The Vigil of a Nation

Lin Yutang

• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789122145
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

For the second time Lin Yutang has gone deep into wartime China and has come out with much to tell. No foreign writer, and few Chinese, could have had such a chance to see past the smoke of war, through the clouds of gossip, and beneath the heaving surface of economic and political change. And Lin Yutang, as always, is unafraid of the truth.His sense of history, joined with his spirit of eager inquiry, led him to watch for the old China along with the new. Only China presents such a study in contrasts, rich alike with romance and with hope for the future. Sitting on the ruins of a Tang palace and telling us tales of ancient times, Lin Yutang looks down at an Industrial Co-operative group working in the gully below and dreams of the China that is to be. He describes a cotton mill, all underground, three miles of whirring machines in tunnels bored beneath the protecting hills; and further west, a vast irrigation system built two thousand years ago and still working perfectly.

1 — FLIGHT INTO CHINA

IT WAS the end of September, still hot like the tropics at Miami. My wife had accompanied me from New York to spend the last days together. We had two wonderful days, knowing that once the plane started, my journey would be shrouded in secrecy, as all travel in wartime is. While waiting for the plane, with an undisclosed time for departure, we visited the city. It was then that we caught for the first time the real atmosphere of war in the United States. There were some sixty thousand soldiers in training there. Early at six we would hear the bugle calls, and all day soldiers marched through the streets singing Army or Air Force songs, some dressed in full kit and some stripped to the waist and wearing shorts, suggesting: practice for jungle warfare and endurance in tropical weather. In the afternoons we saw classes being held in unshaded wooden cabins, with the blazing sun beating down on them to keep up a perfect oven temperature. No wonder their faces were as red as turkeys. If it was a “toughening process” the Army was giving them, they were getting it.

A sense of the mystery of the journey and of the coming separation enveloped us. I did not know which route we were flying, but in any case this was my first airplane trip across Africa and India to China. Knowing that I would be flying across the tropics most of the time, I bought a sun helmet, two polo shirts, and a few extra gray shirts and told my wife not to worry about my laundry on the way. As an extra precaution, I bought two thermos bottles to fill with coffee and milk, and a bottle of Horlick’s malted milk, in case I should miss my meals during the flight. Thus provided, I believed my frail frame, though long addicted to regular hours and sedentary habits, could stand the journey pretty well. A haircut and a visit to the dentist completed the preparations.

The inevitable morning came. I had gone through the briefing the previous day and was told to appear at the airfield at six. It was a cargo plane, and besides the crew there was a Chinese captain returning home with me. The spirit of good cheer had carried us to the end and made the parting not only easy but also an asset during the journey. We had said good-by to each other at the line beyond which she was not allowed. When I had taken my luggage aboard the plane and was standing at the top of the ladder, what was my surprise and joy to see her sitting by the driver in a jeep coming right up to the ship, wearing a naughty and triumphant smile. How she bribed her way in and broke the Army regulations I was too happy to inquire. I suppose there are no fools like old fools. But parting of this kind was good and gave one something to cling to all through the journey.

The route I followed, I understand, is now no longer a military secret. We made ten easy hops to India, flying no more than six or seven hours a day. The ship stopped at Puerto Rico, Georgetown in British Guiana, Belem and Natal in Brazil, Ascension Island in mid-Atlantic, Accra, Fort Lamy and Khartoum in Central Africa, Aden in Arabia, Karachi and Calcutta in India. Thus we flew right across French Equatorial Africa. This was known as the southern route, while on my return I followed the northern route over North Africa. Flying from India to New York in three and a half days is now the common experience of many. Dr. H. H. Kung recently flew from Chungking to the United States in four days, or sixty-three flying hours. The matter is really very simple. One takes off from Calcutta at one or two o’clock in the afternoon, stops at Karachi, sleeps soundly, takes off and comes down at Cairo for the second night, at Casablanca for the third night, and the next midnight one stops at Newfoundland for a cup of coffee and lands in La Guardia airfield at six o’clock in the morning. The airplane has completely revolutionized our conceptions of travel time. One might as well wake up to it, as one of the most important by-products of this war and one of the permanent features of the post-war world. There is no question that after the war, Seattle to Shanghai in twenty-four hours will become not only a feasible but an accomplished fact. Again the matter is quite simple. A plane traveling 350 m.p.h. can, according to simple arithmetic, cover 3500 miles in ten hours. A change of crew would enable the ship to cover 7000 miles in twenty hours.

There is no need to dwell on this part of the journey as if one really saw the countries one passed in the air. All the way we were stopping in American barracks, and there was little chance to get an impression of the country or town one was passing through, even though it was the first time I had touched South American soil and the second time I had touched Africa. I could not even send letters with Latin American and African stamps from the American airfields, as I had promised a philatelic member of the family. But traveling in wartime, one could not have everything. There was some slight compensation in the sense of mystery surrounding the trip. You were either in danger or dangerous and either the Army was trying to protect you or you were trying to protect the Army and therefore yourself, by not revealing the military secret in your possession that on such and such a date your ship was at such and such a place. The satisfaction and minor moral triumph in keeping a secret compensated for the inability even to let one’s family know one had or had not safely crossed the Atlantic. One chafed at the little restrictions and inconveniences, but no more than any civilized being. It is like paying the income tax, going through that agony of mathematical involutions and fine metaphysical differentiations between total income and victory tax income, and net income subject to normal tax and surtax net income, and victory tax deduction and personal exemption and earned income credit, never knowing which to deduct first and which later. You get madder and madder as you come to the end and then someone says, “After all, it goes to build battleships to knock out the Japs,” and your heart skips a jump and you smile and say, “Of course.”

The age of commercial flying is only beginning, and some of our inveterate prejudices have to be gradually worn off. A kind of adult education is required here. There is a story of a Chinese gentleman making his will before going on his first airplane journey, in the first months of the war in 1937. He was in Hankow and was commanded to appear at Nanking the following day. As an official of a ministry, he had no choice but to take a plane provided for him. The evening before his departure, he called his wife and sons and daughters-in-law and nephews together, and lighted some red candles, and after what was considered a last supper, gravely announced his will and gave his dying instructions. Holding his youngest child’s hand, he said, “If anything should happen to your old man…” and broke down and could not go on. His wife was sure that his old bones would not be able to survive his expected crash. There were prayers and assurances in the condolent mood that after all not every plane crashed and there was hope they might see each other in this life again. The family sat up with him through the small hours of the morning in sighs and tears, followed by courageous efforts at smiles, as if nothing was really going to happen, but living intensely every precious minute of their father’s bodily presence upon the earth. Finally, the old man made bold to mention the matter of coffins and began a furtive discussion as to how much of one’s body would remain after sustaining a fail of five thousand, nay, of perhaps seven thousand feet, and what one was to do in case there was no corpse to be found. This is a true story.

Some of our contemporaries still may not have got over this attitude about a flying journey, the same attitude that we had about ocean and railway and motor travel. There are undeniably ships sunk on the ocean, but we do not make our wills before crossing the Atlantic, and friends or relatives sending one off on the wharf smile without a thought that their dear one is going necessarily, or even possibly, to a watery grave. I went through a bad railroad wreck, but still maintain that, objectively speaking, railroad travel is safe. Stories of airplane crashes no doubt make good news and create an impression on the public’s mind entirely out of proportion to the standard of safety achieved. The routine maintenance service of checking a plane after every fifty hours of flight, and the developments of the engine, have brought flying to a state when there is no more reason why an airplane should develop trouble on the way than a town bus. After a few flights one gets familiar with the sensations of landing and taking off as one is familiar with the sounds of a street bus stopping and starting every few blocks. The difference is that the air bus lands one after a few hours in a different country, and one steps out, not in a neighboring town twenty miles away, but in Morocco or Algiers. I was so inured by the time I was on my return journey that when our plane was returning to the airfield at Cairo and I heard in my sleep that “Number three engine has caught fire,” I dozed off and did not know when we landed and took off again. The next morning the pilots referred to me kindly as “a sleeping bag.” They did not realize how much confidence I was reposing in the ATC pilots.

I have seen the movie—The Memphis Belle—telling the story of a bombing mission to Germany. It gives, I think, the most fascinating sensation of a flight and of what one sees from the air. It presents a clear, straight story with a reality that grips, without any contrivance of melodrama. You mentally go up ten thousand feet and get a vantage point to look at the globe, with its blue waters and shore outlines and green pastures and deep forests and cities and towns and highways and rivers. You see the globe and it is round, and in twenty minutes you get a sense of its roundness, through perceiving its advancing and receding horizons, almost as if you were looking at a school globe. As the earth below you shrinks in space, you feel like a genie in the Arabian Nights, looking down on a toy globe, unbelievably beautiful in colors. As one ought to see Manhattan by going out at sea on a steamer, so one ought to look at the earth, reduced to the encompassable size of the eye’s vision. One sees the sun setting behind a sea of clouds or watches a rainfall fifty miles away, or dashes through a rainstorm for only five minutes and comes out in the sunshine and gets a better physical sense of the earth we are living upon.

I insist upon the colors, too, as suggested by the picture The Memphis Belle. There is as yet no method of reproducing the colors of the sea except by technicolor aerial films designed for the purpose. Flying over the Caribbean Sea, one’s senses are struck by the display of colors where the water is of different depths. As the contours of the shore line shrink into miniature proportions, one also sees a beautiful pattern of colors in that Brilliant tropic sunlight, from deep navy blue to purple, lavender, turquoise, aquamarine, shading off into bluish and cabbage green and defined by the buff of the sand beaches against a fringe of bubbly white where the surf is—all on a miniature scale so that the whole seems like a moving, living toy or a jeweled palace made by some cunning artist. The string of islands, with water inlets and creeks and bays and crossings, becomes a connected pattern as the bottoms of the bays become visible, their relative depths indicated by the delicate shading of blues and greens. Where the land rises, it becomes an island, and where it slopes beneath the water, it becomes a strait, or an inlet, or a shallow crossing, and you see the accidents of topography interrelated, intelligible as a mass, as you see them on a model. A fishing craft or a tramp steamer appears like a speck or an infinitesimal leaf, crawling at an almost imperceptible pace, and then you realize that the strait which seems like a shallow rivulet from where you sit may be miles wide. Then you have to imagine that inside that tiny speck there is a miniature toy steam engine, perfectly fashioned with pistons and boilers and shafts and all, in a miniature ship provided with cabins and decks and saloons, all complete. Along these decks walk microscopic creatures who have made that ship and designed that clever engine to make it go, and these creatures themselves are provided with liver and heart and lungs and facial features. You marvel at such a living miniature and feel like a god looking down upon the human beings that inhabit the earth and toil and love and fight till they die.

As there were only two passengers, we were permitted inside the crew’s quarters, being taken as adult democratic individuals who knew what might and what might not be done. They were a good, hardy lot, these American boys of the crew and those I saw on the ground, breezy and strong and cheerful, griping and jeering and cussing in that inimitable Private Hargrove manner, with not a speck of malice in their souls. They ate, they swore, they worked hard, they sweated and were personally clean, and didn’t mind the grease, loving their work and their engine gadgets, yet most living the moment when their work was through. They teased and kidded and clowned and you couldn’t believe a word of what they said. Woe to the mollycoddle who has just left his mother for the first time and takes their words too literally. Yet all this kidding and clowning did not interfere with their discipline and co-operation where work and ministering to the ship were concerned.

The captain was a blond. There was something about his accent and voice, the American voice, milk-fed and strong at the source and somewhat lazily rolled into articulate speech like that of a Harvard student. I suppose there is such a thing as an American voice, which is so distinctive and so good to hear when in a foreign country. The accent has a characteristic laziness, that goes through all the stages from mumbling and rolling of tongues 10 the slightly more careful enunciation of orating Senators. The English accent is lazy, too, when one compares it with the even distinctiveness of the French, or the muscular exertions of German “ach” and “ich” and “Schlacht” and “fünfzig” But the English counteract that effect of laziness in slurring over their vowels by affecting the muscular tenseness about the throat of a man on the point of strangulation. The American completely lets go.

The rather bizarre and inimitable mixture of cussing and slang which forms army speech, so successfully reproduced by “Private Hargrove,” gave you confidence in the pilot’s knowledge of his machine. Evidently he had been playing with switches all his life since he could call switches disrespectfully bitches. Then he looked out into the sky behind his sun glasses, his clean blond hair fluffing in the wind, while you heard the twin motors purring smoothly along—oh, it was beautiful to see! Simple like children, with few wants but a hankering for cigarettes, contented with coffee and sandwiches for their meals, with an utter contempt for boiled eggs, and delighted like children with the discovery of a can of mayonnaise, these boys sailed through the clouds! At night they rolled in bunks or on the ground, or on top of any level mass formed by the coincidental leaning together of some packages of cargo, and rested their heads on their bent arms and fell asleep. Such was the manner of living and sleeping with the army in wartime.

I was never more American-conscious than when I was on the journey, and never more so than when I was on the way back to America, after an absence of six months. Here in the United States where almost everybody is an American, you are not conscious of American traits. Traveling in distant countries, the American is at once recognized. He is on the whole more carefree and wears his part more easily than the sons of other countries. “Breeziness” is the word. Compared with the average Chinese and with other foreigners in China, he is distinguished by a trait of boyishness. There is a youthful jollity and Mark Twainian fun and folly implied in this quality, suggested even by the way obviously grown-up soldiers are called “boys” and office women of thirty are delighted at being referred to as “girls.” The American is at once familiar and easy-going and has a natural pride in himself and his country. You have the feeling that he can’t be taken advantage of easily and won’t take advantage of anybody. He stands for his rights and respects the rights of others and loves getting into a fight any time, verbal or physical. He blasphemes and swears when things displease him, and half believes in God, but more in an instinctive hillbilly sense than in the church sense. He is also a spendthrift with a good business sense. His social dealings are simple and direct, coming from a society where everybody is everybody else’s equal, and where if he does not like a place it is relatively easy for him to cut his ties and move about until he Ends what he wants, and where if a man honestly tries to do his job well, he gets a fair deal. He clowns and loves a good time, but only the most fantastically shallow observer can deceive himself that he is “soft” or “effeminate.” How did that notion ever get into the head of the deep and profound metaphysical German observers? He submits to discipline but only when that discipline squares up with his sense of justice. He stands for no red tape and innately hates rituals, and has more respect for puppies and horses than for aristocracy and kings. All these tie together into a pattern of quiet efficiency and simple courtesy and good-neighborliness that struck me vividly when I saw the officers and men of the ATC on the way to this country after a period of absence.

My reading of See Here, Private Hargrove gave me an insight into the character of the average American, in particular the G.I. I saw on the journey, the inner man as exposed in army life, stripped of his social armor. I believe the characterization is accurate and true. That soldier who jiggled his toe in the small of his buddy’s back by way of waking him up in the morning is a funny but enormously effective creature. To be sure, this is a humorous book, portraying only the affectionately familiar and comical side of the G.I., and it says not a word about the other side—his serious side when he gets to work. But even without any profound knowledge of human psychology, the reader easily senses that he has got the stuff that makes a good soldier, ready to scare away the Devil himself with a good mouthful of slang, and when the Devil sasses back with quotations from hell, he can take it, too.

I lament the fact that the book isn’t easily translatable into Chinese, for it would help enormously in a better appreciation by the Chinese of the American G.I. in China, To a Chinese crowd, and even to an educated Chinese circle, the G.I. in China certainly seems strange. Yet in spite of the necessary strangeness to each other, between the average American who knows nothing about China and the average Chinese who knows nothing about America, who are now, however, brought together by the war, I know the barrier is no deeper than that of language and superficial customs. The average American officer or enlisted man is forthright and fairly tolerant; sometimes his manners when he is displeased amount to brusqueness, and the Chinese, not knowing the American frankness, or not familiar with American profanity, are a little taken aback. I knew a Chinese flyer who was greatly offended when he heard a Chinese fellow-pilot referred to as a “son-of-a-bitch”; he knew enough English to know what that phrase means but not enough to know how many people share that common honor in army barracks. Without direct evidence, I know every G.I. has been at one time or another affectionately and politely called a “monkey” by his sergeant or by his buddies. The Chinese officer cares more for dignity, even for literary expressions, and if he does not know American manners, he is apt to take the American’s addressing him familiarly with a “Hullo, Joe,” as an evidence of disrespect. The moment the Chinese and the American talk fluently a common language, however, whether in English or in Chinese, all barriers vanish, and the Chinese say he is frank and natural like themselves. If the Americans are sometimes brusque, the Chinese discover that they have the compensating virtue of saying what they think and telling you honestly to your face; on the other hand, they can be quite thoughtless at times and tend not to face realities until they come up against them smack in the face. In international politics, I have never seen the American people play a “deep” game, and I don’t think they can. The thing the Chinese have yet to learn is that when an American soldier swears, they need not take it in the dictionary sense. Someone ought to publish a historical study of swear words used by English and American generals and sea captains, and explain to the Chinese people that they mean, in the army and at sea, only something slightly less a...