The only way for America
to save itself is for America to save China. —GERTRUDE STEIN
“Today, my first in Chungking,” Clare noted on May 9, 1941, “we saw two things we had travelled eight thousand miles to see.” She and Harry were staying at the residence of a government minister in China’s wartime capital. That morning she had sat writing by a window overlooking a small walled garden and cliffs that dropped to the yellow Yangtze River. “The air was hot and heavy with dust, and the smell of China. A distant rhythmic beating of drums drifted up on the wind.” Every now and then the rhythm was broken by blasting noises that shook walls and rattled lamps. Workers, Clare had been told, were tunneling into the hillside to give all 400,000 of Chungking’s citizens cover from daily Japanese bombing raids.1
At eleven-thirty a servant came in and said apologetically, “The red ball has gone up.” This meant that enemy planes were only half an hour away. Mr. and Mrs. Luce must go at once to the American Embassy across the river, where they would be safe.2
No sooner had they arrived on the other side than the launch that brought them rushed back and returned with an entourage accompanying a slim, lithe man in a black uniform and white helmet. As he tipped it in greeting, the Luces recognized Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalists and Generalissimo of the armed forces. They were due to take tea with him the following afternoon. Chiang did not stop, and a limousine whisked him away.3
Within minutes of arriving at the Embassy, Clare found herself in an eerie repeat of her Belgian experience exactly one year before. She stood on the terrace and counted no fewer than forty-two Japanese planes approaching the city. Whereas in Brussels there had been only one bomb shelter, here she watched “orderly riverlets of people” moving into caves hewn from slopes of solid rock. In seconds the whole sky was ablaze, and a pall of smoke a mile long curled slowly upward. Then, skimming the riverbank, where junks and sampans were moored, the planes dumped incendiaries and high explosives that burnt gold-red in the sunlight, before returning whence they came.4
Playwright Boothe could not have invented a more dramatic start to her stay in the Orient. She had hoped to see both the Generalissimo and the war up close but hardly expected to do so straight away. Hostilities provoked by Japan’s expansionism in Manchuria, and along the eastern seaboard, had been raging for four years, so violently that Chiang and his Kuomintang government had been forced to withdraw from Shanghai to this remote city in Szechwan. The Japanese, unable to pursue with heavy artillery along China’s narrow, unpaved interior roads, had resorted to air assaults on Chungking. Already their planes had dropped ten times as many bombs per acre as the Germans had on London. At first casualties had run as high as five thousand daily, but now, thanks to the industrious shelter builders, they were down to as few as a hundred. In other provinces, she had been told, over 3 million Chinese had been killed or wounded, 2 million orphaned, 50 million left homeless, and 300,000 raped. Unaware, as was most of the world, of the magnitude of Stalin’s purges in the Ukraine, Clare reckoned this was the greatest suffering mankind had ever known.5
At the appointed hour the next day, Harry, full of scarcely hidden joy at being back in China, escorted Clare to the residence of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Mei-ling Soong. The latter received them first, in a large, dimly lit living room. Elegant and forceful, yet visibly drained by the bombing, she conversed for an hour in fluent, Wellesley-accented English. Clare, recognizing an intelligence comparable to her own, was content to listen. Luce, who was captivated as much by Madame’s charm as by her cleverness, hardly noticed when Chiang slipped quietly into their midst.
The Generalissimo, a taciturn man who expressed himself largely in grunts, thanked them for coming so far to see his people. Gifts were exchanged: a jade ornament and silk pajamas for the visitors, cigarettes and an album of photographs for the hosts. Getting to the prime purpose at hand, Harry told Chiang that he wanted more than anything to see the battlefront along the Yellow River. As he spoke, and Mei-ling translated, he had the feeling that Chiang’s “pinhead black eyes” were burning into him. To his surprise, he and Clare were granted permission. Not only that, they were offered the use of a small plane.6
Clare and Harry with Madame Chiang and Chinese orphans, Chungking, May 1941 (Illustration 34.1)
Afterwards Harry wrote up the encounter for Life, in his customary awestruck style. He said that Chiang’s presence outshone every other, while Madame was “an even more exciting personality than all the glamorous descriptions of her.” Together they would be remembered “for centuries and centuries.”7
On the afternoon of May 13, the Luces took off in a tiny Beechcraft from Chungking’s “airport”—a sliver of dry riverbed on the lip of the Yangtze—and flew north towards the front. Clare, sitting beside the pilot, was immediately struck by the absence of anything like a modern highway in the terrain below. It seemed to her that the country Harry hoped to see transformed by Western industrial ways was not so much exploitable as exhausted.
Was this land so precious that men dare not even sacrifice an inch to run roads across it? … Even in “good years” the overburdened soil must be weary of the plow, the harrow, the thousands of water buffalo feet, the billions of human ones that dig and dredge and prod and poke about in it endlessly. It must want to be left alone, to be just mud, quiet primordial slime. Like an old mother, it must be infinitely tired of bearing, hungry to be fed, sick of feeding.8
Night-stopping in Chengtu, they met with the head of a military academy and the presidents of four colleges. Hearing her husband promote republican democracy, Clare saw the full extent of his missionary zeal. “Harry always trying to find out how many people understand the principles of Sun Yat-sen,” she scribbled on tissue-thin notepaper.9
The following morning they flew over the snow-topped Tsingling Mountains towards Hanchung. As the Great Wall of China came into view, “writhing and coiling” like a dragon, all the reading Clare had done for the trip came back to fertilize her imagination. She vented her thoughts in the literary form she found most natural, a dialogue with herself:
“It was built, thousands of years ago, to stem the hordes of Huns, Tartars, Mongols, Manchus, and later the Turks, Arabs, Tibetans, Barbarians, who beat against China in cruel, never-ending waves, seeking to pillage the fruits of the fat years, to loot the looters, the Princes and Lords of China, to enslave the enslaved still further.”
“But China always absorbed them! The way they will absorb those disgusting Japs.”
“You just can’t wait to get to the Japs. You are like everybody else, infatuated with ephemeral headlines.”
“Now, I’m on China’s side. I want her to win, even though you make China sound so dismal—and hopeless.”
“But we can’t help China today, until we know China’s yesterday.”
In her mind’s eye Clare saw the European colonizers who had come in between, imposing tariffs and forcing the buying of opium, the bloody Boxer Rebellion, the Manchu dynasty toppling, and the coolie cutting off his pigtail, “that ignominious symbol of servitude, that convenient rope for swinging pates from poles.”
As yet Clare seemed less aware of another momentous change in China, which the conflict with Japan obscured. It was a decade-long civil war, temporarily abandoned, between the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung and Chiang’s Nationalists—nothing less than a struggle for China’s political soul that would resume after the common enemy had been vanquished. But for the time being, the indigenous antagonists were joining forces along the Yellow River to discourage the Japanese from crossing.10
The ancient city of Sian marked the farthest point that the Luces were to travel by air. At the headquarters of the northern armies nearby, they saw a map of defensive positions, stretching a hundred miles east. That night they boarded a slow train going in the same direction. Just before dawn they transferred to a car. It was chilly and the moon was still shining as they proceeded across the Shensi plain. Skirting the beautiful Flower Mountain, they arrived at a village where a group of cavalry was waiting to accompany them on the final stage of their journey.11
Mounted on Mongolian ponies, Harry and Clare rode six miles in oppressive heat to the heavily shelled city of Tungkwan. Close now to the ultimate outpost, they walked through twisting lines of trenches, gun nests, and thickets of trees. Clare could conceive no greater contrast to the bare, streamlined fortifications of the Maginot Line. All at once the famous “bend” of the Yellow River opened out ahead. Aiming binoculars at the opposite cliffs, she spotted Japanese emplacements, a sentry, and the flag of Nippon.12
Back in Chungking, the couple dined with the Communist general Chou En-lai, and continued to record their separate impressions for publication. Though Harry had some knowledge of the language, and in a moment of vanity had once said he could think of nobody with a better intellect than his, he offered no analysis of the country’s history, culture, or current plight.13 On the contrary, his reportage consisted mainly of facts and figures, assembled like a field report.
We went into the caves—each cave bedding about 15 soldiers. In each cave a writing table and a bookcase—in all about 100 books. In front of one of the caves 50 soldiers sat in a circle listening to a lecture on political science.14
Clare gamely snapped pictures to illustrate his article—observing such details as a colonel’s flower garden made out of bomb rubble—while continuing to scribble notes for her book. Some of the finished prose would end up in Life, and it was among the best she ever wrote. Making brilliant use of the overview air travel had given her, she described the rice paddies of Kwangtung as “silver, brown, tender green geometrical patterns … shaped like cockleshells, half-moons, shining slivers of quarters, interlocked endlessly.” Villages and towns were “all alike in color and structure: gray clusters of roof tops, cellular growths like wasps’ nests.” She wrote of “cities lying like black spiders” or “like muddy hubs in the brassy wheels within wheels of the wheatlands.”15
Where Harry nostalgically saw only a China of “intricate and fairylike beauty,” Clare both saw and understood the physical and metaphysical relationship of the Chinese peasant to the land he cultivated.
The toiling son of Han endlessly plows his lovingly hoarded thin excrement back into the weakening soil. The rice, the millet, the soybean, even the peaches and persimmons he eats become compound of him, he of them most intimately. The man eats his farm. His farm eats him—so man himself becomes the greatest crop, the animate crop of the soil of China. Sometimes when the man-crop grows too large, and the soil too weak to bear it, a drought … touches off a long disaster of famine. Sometimes the floods partially retrieve the disaster of the droughts. Rising convulsively, the rivers drive the ravenous and surplus crop-man from it, or trap him under turgid waters by thousands, plowing him under, to fertilize the good and weary earth, with rich silt and slime, and with flesh and bones built of rice and peaches.16
The misery and homelessness that pestilential disasters wrought drove rural survivors to disease-ridden, urban slums.
The cripples and dwarfs and lepers who infest the cities, the ulcerated blind beggars, cracking the lice from their own mangy beards in their yellow teeth, the blood-spitting children, eyesore and snot-nosed, verminous and scabrous, the white-eyed, sunken-eared women, all the fang-toothed idiots were born of the floods and the famines, are the spawn of the catastrophe called China … Chinese cities smell of dung, tears, sweat and corpses. In Shanghai today, the authorities do not count the bodies. They report, “so many tons of human matter gathered up this morning.”17
Her last sentence touched on the country’s real tragedy: its ingrained tolerance of centuries of despotism, which would soon enough mutate into Communist enslavement.
One rainy night Clare satisfied her abiding fascination for the drama by taking a rickshaw to the theater district. Protected by an awning pulled down to her eyebrows, and an odorous canvas drawn up to her chin, she set off down a muddy side street. After ascending numerous flights of steps that streaked the flanks of the town “like hundreds of frozen escalators,” she transferred to a litter. In the fading light she noticed that the shoulders of her coolies had callused dents from supporting the bamboo poles.
Over the course of the next several hours she saw part of a modern romantic play, a patriotic-epic movie, and a classical drama. The last was performed in a brightly lit auditorium full of soldiers, women, and children laughing, eating, reading, and calling out to friends. On a bare stage, seemingly oblivious to the confusion, creatures in bearded masks, towering headdresses, and flapping sleeves “went through stylized motions, to the desultory and arbitrary clanging of cymbals, and the strange, reedy wailing of alien stringed instruments.”
Her guide noted some inattentiveness among spectators and said it was a sure sign that the old drama was dying. Modern plays and movies had heroes and heroines more relevant to a China at war. No matter how fanciful the plot, their message was always the same: “Defeat the Japs!”18
The Luces left China on May 21. Airborne again, Clare mulled over what she had seen and heard in the last two weeks. She especially remembered something a Chinese diplomat had said to her: “You have taunted Europe with its Munich, and for four long years have failed to recognize your own.” He was referring specifically to Japan’s onslaught on China. Why, he wanted to know, was the Roosevelt Administration still trading with the imperial aggressors?
“If Japan really gets tough we’ll stop,” she had weakly replied.
“Japan is tough,” he went on, “thanks to your scrap and oil.” If Americans really cared about what was happening to the Chinese, they would end Japanese exports. But then, he said, “you will have to go to war.”19
Clare saw now, even more clearly than she had in Europe in 1940, a fundamental fact of modern geopolitics: “There are no hemispheres in an air world.” When the Japanese, land-hungry and bristling with fighters, bombers, and aircraft carriers, realized that Singapore and the Dutch East Indies could be conquered more easily than China, they would cast their expansionist gaze to a more distant horizon: the resource-rich Philippines, five hundred miles away. From there Hawaii, and even the American mainland, might seem obtainable goals.
The time had come for Americans literally to “reorient” themselves, to modify their preoccupation with Europe, and to look to the Pacific, where “the bloodstained Sun of Japan was rising fast.”20