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

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       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