Strange Lands And People

By Martha Nemes Fried

     Crossing the street crowded with rickshaws, limousines, pedicabs, taxis, trucks, busses, private cars, bicycles and trams required the skills of circus performers and stunt men. The clang-clang, bang-bang and toot-toot of the vehicular traffic was deafening. The figure of a short, skinny coolie carrying two office desks attached to each end of a bamboo pole the center of which rested on his shoulder stunned me. Everything I saw was both frightening and seductive and I immediately fell in love with it.

    It is important to remind the reader that the world, which has become a global village through the miracles of television, satellite dishes, interactive computers, fax machines and the information superhighway, was a different place in 1947. We have become accustomed to a daily diet of horrifying scenes of televised wars, revolutions, terrorist acts and street violence in faraway places. Japanese eat Big Macs and Americans eat Sushi. Let me take you back to the middle years of the last century. New experiences in new places were fresh and stimulating for us and I had a sense of excitement the whole time we were in China.

     I worked as a temporary for a Wall Street law firm for six weeks before my departure for China. As soon as I discovered the firm represented people with corporate and philanthropic interests in China, I asked one of the junior partners to write me a letter of recommendation for a job in Shanghai. He obliged by penning a well crafted missive to one of his old college classmates who was the chief counsel to Standard Oil.

     I had access to the folders containing information about clients and perused them while attending the switchboard when the operator went to lunch. I was reading The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night at home. There were times when the personal lives of clients, specifically detailed in their divorce suits and premarital agreements, could easily be confused with incidents in the lives of Fitzgerald's fictional characters.

     Francie Lanahan, a woman in her early forties, who had prematurely white hair and an alcoholic husband, was the office manager. She took a liking to me, a sentiment I returned, and she told me stories about the 1929 crash when she worked through the night at Milbank Tweed, a prominent law firm at the time. She was childless and appointed herself to be my tutor. Her conversation was peppered with juicy stories about the lives of wealthy clients. I still remember how flabbergasted I was when she related the case of an executive who had a heart attack in his secretary's arms at a Chicago hotel. The law firm bought the silence of the secretary and the hotel clerk, circumvented an autopsy, had the man's body shipped home in a casket, and prevented his wife from ever finding out the truth.

     Francie's and Fitzgerald's revelations about the rich and powerful, whose highjinks scandalized me, melded in my mind. It was easy to see they were not buffeted around by life like ordinary people, but were protected from scandal by high priced attorneys. Considering the lack of any shelter from the invasion of privacy today, I yearn for those times when intimate matters were respected and most newspapers had ethical standards.

    With the junior partner's letter of introduction in hand, I phoned the Standard Oil counsel the day after I arrived in Shanghai to arrange an appointment. I can no longer remember the man's name, but the meeting in his office left an indelible impression. He told me there were seven good jobs available in Shanghai, described the benefits and drawbacks of each one and said the choice was mine.

    I selected China Relief Mission because it promised to be the most interesting assignment. The new organization was to be under the aegis of the American Consulate and was situated on the first floor of the same building, which was one of four major edifices at the intersection of Foochow and Kiangsi Roads; the others were the Metropole Hotel, Hamilton House and the Shanghai Municipal building. The job also came with many of the perquisites consular employees enjoyed. My guardian angel picked up the phone and made an appointment for me with Donald Gilpatric, the chief of mission. The rest was a formality.

    This was my introduction to the world of privilege where a single letter and a phone call were enough to get someone not just any job, but a very comfortable position. Having read the stories and novels of Fitzgerald just before leaving for China was fortuitous. I was primed for accepting a way of life that guaranteed some of the luxuries his wealthy fictional characters were accustomed to, but I never took my good fortune for granted.

     I frequently ate lunch at the YMCA coffee shop due to its proximity to the Park Hotel and its passable, inexpensive food. Mr. Arrowshirt came in for lunch a week after we debarked. He greeted me as if we had been great friends and joined me at my table without asking me if he could. I held my curiosity about the fate of the shirts in check, but learned the outcome of his game plan anyway because he was eager to boast of his coup. He got them past customs, kept five of them for himself and sold the remaining seventy at a good profit.

    It was not possible to ignore the polarities of existence between the haves and have-nots in Shanghai. I was acutely aware of them by the end of the first week of my stay. Broken down shanties were right next to luxurious hotels and apartment buildings and people looked for food in garbage bins outside the expensive restaurants we frequented. Perfectly coiffed and manicured women, the wives of Chinese generals and wealthy businessmen, dressed in chi-paos made of the finest silk, their creamy complexions lightly powdered and their lips and nails glossed vivid red, passed down the street in noiseless black limousines. These women, whose primary function was to advertise their husbands' wealth and power, sharply contrasted with their penniless countrymen who sat in the gutter in tatters begging for food, with only runny holes where their eyes had been.

    Raw life was shoved in my face and hit me hard. I knew if I let everything get to me too deeply I would not survive the long stay. I had to place a degree of emotional distance between myself and the wretchedness and corruption around me without becoming entirely indifferent to the sufferings of the poor and the opulence of the rich. Striking that delicate balance was my most difficult task.

    Once my employment was assured, we looked for a small apartment. We quickly found out that a private flat required a bribe, euphemistically referred to as 'key money,' of two to three thousand American dollars. Someone suggested that we rent part of an apartment, a very common practice in Shanghai then. We saw an advertisement in the newspaper placed by Mrs. Hauptmann, the widow of a German businessman. She had a room to let with private bath in her eight-room apartment on the fifth floor of Hanray Mansions at 1162 Rue Joffre, a tree lined avenue in the former French Concession, called Frenchtown by the locals. The apartment building had a lovely garden in the back and was right next to the residence of the American Consul.

    The living and dining rooms, the use of which she promised us for occasional entertainment of guests, had a glass wall leading to a solarium fronting on Rue Joffre. She rented me the library filled with a thousand books, European furniture, Sung vases, Chinese carvings and porcelains and a large Buddha on a black lacquer stand. There was a small round table with two comfortable chairs where I had my afternoon tea and a capacious couch, which was made up as my bed at night.

     My windows opened on Rue Joffre and through them sunshine streamed in affording me an unimpeded view of the great old leafy trees on the avenue. The rent included the services of the amah, who did my laundry, cleaned my room and cooked my food; it did not include the food purchased especially for me. Mrs. Hauptmann presented me with an itemized bill for all expenses incurred on my behalf once a month. I settled in and Mort took off for his field site, Ch'u Hsien in Anhwei province.

     I had two free weeks before starting work on September fifteenth and used some of the time reading the books in my newly acquired library. I took a leisurely walk around the neighborhood each day to familiarize myself with the elegant shops as well as the street vendors who sold everything from fresh flowers to condoms all laid out on the sidewalk on a piece of cloth.

     My constant companion during these explorations was Elise, Mrs. Hauptmann's seven-year-old granddaughter. She informed me with great assurance that Chinese blood was not red, certainly not blue, but green. I was never to trust any Chinese, she cautioned.

    I had never heard so many outrageously ignorant and prejudiced words out of the mouth of a child before. She said she was teaching me the facts to save me from dangerous mishaps and warned me about green-blooded white-slave traders. I attempted to rid her of these twisted notions, but as I observed, more often overheard, her treatment at the hands of her mother and grandmother, it became clear that I had tackled the impossible.

    Her mother, who was only three years older than I, had totally abandoned her child. She lived on the premises, but she had cut all emotional ties with Elise. The woman conducted her life as if her daughter did not exist. She was divorced from Elise's father and fully devoted to her plan of catching an American husband in her net. She was either on the telephone arranging a date, painting her nails, fussing with her hair, applying cosmetics to cover the premature lines on her face that revealed her excessive fondness for alcohol, or all dressed up and out the door to meet a new prospect.

    Mrs. Hauptmann, a large-boned woman who wore her hair in a tight bun, was long on greed and short on patience with children. She slapped Elise around, struck her hands with a ruler when she hit the wrong key on the piano during practice and smacked her for the slightest infraction. Elise's feeling of superiority to anyone who was not an Aryan, a notion learned from Mrs. Hauptmann, became her shield against the pain of her daily life. It endowed her with the comforting feeling that there were people in the world more wretched than she was.

    Mort had a letter of introduction from a New York anthropologist to Mark Phillips, head of a British relief agency with offices in Hamilton House. Mark treated Mort to lunch and helped him understand the current economic, military and political situation in China. He displayed considerable expertise and Mort was eager for me to meet him. Shortly before he left for Anhwei Province, he invited Mark to join us for dinner at the Fiacre on Rue Joffre where the Wienerschnitzel was divine. Mark was quite a handsome man who was also blessed with intelligence and dry English humor. A few weeks after Mort left for Ch'u Hsien, Mark asked me to dine with him at Chez Louis where excellent French food was prepared by a Chinese cook. Mark was an interesting, highly literate companion. Our evening at Chez Louis was a welcome change from Elise's company.

    While I was slowly making adjustments and forming new friendships in Shanghai, Mort was cautiously getting his feet wet as a first-time fieldworker. Here is one of his early letters from Ch'u Hsien where he was the house guest of Mr. Bien, the wealthiest merchant in town who adamantly refused to accept payment for food and lodging. Mort solved the problem by constantly giving him expensive presents. A Parker pen, a phonograph, and a portable typewriter, commodities that local people could only have purchased on the black market for an extremely high price. Still, the arrangement caused Mort discomfort. To someone in Mr. Bien's position in the community, giving hospitality to an American scientist meant an enhancement of his reputation. The Chinese call this "face." But his motivations went beyond that as will be seen in a subsequent letter from Mort.

Ch'u Hsien   
September 24, 1947