A
little background for my father’s book Travel’s
in a Vanishing Empire: China 1915 -1918, now available in bookstores and
Amazon,etc.
Remembrance of China Past
The year I turned
twenty, my father was taken ill at sea and was transported to the American
Hospital in Nice, France to recuperate.
Since I had lived in Nice the year before and spoke French, my family
sent me over to bring him home.
I found him in a
wide, airy ground floor room, with French doors that let out to a sunny terrace
surrounded by palms. Ever afternoon I would wheel him out to sit under the
wind-rattled trees and shrubs and we would sit there talking.
This was the first time I ever remember
spending so many hours alone with him. He was old by then, seventy-one or two and he spent a
long time talking about his past. He had traveled widely in his younger years,
first to Shanghai, where he spent three years teaching English at St John’s
University, and later to Russia, Finland, France, and also Germany during the
Nazi era, among other places. But his earliest and fondest memories were of
China.
He was only twenty-four when he first went out
to China, an innocent abroad in the storied East of his imagination, which was
in fact decidedly different than he had supposed. This was 1915, and the
country was in chaos. There were
rebel armies vying for power in the north and the south. Bandits were everywhere; there were
floods and famines, and there was no effective central government. Yet in spite of this, and in spite of
the difficulties of travel in those years, whenever he was free, my father set
out to explore the countryside.
Sitting there on the wide terrace, under the
fresh breezes of the Cote d’Azure, he fell back into his past and in the slow
well-paced style I remember so well from family dinners, he recounted all the
old tales that I had grown up with.
He loved the Chinese landscape, the rice
paddies, the old pagodas and gravemounds and canals. Since he spoke the
Shanghai dialect, he was able to chat with the local peasants and villagers,
and he came to love the enduring peoples of rural China. This was in fact a
world of squalor and stench, stifling heat and chilling cold spells, rats, and
bad dogs, but he overcame all that and spoke of the beauty of the tattered
sails of the junks making their way along the network of canals, as if sailing
through fields. He retold a long tale of a hunting expedition on the Grand
Canal and climbing trips in the Chili Mountains. He also recounted the
adventures he experienced during an attack on Shanghai when, as a member of the
Shanghai Volunteer Corps, he was called out to defend the bridges of the city
against a rebel advance.
He described events and situations he had
skipped over in his dinner hour tales in order not to disturb his children ---
stories of the starvation and leprous beggars, abject poverty and the ruthless
abandonment of newborn babies left in the fields to die since the families were
too poor to feed another mouth. And squalor, squalor everywhere.
One
afternoon as we sat watching the wind in the palms he fell silent, after
recounting one of his tales. I let the silence between us endure and then
slowly he spun out what was perhaps the most telling of his many stories from a
personal point of view.
He was
sitting in an upstairs room in his quarters in the American Legation, watching
a hot steady rain fall on the vista beyond the window. The Souchow Canal
separated the compound from the small village beyond, and on the opposite banks
of the canal, three water buffalo contentedly chewed their cuds in the heavy
rain. One of them was lying down,
and on its back sat its keeper, a stolid Chinese peasant dressed in a straw
rain cape and a wide straw hat. Three junks were sculling slowly down the canal
past another man who was squatting by the shore, washing rice for his evening
meal. Beyond the bank, the fields of the cone shaped gravemounds stretched away
to the cultivated fields beyond.
It was a classic Chinese landscape, almost timeless and unchanged after
forty centuries, but for some reason he was reminded of Broadway in New York
City, on a similarly hot rainy afternoon as he stood watching the rushing crowds
of theater goers pass by. It seemed to him impossible that two such alien
worlds could exist on the same planet.
And yet, what appeared to him as the more exotic and bizarre was the New
York scene.
This was
almost a year after he first arrived in China, but it marked a turning point
for him, a full acceptance of Chinese culture, with all its terrible
beauty.
His Chinese years, and the events he
experienced there shaped his life. He was born in the racist environment of the
American South, but after he came back he was never able to see a person as
anything other than a human being, white, black, or Asian. He later became
involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and was steadfast to the end in defense of
civil liberties
*****
After a
week or so in Nice, he was released from the hospital, and I brought him home
on a curiously turbulent overseas flight. This was the last time I had a
conversation of any length with him.
He died in
1967 at the age of 75.
John
Hanson Mitchell
