1056 Ave. Joffre
Shanghai
Dec. 26, 1927
Dear—
Your letters to others I happened to see last night and today being the day after Christmas and the children still absorbed in their toys, I am moved by an unaccustomed sense of leisure to write you solely in the selfish hope that you will write to me.
Your letters mirror a delightfully placid existence in your American home. I feel in some ways like a poor little girl looking into a shop window full of unattainable pleasures. Like the same little poor girl, however, I have my compensations. Living in China these days is like being the spectator at a tremendous melodrama, with the Communists as villain and the Nanking government as the fair damsel in distress. The crisis is fast approaching and the spectators, as well as the heroine, are beginning to look frantically about for the hero, who, as yet, has not appeared, and may not even yet be born! Meanwhile the villain is waxing bold and furious and no one can foretell the end….
As for China itself, it is very difficult to speak of the future here. We stand by from day to day. If this were any other country one would say such a condition of chaos could not possibly continue, but in China anything can continue indefinitely so long as people gather together enough food to keep from starvation. Tremendous crops and poor transportation have combined this year to make rice in central China unusually cheap and therefore chaos is the more philosophically endured.
You will have read of the Nationalists’ endeavor to get rid of the Soviet. They have returned the Russian Consul and all the Red Russians they could get hold of. Many Russians have been treated most brutally in Hankow and Canton. I hate Bolshevism, but I hate brutality, too. Everyone has been shocked by the brutality of the Chinese in this affair.
The hardest thing about living in China these days, however, is the spirit of disillusionment and despair which is everywhere growing. The best Chinese are so sad over the failure of the Nationalists, already apparent, that it is heart-breaking. The Nationalists are using the old militarist methods — heavy, illegal taxes, corruptly spent. Same old thing! Chiang Kai-shek could retire a rich man, we hear, and whether true or not, the gossip implies disillusionment.
All this is hard to bear. The leaders in the Nationalist party are returned students, for the most part. It is a shock to those who have believed that in modern education lay the salvation of China. The hopefulness in the whole thing is, however, that this despair and disillusionment may be the beginning of sober self-realization and facing the fact that the roots of China’s troubles are in the moral weakness of her upper classes, and in the helplessness of the peasants. Full humility and facing of truth is the only hope I see for this country. Many are realizing it. But here in Shanghai I am appalled by the wanton extravagance and carelessness of Chinese rich people. I feel as though I were living at the capital of Louis of France before the French revolution broke. The streets are crowded with hungry, sullen, half-starved people and among them roll the sedans and limousines of the wealthy Chinese, spending fabulous sums on pleasure, food, and clothes, wholly oblivious to others. This cannot go on forever. Personally I feel that unless something happens to change it, we are in for a real revolution here, in comparison to which all this so far will be a mere game of ball on a summer’s afternoon. Then it will be a real uprising of the ignorant and poor, against those who own anything. When it will come, no one can tell. Good crops put it off awhile. But the people are very restive and angry now….
Shanghai is swarming, too, with destitute White Russians. They keep pouring down from the north, anxious for money or work or anything. They do the most menial labor, and are oftentimes the most pathetic of creatures. The night watchman at a Chinese house near us was once a professor of literature at a Russian university — a cultured gentleman. One’s heart gets so surcharged with the sorrows of the world here sometimes that one breaks….
As ever,
Pearl
As for my own bit of the city, it was a small third-floor apartment in a fairly comfortable house which I shared with two other American families. Of those months I spent in Shanghai there is not one incident worth telling except a pleasant day after Christmas. Somewhere during that time I wrote a story and it was sold by my agent in the United States. Yes, I had an agent by then, because it took so many months to wait for rejections. A month perhaps, to write a story and type it, a month to send it to New York where all magazine editors and publishers seemed to live, two or three months for a lagging decision to reject, another month for the rejection to reach me, made me foresee an eternity of waiting. One day when I was walking past Kelly and Walsh’s bookstore, I went in and among some secondhand books I found a dingy little book called The Writer’s Guide. It was published in London, but I searched the index and found the names of two literary agents who had offices also in New York.
I wrote to them both. One of them replied after two months that he could not consider material from me because “no one was interested in Chinese subjects.” The other, David Lloyd, replied that he would like to see my material. I sent him my two stories once printed in Asia Magazine, with the suggestion that they might make a novel. As a matter of fact, Brentano’s had already written me about the first one, asking me to enlarge it into a novel, but upon reflection I had decided that the story was too slight to enlarge and they had declined the second story as a possibility for combination. For a long time no further word came from Mr. Lloyd, and I all but forgot the stories.
But some other small story was sold, somewhere, I don’t remember where. That Shanghai Christmas was the most dismal and wretched I had ever had, and added to the general sadness of my situation, I received not one gift which had any meaning. I am not one to care for gifts, nor to be ungrateful, I hope, for thoughtfulness, but that year I needed just one real gift.
The day after that dark Christmas I decided upon what, for me, amounted to a crime. I decided to spend my little store of money, and thus entirely selfish, I sallied forth on a grey December day and bought Christmas gifts for myself.
I wish that I could say that I felt afterwards a sense of shame but even now I feel nothing but satisfaction. For those few objects of beauty which my dollars could purchase had such a restorative influence upon my soul that from then on my courage was renewed. And of that winter in Shanghai I can remember nothing else, wilfully of course, for there was plenty in our crowded house.
No, wait — I do remember Li Sau-tse and her romance, which in its small way was contemporaneously connected with the romance of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling, then a young Shanghai debutante.
The redoubtable Li Sau-tse had of course accompanied us from Japan and she had established herself in the basement kitchen of our three-family house and proceeded to cook our meals. With the three amahs, she declared, she could manage, although she might in the future want a table boy, but it would be one of her own choosing. We were willing to be managed and gave no more thought to the table boy. One morning, however, we heard a violent noise in the basement where Li Sau-tse lived, a man’s voice protesting loudly. A man? Our servants were all women. I sent an amah for Li Sau-tse and after a few minutes she came up breathless and red-faced while the man’s voice continued to bellow from below.
“Li Sau-tse,” I exclaimed, “what is going on?”
She explained. Since these were modern times, she had fallen in love with the table boy of a neighbor the winter before and there had been some amorous passages and promises. Then the man had disappeared.