Читать книгу China Hand - John Paton Davies Jr. - Страница 9

A native restlessness propelled me from Madison at the end of my two years at the Experimental College. I decided to take my junior year of college at Yenching University, near Peking, and then return to the United States for my senior year. Gordon Meiklejohn, my classmate and Alexander Meiklejohn’s son, joined me in the adventure. As a first step, I drew on Gordon’s and my slight resources and ignorantly bought in Gary, Indiana a secondhand Stutz. It had three bullet holes in the back. Because of these blemishes and, as we later discovered, incomplete documentation, the price was appropriately and conveniently low.

In this scarred vehicle we drove to Kansas where we briefly labored at harvesting wheat. When we had earned barely enough to fuel us to California, we resumed our journey and arrived in San Francisco nearly penniless. There we were befriended by a diminutive and effervescent Irishman named Albert Bender, friend of the elder Meiklejohns, and patron of Golden Gate arts. He put us up and induced the Dollar Line to sign us on as ordinary seamen aboard the President Pierce. After squeegeeing our way across the Pacific, we jumped ship in Japan and proceeded to Peking.

Yenching University, to which Gordon and I were admitted, was supported mainly by American missionary institutions, although Harvard and, to a lesser degree, Princeton had connections with it. The faculty was Chinese, American and European, and instruction was in Chinese and English. Because Yenching was regarded as one of the best universities in China, it drew students from all over the country. Foreign students were a rarity, so Gordon and I were looked upon as minor curiosities. Gordon concentrated on the physical sciences in preparation for medical school and I majored in journalism, in anticipation of a glamorous career as a foreign correspondent, traveling about the world (first class), darting in and out of wars, mingling easily with the high and the mighty, and reporting it all in crunchy cables to an appreciative public.

My course of studies was unexacting. This left ample time for basketball, track, and convivial association with other male undergraduates. I was cautiously reserved with the women students lest, in a still strait-laced society, offense be taken, or jealousies and ill feeling aroused. I made frequent visits to nearby Peking and once met there a diplomat, O. Edmund Clubb, then a junior official in the American Legation. I regarded this as something of an event because, never having met one, I held diplomatists in some awe and was consequently relieved to find Clubb unassuming and friendly.

Political activism had periodically swept Chinese campuses, usually in the form of demonstrations against some act of foreign aggression, but the academic year 1929–30 was relatively quiet. The exhilarating National Revolution of 1926–27 had subsided, far short of its goal of unifying the country. And the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, beginning Tokyo’s attempt to conquer China, was more than a year away. The Communist movement did not have the broad appeal that it came to exert during World War II; it was riven by doctrinal squabbles and rivalry between those underground in the cities and those, including Mao Tse-tung, with a fledgling “Red Army” holed up in the mountains of Central China. I was told that there were Communist students at Yenching, but I do not recall having met any. Certainly, they were inconspicuous. The majority of the students at this conservative school were then preoccupied with preparing for careers.

Following final examinations in June 1930, I journeyed to Inner Mongolia where I visited construction of an irrigation project on the Yellow River, north of the Ordos Desert. This was frontierland—steppes, horsemen, and camel caravans.

Later in the summer, Gordon and I returned to the United States by way of Manchuria (much of which was still a land for pioneers), the interminable trans-Siberian railway, and western Europe. We traveled in the company of Maxwell S. Stewart and his wife. A recent member of the Yenching faculty, Stewart had five years earlier taught me mathematics at the Shanghai American School. He was now embarked upon a journalistic career. We crossed the bleak Manchurian-Mongolian-Siberian borderland and at the frontier encountered our first specimens of Soviet Man, the border guards. They were large, forbidding fellows who did not radiate goodwill. The smaller, scruffier functionaries and attendants on the train were no more genial. At first I thought that their sullen attitude toward me was because I was regarded as a member of the capitalist class. But then it became evident that they treated their proletarian compatriots in much the same or worse fashion—in such contrast to the outgoing, demonstrative behavior of the émigré Russians I had known and observed in China.

The Stewarts, Gordon and I traveled in the cheapest category, “hard class,” on bare wooden benches. We bettered our sleeping conditions by renting bedding rolls. Food tickets for sparse, badly cooked meals in the dining room were exorbitantly expensive. I subsisted therefore on several large bars of chocolate that I had brought along as emergency rations and loaves of sour black bread bought from wizened peasant women at stops along the way. The staff of life fermented in the belly, so when I arrived in Moscow after of week of this diet I was in a state of bloat.

There was little else but black bread—and only occasionally that—at stations. 1930 was a hunger year, for Stalin was collectivizing Soviet agriculture. Consequently, food production and distribution were in deep decline. The people along the railway were shabbily dressed, much of the housing was old log cabins, and most of the roads visible from the train were mud. The Soviet Union seemed more backward than feudalistic China.

Through his journalistic contacts, Stewart arranged for Gordon and me to stay at the Moscow apartment of Anna Louise Strong, who was out of town. I regretted not being able to meet Miss Strong, as she was a celebrity—an American author of pro-Soviet articles and books and a firsthand reporter of revolutionary events in China during 1927. Her apartment was a gratifyingly economical and convenient base from which to explore Moscow, which, aside from Red Square and the inaccessible Kremlin, was either dilapidated or being excavated for new construction. After a day or two of wandering about, mostly looking for a restaurant or food shop where we could get something to eat, Gordon and I were ready to move on to western Europe.

The travel authorities, however, wanted to know when we had arrived in Moscow and where had we been since that time. There was no record of our presence in the city. Very suspicious. It took a couple of days to get from an acquaintance of Miss Strong an acceptable written statement that we had lodged in the Strong apartment. Only then were we permitted to leave.

Crossing the border, from the socialist paradise to Pilsudski’s Poland, was a move from the grim and leaden, where the only decorative color was red, to good cheer and kaleidoscopic colors. In a spick and span little station restaurant I celebrated with a double order of ham and eggs.

Columbia University was next in my itinerant education. Gordon went on to McGill and a distinguished career in medicine. My credentials were so unorthodox that I was accepted as a university, not Columbia College, undergraduate. This meant that I had a wide range of studies to choose from and that most of my classes were at night. I had abandoned my superficial decision to be a newsman because my free-lance efforts out of Yenching were discouraging and I doubted my ability to become a successful reporter. I decided to try for the Foreign Service. To that end I took a course of international law under Philip Jessup.

My most pressing problem was money. From their meager income my parents contributed some. So did my aunt, Florence Davies. I had to earn what I could. Through the good offices of International House, my name was placed before Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. as a candidate for tutoring her son David. She received me graciously and drew me out on my life accomplishments. A few days later I received a telegram: AS IT SEEMS IMPORTANT THAT OUR SON SHOULD BE ENTHUSED OVER ATHLETICS WE HAVE DECIDED TO ENGAGE THE MAN WHO NOT ONLY IS STRONG IN ATHLETICS BUT SHARES DAVIDS INTEREST IN ENTOMOLOGY I THANK YOU FOR COMING TO SEE ME AND REGRET NOT TO OFFER YOU THIS POSITION MRS JOHN D ROCKEFELLER JR

So I took the next available job. It was as a dishwasher in a Dixie-style restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue run by a genteel Southern woman whose staff, aside from me, was entirely Japanese, up to their elbows in corn pone and succotash.

After graduation from Columbia in 1931, I took the Foreign Service examinations. While awaiting word of the results, I stayed with my maiden aunt Flossie in her little house near the Art Institute in Detroit. She offered shelter to Donald and me any time we needed it because our parents were in China and we had no home in the United States. Aunt Flossie was then art editor of the Detroit News, a woman of abounding emotion, at once warmly outgoing and vulnerable. But she prided herself on being a true newspaperwoman, frightfully hardboiled. In practice this meant no more than that she was a woman of considerable common sense.

Aunt Flossie’s friends were varied and entertaining—newspaper people, artists, museum curators, automotive engineers. Through her I met at one time or another Diego Rivera, hard at work on a turgid mural; the calmly droll Swedish sculptor Carl Milles; and Eero Saarinen, the architect, gingery and taciturn, both of whom lived near Detroit. Similarly, at Dearborn I participated in an evening of sycophantic square dancing at which the host was the original Henry Ford, spare and aloof in this one of his several ineffectual efforts to retrieve the lost simplicity of American life.

The Department of State notified me in November that I had passed the Foreign Service examination. In January 1932 I went abroad—a dime ferry ride across the river to the American Consulate at Windsor, Ontario— for probationary duty as a Foreign Service Officer, Unclassified (c) with a princely stipend of $2,500 a year. A year of in-job training and I was transferred during the last days of the Hoover administration to Washington for three months of tutelage in the Department.

We were fifteen novices, lectured to by Foreign Service and departmental officials on the various categories of consular work. At the end of the three-month course the instructors graded us. I received mixed appraisals. The immigration law and practice instructor wrote that I showed very little interest in the course, that my “manners left much to be desired,” and that I was “the least promising of the officers in the class.” I lacked “a desire to show off to the best advantage.” He concluded, “I would not entrust him with visa work.”

The international law instructor described me as “mature and mentally keen. He should develop in the Service, if his initiative is challenged with responsibility.” The lecturer in foreign commerce considered that my “English in some respects leaves something to be desired.” And the consul general who drilled us in “documentation of merchandise and shipping and seamen,” C. E. Gauss, whom I would later encounter, granted me good appearance, courtesy, pleasing manners, “but not particularly energetic, inquiring, attentive or accurate. Thirteenth in a class of fifteen officers.”

“Appears to have judgment and common sense,” the passport and citizenship instructor conceded, and “to be older acting than his years, to be industrious, and to have a sense of responsibility. Has the qualifications of a good officer. Very serious disposition, courteous.”

With these spotty, contradictory credentials I was assigned as Vice Consul to my first permanent post—Kunming, in the far southwestern mountains of China.

Created as a career organization in 1924 by amalgamation of separate diplomatic and consular services, the Foreign Service was in the early 1930s still a personalized institution. It numbered some 700 officers (11,500 in 2010), and so one could come to know, at least by name and position, a high proportion of one’s colleagues. While the system operated impartially and primarily on merit, with assignments and transfers made in accordance with the needs of the government and promotion in accordance with performance, favoritism was not unknown. But it was no more, and perhaps even less prevalent than in large business enterprises, and certainly far less than in state and municipal governments.

Those who belonged to the Foreign Service tended to regard it as an elite corps. This was partly due to their status as representatives of the American government. As an apprentice Vice Consul at Windsor, I had received from the Canadian government an exequatur, engraved on vellum, authorizing me to exercise my meager consular powers, and issued over what purported to be the signature of George V, Rex Imperator. This autographed license from the King Emperor put me, in my own estimation, a notch above the boys across the river at Detroit city hall.

Another superficial factor contributing to a sense of elitism was the public conviction, fostered in novels and films, that Foreign Service life was glamorous—fraught with royal levees, deadly intrigue, and upper crust philandering. For a few it may have been somewhat so; for most it was not. A very small minority gratified a need for feeling superior by dressing the part. The workaday costume of one of these diplomats, whom I later encountered at the Peking legation, was wing collar, striped trousers, black chancery jacket, and pince nez, so that he looked like a reception clerk at a five star hotel. Along with the costuming there usually went a preoccupation with the social swim. In Washington I had impressed upon me by one of these colleagues the importance to one’s career of attending debutante balls and titillating dowagers at the Sulgrave Club.

But occasional petty vanities were not the real reason for regarding the Foreign Service as an elite corps. It had inherited from the best of the old diplomatic service a compelling sense of public duty. The roots of this commitment, I suppose, reached back to a nineteenth-century assumption that with privileged status went an obligation to serve the commonweal, an attitude exemplified by the Massachusetts Adams family. This tradition was maintained on into the 1930s, and beyond, by several diplomats of the old school, notably William Phillips and Norman Armour. These men and others like them were looked up to by junior officers as models of high-minded devotion to duty. The Secretary of State at the time that I entered the service, Henry L. Stimson, was of the same character—an upright, public-spirited gentleman.

In such an atmosphere it was assumed that a Foreign Service officer was a man of honor and that in his relations with the public and his colleagues he would so conduct himself. On this assumption, the Foreign Service went about its business untormented by anxious preoccupation with security and discipline. The rare breaches of honor were usually dealt with quietly but firmly, as in a gentleman’s club. The practice was that the senior officer at the mission or consulate, knowing personally everyone on his staff, dealt directly with the offender and, in accordance with his judgment, would let the incident pass with a warning, enter a black mark on the offender’s record, offer him an opportunity to resign, or recommend to the department his discharge.

At the time I entered the Foreign Service, fingerprinting an officer was unheard of. When this precaution was some years later routinely put into effect, I felt a twinge of sadness, as if trust between friends had been spoiled. Bugging an officer’s telephone and home or testing his veracity by lie detectors were unknown and would have been considered an outrage. The greatest security of the early Foreign Service may well have lain in, along with the tradition of honor, the close association and familiarity of its members with one another due to the small size of the staffs at posts abroad and, relatively speaking, of the Foreign Service in its entirety. A man’s character and point of view became well, and with time, widely known within the service. With this understanding of one another often went a wholesome tolerance of considerable nonconformity and even eccentricity.

* * *

The American Consulate at Kunming was small—a Vice Consul slightly senior to me and I. American interests in this highlands corner of China, bordered by Tibet, Burma, Thailand, and Indochina, were slight. The province of Yunnan, of which Kunming was the capital, was then a French sphere of influence and the only access to it, save for ancient foot roads and trails, was a narrow-gauge railway from Hanoi. I lived, then, in a picturesque, uneventful, and placid environment. I traveled about town in a sedan chair, enjoyed the gardenias, wisteria, and jasmine that flourished in the Consulate’s courtyards, and played tennis at the tiny Cercle Sportif Français.

Shortly after my arrival at Kunming a circular came from the Legation at Peking asking if any officers wished to apply for the two-year course in Chinese studies at the Legation. Graduates in this course were considered as specialists, serving most of their career in China. I applied, believing that as a China specialist my opportunities for advancement would be improved. My replacement at the Consulate was my boyhood friend Jack Service.

Most of my time during the two years (1933–35) at the Legation was spent with Chinese tutors, ceremonious gentlemen after the style of classical scholars, and in prescribed readings about ancient and modern China. Then there were diverse associations. Among them were a number of writers and scholars who were to influence foreign attitudes toward China: an unknown reporter named Edgar Snow, before he made his way into Communist territory and wrote Red Star over China; John K. Fairbank, then a graduate student and destined to become the dean of Chinese studies in the United States; Harold Isaacs, who was soon to produce his scathing Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution; Allan Priest, the curator of Chinese art at the Metropolitan Museum acquiring Chinese antiquities; and Owen Lattimore, writing about Mongols and Manchuria.

It was in Peking at this time that I also met the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Père Teilhard de Chardin, a man of craggy radiance. Likewise, in 1933–35 I first encountered Chiang Monlin, the urbane and gentle chancellor of Peking National University, and Hu Shih, the eminent scholar who had led the revolt against the archaic cast of Chinese literature, and the movement to use the vernacular in writing.

The American Minister to China was a gregarious, roly-poly Oklahoman named Nelson Trusler Johnson. His instincts and behavior were those of a folksy, shrewd, small-town politician. But being a China specialist, he had acquired a repertoire of Chinese ritualistic platitudes that he took pleasure in rendering as the occasion required. As he had, at a mature age, recently married and promptly sired a son, he was occupied with the novelty of family life. He left the administration of the Legation to the Counselor, Clarence E. Gauss, who in Washington had been so faintly impressed with my qualities.

Round-shouldered from a life spent bending over a desk, with an underexposed complexion, a thin-lipped mouth down-turned at the corners, and pale eyes refracted through thick lenses, Gauss was a chilling spectacle at first encounter. He had begun his career as a clerk in the old Consular Service and through outstanding ability advanced close to the top of the Foreign Service. His subordinates respected his professional competence, his wary, analytical mind, and his stern integrity. Behind his defensive shyness, Gauss was a complicated personality, ready to castigate what he considered to be error, and at the same time yearning for appreciation and awkwardly warm-hearted with those who he thought did not depreciate him.

In Peking I came to know American military officers, especially those who were my counterparts in Chinese studies. One of them was Captain Frank Dorn, called Pinky, a nickname given him as a cadet because of his complexion. The Military Attaché at the end of my Peking tour was Colonel Joseph W. Stilwell. Dorn and Stilwell would later play an important part in my life. In command of the Marine Corps detachment assigned to protect the Legation was Colonel A. A. Vandegrift, who later was Commandant of the Marine Corps. One of the lieutenants of the guard was [Lewis Burwell] “Chesty” Puller, now a legendary hero of the Marine Corps. A phenomenally high proportion of the Army and Marine Corps officers stationed at Peking became generals in World War II and the Korean War. This was in part because of their special knowledge of northeast Asia. Also, it seemed to me, they were more talented than the average military officer.

Peking was blessed with many beautiful and bright young women, from the Turgout princess, Nirjidma, to bevies of visiting American and English maidens whose mamas or aunties were exposing them to the glories of old Peking. My three bachelor colleagues and I were consequently fortunate in the range of companionship available. While we gratefully embraced these opportunities, none of us married during our Peking tour of duty. In my case, I felt insufficiently established in my profession to take on so considerable a responsibility.

I left Peking with regret, not only because of fond associations, but also because this ancient, mellow, and noble city was a delight to live in. The symmetries of the great gates and walls, the squares and long vistas, the vermilion, emerald, cobalt, and imperial yellow of gates, pillars. and tiles, but most of all the casual, tranquil cadence of the old capital created an atmosphere of comfortable, well-worn elegance.

Mukden was my next post. It was the economic and transportation center of Manchuria, a coarse and important city. Manchuria was occupied by the Japanese Army, which had set up a puppet government over the region. The American government did not recognize the legitimacy of the Japanese conquest or the puppet regime of Manchukuo. Although the Japanese Army did not overtly treat us as enemies, it was evident that it so regarded us. Our position in the American Consulate General was therefore a delicate one.

Mukden was primarily a political reporting post, informing Washington of developments inside Manchuria, Chinese guerrilla movements along the Korean border, and recurrent clashes between Japanese and Soviet forces along the Mongolian and Soviet frontiers. I found this work much to my taste and at times exciting. It and a handful of American and British friends compensated for the harsh environment.

American journalists occasionally visited Manchuria. Frustrated in their efforts to get the truth from secretive Japanese officials, they called at the Consulate General for information. J. P. McEvoy of the Reader’s Digest was one. William Henry Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor and John Gunther were others. The Consul General, Joseph W. Ballantine, made a practice of briefing the visiting journalist orally. Then, if he judged the writer to be reputable and discreet, Ballantine would pile on a conference table a collection of our reports to Washington about Manchuria and invite the visitor to draw on their contents for the enlightenment of the American public. Ballantine cautioned the journalists not to reveal where they got this information and, if asked, to say that they found it in the gutter. John Gunther spent two days with our files; much of his Inside Asia section on Manchukuo was a rewrite of material he had gotten from us.

Most of the documents that Ballantine and I showed to journalists were classified. There were only two grades in those days: “Confidential” and, rather sweetly, “Strictly Confidential.” The latter was then regarded as “Eyes Only” in the subsequent runaway inflation of security. At any rate, we “violated security,” on our own initiative and for reasons that we considered to be in the national interest. We suffered no pangs of conscience over what we did. Quite to the contrary, we felt rather virtuous over making available, through journalists, classified information that we thought the American people had a right and need to know.

Home leave came during the spring of 1937. I traveled in the company of Colonel and Mrs. Vandegrift across the trans-Siberian, this time “soft” class. I stopped off for a couple of days in Moscow where I met several members of the American Embassy staff, including George F. Kennan. Stalin’s great purge was in mid-passage and the atmosphere of Moscow was tense and withdrawn. Kennan had attended the contrived “trials” as an observer and recounted to me in detail the incredible accusations against and self-incrimination of the old revolutionaries. It was a chilling story, one which stayed with me.