly be?

I missed lunch, not that I wasn’t hungry, but I didn’t want to go to a restaurant alone and have everyone stare at me. I didn’t want to try to hold a conversation in my limited Chinese either. I went back to my room, and to keep warm I climbed into bed. I began reading Peking. Now and then I looked up at my Chinese clothing hanging on books behind the door. Little by little it began to sink in. I was now a bonafide student in Peking. And for the first time in my life I was alone; I mean really alone. But there was always Monday morning, my first class, and I’d be meeting students. I didn’t sleep much that night, and it wasn’t only because of the cold.

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Chapter 9c
Learning Chinese in Peking

We waited until the car emptied, then slung our seabags over our shoulders and stepped out on to the platform. Upon seeing us emerge, a gang of coolies wanting to help us materialized out of nowhere, and then came the beggars and street urchins. Coming through the crowd was a Marine gunny sergeant, waving a brown envelope above his shoulder, and shouting angrily for the crowd to get out of his way. When they saw him, they cleared a path. He stopped short, looked at me, and said, “Marine, you look like shit.”

The gunny was from 5th Marine Headquarters quartered in the old British Legation. He was under orders to pick us up and take us to the University of Peking where we had to register. It was Saturday afternoon when we arrived, and the gunny explained that the headquarters office was closed. The university was providing quarters and all we needed to do was check in at headquarters every Saturday morning. “You have until next Saturday,” he said. “I’ll log you in.” We thanked him and I apologized for my appearance, blaming it on the conductor for locking me out. He softened his tone a bit, even smiled, and was not as gruff as he was at first. He said we could stop at a bathhouse on our way to the university and I could clean up. He had a 4×4 and a driver waiting for us outside the station.

We drove to a bathhouse, similar to the one Stevenson and I visited in Tsingtao, and I felt better after a good scrub down. I came out clean shaven and smelling of fufu perfume, with my uniform cleaned and pressed, and my shoes shined. The whole operation took less than an hour. I wished I had Stevenson’s barracks hat to make it complete but he wouldn’t loan it to me. The others were waiting and we took off in the 4×4 through the streets of Peking.

What excitement to be driving for the first time through this great Oriental city, one of the greatest capital cities of the world. Suddenly the gunny took on another role. He began pointing out all the sights, telling us to look here one moment, and over there the next. He was quite knowledgeable about the history of Peking and took delight in telling us about the city. “The wall around the city, over there to our left, it’s 4,000 years old,” he said as we drove along the western section of the city. Indeed, it was a magnificent wall. “It surrounds the whole city, and within the walls are some four and a half million people.” He had the driver stop so we could see the wall better. “There are four main gates,” he continued, “but they couldn’t keep out Genghis Khan. It was called Chungtu in the 12th century when he arrived with 100,000 mounted horsemen and stormed the place. It was his grandson, Kublai Khan, who rebuilt her and changed the name to Cambulac-The Great Capital.”

The gunny, self-made historian turned guide, insisted we drive through Tiananmen Square. “Here you will feel the might of China,” he said, and he was right. We could almost feel the strength of China by looking out over this vast empty square which seemed to radiate power. He had the driver take us to the southern end of the square and here we stopped. “Look at that, look, look,” he shouted, pointing to three marble bridges that crossed a narrow moat. On the other side was a high-walled building with huge gates. Adorning the wall was a grand poster of Generalissimo Chiang K’ai-shek. “This is the Forbidden City,” the gunny shouted, standing up in the front seat of the Jeep and spreading wide both his arms as if embracing the whole of Peking. His excitement was infectious, and like laughter in a schoolroom, it spread to us. We felt the full glory and the excitement of being in Peking. Even Melanowski agreed, “It is nice.”

We made one more stop, The Temple of Heaven, and then the gunny delivered us to the University of Peking. He handed me a brown envelope with our orders and wished us good luck. We had only known him for a few hours and yet we felt we were losing a good friend. “I’ll look you guys up,” he said, and we knew he felt the same. The Marine Corps can do that to you. We were sad to say goodbye, and ten minutes later we regretted leaving the gunny and his world behind. The head counselor of the university was waiting for us. He wasn’t anything like the gunny.

Dr. Siang Wren, head counselor, could have been Dracula reincarnated. He had a pockmarked face and was well past middle age, but he carried himself erect as a board standing upright. He wore a dark robe that fitted high around his neck and extended down to his shoes. You got the feeling that if he tried to walk he would trip. He had pince-nez glasses perched on the very end of his nose. He kept his hands tucked into his wide sleeves and when he greeted us, he bowed slightly, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on us all the time. He did not offer to shake hands, and we found ourselves bowing too. He did it naturally; we did it awkwardly like the three stooges did in the movies. We knew at once Dr. Wren was a man who demanded respect.

“I will address you gentlemen in your own language,” he said quietly in an English Oxford accent. “But this will be the last time we speak in English.”

“But we don’t speak Chinese,” Melanowski interrupted.

Dr. Wren didn’t like to be interrupted. “That is why you are here,” he snapped. You could suddenly see flames in his eyes, enough to burn a hole in Melanowski. But Melanowski was not about to be intimidated by an emaciated, arrogant Chinese professor.

“I am here because they sent me here, sir” he fired back, putting much emphasis on sir.

Dr. Wren would not concede. “Yes, you are here to study Chinese,” he said, “and we shall teach you Chinese.” He removed his right hand from his sleeve and raising a finger to his lips, he continued. “You are a guest of the Chinese National Government. You will be given Chinese clothes to wear, a slate to write upon and books for your studies.” He took the brown manila envelope that I had given him and opened it. He read the contents very carefully. This was worse than standing at attention in front of Col. Roston while being reprimanded for coming in late from liberty. He then scrutinized the three of us, starting at the tops of our heads, then down to our shoes and back to our faces. He had an uncanny ability of making us feel the size of toy puppets, and all he had to do was pull the strings to make us act as he wanted.

I waited but he didn’t pull the strings. “You will address me, and all your professors and all your teachers, as ‘syan-sheng.’ Syan-sheng means sir. You will be given Chinese names.” He studied the records again. “Why do you want to study Chinese?” he asked looking at me.

I was confused with the question and didn’t know quite how to answer. I was tempted to answer him in Chinese but I thought it best not to. l didn’t care to leave myself wide open for harsh criticism that be most likely would reign upon me. “Well,” I said stumbling for words, “I guess, I mean, I mean I like China. I want to know how to speak to the people.”

“You like China?” he questioned.

“Yes, I like China.”

“Your last name we can translate into Hsi. You are Hsi Syan-sheng. You understand?” I nodded. Dr. Wren continued: “You say you like China. How much do you like China?”

“Very much,” I replied. .

“You say very much. The verb ‘to like’ in Chinese is ‘huan.’ To like very much is ‘huan !oh.’ Your Chinese name is Hsi Ruan Loh. Repeat it.”

“Hsi Ruan Loh,” I repeated, pronouncing slowly each word.

It was an easy name to pronounce and I rather liked it.

“Very well. Again, what is your name?” Dr. Wren asked. “Hsi Ruan Loh,” I said proudly.

“No,” the professor snapped. “When asked your name you will reply, ‘Wada bee sheng shir Hsi Huan Loh.’ ‘My humble name is Shi Huan Loh.’ When you ask an elder his name, you must ask for his ‘gwei sheng,’ his honorable name. Now you understand.” That was one of the first things that Mrs. Murray taught me, but it was best I didn’t tell him that I knew. I didn’t want him to end up losing face.

I could see the anguish on Melanowski ‘s face. I knew at once this was not what he had in mind when he agreed to study the language. It was not the easy duty he thought it would be. To him, Dr. Wren was another Col. Roston, and he didn’t like Col. Roston. But I was finding the situation quite the opposite. It was like a game, and I liked games when they were a competition. The good doctor was simply playing a game. I felt this until he made his next announcement and then I wondered if l too might be wrong. There was no winning this game. Dr. Wren announced that each of us would be given separate quarters, and that meant not only separate rooms but we would be located in separate buildings as well. He gave each of us a piece of paper with a name and an address. Mine read Hostel No. 3, 253 Da Shao Lao Road.

I didn’t have a chance to talk things over with the other two, or even to say goodbye to them. Dr. Wren made certain of that. We were suddenly being ushered out of his office by his assistants. He had made arrangements for pedicabs to take each of us to our quarters. Our last instructions from Dr. Wren were that classes start at 0700 sharp on Monday morning. Before I knew what had happened, my two friends, my Marine Corps buddies, were gone and I was alone.

My pedicab driver placed my seabag on the seat next to me and I settled back for a new experience-riding a pedicab in Peking. Unlike two-wheeled rickshaws that are pulled by coolies who position themselves between two shafts, pedicabs are three-wheel bicycles that are peddled by drivers who sit in front. Passengers sit behind them in the rear. Pedicabs seem more humane than rickshaws but it’s still grueling work. I remember Roger telling me how the rickshaw business began. “Not Chinese like everyone think,” he said. According to him, the rickshaw was invented in Japan in the 1860s; the American Baptist missionaries called it jinrikisha, which means ‘man-powered cart.’ Its popularity spread from Japan to China and to most countries of Asia. For almost fifty years the style of the rickshaw was little altered. Then came the two-wheeled bicycle and a revolution in the transportation business in the Far East. The bicycle principle was added to the rickshaw, and every city in the Orient, it seemed, made its own version of the tricycle-rickshaw, now called the ‘pedicab.’ Roger disliked the use of rickshaws. He often said the rickshaw was an invention of the imperialists to enslave the Chinese. Shanghai had more rickshaws than any other city in China, some 50,000. “Shanghai much much foreigner people, now you savvy why,” he said. I disagreed with Roger. Nevertheless, I rather liked rickshaws, but then I am not Chinese. Pedicabs were not popular in Tsingtao because of the hills.

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Chapter 9b
Peking

The worst duty in China, and certainly the most dangerous, was train guard duty. The coal shipments guarded by the 1st Marine Division were vital to the Chinese people. Gen. Wedemeyer pointed out that it was a military necessity that at least 100,000 tons of coal reach Shanghai every month, and his orders to IIIAC were to ensure that this coal reached its destination. Without coal shipments Shanghai would collapse. The average Marine standing his tum on guard, huddling against the biting winter wind that blew down from the Gobi Desert, was not aware of this, but his superiors were, and they lived under the constant pressure of that knowledge.

The communists were regularly sabotaging rail lines and firing on Marine-guarded trains. At Chinwangtao, Marines clashed regularly with the communists. What was so crazy about it all was that many of these communist partisans had risked their lives time and again to rescue American flyers from the Japanese. On Guam I had met crews of B-29’s who had bailed out on their return from bombing Japan and had been smuggled to safety by villagers who were now held to be enemies. In this very same area communists now sniped at Marine trains, and Marines shelled villages in retaliation. While both sides avoided open warfare, the area of intermittent conflict was spreading as IIIAC expanded its bold on key cities and vital routes of communication.

The night before when we toured the town, I met a couple of off-duty train guards in the Cherry Club. They weren’t too happy guarding trains and envied us in Tsingtao where it was peaceful and quiet. Without thought, I mentioned we were in China to repatriate the Japanese and nothing more. “Don’t give me that bullshit,” one Marine yelled and for a minute I thought he might get up and take a swing at me. “Marines are in North China to support Chiang’s regime. They said we were coming to evacuate the Japanese from China, and so we did. They shipped all those little yellow bastards back in a couple of months.”

The second Marine butted in. “Do we go home?” he asked. “Hell, no! No sooner do the Japs began to leave, when we hear the Russians are coming.”

“Yea, the Russians,” the first Marine sounded out. “We have to stick around to counter the Russian troops in Manchuria or they’d take over China. Then they announced that we are remaining indefinitely to guard supply lines from coal mines to the coast. That, too, is bullshit. Everybody knows this ain’t so. We are here to protect and defend Chiang K’ai-shek. The Kuomintang knows this! Chiang K’ai-shek knows this! Who doesn’t know it? The American people don’t!”

After the next round of beers, they both mellowed out and agreed Tientsin was good duty. “Hell, it’s better than selling cars in Pittsburgh,” the first Marine said.

“Or working in the friggn’ steel mills,” the other Marine added. They were both from the Pittsburgh area.

On the way to our train compartment the next morning, I watched two Marine guards take their positions on top of a boxcar. The doors were barred and locked. Their positions on top of the cars didn’t look very comfortable. I asked one Marine where he was from, the first thing a Marine asks when he meets another Marine. He said he was from Detroit. “I thought Detroit was cold,” he said, “but shit, this is colder than a witch’s tit, coldest I’ve ever been in all my gawd damn life. We sleep in our clothes and still can’t keep warm.” He told how one time he drank putrid water to make himself sick so he could go to sickbay where it was warm, and where he could get some decent food. Marine guards on the run to Peking had their own compartment with bunks and a wood stove to keep warm. At midpoint between Tientsin and Peking the northbound train made rendezvous with the southbound train and here guards changed trains and returned to their home’ base. They had a sign hanging on the outside of their compartment: THE GOBI EXPRESS.

Our conductor, a nervous and excitable little old man in a thread-bare uniform, led us through throngs of pushing and shouting people to our compartment. When we saw the people attempting to funnel up the steps and through the doorway, we never thought we would make it. This obviously was not the time to be polite and courteous. We shouldered our seabags and hit the line like Notre Dame linebackers do when charging Army at their championship football games. Our conductor was the referee. Somehow he got ahead through the crowd and we could see his hand waving frantically above the heads of the people, summoning us to follow. Unlike most trains, this one had a long hallway that ran the length of one side of the compartment. Every inch of hallway was jam-packed with passengers trying to find their compartments. They carried loads of luggage; their friends helping them carried loads of luggage; their coolies following behind them carried loads of luggage. Once they were inside their compartments, others outside on the platform passed to them more loads of luggage through the windows. Where all the luggage was going to be stored was a mystery.

Our four-berth compartment was jammed with passengers, all waving tickets at our conductor. Again this was time for action. We had to block and run scrimmage, and push everyone out the door. We tipped our conductor with a dollar note and locked ourselves in. We threw our seabags on the top bunk and sat down on the lower bunk.

The coal-burning train to Peking could hardly be called an express. In better times it could make the nm in less than a day, but not now. It stopped for one reason or another every few miles. Some of the stops lasted an hour or more. At one unexpected stop we saw two Marine guards run past our window with their weapons drawn. A half-hour later we saw them returning and threw open our window and asked what the delay was all about. “One of our tanks guarding the line ahead ran over a Chinese man on a donkey cart,” one Marine said.

“What happened? we asked.

“He killed them both,” he answered and went on his way. We learned later the tank commander had to pay a fine of $10 for the man and $20 for the donkey.

The train to Peking was one of those ancient conveyances that must have served the US Marines before us during the Boxer Rebellion. The coal-burning engine huffed and puffed and sent out belches of steam and messy black soot. It left Tientsin and reached out for the outer edges of the great Gobi Desert, possibly along the same route Genghis Khan had taken with his hundred thousand mounted horsemen when he conquered Peking.

We watched the great empty landscape of China, arid and dust-swept pass in slow motion beyond our window. The earth was brown, all brown without color. Farmlands were flat with the houses low to the ground and surrounded by mud walls. Burial mounds of hard earth dominated much of the landscape. The mounds seemed to be endless. The sun, only a mellow disc in the sky, lay low on the horizon, without giving warmth, and played hide-and-seek behind the mounds. The motion of the train was hypnotic. The click-idy-clack, click-idy-clack was mesmerizing. It was easy to fall into a reverie. I found myself thinking less about working with my father in his electrical shop and more of Ming-Lee and what we would do when she joined me in Peking. Maybe she would even stay with me and not go back to Tsingtao. It was a very nice thought to dwell upon.

When I tired of looking out the window, I turned to reading Lin Yu-tang’s The Importance of Understanding. I read for a while, drifted into thought, and then returned to reading. The book had more meaning for me while rumbling across a barren Chinese countryside than it would have had I been reading it back home. I thought about the author giving up China to live in America. Those Chinese I talked to believed he was a traitor. I was giving up America to live in China. This was the lot of all China Marines. Were we giving up more than we were gaining? Back home did they consider us traitors?

We didn’t move, we crawled across the wasteland, and by the next morning, after endless stops, I grew weary of reading. I left the compartment to walk along the hallway to exercise my limbs. I opened the door that lead to the next car and came upon an open area between the cars. A steel ladder led to the roof. I climbed the ladder and found I could sit on the roof with comfort, with my legs dangling over the side. I had a splendid unobstructed view. Since we were moving slowly, there was not a great deal of wind.

For the next few hours I sat there, studying the unattainable horizon. The tracks before us unrolled like a black ribbon upon an endless waste, and behind us we left a finger of smoke that lingered motionless in the lacquered sky. I became dust-covered-my eyelashes, my hair, my clothing. Then I saw it.

First I saw the dust, a sky of dust, and then the outer walls. It was Peking. The great city loomed up like a picture in a child’s storybook. Peking, the mighty and ancient capital of Cathay. What a magnificent sight.

It seemed like forever for us to close the distance; there was something so strange about it all. There appeared to be nothing else except a city surrounded by a wall. There was no hint of what might be beyond that wall. It was, if anything, a bit frightening.

The track led into an arched opening, with barely enough room for the train to slip through, and certainly not enough for me sitting on top of the car. I leaped down on the platform between the cars, but to my horror the conductor had locked the door. I couldn’t get back in! I climbed back up the ladder and lay flat on the roof, and at that instant we entered the tunnel. I was suddenly in a black void, enveloped in a cloud of acrid smoke, choking and gasping for air. We emerged from the tunnel with me coughing and covered with black soot.

But in another fleeting moment I forgot my discomfort. It was like an explosion. A new and fascinating world opened up before me, strange and unbelievable. Everything caught my attention. I wanted to stop the train then and there, as though once we passed it might disappear and be gone forever.

As we edged deeper into the city, I could hear the sounds, even above the roar of the train, and I could even catch the smells. Rickshaw and pedicab drivers shouted warnings as they padded along, vendors clicked wooden blocks to gain attention, wood-burning trucks tooted their horns and there was the general clamor of an excited city.

Still coughing and covered with soot, I made my way down the ladder to find the door open. But getting back to the compartment was a chore. The narrow hallway was again crammed with people, this time attempting to make a quick exit when the train reached the station. I pushed my way through the crowd, like the quarterback at Notre Dame, and eventually got back to the compartment where I found Melanowski and Gilbert impatiently waiting. They were angry and started shouting at me, but their anger quickly passed when they got a better look at me. They broke into laughter. “Look at you!” Melanowski shrieked flopping back into his seat.

“What in the hell happened to you?” Gilbert asked. “You look like a West Virginia coal miner.” I explained what had happened, cursing the conductor who locked the door, but not really minding, and then looked down the front of my uniform. I was a mess, covered with black soot and grime. I looked in the mirror above the wash basin. The wind had tangled my hair and it stuck out in every direction. My eyes still stung from the smoke, and they watered with tears, and as the tears ran down my cheeks, they streaked my face. I was in no condition to report to Marine headquarters looking the way I did. I would have to stop somewhere and clean up first.

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Chapter 9a
Last Train to Peking

I didn’t have to wait until the next morning to have Col. Roston break the news to me. Stevenson told me without the need to wait. I figured it had to do with my meddling in the affairs of all the guys and their Chinese dolls. Maybe the colonel knew about Ming-Lee and me, that I planned to move in with her. Could I be on the next boat home? I wasn’t afraid to face the truth, that I was keen on a Chinese girl, but what about her, Ming-Lee? Would she understand that this wasn’t my doing? That’s the first thing I said to Stevenson: “What about Ming-Lee?”

“She can join you,” he said.

“How in the hell can she join me? How do I get her to America? You know the rules.” “Who said America?”

“You did.”

“I didn’t say anything about America. You didn’t give me a chance to say anything.”

“Okay, let’s start from the beginning. I am going someplace.

So where am I going?” “You’re going to Peking.” “Peking!”

“Yea, Peking. The colonel is sending you and two others from Fox Company to Chinese language school in Peking. A special six-month course at University of Peking, sponsored by the Nationalist Government. They are taking three guys from every outfit, and you have been selected. You’ll be detached from Fox Company and put on TDY.”

Col. Roston confirmed the appointment the next morning. “You will wear Chinese clothes, and you will have your own rice bowl,” he said with a smirk while shaking my hand. He returned to his seat behind the desk, with the American flag to one side and the Chinese nationalist flag on the other, and became serious again. He mentioned the directive from Fleet Marines. “Aside from you,” he said, “Cpl. Gilbert from Easy Company has been chosen. Maybe you can recommend someone from Fox Company.” He saw me glancing around. “Not Whittington. He’s got so many points he should have gone home a long time ago. And not Stevenson. I can see the two of you running around Peking. Besides, we need him here. Pick somebody else, and be prepared to leave before the week is up. You’ll fly to Tientsin and take the train from there to Peking.” He then dismissed me. He may have been smiling but I didn’t wait long enough to make certain. You never knew about your COs. You thought they didn’t care but they did. Sometimes.

Not one single Marine, not a one, wanted to go to Peking, especially to go to school to study Chinese. Part of their reasoning was due to a directive that came down from Fleet Marine Headquarters. It was disturbing news. On April 1^st, 1946, the 6th Marine Division was officially disbanded. The 29th Mariners became Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Brigade. It didn’t mean much to the new recruit replacements who were joining the 29th in droves, but for the old timers who fought with the regiment since Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester and survived Okinawa, the news didn’t come with any great joy. Even more disheartening was the order that we had 30 days to remove 6th Division patches from our uniforms and replace them with 4th Division patches. That was the worst possible thing they could have done to us. Headquarters could have told us we were being absorbed by the US Army and it would have had Jess effect than telling us we had to give up our 6th Division patches.

No one wanted to go to Peking knowing that when they returned there would no longer be the 29th Marines. I felt much the same, but I had my orders, and I was getting desperate. I had to go, and I had to take two men with me. Cpl. Gilbert from Easy Company had already been chosen, and now another Marine from Fox Company had to volunteer. I knew it was hopeless to recruit Hecklinger. With his woman problem, he was only a step away from going over the hill as it was. Col. Roston wouldn’t let Stevenson go, as he was needed to run the office, and he knew we’d get into trouble if we went together. Ruker was tied up in the laundry room and wouldn’t want to jeopardize his position. Kyle couldn’t stay awake long enough to make up his mind. Terry thought I was crazy even to mention it to him. “Go back to school!” he stammered. “I couldn’t get through the sixth grade.” That left Smitty, Chandler and Melanowski. I thought both Smitty and Chandler would be good mates for six months, but Melanowksi was out of the question. He had never even opened a book let alone read one. But Smitty and Chandler flatly refused. l told them they didn’t have a choice. Colonel’s orders. One of them had to volunteer.

“I hate the gooks so why do I want to study their stupid language,” Smitty said and rolled up his sleeve. He gently kissed the Hawaiian girl tattooed on his forearm, as be always did when he was frustrated or under pressure. Chandler made some lame excuse about needing reading glasses. When I said he could have his eyes checked in two days, he complained about his arthritis. When I questioned him further, he didn’t even know what arthritis was. “It just sounds good,” he said. I didn’t even bother to ask Melanowski.

“I’ll tell you what,” Chandler finally said. “Since one of the three of us has to go, I say we draw cards.” They agreed and they drew cards. Melanowski drew the top card. He would be going with Gilbert and me to Peking.

“Well, old gold bricker, we’ll be waiting here for you when you get back,” Stevenson said when I went to his office to say good-bye. “Hell, six months is no time,” he added and then handed me a package that just arrived in the mail. It was from my sister. She had mailed me three Lin Yu-tang books: The Importance of Learning, The Importance of Understanding and From Pagan to Christian. I was delighted.

“When I finish reading these volumes,” I said, “I will be able to stand up to Rose Djung.”

“When you finish reading them,” he replied, “you won’t want to.”

Sammy checked out a 4×4 and drove Gilbert, Melanowski and me, along with Ming-Lee and Little Lew, to the airport. I felt terrible about leaving. Things were going well for me in Tsingtao. Ming-Lee was terribly sad but she cheered up when I made her promise she would come visit me in Peking. Little Lew was all tears. “I’m not leaving forever,” I explained to him. “I’ll bring you back a present. What would you like?”

“Only you,” he cried and started to tum away. I reached out and grabbed him and pulled him close to me. Try as I did, I couldn’t hold back my own tears.

“Lew, listen to me. Everything will be alright,” I said. “The guys will take care of you.” He wouldn’t stop crying and my heart went out to him. I thought of him in that sewer, and now only a couple of months later he was a changed boy with rosy cheeks and hope at last. When Ming-Lee saw the tears in both our eyes, she too began to weep.

“You better get out of here,” Sammy said, “or you’ll see me bawling too.” I left them standing at the edge of the terminal building, not daring to look back.

My terrible anguish about leaving my friends passed when I climbed aboard the DC-6 and saw for the first time the inside of an aircraft. I had not flown before and I looked forward to this moment. Back in 1946not many people had the experience of flying. When one wanted to travel across America they took a train. When they traveled across oceans, they went by steamer: three days across the US by train; five days from New York to London by boat; three weeks from San Francisco to Manila and Hong Kong by slow boat. That song “A Slow Boat to China or Maybe Siam” was only too fitting. For us, two hours from Tsingtao to Tientsin by a DC-3 Gooney Bird wasn’t bad either.

The pilot, a young 1st lieutenant flyboy with a MAG-3 patch on his flight jacket, instructed us to make sure our seat belts were secured and then reminded us that lifejackets were under our seats. He added we would fly at 5,000 feet and would follow the Yellow Sea to avoid flying at a higher altitude to clear the Loh Shan Mountains. He didn’t say it, but I imagined he didn’t want a repeat of the three spy planes that went down in bad weather on the north shore of the peninsula. I could envision Fox Company coming to look for us.

We strapped ourselves into bucket seats with our backs to the bulkhead. Gilbert was all smiles while Melanowski had the look of uncertainty in his eyes. The co-pilot closed the door, swung a bar down into place and locked it. He yanked twice to make certain the door was secure. He paid no attention to Melanowski who sarcastically asked if the captain thought we might try jumping out. Ignoring him the co-pilot walked to the front of the aircraft, disappeared behind another door, and the three of us were alone. The propellers began to rotate, painfully, the port side first, then the starboard, coughing and spewing out smoke as they labored to come to life. Once they began turning in unison, the pilot revved them up. The old bird began to vibrate and shake, and the noise grew so loud I could no longer hear Melanowksi complaining. We began rolling down the runway, turned and stopped. The plane jolted as the pilot applied the brakes and held them. I didn’t think the noise could grow any louder, but it did as the pilot revved to full throttle. He then released the brakes, and we went rolling down the mesh-laid landing field. It seemed we would never lift off the ground. Breaking all rules, I unfastened my seat belt and stood up to look out the tiny oval window above our heads. Gilbert followed suit. We watched until the clouds obliterated our view and the ground below disappeared. Even the wing and starboard engine, only yards away, melted into the white void, and the air in the cabin turned frightfully cold. We reached for blankets stuffed behind our seats, and spent the next two hours shivering and wondering if we would ever reach our destination. There was one advantage with the unending loud noise-we couldn’t hear Melanowski beating his gums.

I had never been to St. Louis, but I had seen enough movies to know I’d like the place. When I saw Tientsin, I thought I had arrived in St. Louis. It was a displaced modem Western city transplanted to the Orient. High rises, glass-fronted shops, wide avenues, restaurants and at night bright lights, not at all what one might expect for China. I had seen Broadway and 42nd Street when I got out of boot camp while on my way home on furlough, and the main drag though Tientsin was much like Broadway and 42nd Street. No wonder China Marines bragged about Tientsin duty. That night a couple of Marines from the garrison showed the three of us around town. We found it so enjoyable I hoped we could spend a few days more, but we had a rendezvous at 0600 at the rail station the following morning.

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Chapter 8c
Losing Face or Honor?

The word face is misleading, and I soon learned very few of us Westerners fully comprehend its meaning. When the Chinese speak of face, it’s not “faces” they mean. They are concerned with a psychological and not a physiological entity. We can all admire a pretty Oriental face, with those beautiful almond eyes, but it’s their physiological face that we have a hard time understanding. Marines have face, but it’s not quite the same. Many men who lost their lives in battle on Okinawa lost their lives because they didn’t want to lose face in front of their buddies. They charged machinegun nests, not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they wanted to prove to their buddies they weren’t afraid. It’s more of a question of honor. The man who is slapped in the face and does not offer a challenge to a duel is losing “honor,” but in the Chinese sense he is not losing “face.” On the other hand, the unruly son of a Chinese general who goes to a Sing-Song cabaret and is insulted by a singer, and returns to order the arrest of the Sing-Song girl, then has the cabaret closed down, is getting “face,” but we would hardly say that he is gaining “honor.”

Marines want to be heroes, but only among their buddies. They come back from liberty, bragging that they beat up a couple swabbies, or they decked a queer who looked at them sideways. Maybe they say they met this big-titted blonde driving a convertible who stopped to pick them up and she had a case of booze in the trunk, and they went to her place and screwed all night. They wouldn’t dare say they went to Hollywood and had coffee and donuts at the USO and waited

a couple hours to make a free call home. They talked about their girls back home, but that was different. No one ever dared belittle another guy’s girl back home, not even in jest. And a Marine never admitted to the weakness of love. How do I explain this to Roger? “Yea, Roger, you’re right,” I said. “Me likie Ming-Lee.”

Love for China Marines came at a price. Jerry Ruker was in love, and he was a decent fellow. He could get away with things no one else could. Officers and staff NCOs had room boys and barbers come to their quarters. Ruker was the only non-NCO who had a private barber come to his room at the Strand every morning, just a few minutes before reveille. He had his own private rickshaw boy wait for him at the gate. He sent out his shoes to have them polished, and he had a private tailor who not only kept his uniforms trim but also tailored his shirts and even his skivvies as well. For some reason the other Marines respected his ways and he was not the subject of their wrath of jokes. In a way, he was everyone’s hero.

At the Prime Club, Ruker was King. He drank good Kentucky Bourbon. He was the only guy I knew who had his own private stash, a bottle the bartender kept behind the bar for him. And women adored Ruker. He was a gentleman to them all, and to Jenny he was a saint. If ever a code of chivalry existed in the Orient, it was displayed when Ruker was with his girl. Had he been able to walk the street with her, and come to a puddle of water, you could be sure he’d take off his field jacket and throw it down for her to walk upon. But then you never walked with your Chinese girl in public.

Ruker and Jenny were in love, and anyone would know there was something special between them when he entered the Prime Club. The instant Jenny saw him, no matter who she was with or what she was doing, she dropped everything and went running toward him with her arms open, and he picked her up and swung her around the room with her feet a yard above the floor. He may have been troubled when he saw her sitting with paying customers, but he never let on that it bothered him. He smiled through it all. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. We all wished we had enough money to have the girl we liked sit with us all night, but no one had that much money, except maybe a couple high-rolling blackmarketeers and the White Russian con artists. The women were marvelous in pacifying their boyfriends.

For a West Virginia backwoods boy, Ruker was a magnificent dancer, and he taught Jenny everything he knew. When the two of them did the tango, everyone on the dance floor stopped to watch them. He was always jolly and happy, and he made those with him feel the same. “Oh, I love this country,” he would say, and then add: “The women too, of course.” He did have his competition though. Billy Stompano, an Italian pretty-boy from LA was one. He wore his uniform like a zoot-suiter did. When he got into a club, he took off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt down to the waist. He had a heavy gold cross on a gold chain hanging around his nee~. He carried a comb in his back pocket and was forever combing his hair. No one liked Stompano, but they did like Ruker.

Ruker was the only guy I knew who slept with a girl from the Prime Club. I refused to believe it when I first heard it, but in private he confirmed that he was living with Jenny, The management had fixed up a spare room for him and Jenny above the club and he had moved in with everything but his sea bag. He spent several nights a week with her in their love nest, as he called it. It was almost like they were married. It was clever how he did it. Had he been a civilian and put his mind to business, he would have been a millionaire. At the Strand he managed to get assigned as laundry clerk. He had a room on the ground floor where Marines brought their laundry every morning. He had them fill out laundry slips which he signed and gave back to them, and at 10:00 every morning the Chinese came and picked up the laundry. He never lost as much as a sock or a skivvy drawer. He knew not to cause a disturbance or have any disagreements. No one had complaints. He convinced the Exec that he should have a gate pass, to supervise the laundry business, so the troops don’t get ripped off. “Good thinking,” the Exec said and signed his pass. He made it known it was his duty to go to the gooks to be sure they were using proper soap and hot water and not beating the laundry to death on a pile of rocks. When he was seen coming in the gate in the morning, a half hour before reveille, he was lauded for getting up so early and making sure the chinks were on the ball. No one knew he was out all night with Jenny and was just getting in.

But Ruker was no fool. He realized he was at a dead-end. Life was to be lived for the moment, and he accepted this without any feeling of self-pride. “We have to take from life what we can,” he told Jenny. He never denied to her that he would have to leave her one day. “I am in hell when I think about it,” he told me once, “but this is the way it is. We live in two different worlds.”

With Hecklinger it was something else, cool-handed Heckinger, the guy with an answer for everything. He had fallen in love with a Chinese girl and he wasn’t any better for it. “I never thought it would happen, not with a slant-eyed slope head,” he said. “I always knew you can’t squat with your spurs on, but I did anyway.”

Heckinger was a cowboy philosopher who had a saying for just about anything, but he never talked much about himself, until we were pinned down in a foxhole for two days and two nights on Okinawa. A foxhole is like a confession box in church. You begin telling things you never would outside. He was a cowboy, proud of it, and he even had the bowed legs to prove it. The only thing, he told me the second night, he didn’t know the ass-end of a horse from its head. He was an undertaker’s assistant. The rumor that went around was that his old man was killed busting a bronco when Hecklinger was six years old. In truth the old man was a bulldozer operator for an oil company and he died when the machine turned over on him, leaving behind a wife and three kids. At seven Hecklinger ended up in a home and at nine he was adopted by an undertaker and his wife in Oklahoma City. “I’d never be in the Marine Corps hadn’t the judge given me an option,” he said.

“Why’s that, Stretch?” I asked. We called him Stretch. He was about six four, skinny as hell, and the other rumor was he was hung like a stallion.

“I reckon I had this bitch and she ditched me, fur no reason. She just upped and said she didn’t wanta screw me no more. So I read about this creep artist who cut off his ear and gives it to his whore, so I think it was a good idea. But not to cut off my ear. We had a cadaver come in and I cut off his prick and mailed it to her. She panicked and called the cops and I went to jail. ‘Military service or to prison,’ the judge said. What the hell, the Marines sounded good. So here I am getting my ass blown off for sump’ton stupid.”

“This isn’t actually any genius idea you have now,” I said when he told me about his Chinese girlfriend. I was having a hard time believing what I was hearing.

“Hey, I know what you are thinking, but this is different,” he said. I thought we were back in the foxhole confessional box on Okinawa again.

“But she’s a whore,” I said, taking a chance that he wouldn’t lay a haymaker on me. He was a street fighter and capable of doing it. I then realized he was too troubled emotionally to be aggressive. He wanted sympathy.

“Come on, don’t say that,” he said sadly. I knew what was coming was not going to be easy. “I wanta take ya’ll to meet her.”

I wasn’t keen on meeting her, that is, until I realized the magnitude of his involvement. “I’m tired,” he confessed. “I hate this shit Marine Corps. I never wanted to be in it in the first place. I don’t wanta go back to pumping dead corpses with formaldehyde. This woman ain’t no different than me I tell yea. Hey, buddy, think about it. We call them sluts and bad mouth all these whores in Ping-Pong Willies, a thousand assholes under one roof, and we say every chink woman has her price and they are all available for a price. That’s a crock! And what about all these White Russian broads, they brag that they were cousins of the Tsar. Bu]! shit! They were kicked out of Russia and had no place to go. What about them? White Russian women get twice as much as a chink for a screw and that’s the difference with them. So what do we do, we screw them all; we give our dollars; and we go back to the barracks and call them all worthless sons of bitches. Are we any better? Come on, are we any better than them?”

It was dark when we set out to meet Hecklinger’s Chinese girlfriend. She lived deep in a poor section of town, where the streets were even too narrow for rickshaws. The pavement was cobblestone, rough and irregular; no street was straight for more than a dozen yards. They all twisted and turned, ran uphill for a couple yards and downhill the next. The buildings had slits for windows and like the doors they were locked shut. The walls were damp and if you touched them your hand came away soiled. The cobblestones were slick with grime and filth. “Don’t talk too loud and make noise,” Hecklinger warned. “Someone might open a window and dump a piss pot on us.” We had to be careful as we trudged along; we slipped with every step we took. When we chanced to see someone in a darkened corridor, they vanished suddenly without a trace.

I ended up looking behind me as much as I did where we were going. But Hecklinger knew his way. He made turns and rounded bends that completely befuddled me. At last we came to a door. He knocked a secret knock and the door creaked open. An old lady all in black with bound feet stood there. She smiled a toothless grin and bid us enter.

Presently the girl appeared. If I were to see her in the daylight I would not recognize her. The room where we sat, and drank tea, was as dark as the streets outside. I tried conversing with her in Chinese but she would only giggle. Conversation was impossible. Hecklinger in his pidgin English got his message across and they seemed to have no difficulty understanding one another. Hecklinger had obviously spent much of his time in her company. Here was an example of a case that I had heard so much about. A family sells the services of their daughter, and as is the custom, a young brother goes through the streets pimping for her. “Hey, Joe, you want my sister, clean girl.” Like everyone else I thought it was a promotional gimmick, but I could see now it was no gimmick. The girl was real, and so was her brother that we met. I gathered Hecklinger was supporting the entire family. The brother, he told me later, lay around with little to do anymore.

Hecklinger wandered off into a back room with her and an hour passed, and then another. Still he didn’t appear. I had to get back to the Strand by 2200 or be put on report. I don’t know how I managed, but I found my way through the maze of alleys, caught a rickshaw and was back at the Strand just as the bugler was blowing taps.

In 1946, trying to maintain a romance with a Chinese woman was near impossible. Any serious relationship had to be clandestine. Let it be known that a Marine entertained the idea of marrying a Chinese woman and he was on the next boat back Stateside. There was no law forbidding it, but the unwritten law was strictly adhered to. The church in town also worried with ~he authorities. They reported any attempts by Marines or sailors to marry.

Roger knew my feelings for Ming-Lee and he suggested that I rent a room m town and that we move in. I was beginning to think it might be a good idea. We were clearing 50 dollars a month on a Pfc. ‘s pay, and I made a couple of extra bucks from black-marketing PX goods. Cigarettes were ten cents a pack; I could get a quarter. I wouldn’t have to hang out at the Prime Club so much, and that would save money. I decided to talk it over with Stevenson. I went to meet him in his office where we could talk, making sure Col. Roston and the Exec had left for the day. He was sitting behind his deck puffing away on a Chesterfield. Before I could say a word, I knew something was wrong. It was written all across his face. “Looks like I won’t be seeing you again,” he said.

I didn’t expect this. He was leaving. What terrible news it is when you hear that a buddy is leaving. It can be devastating. Often it’s harder to take than when you leave home. Good buddies are forever. But Stevenson hadn’t even hinted that he was leaving. He must have known.

“Holy shit! You can’t go just like that,” I said. “What the hell, you could have said something.”

He looked at me in the strangest way, like I had lost my marbles. He got up from his chair and walked around to the front of the desk. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, buddy, he said. It’s not me. It’s you who is leaving.”

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Chapter 8b
Roger, the Information Bank

Ever since I began studying Chinese, Roger wanted to take me to a Sing-Song cabaret. “Good way learn Chinese,” he said. The Saturday after we had dinner at the Djungs, Stevenson and I conceded and Roger took us to a cabaret. I guess I was expecting something like the Follies in Paris, with dancing girls kicking their legs above their heads. We soon learned a Sing-Song cabaret is nothing like that. There were no women kicking their feet up high. In fact, the only woman was a lone singer on stage. The audience was made up solely of Chinese men in long robes who sat at tables about the size of postage stamps drinking tea and eating sunflower seeds. I hoped we’d sit far in the back but Roger lead us to a table right in the first row in front of a raised dais, which served as the stage. We could not have gotten any closer without sitting on the stage.

We were the only Westerners, and felt very much out of place, until the Chinese bowed when they saw us and gave smiles of approval. Stevenson gave a deep bow from the waist, holding his barracks hat across the chest.

I couldn’t make out if the songstress was pretty or not. She wore a long, white silk dress with a high collar, and she was so heavily made-up it seemed that if she smiled her face would crack. Her lips were painted fiery red like rose buds, and her face was so white with powder she didn’t look real. Her hair shone in the light, and she had bangs that reached down and covered her eyebrows. She stood in front of a microphone that was so outdated the only place you see them is in silent movies. Two musicians sat slightly behind her on high stools. They were playing fiddles of sorts. One instrument had half a dozen strings; the other only two. “The one with more stlings call qin in Chinese,” Roger explained. I had never seen him so excited. He was actually bouncing up and down on his seat as he tried to explain it all to us. “Vely old, most old in China. Other call erhu, two-stling. I teach you how play.” We had to calm him down.

Behind the singer and the two-piece orchestra stood an old man wearing a worn western suit coat much too small for him. In each hand he held a huge brass cymbal which he brought crashing together making an ear-shattering noise that vibrated across the room and rebounded off the walls like cannon fire. When the clanging stopped, the fiddlers began playing in tones so high and so shrill they gave the same effect as running fingernails over a glass plane.

After short pauses, the songstress would begin. No one but the Chinese trained from youth can sing with such startling high soprano voices. How totally alien to foreign ears. Although her voice was high, extraordinarily high, it was not shrill. It remained at the same high pitch level without vibrato or variation. Each time she paused, the musician with the cymbals would clang them together several times, and the fiddlers would begin their duet. At other times the songstress would continue with her singing, higher and higher, and then the two fiddlers and the musician with the cymbals would all try to out “noise” one another. One might expect the audience to be elated, to applaud with enthusiasm, but they didn’t. They remained dispassionate, unmoved, without apparent feeling. They continued drinking tea and splitting sunflower seeds with their teeth, and showed no emotion or indication that they either liked or disliked the music. What they lacked, Roger made up for in enthusiasm. Even out in the street, after we had left the cabaret, he sang in high soprano, like the woman on the stage, for all in the street to hear. Stevenson and I picked up the beat trying to imitate him. Everyone on the street who saw and heard us must have thought we were drunk. We were drunk, but not from alcohol.

After the Sing-Song cabaret, Roger insisted we visit a few of the more popular bordellos in town. “You learn more, like in school, but only lookie see,” he said. We then became sunflower seed eaters and tea drinkers, sitting with strange women in incense-filled rooms, making small talk and holding conversations we never would have had at the Djungs. Once again Roger became our teacher. “Girls come from country when maybe ten years old,” he said and introduced us to Sue- Lee. She was incredibly shy, especially for a girl in her trade, and she couldn’t have been over fourteen. “You furstay Chinese people, boy Number One, no girl Number One. Pay mama-papa money for girl. Like shoes, like hat, you buy girl. She work fur other girl, wash, empty pot. She get fourteen, she now sleep wid man. You first time sleep girl, pay ten dolla mecan money. No one dollar. Maybe twenty doIla girl Number One.” One dollar for short time; one and a half dollars for a long time, meaning an hour. Virgins went for ten dollars, or twenty if they were pretty.

We left Sue-Lee standing in the room, with the mamasan yelling obscenities at us, and went to another house. Every bordello we visited had four floors with open balconies that faced a courtyard. When a customer entered the courtyard, hundreds of girls, those who were not occupied, appeared at the railing waving and shouting. You felt like a matador standing in the center of a bullring, looking up at an audience cheering you.

“Buying and selling humans, do you agree?” Stevenson asked as we took seats in another room and ordered more tea. I couldn’t answer him and Roger didn’t quite understand. .

The girls here were even younger than at the first place. The mamasan wanted to know if we wanted a virgin, a young girl that just came in from up north. We declined, and she asked if we wanted instead a well-trained and experienced girl. As the girls came and went, Roger continued his conversation.

“I tell you this China now. Me no can change,” he replied. “And what is their future?” I asked.

“Their future is now. You alive, that is enough. This is China, under Generalisimo, remember?”

There were many questions we wanted to ask, but Roger’s English was limited, and my Chinese was not much better. Roger did manage to get his point across. He was a gad about town, a real Oriental playboy, but he was also very careful. He let it be known that the female companionship that Gls sought in bordellos was a risky undertaking in China. We were warned there were plenty of girls but there was also plenty of venereal diseases. Before the bordellos were put out-of-bounds by the Provost Marshall, every bordello had a pro station run by the U.S. military. When the bordellos closed, pro stations were set up at entrances to camps, and every Marine who returned drunk had to take a pro, whether he indulged or not. It was a messy business. The men had to insert a small tube-like object into the end of their penis and squirt in a dark brown liquid that looked like dye, and which burned terribly. He then had to rub over his entire private parts a white cream that played hell with skivvy drawers. It was the price one had to pay for love in the Orient.

“It’s better than getting bullhead clap,” Terry testified at one of our bull sessions. “The medics stick a tube up your dick all the way into your bladder. Then they turn a small knob that allows small knives to extend out the sides of the tube. The tube is withdrawn with a twist and a pull, opening up the tract.” Terry laughed aloud. “You can hear the screams clean out of the sickbay and all over the compound when this happens.”

“How do you know, Terry?” Chandler asked. “That’s what they tell me,” he replied.

It was a fact, everyone who played around with the ladies was worried about bullhead clap, yet no one really knew what it was. There were all kinds of scuttlebutt going around, that guys who had it when they returned to the States were sent off somewhere never to be heard from or seen again. Of course, no one knew where that “somewhere” was located. Nobody really believed it, but they all talked about it.

There was a sign above the door in the sickbay that added to everyone’s worry: “We treat sick liver, ulcerated stomach, splintered spleen, high blood pressure, weak heart, shattered nerves, diabetes, Bright’s disease, beriberi, rheumatism, insomnia, arteriosclerosis, piles, fistula, chronic dysentery, and constipation, but we have no cure for bullhead clap.”

Roger was really a phenomenon. If it wasn’t a Sing-Song cabaret or whorehouse he introduced us to, it was a medicine show or a sidewalk story teller. The medicine shows were fun to watch. Performers could do amazing feats of strength, like picking up weighted concrete blocks with their teeth. Meanwhile, their partners ran around selling snake oil guaranteed to cure everything from heart ailments to arthritis. It was touted that it could stop heart burn, that it killed pain for tooth, that it was goo~ for sprains and strains, that it prevented impotency, and that it could stop falling hair.

The storytellers were master showmen. They sat on dark street corners, and under the glow of a flickering oil lamp, they to!~ tales of daring feats and gallant acts of heroism. They kept their audience, sitting huddled around them, mesmerized, dwelling in a magic world of wonder. I had a difficult time understanding the Chinese they spoke, but it didn’t matter. The drama was captivating enough. Roger was worse than anyone and no help when it came to translating. He was too involved. His eyes were as wide open as the youngest tot in the audience, and his jaw hung lower than anyone else’s. It was like an Italian opera and you didn’t have to know the language to enjoy it.

Roger had answers for most everything. When I asked him about Lin Yu-tang and mentioned my discussion about him with the Djungs, he had an answer. “Your fiend, Djungs, they no likie him. Him go China to Melika. Him born Fukien. Now him live California. Him think no likie Chinese. Him think same same him papa, missionary man.” He was right. When I looked up Lin Yu-tang in the library, I learned his father was a Presbyterian minister, and like his father, he was a devoted Christian. I wanted to read more about Lin Yu-tang but the library had only reference material and none of his books.

I wrote home to my sister and asked her to send a couple of his books.

I never did understand why Roger hung around us so much, especially when he was openly snubbed and ridiculed by the other Marines, but he always took it without malice or complaint. We thought maybe he was just thick skinned and didn’t know any better, but he was sensitive to many things. One thing for certain, he was truly concerned about Ming-Lee and me. “She na’lice girl,” he assured me.

“I like her very much,” I said. It was a confession I didn’t care to make publicly. “Marines are not supposed to say they are in love.”

“You speakie only weak man know love?” Roger replied. “For Marines, yes, only weak men fall in love.”

I was saying words but idle words, words that I didn’t mean. We often say things we don’t mean. It’s another way of saving face. Mrs. Murray often tried to explain what face means to the Chinese. “You must understand,” she often said, “you do not want to make the Chinese lose face.”

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Chapter 8a
ROGER, ROGER

As we remember things in life, our minds also tend to forget them. This has to be an inborn mechanism that keeps us from going insane. Cpl. Marsden said in a few years we would forget many of the horrors we witnessed on Okinawa, but we said we would always remember them. How could I ever forget when Terry and I were pinned down in a foxhole on the southern end of the island. It was raining and we lay in a foot of mud. Suddenly there came a banzai charge. We could hear them yelling above the splattering of the rain. Terry poked his head up, grabbed his M-1, took aim and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened! His Ml misfired. It was the mud. He called for my rifle and I handed it to him; it too misfired. I thought we were doomed, and then I saw Terry leap from our foxhole. He grabbed his entrenching tool, and began swinging it like a baseball bat. He knocked over a soldier with one blow, but he didn’t stop. Like a mad man, he hammered down on the man with crushing blows, until he beat him to death. It was bizarre, like a Class B movie. I could see him silhouetted against the night’s sky, rain falling all about, flares going off all around, the sound of rifles firing. He fell back into the foxhole, shaking like a dog after it had been given a bath. When the rain stopped and the banzai charge was over, we climbed out of our foxhole, and there in the ditch was not a Japanese solider but a young boy, perhaps eleven or twelve. He was stone dead.

Now, only a few months later in Tsingtao, I hardly remembered the incident. One does forget, and I would probably have forgotten it altogether hadn’t it been for Terry bringing it up one night when several of us were drinking beer at the EM Club in town. I never thought the nightmare would have haunted Terry but it had. There were other such memories that slowly began to fade, and in years to come they would be gone. Still, there were some images, memories of Tsingtao mostly, that I was sure we could never forget. Whittington spoke of one image he will remember always. It was early morning at the Strand.

“Our squad bay was in the front room on the third floor”, he said. “Because it was the only tall building around, you could see for great distances. There was a public park about 400 yards away, and the ocean was beyond that. One cold, frosty morning, I had grabbed a can of pineapple juice from the windowsill-one from the batch the guys had swiped from a warehouse at the docks while on guard duty-and went out on the verandah. I spotted some elderly Chinese men, in fedora hats and dark overcoats, practicing Chinese exercises. The trees in the park were stark and bare. As the men exhaled their breath came out white and hovered in the still air. They moved in slow motion, with deliberate animation. I was transfixed by the subtle beauty of it all. While I was watching, a “honey-cart” that had just visited our outdoor head went by. That beautiful image of those men in the park, as fine as a painting by a great master, vanished, and was replaced by the one of the honey cart. Both images will always be there.”

Mrs. Djung and her daughters Mae and Rose had their friends for dinner at least once a week, but I was not invited to dine with them a second time. Sometimes I would help the servants in the kitchen prepare djow-dzes, cutting the dough in squares and getting myself covered in flour, while Mrs. Djung did the supervising. We would practice speaking Chinese and it was fun, but when the guests were about to arrive she would usher me out of the house and send me back to the base. I really wanted to be a part of the family but try as I did I was not accepted. I felt I had green hair and three eyes and was an alien out of Flash Gordon. Nevertheless, I still strived for their approval. I made the mistake, however, of asking Mae one time if she wanted to come to a movie on the base. There was a good John Wayne movie playing that everyone was talking about. She was polite and said she didn’t care for John Wayne and suggested instead I take a girl from one of the bars that I frequented. It was difficult for me to explain that some of the girls were really quite nice. They didn’t go around sleeping with every GI that came along. In fact, some girls didn’t sleep with the Americans at all. They worked hard supporting their families-mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, and the grandparents-and a few were even putting themselves through school. That’s what the girls told us and there was no reason not to believe them. I spoke to empty ears at the Djung house.

I often spoke to Mrs. Djung about my friend Stevenson. “He’s really a smart guy,” I said. “He has a year of college, and when his China tour is up, he’s going to finish college and then get a commission. He wants to be a Marine officer.” It was true, Stevenson did plan to go back to college, and secretly he wanted to get a commission, but he couldn’t go around the squad bay bragging to everyone that he was going to be an officer one day. He did mention it once and the guys laughed him out of the room. “You an officer, ha, ha, ha, you gotta be kidding!” We all knew Marine officers were special stuff, the stuff that you are born with. You just didn’t decide out of the blue you wanted to be one.

“He sounds like a very nice boy,” Mrs. Djung said. I had her where I wanted her. Now all I had to do was appeal to her emotions.

“He is very nice,” I said. “He’s very interested in my Chinese lessons. He studies too, on his own. He always asks me about you. He misses home a lot.”

“Well, then you must bring your friend one day. He can come for dinner.”

“I will tell him,” I said.

When I did tell Stevenson he was delighted. I told Mrs. Djung and she set the dinner date for the coming Friday night. The spit shine on Stevenson’s shoes never looked brighter, nor the crease on his trousers sharper. He wore his barracks hat, refusing to loan it to me, and bought Mrs. Djung a box of chocolates at the PX. I had class with Mrs. Djung that day until five, but she had given me written assignments to prepare while she and her daughters labored in the kitchen with the cooks. I told her that Stevenson liked djow-dzes and they made a platter of them a mountain high. Once when I peeked into the kitchen to ask her a question about my lesson, I saw tons of food. This was certainly going to be a big banquet. I was hoping Dr. Fenn would be one of the guests. I’d like to pit him against Stevenson. Five o’clock came and no sooner had I closed my book than the doorbell rang. It was Stevenson, right on time.

I was truly impressed with Stevenson. He was the perfect gentleman, gracious in every way. And he completely baffled me, or was he masquerading? No, I was seeing a side of him I never knew. Like a boxer who had been preparing himself for a long time, he entered the ring. “I saw a copy of Lin Yutang in a bookstore in town,” he said before dinner when we were seated in the study. “Do you agree with his philosophy?”

He threw the first punch but Rose countered quickly. “If you are talking about bis From Pagan to Christian, we can hardly agree,” she spoke up, “We are Buddhists in this family.” “Oh, I am not questioning his beliefs or disbeliefs,” Stevenson said, getting himself into a corner and I wondered how he was going to get out of it. “When we came to China

I thought I might find the answer.” He was sparring now and it was working.

“And what is that?” Rose asked, ready for the next jab. “How Dr. Lin viewed the West,” he said avoiding a clinch.

“Western culture sees nature in the terms of control and exploitation. But for the Chinese, it is the source of all harmony and balance. Isn’t that what you call the yin and the yang.”

Bravo! Stevenson had won the first round. He had the Djungs waiting for his next move.

“So few of you foreigners understand yin and yang,” Mrs. Djung said.

At that moment, Bea Ling, the amah, announced that dinner was ready. The others hadn’t arrived. I thought perhaps they must have already been seated and were waiting in the dining room but when we entered the room the table was set for five. There were no others coming. Mrs. Djung was keeping us isolated from her friends. I was terribly disappointed but not for long. The food was served, and it was good. Course after course arrived, and the djow-dzes came in two heaping platters. We did our best but couldn’t finish them.

After dinner the conversation resumed. Perhaps it was best that no other guests were invited. Rose and Stevenson were back in the ring. Stevenson didn’t see it coming but she was about to land the finishing blow when she asked him about his studying Chinese.

“Yes,” he said, “I wish I had time to study like Stephens here, but I have to work in the office late in the day.” “But then, how do you learn Chinese?” she asked.

“From my Chinese friends,” he said. “They teach me.” Without hesitation, and with great pride, he began speaking Chinese, the colloquial Chinese he learned from the street and from the taxi dancers in town. It was his destruction. Mrs. Djung choked, as if something had lodged in her throat and she lost her capacity to breathe. Rose, who was sitting next to her, slapped her on the back and handed her a napkin. Mae turned crimson red, and for a moment I thought she might become ill too. It didn’t help when I chuckled, for poor Stevenson had no idea what he was saying. Some Chinese curse words when translated into English are mere names of animals, but when spoken in Chinese in certain phrases they can be very foul in meaning. I was still laughing when we got back to the Strand. What came as a complete surprise was that Mrs. Djung invited Stevenson for dinner again. No one could deny, he was gracious, schooled in every charm, and he was thoughtful too, especially when he went bearing gifts from the PX. He was invited back again and again.

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New Chinese Teacher‘s Philosophy

Existentialism, Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre. The names were swimming in my head when I got back to the Strand and I couldn’t wait until I could tell the others about my night at the Djungs. Marsden, Pappy Preston, Melanowski, and Chandler were all huddled around the kerosene stove, warming their hands. Pappy Preston had the floor. “When I get back to the States,” he was telling the others, “I’m going to make it up to my wife; I’m going to make it up for all the time we lost not being in the sack together.”

“You can never make it up,” Marsden said. “A piece of ass lost is a piece of ass gone forever.”

“Why can’t you make up for it?” Melanowski asked. “Because you should be getting it anyway, as much as you can, without thinking of making it up,” replied Marsden. Seeing me there, he said, “Come on, Stephens, sit down. What do you think?”

There was no use telling him about Kierkegaard, whoever the guy was. Nor would I even dare mention him. “I think you’re all full of crap,” I said and felt better.

Marsden slapped me on the back. “You’re okay, kid,” he said, trying to be nice. We had a run in that morning and he knew I was still holding a grudge. I didn’t feel like shaving and thought I could get away with it. None of us had much of a beard. The oldest Marine in our bay was nineteen. Pappy was 29, an old man by Marine standards, but he was only visiting our bay so he didn’t count. I thought I could get away with it, and I felt good about it for Lt. Brandmire didn’t notice during morning inspection. But Marsden did. He tore into me when we got back to the squad bay.

“You’ll shave now,” Marsden demanded.

“Okay,” I retorted, somewhat of a smart aleck. “I’ll shave.” “Dry shave,” Marsden said.

“Okay, dry shave,” I replied, still with a smirk on my face. What was the difference? I remembered my first home leave after boot camp, and the pride I had that I shaved now. My father looked at me. “Put some milk on your chin and let the cat lick it off. That’s all the shave you need.”

Marsden detected the smile on my face. “You’ll shave lying under your bunk, and don’t come out until you look like a proper Marine.” The others stopped stowing their gear and looked toward me for my response. “You have your choice. Shave or no liberty for a week.”

Marsden didn’t need to make threats. He had his own way of settling accounts. I did as he said. I shaved, without soap or water, lying tightly squeezed under my bunk. I knew I would never appear again at roll call unshaven. It wasn’t the agony of dry shaving that bothered me; it was the feeling of losing favor with Marsden. We all respected that guy. It goes back to Okinawa, and even before that.

Marsden went though some heavy battles in the Pacific; he had enough points to go home but he was needed to help get the troops into China and settled. He volunteered to extend for a few months. We knew he wanted to get back to his wife. He carried her photograph around with him in his wallet. She was a big woman, dark, Italian looking. She had plain features with her hair combed straight back. Marsden was proud of her, and to him she was beautiful. He had another photograph of her with their two sons. He showed the photograph whenever he could.

He wasn’t a braggart. He was what you call “calm and collected.” We were on the southern tip of Okinawa, bedded down in foxholes preparing for the final mopping up operations. Japanese soldiers and civilians escaping from caves attempted to filter through our lines. No one knew for sure if they were attempting to surrender or were coming to locate and report our positions. It was night and Chandler was on watch. We heard him slide back the bolt on his Ml and slip a cartridge into the chamber. Then he called out, “Halt, who goes there!” A moment of silence and Chandler called again, “Give the password!”

We were all awake now, waiting. Marsden leaned far out over his foxhole, and in the soft light of night we saw him take careful aim. He squeezed off one round, took aim again, and fired a second round. Then came silence. Not a sound was heard. The next morning, not more than fifty yards away, only a few feet from foxholes where the Second Rifle Squad was dug in, two Japanese soldiers lay dead, both shot through the head. They had died instantly, before they could lob their potato mashers into the foxholes. Marsden made no comment, except to call out to the squad leader to throw some dirt over the bodies to keep the flies from carrying them off. Heavy fire kept Fox Company from advancing that day, and by the next morning the dirt over one body was piled a couple of feet high, to keep the flies away and the smell down.

No, Marsden was not a braggart, but he did demand respect from his men. He got what he demanded.

Mail call that same morning put us all into a happy mood. Melanowski produced a newspaper clipping stating that Ben Hogan continued to dominate the world of professional golf. “Now hear this,” he said, waving the clipping above his head, and began reading it aloud again. “As the year’s top money winner, he takes home $42,556.36.” There followed sighs and whoops from everyone.

Other information followed. A horse named Assault, with a clubfoot, finished first in the Belmont Stakes in June, becoming only the seventh horse in history to win the Triple Crown. There were hoots and boos, and money to be bet, when Smitty announced the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers were deadlocked with identical records.

“The Cardinals won two straight games in the National League playoff,” he shouted. “And they went on to defeat the Boston Red Sox, four games to three, in the World Series.”

Everyone listened when Hecklinger read aloud about a star movie performance by Harold Russell, a veteran who actually lost his hands in the war that eventually won him a special Oscar. He then read about another movie that got everyone thinking, a drama about three veterans home from the war trying to adjust to civilian life. “It’s called, ‘The Best Years of Our Lives,”‘ he said.

“What best years,” Melanowski said. “Not here in China.” “When you get back home, stupid,” Terry sounded off and an argument started.

It was April and spring was beginning to show its face. Conditions in Tsingtao were improving and life for the Chinese was getting better. All the privates in Fox Company made Private First Class, or PFC. Some PFCs were promoted to corporal. The guys gave me a surprise when they sewed my Pfc. chevrons on my green skivvy shirt. With good weather we no longer minded our conditioning hikes into the hills north of the city, and on Sundays when we were not on guard duty we took long walks, some into the countryside. When the 7^th Fleet came to Tsingtao, that was something else. The town became undone at the seams. We were advised to stay in our quarters but we didn’t want to miss the fun. Merchants pulled down WELCOME MARINES signs and put up WELCOME US NAVY signs. You could be certain prices would go up. We had two currencies, FRB, the provincial currency, and CNC, the Chinese National Currency. FRB was around 900 to one dollar. That was on the weekends. It was less during the week. It climbed to 2900 when the fleet was in. American dollars could always be used.

Roger continued to be a good friend and he was helpful when I wanted to get Ming-Lee out of the Prime Club. He brought Ming-Lee and Judy to the New Year’s dance at the university for Stevenson and me, or we would never have been able to get them out. When the weather was good and Sammy was free, we’d make long drives into the countryside. The guys didn’t like Roger hanging around so I had to make excuses to him and then meet him somewhere in town. They called him a freeloader, which in part was true. He drank with us and he ate with us, and he would grab a dance ticket from the table any time he wanted one, but he never offered to pay. I didn’t mind. Roger was good company. Through him I was beginning to learn something about China. Like most of the guys, I knew nothing about the country before we came, neither its history nor its politics. We had no idea about the forces at play. All we knew was that we had to stand guard duty. What was happening behind the scenes was far beyond our comprehension. Even the very name communist-we had no idea what it stood for, except, they said, it was. something bad, some kind of evil force. We may not have known what was going on, but we couldn’t stop feeling that something was wrong. There were times when we drove through the countryside, and after meeting and talking to the people, we could feel a gloom that was unexplainable.

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New Chinese Teacher

“We have a teacher for you,” Mrs. Murray said. “She  is Chinese,  and from a very prominent family here in Tsingtao. Her name is Mrs. Djung. I have told her all about you, and she is looking  forward to meeting you. She has two very lovely daughters.”

It was several weeks before the Murrays left and I spent as much time with them as I could. Col. Roston agreed to my continuing with my studies and had Stevenson extend my gate pass. With Mrs. Djung’s address written in both English and Chinese characters I set out one day soon after the Murrays left to meet my new teacher. I wanted to take a rickshaw but none of the rickshaw boys could read so I walked. I knew the general location of the address, along the seawall that I had often walked after my Chinese classes.

Often on my long walks from the Murrays into town I wondered who lived in these grand stone houses that faced the sea. They had to be rich. Some of the houses had shiny black rickshaws parked in front. I soon found the house I was looking for, set back from the road behind a high stonewall. Like on most walls in Tsingtao, along the top, pieces of glass were embedded in the concrete. Stone steps led up to the doorway. I rang a bell and listened. I could hear it ring inside the house.

An amah in black-and-white dress opened the door. I said in my best Chinese that I would like to see the lady of the house. She put her hands to her mouth and chuckled. I was used to this by now. Chinese didn’t expect white men to speak their language, and if they did, they laughed. It was annoying. I was about to admonish her when Mrs. Djung appeared. She wasn’t anything like I expected. She was quite stunning, a very proper Mandarin Chinese lady.

She was, indeed, handsome, and very dignified. She was unusually tall, for a Chinese, standing about five-eight or nine. Her hair had strands of gray and was drawn back into a bun. She wore octagonal glasses, without rims. She reached out her hand and smiled. It was a frozen smile, like on a porcelain figurine.

“Mrs. Murray has had nothing but nice things to say about you,” she said. Her accent was very British. Her coldness vanished, and I found I was beginning to like her. As she led me into the house, still holding my hand, two young women appeared from another room. “These are my daughters, Mae and Rose,” Mrs. Djung said.

“Mother is very pleased that a foreign student is coming to spend time with us,” the girl named Mae said.

She was dressed in western clothes, a woolen plaid skirt and a heavy knit sweater. Like her sister Rose, who was dressed much the same, she was very pretty. I stumbled for words and didn’t quite know what to say. I could feel the palms of my hands grow wet, and I wished to drop Mrs. Djung’s hand.

“Mae is right,” Mrs. Djung said. “We are looking forward to having you with us. So come in and sit down and tell us about yourself.” I explained briefly about my studies with Mrs. Murray, and we conversed for a bit in Chinese. At first I was embarrassed, speaking Chinese, but that soon passed when neither she nor her daughters laughed. The conversation returned to English, and it was obvious they wanted to practice their English.

“We are having an early dinner,” Mrs. Djung said, “and we hope that you can stay. We can get better acquainted, and tomorrow we can begin our lessons.” I said I could stay. “Dr. Fenn will be here. He’s a professor at the University  of Shanghai, visiting Tsingtao for a few days. You will like him.” “Maybe you will be more comfortable in the study,” Rose said. “We have to leave you alone while we get ready for dinner. Mother supervises the kitchen. We are having northern Chinese food. I hope you like Chinese food, do you?”

The study was paneled in dark mahogany with fine oriental rugs on the floor. Behind a glassed-in bookcase were rows of books. I glanced at the titles, some Chinese, a few French but mostly they were English. Several photograph albums sat on an oval table near the windows. “You can look at the albums if you wish,” Rose said and left. I was alone. I felt like I was ma museum.

I was curious about the albums. There were three, and I began looking at them starting with the largest one first. Captions under the photographs were in English. The shots were unlike any I had seen before. There was a beach scene, two people walking up a sandy beach, but you could not see their faces. The photograph was taken from the back and showed their footprints in the sand. Another was a silhouette of two people sitting on a wall, facing one another, but they were totally in the dark,  and again you could not see their faces. The background  revealed an open sea with a setting sun reflecting  upon the water. Junks in the far distance left their wakes upon the still water. These were not like the photographs  we Marines took-photographs  of us standing posed in front of temples, sitting in rickshaws, clowning around at the beach, and with us always facing the camera. These were so different. Whoever it was, they took photographs  of details rather than whole subjects. There was a close-up of the peeling bark on a tree. Another one was the crevasse between two rocks, with a blade of grass growing in the opening. They reminded me of pictures you see sometimes in LIFE magazine, when the photographer  tries to be creative.

Dinner was a formal setting: napkins  in silver holders, cutlery laid out in proper order next to the plates, two types of drinking  glasses,  both cut crystal. There was no revolving centerpiece like I had seen in most restaurants. When we were seated, with Mrs. Djung at one end of the table and Dr. Fenn at the other, the servants began to arrive with platters of food. Mrs. Djung explained each dish. They were delicious. I favored most,  a dumpling  called  djow-dze. Mrs. Djung  was very pleased when I had several servings.

Dr. Fenn was very polite. He spoke slowly, choosing each word carefully. He was a frail man. He was dressed in a long robe, like the Chinese gentlemen I had seen in cabarets, with wide sleeves in which he often slipped his hands when he wasn’t  using them. His fingers were long and delicate,  and his wrists so slender they appeared  they might break if he picked up a weight. He didn’t talk directly to me but through someone else. “How does Mr. Stephens like Tsingtao?” he would ask Mrs. Djung, and the others at the table would all turn to me for my answer. I didn’t mind. Maybe it was the custom, I being the youngest  one there. I found it rather amusing.

“Does Dr. Fenn live in Shanghai?” I asked Mrs. Djung, and everyone turned to Dr. Fenn. I could play the game too.

The conversation drifted from one thing to another, with occasional questions as to what my thoughts were about the matters they were discussing, and then it turned to literature. “Dr. Fenn and I were discussing an issue the other day,” Mrs. Djung said, “and maybe you can help. We have read so much about Western culture, and now we have a foreign student among us to explain it.” I smiled, and said I would be pleased to help in any way I could. I liked Mrs. Djung.

She continued. “Tell me,” she said. “Do you think the philosophy of Kierkegaard had much influence on Christianity or led to the philosophical existentialism movement?”

“Huh?”

“Kierkegaard,” she repeated. “You know, Jean-Paul Sartre.” “Huh?”

Our conversation after that changed to other more mundane topics, like how much effort it takes to make a good djow dze. “You know, no two cooks make them the same way.” I said that was nice to know, and no one bothered to ask me any more questions.

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The Rape of Nanking

“In 1937, Japan launched a full scale invasion of China,” he began. “That same year the Nanking Massacre took place, better known as the Rape of Nanking. The American gunboat USS Panay was bombed and sunk near Nanking. Japanese troops soon occupied all of North China. All foreigners, non-Chinese that is, were herded into concentration camps. The Murrays were among them. “

The three of us, Lt. Harper, Whittington and me, became mesmerized by the tone in his voice. He spoke with conviction. To win a point, like the Sophists, he asked questions that we couldn’t answer. “Do you know where I am leading? No. Well, let me tell you, the Japanese didn’t travel alone. They brought their women with them. Their women! Only they were special women. They were sex slaves. This is what Clara Murray became, a Japanese sex slave.”

The words came as a chill wind but without the cold. Lt. Austin hesitated, as though waiting for a question he knew we wouldn’t ask. Letting his words sink in, he continued: “Instead of sex slaves, the Japanese called them jugun ianfu, meaning military comfort women. It’s a euphemism for enforced military sex labor for the Japanese Imperial Army in the name of Emperor Hirohito. It’s the Japanese way of hoping to obscure the dreadful reality behind the term. The number of victims involved is estimated at nearly 200,000, though it is possible that the figures are even higher. Who were they? Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipina, Indonesian, as well as Dutch women taken prisoner in the Dutch East Indies.”

Incomparable Japanese Atrocities

Suddenly the world before me lit up, as if one of those Nip memie bombs had exploded right before my very eyes. This was no dud. Lt. Austin’s words were a sledgehammer blow right in the midsection. As a movie opens up on the silver screen, suddenly it was all there. Ever since Okinawa, something had been deeply puzzling me. I had found it too horrible to talk about, even with my Marine buddies. There are some things we bury deep inside ourselves and this was one of them. When we were mopping up in the south, we entered the caves where the Japanese had been holding out. Only after intense shelling and with Napalm poured into the air vents were we able to flush them out. Not many surrendered, and those who did came out with their hands up, heads shaven, wearing only strips of loincloths for covering. Their Emperor wouldn’t be happy with them now, surrendering as they did, but still, we felt pity for them, until we entered the caves. Those who didn’t die from our shells and Napalm lay dead from their own hands. They had committed harikari. But there was a sight even more dreadful than dead Japanese soldiers who split their guts open with sabers or ended their miserable lives with bullets in their heads. Almost without exception, in nearly every cave, we found women who had been massacred, and all were completely naked. They had not a stitch of clothing on their bodies. Many had their hands bound behind their backs with cord or wire, wire that had cut so deeply into the flesh their hands were nearly severed. They had struggled. Sometimes it was less than an hour after a shelling when we stormed the caves, and already by then maggots began their work. It was a horrid sight that was to haunt us long after, one that had no explanation, until now.

The G2 officer must have been able to read my mind. “You saw it on Okinawa,” he said. Turning to Whittington, he asked, “And you too. What did you see?”

“I especially remember one clear, warm day,” Whittington began. “It was sunny, about our 79th or 80th day of fighting, and we were on the southern tip of the island. We were on a high cave-infested bluff overlooking the South China Sea. Navy ships were cruising just off shore blaring surrender messages through their PA systems. Navy sailors with rifles were exchanging fire with Japs we could not see. I was in a group of ten or fifteen Marines wrestling with 55-gallon barrels of napalm. We were pouring the stuff down the cave air vents. Gunfire and grenade noises were everywhere. Every once in a while a Jap soldier or an Okinawan woman would appear out of nowhere and jump off the cliff. I remember it as one of the most surreal moments of my life.”

“Did you go into the caves?” Lt. Austin asked.

“Yes, and there were the women who didn’t jump. They were dead.”

Lt. Austin began again. “Toward the end of the war, the supply of women was dwindling, and there was more indiscriminate kidnapping of women by the Japanese Imperial Army under the enforcement of the Military Compulsory Draft Act in 1943. This is what you saw on Okinawa. At the end of the war, survivors of military sexual slavery were not informed of Japan’s defeat. During Japan’s retreat, to keep the facts from becoming known, they massacred these helpless women, by driving them into trenches or caves and either bombing or gunning them down.”

Lt. Austin went on to explain how each woman was made to serve an average of thirty to forty soldiers per day, with more soldiers waiting in line. Women who were not submissive were brutally beaten and tortured. Escape was impossible due to strict surveillance. Japanese soldiers were reminded that women were their common property.

“Women from the working class and farmer families were assigned to lower-ranking soldiers, while Japanese and European women were for higher-ranking officers. Clara Murray became officers’ property.”

Lt. Austin read from the dossier, a horror story from real life. It was part medical report, and mentioned things like antisocial personality disorders, shared psychotic disorder and psychotherapy. The report listed eyewitness confessions by prisoners who stated that every woman caught by the Japanese had been raped, without exception. When Japanese soldiers couldn’t  find women to rape, they had been seen copulating with sows in some districts. In places where the villagers had not had time to hide themselves  effectively,  the women were captured,  herded together, stripped naked, and driven forward by the imperial  army as beasts of burden until  they reached their destinations.

“Witnesses  reported  that Mrs. Murray was raped when she was eight  months  pregnant,”  Lt. Austin  continued. “On resisting,  she was beaten and her lower jaw was broken. Her daughter was born a month later. Clara Murray was twelve when they were captured. Age meant nothing to the Japanese. She spent six years handed from one officer to another, until she no longer had her senses. We want to treat this as war crimes,  but our difficulty  is that no one wants to come forth with their own testimony. Every witness points a finger at someone else. We had hoped Mrs. Murray and her daughter might help, until this last incident with the sergeant.”

“And you want me to see what I can do?” I said.

It was an ugly  affair and I didn’t think I could confront Mrs. Murray by asking such horrid questions,  but I had to agree that I would at least try. But there was no need. When I arrived at the Murrays the following  Monday afternoon, Mrs. Murray announced Clara was out of the hospital and that they were returning  to England. She  used the pretext  that they thought  it was best for Mr. Murray who could recuperate back home and regain bis health so that they could return to China.

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