Shooting the War

“I am not serving bird’s-nest soup or shark fins,” she explained, “because I don’t feel it is right to have such delicacies in time of war.”
She spoke with the same faint trace of a Georgia accent that my husband has, for she had received her early American schooling in Macon, which happens to be not far from the town where my husband was born.
I tried, in an experimental spirit, all the peculiarly flavored dishes. They included the peppered sinews of fowl, and other items less recognizable, but delightfully seasoned and served in bewildering array.
Course after course was served, but each time an exotic-looking dish was brought in, Erskine waved it aside and asked for another serving of rice.
Madame Kung was perturbed.
“Rice is peasants’ food,” she said, “and I served it tonight only because I wanted you to sample truly Chinese dishes.”
“That makes me a peasant then,” Erskine gulped, “because I was raised on rice in Georgia and I like it. This is the first time I’ve been able to find any since we reached Hong Kong.”
Madame was speechless for a moment and then she called the maids and ordered them to bring in all the rice in the kitchen. She and Erskine ate nothing else during the remainder of the dinner.
We came to find out later that it is surprisingly difficult for a foreigner to get rice in China. Foreign travelers are expected to prefer more elite fare.
Hong Kong had the unreality of stereopticon slides. Its streets showed three dimensions, but even as we were rolled through them at breakneck speed in rickshas they still retained that insubstantial quality of one picture succeeding another. The hillsides were piled high with crowded houses. Decorative Chinese-lettered signs were strung across the alleys, and fabulously plentiful flowers were sold under all the archways. The stores were spilling out into the streets with their stocks of Swiss watches, English woolens, carved ivories, and embroideries at fantastically low prices. Everything was cheap, because Hong Kong was a free port for foreign articles, and coolie labor made native products cost next to nothing.
We were astonished when a tailor arrived unsolicited with our breakfast tray. He quickly talked my husband into ordering a suit, which he copied from one of Erskine’s old ones—for the Chinese can copy anything—and it was delivered with our morning paper the next day, perfectly tailored and finished down to the last hand-stitched lapel.
We were startled but delighted when, the following morning, the instant we woke up, a shoemaker was at my husband’s bedside with a pencil to draw the outline on a piece of paper when his foot first hit the floor. A pair of Erskine’s old shoes served as a model, and by noon my husband had a beautifully finished pair of new shoes.
I gave the shoemaker some jobs, too. I ordered cases of chamois leather, closing with zippers, for each of my five cameras, for each flash gun and chromium reflector, and for all of my filters. When they were finished they fitted each piece of equipment like a glove and acted as perfect dust protectors. When it came to final packing of supplies, I tore off and discarded all the cardboard protectors of my three thousand peanut bulbs. The bulbs themselves I packed into two large wicker baskets such as Chinese peasants carry. Merely removing the wrappers saved one third of their weight. I knew that it risked a great deal of breakage, but space would be at a premium as we flew across China. During my work later in Moscow, in that vast quantity of flash bulbs I found only six that were even cracked.
The luxurious Chinese world which Hong Kong presented began swinging toward the opposite extreme when we started our flight to the war capital of Chungking. We were taken to the airport at midnight to wait for an unannounced departure time. Since three hours of the flight were made over Japanese-held territory, the take-offs were planned when two layers of cloud would offer the best possible chance for the Douglas to pick its course between them, unseen from the ground, and with the hope of being undetected by enemy planes that might be scouting above. Since there was always the chance that we might have to make a forced landing back in the wilderness, in case an air raid over Chungking should make it impossible for us to land there, we were told to carry a couple of sandwiches.
We were flown by an American pilot and co-pilot, volunteers flying for the Chinese National Airways, who have since become famous in the group of American “Flying Tigers” who attacked the Japanese during the invasion of Malaya.
We flew in a plane laden with bales of money freshly printed to pay the Chinese soldiers, and every kilo of extra luggage brought for us, every camera and every film pack, displaced its weight in money. We sat on stacks of Chinese dollars, we tucked our legs around them, and I believe that if we had actually had to land in the wilderness we would have warmed our hands in front of fires built of money.
But the Japanese stayed out of our way that night, and after circling over intricately sculptured mountains, carved into whorls and arabesques by the agriculture of thousands of years, we darted down between two towering peaks and stepped out on a narrow landing field at the bank of the Yangtze.
At first I could hardly believe I was in Chungking; in the early-morning light it was difficult to see a human habitation anywhere. Then we began climbing the stone steps on the north bank-446 steep, by actual count—toward the capital on the mountaintop. Halfway up we began seeing people, hundreds and thousands of people. They were carrying little baskets of cracked rock out of the newly blasted dugouts; they were squatting in the road, dipping chopsticks into bowls of rice; some of the luckier ones were riding in sedan chairs carried up the breathlessly steep streets by two human beings. The roads were lined with dugouts carved out of solid rock, dugouts not only for humans, but also for automobiles and trucks. Everywhere there was the never-ending activity of building.
The Kialing House, our hotel, in addition to being filled with its usual foreign population, was overflowing with a fashionable Chinese wedding, proceeding in the midst of much starched pink tarlatan and massed artificial flowers. The many cell-like bedrooms were being utilized by the gentlemen guests, who were changing to swallow-tails and tuxedos, the last costume that we expected to see in war-torn China. However, a corner cot was found for us, and depositing our luggage on it we made off to the Soviet Embassy.