LOFTER-网易轻博

2

A glimpse of China

We sailed from the Pool of London at dawn on Christmas Day, 1936. My British shipmates were disgruntled at having to leave on Christmas Day and many of them had hangovers from consolatory junketings in the Galleons Inn the night before. But the Chinese crew were glad to be leaving this land of cold and fog and to be sailing back to their homes and families.

I stood on deck, so excited at the prospect of a great adventure that I paid no heed to the biting wind as fussy tugs nosed us out into the tideway and as we slipped down London's great river, past forests of cranes, past warehouses crammed with strange goods exuding smells which I could not recognize, past breweries giving off a fragrance which I could recognize all too easily, past ships from all over the world, past the pompous magnificence of Green­wich until, imperceptibly, the river became an estuary and the estuary became the sea.

Then the movement of the ship felt different. We no longer glided; we thrust our way forward and the wind and the waves tried to hold us back. The powerful old engines throbbed and sent a tremor through the ship as we gained speed and carved our way through the grey sea.

Under the captain, the undisputed master of the ship, were three main departments, deck, engine room and stewarding, with two minor departments, radio and medical. Between the three main departments there was intense rivalry and mutual dislike.

With the exception of the third officer, I got on very well with my shipmates. He, however, became my mortal enemy. He was a racist, a fascist, a braggart and a snob. He had acquired some kind of public-school accent and he threw his weight about insufferably. The Spanish Civil War was on and as we sailed down the coast of Spain towards Gibraltar we spotted some British destroyers engaged in enforcing the farce of ‘non-intervention’,which meant prohibiting aid from reaching the legal Spanish Republican Government while Hitler and Mussolini poured in a stream of weapons for their protege, General Franco. The Third Officer gloated: ‘Franco will teach those bastards a lesson.  He may use coloured troops but he knows how to handle them and he himself is a Christian and a Gentleman. Hitler will never let him down. We could do with a Hitler in England to keep the wogs and the upstarts in their place!'

At first I tried reasoning with him but we had no common ground and we drifted into enmity. Needless to say his hatred for coloured people didn’t stop him from whoring with native girls in every port of call. But, on one occasion, it proved to be a stronger force than his phoney patriotism. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was recent history and feeling still ran very high against the barbarities committed in the name of Mussolini’s ‘civilizing mission’. When we arrived in Shanghai, we found an Italian and a British warship there and one evening their crews engaged in a regular battle—ostensibly around the issue of the invasion of Ethiopia. Normally, the Third Officer would have been delighted to see the Italians get badly beaten up but on this occasion he supported them and said that ‘we’ had a lot to learn from Mussolini.

A few years later the ship was torpedoed and sunk by one of Hitler’s submarines. I do not know if any of my shipmates perished but, by an extraordinary quirk of fate, I know that the Third Officer did not. Nearly twenty-eight years after my voyage as ship’s surgeon, while on holiday in a North China seaside resort, I visited a nearby port where my ship had called. 

Walking along the jetty in the bright morning sunshine, my companions and I saw a British ship tied up alongside. One of the ship’s officers must have heard us talking English for he came down the gangplank to engage us in conversation. He was big, burly, red-faced, wore his cap at a rakish angle, spoke with a public-school accent and although it was not yet ten in the morning, he was swaying on his heels exhaling a fruity aroma of gin. It was my old enemy the Third Officer.

He had not the slightest idea who I was and at first I wasn’t quite sure about him. He asked us aboard to have a little drink, but I thought that time could have done nothing to bring us closer and I declined.

The daily ship’s inspection took us into the Chinese crew’s quarters and I was shocked at the contrast between their living conditions and ours.  Whereas the officers each had a cabin on deck, the Chinese crew were huddled together in the after part of the ship just above the propeller. Their quarters were hot, noisy and cramped but they kept them very clean.

Although their accommodation was poor, their food was much more appetizing than our own and I sometimes conducted a one-man ‘hygiene inspection' of the Chinese galley at meal times. When the Chinese cook sensed that my interests extended beyond the purely medical, he usually offered me a bowl of some tasty concoction and showed me how to use chopsticks. Then I would sit round on the after deck with the Chinese sailors, show my approval of their cooking by sign language and try to make contact with them. A few of them could speak English and from them I gradually acquired some understanding of the intense exploitation from which they suffered. They nearly all came from the big Southern ports where overcrowd­ing and poverty were acute. Jobs on foreign-going ships were highly sought after for the wages were comparatively good and, at least for the duration of the voyage, they were secure. Consequently an opportunity existed for their exploiter’s hangers-on to squeeze something for themselves and this was utilized to the full. In order to be considered for a job at sea, applicants had to bribe layers of brokers, middlemen, compradors and agents of all nationalities. To do this, they either had to borrow the bribe money or sign an undertaking to pay it off out of their wages at compound interest. In this way they lost the greater part of their wages before they saw a penny of it and since they usually signed over most of the remainder to their families, they themselves actually received very little in cash. Ah Li, my medical assistant, who kept the sick bay spick-and-span and dusted the regulation twelve Winchester quarts of medicine, found himself in possession of ten shillings as we neared the home port and he planned to use it to buy his little boy a tricycle. I doubted whether he could buy a tricycle for so little money but he assured me that it was sufficient and so it turned out to be, for in one of our ports of call, he bought a sturdy little Japanese-made tricycle which we parked in my cabin. As the ship slowly came alongside in Shanghai, Ah Li spotted his wife on the quayside holding their baby son in her arms. He rushed into my cabin, more excited than I had ever seen him, seized the tricycle and held it aloft for his son to see. When the child realized the treasure in store for him, he almost flew through the air to get it and the parents’ delight at the child’s happiness made it a most moving reunion.

In Shanghai, the old crew was paid off and a new crew signed on. When the applicants had bribed, cajoled and squeezed their way through all obstacles, they still had to cross the medical hurdle. A rigorous medical selection had already taken place before I saw them, for most of the men had sailed before and none of them was prepared to squander bribe money if there was no chance of passing the medical test. Nevertheless I could feel the tension as the men lined up for examination; their future, the future of their families, whether they would eat or go hungry, whether they would sleep with a roof over their heads or doss down on the waterfront, depended on the result of my examination. I had always known that medicine cannot be divorced from social conditions but now, at the very beginning of my medical career, I was confronted by the contradiction between health, exploitation and poverty in a particularly naked form. In the crowded conditions aboard ship it would be easy for a man with open TB to infect a dozen others during a voyage and I therefore regarded the detection of infectious diseases as my main duty. 

I took this, my first real medical undertaking, very seriously and tackled it slowly and thoroughly. This irritated some of the officers who wanted to get ashore to the delights of Shanghai and they urged me to get a move on, telling me of previous ship’s surgeons who had done the whole job in a couple of hours. But I plodded on, conscious of my lack of experience and of the serious consequences of making a mistake. Many of the men had evidence of vitamin deficiency diseases but unless their symptoms were severe, I usually passed them, for with good food they would recover within a few weeks and they presented no danger to their shipmates. I rejected men with active venereal disease, but I passed those with small ruptures for this was their only chance to save enough money to get them operated on, while if, by chance, they strangulated at sea, I would be able to deal with them surgically.

In spite of my somewhat lenient requirements, I examined more than two hundred applicants in order to select eighty. This will give some idea of the poor state of health even among skilled seafaring men.

Although it is more than thirty years since I first went ashore in Shanghai, some scenes, some impressions of the week I spent there are indelibly etched on my mind.

The beggars. The swarms of beggars of all ages, whole and diseased, vociferous and silent, hopeful and hopeless, blind and seeing. All having in common their poverty, their degradation.

The prostitutes. The smart ones in the foreign concessions with makeup, high-heeled shoes and skin-tight dresses slit to the thigh. The cheap ones in the sailors’ districts, unkempt, raucous, brazen, The child prostitutes. The two frightened, bewildered little girls dragged along, one in each hand, by their owner who offered them singly or together for fifty cents an hour.

The poverty. The rows of matsheds where hundreds of thousands lived and died. The hunger-swollen bellies. The rummaging in garbage bins for possible scraps of food.

The children. I can do no better than quote a Canadian hotelier who lived in pre-Liberation Shanghai for more than twenty years and who, on a return visit in 1965, recalled the familiar sights of old Shanghai:【1】 

‘I searched for scurvy-headed children. Lice-ridden children. Children with inflamed red eyes. Children with bleeding gums. Children with distended stomachs and spindly arms and legs. I searched the sidewalks day and night for children who had been purposely deformed by beggars. Beggars who would leech on to any well-dressed passer-by to blackmail sympathy and offerings, by pretending the hideous-looking child was their own. 

‘I looked for children covered with horrible sores upon which flies feasted. 

‘I looked for children having a bowel movement, which, after much strain, would only eject tapeworms. ‘I looked for child slaves in alleyway factories. Children who worked twelve hours a day, literally chained to small press punches. Children who, if they lost a finger, or worse, often were cast into the streets to beg and forage in garbage bins for future subsistence?’

In 1965 he searched without finding, but in the 1930s there was no need to search far for such sights were everywhere to be seen.

Rewi Alley, New Zealand writer and poet, for many years chief inspector of factories in Shanghai, wrote:

 ‘I think back on the eleven years of factory inspection in Shanghai, and of all the crude exploitation seen. The long lines of weeping children, many only nine or ten, stirring the basins of silk cocoons in silk filatures, the dead-weary apprentices with beri-beri swollen legs in the dark sweat shops of back alleyways, the exploited contract labour working their twelve-hour shifts in cotton mills, and all the rest of the filthy oppression the system brought in its train. Then the end of the road for prostitutes thrown up by an utterly wicked society, whose life amongst the cheap brothels on Foochow Road averaged two years. The callous, bloated rich and the incredible poverty of the poor.’ 

The bodies floating down the river. Leaning against the ship rail, I could see them bobbing up and down in the murky water, now hitching against a buoy or a mooring rope; now breaking free to continue their journey down to the Peaceful Ocean. I asked the bosun whose bodies they were, where they had come from. He shrugged. Not with indifference but with resignation and with great sadness. ‘Who knows? All are different. Some just died but no money for burial. Some jumped into the river out of great sorrow. Some were thrown in by their enemies. There is famine up the river and many thousands die each day. There are bandits. There are soldiers who are no different from bandits. These days, many girls are sold into the Houses of Joy and some prefer the river. China is sick and that is why there are many bodies in the river.’ 

The wealth. Ostentatious, overflowing wealth. Shop fronts of onyx and stainless steel. Shop windows crammed with diamonds and gold. The Longest Bar in the world where a Tom Collins cost more than a labourer could earn in a month; where women flashed rings that would ransom thousands from death and desolation.

The rickshaw races. Fat foreigners from many countries, straw-hatted and sweating, choosing their pullers. Poking them in the ribs to size them up. 

Lining them up for the start. All fair and square. Nothing crooked about this type of race, good fun. Once the length of the Bund. Barely a mile. A dollar for the winner and fifty cents for the runner-up. Pretty generous when you come to think of it. The pullers. Straining every muscle, gasping for breath, half-naked bodies dripping with sweat.

The Great World. The biggest, noisiest, most extraordinary amusement centre in existence. Snacks and drinks to tickle every palate. Shops selling everything imaginable and unimaginable. Peking opera competing with leg shows, acrobatics with strip-tease, magicians with mademoiselles. All jostling one another, all screaming for customers, all itching to empty your pockets. I did not know it then, but I was in the heart of the empire of Tu Yueh-sheng（杜月笙）, leader of the Green Gang secret society of which Chiang Kai-shek（老蒋） was a member, unofficial Mayor of Shanghai, King of Shanghai's pimps, drug peddlers and brothel keepers, holder of more directorates of Chinese banks and business houses than any other man in Shanghai, decorated by Chiang Kai-shek, owner of a private army of fifteen thousand armed thugs, a multi­millionaire gangster listed in China’s ‘Who’s Who’ for 1930 as banker, philanthropist and welfare worker.

Imperialism. Shanghai, the greatest city of a sovereign country, with warships from every country moored in her main artery, their sailors roaming the streets at will, a law unto themselves. The city was sliced up into the International and French concessions, both enjoying extraterritoriality. Criminals had only to cross the concession boundary to escape the law, but an unwritten agreement stipulated that suspected communists would be handed over on request. The police officers were foreigners and the ordinary Chinese policemen under their command wore foreign-type uniforms. I went to the British Bank on the waterfront to cash a cheque for £10. A huge, imposing building with granite pillars and flights of marble steps. At the top, bearded Sikhs holding rifles with fixed bayonets guarded great bronze doors. I felt that I must have made a mistake, they could not possibly cash cheques for £10 here. So I asked the Sikh guard, and while I did so, a Chinese peddler sneaked past, hoping to sell his cigarettes inside. The Sikh spotted him, thrust a rifle butt viciously into his loins, and kicked him down the marble stairs. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he explained, ‘they think they own the place!’

The Chinese certainly owned Shanghai, but they were not to take possession for another twelve years.

Within a few days of leaving Shanghai to continue our voyage northward, one of the crew reported sick with fever, pains in the limbs and severe head­ache. I could find no cause for his illness, so I put him to bed. I instructed Ah Li to feed and nurse him, and I visited him twice a day. The sick bay was stocked, according to Board of Trade regulations, with twelve Winchester quarts of medicines. They were labelled, I supposed, according to the diseases they were alleged to cure. One bottle, however, was described as ‘Sweating Mixture’, and I was not sure whether it was to cure or to cause sweating. I tried a dose and concluded it was either aspirin or something similar. Then I gave some to the patient, and although it eased his headache, the fever continued and his general condition gradually deteriorated. He became weak, refused all food and his mind became clouded. On the third day I noticed a faint rash(疹子) on his chest, and a slight distension of the abdomen. I suspected typhoid fever（伤寒）, and decided to keep him isolated until we reached the next port. 

As we sailed into harbour I took a blood sample, and sent it ashore for urgent examination. Within a few hours the report came; he was suffering not from typhoid fever, but from typhus fever（斑疹伤寒）. In this part of the world the two diseases resemble one another so closely that, if one asks for a blood test for one of them, the laboratory also carries out a test for the other.

The patient was put ashore and taken to the hospital for infectious diseases, where, as I was later informed, he made a good recovery. But he created all sorts of complications for the ship. Typhus fever is carried by lice, and if there were infected lice on board, not only could there be a danger of the disease spreading among the crew but, much more serious for the quarantine authorities, we were a source of danger to every port where we docked. Unless and until I could issue a certificate declaring that this danger did not exist, we would not be allowed to go alongside and no one would be allowed ashore.

The lice were the key to the situation. If there were no lice, there was no danger.

I assembled the crew on deck and, assisted by Ah Li, systematically examined their quarters, bedding and clothing. We did not find a single louse. 

Then I asked the crew to strip, and I examined their bodies with similar negative results. We then inspected the officers and their quarters in the same way, finally Ah Li and I examined one another. Only the Fascist-minded Third Officer refused to be inspected, saying that since he never went near the ‘yellow bastards’, he ‘could not have got their bloody lice’. But, when I pointed out that we had not found any lice on the Chinese, and, maybe, he had given them his ‘bloody lice’,he reluctantly agreed.

Since there were no lice on the ship, the sick sailor must have been infected before joining and must have been incubating the disease when I examined him. I signed a statement to this effect, and the Port Sanitary Officer, after a perfunctory search, countersigned it. We were then allowed to go alongside and tie-up after large metal rat discs, which would preclude a rat from running along the ropes to the quay, had been fixed to the mooring lines.

The next port was a dismal looking place, which served as an outlet for a British-owned coal-mine. We took on enough coal here to last us for the rest of the voyage and during the loading I obtained an idea of current rates of pay for Chinese labourers.

I watched the tall, lean North Chinese carrying coal several hundred yards from the dump. Working in pairs, they would fill a heavy wicker basket, take it up the ship's side, tip the coal into the bunkers, and be paid for the trip as they left the gangplank. The rate was one cash a trip between the two men. This worked out at one-fiftieth of a penny a trip a man, at the current rate of exchange. Since one round trip took about ten minutes, a man was unlikely to get in more than fifty trips a day, for which he would get the equivalent of one penny. It is possible this could buy enough coarse grain to keep a man alive, but what their families lived on, or what happened when there was no ship in port, can only be imagined.

As we sailed North, the weather became colder and the sea lost its blueness. We had travelled through tropical seas for several weeks and, while I had an adequate supply of white cotton uniforms, I lacked cold weather clothing. Soon it became exceptionally cold. It was February, and by the time we reached Dairen, ice was floating on the sea. The steam pipes had not been lagged, and as soon as we docked, they froze and we were left without heating in our cabins, without hot water and tasted scarcely any hot food. Gloom descended.

We were loading soya bean oil in bulk, a difficult task that necessitated the re-arrangement of all the other cargo. This was the Chief Officer’s responsibility and he groaned under the weight of it. He insisted on doing everything himself and complained that no one helped him. His lady friend, a White Russian emigrée of whom he had been speaking throughout the voyage, did not appear as expected, and he had no time to go ashore. The weather got colder and colder and gradually he worked himself into a state of acute anxiety. One afternoon, when his steward went to his cabin with a cup of tea, he found the door locked on the inside, the port holes tightly screwed down and no answer to his vigorous banging. There was nothing for it but to smash the door, and this was done in the nick of time. The distraught Chief Officer, determined to get warm and forget his troubles, had brought two charcoal burners into his cabin and had gone to bed with the cat. The animal was already dead from carbon monoxide fumes given off by the smouldering charcoal and the Chief Officer was unconscious and breathing irregularly. I carried him out on deck, gave him artificial respiration, and warmed him with hot water bottles while Ah Li rushed ashore to get an ambulance. Within half an hour we were racing through the streets of Dairen to the City Hospital.

Dairen was then a Japanese colony, and the hospital was staffed by Japanese doctors and nurses. I remember that it was intensely hot, with an overpowering stench of garlic. Going into the hospital from the bitterly cold, windswept streets, was like entering an oven, with the heat accentuated by the crowds of people inside, all chewing garlic, which was thought to protect against respiratory tract infections.

The Chief Officer developed pneumonia, but he recovered with sulpha drugs（磺胺类药剂） and with a form of wave therapy greatly favoured by the Japanese doctors. 

We had to sail without him, but he caught an aeroplane to Singapore in time to rejoin the ship on the homeward journey.

The Japanese colonialists were arrogant and overbearing towards their imperialist rivals, but they treated the Chinese with viciousness. Curses, kicks and lashes were distributed liberally on the slightest provocation, or even on none at all, and it was easy to sense the smouldering hatred the brutality aroused. At that time, in that place, the Chinese were powerless to resist, but elsewhere in China the Communist armies were regrouping after their heroic Long March, and a weapon was being forged which, in eight years, would smash the mighty Japanese military machine and humble the arrogant conquerors.

On our return journey we again called at Shanghai, and a passenger, who had left the ship there a few weeks earlier, sent me an invitation to a banquet.

It was my first experience of the delights of first-class Chinese cooking, and even after all these years I recall the procession of crisp sucking pig, mandarin fish, plovers’ eggs, roast duck, truffles and soups of surpassing delicacy. Whenever it seemed that the end had been reached, and gluttony had been subdued, a momentary pause in the succession of dishes signalled the appearance of a culinary tour-de-force which began the whole process over again.

Late at night the party came to an end and I began my walk towards the ship. The streets were quiet, deserted, and a gusty sea wind drove rain clouds across the moon. From round a corner came the sound of marching feet. Soldiers appeared, escorting a young man, stripped to the waist, his hands tied behind him, his hair tousled and his face bruised and swollen. He marched with pride as though leading the soldiers. 

When I reached the boatman who would row me out to the ship, I asked him what was the meaning of the strange procession. The young man, he said, was a Communist or at least, he might be one. In any event, he would be shot since he was under suspicion. There were such processions every night; sometimes many.

As the boatman rowed me across the swift, dark waters of the Whangpoo, I could see his family huddling in the bottom of the boat which was their home and their source of livelihood. A few flimsy planks separated them from the turbulent river, a few coins saved them from starvation. I thought of the unseen bodies floating down the river. I thought of the pain, the misery, and the degradation that was China. I thought of the contrast between the meal I had just eaten and the gnawing hunger of millions of Chinese. ‘They must rise up’, I said to myself. ‘They must rise in revolution. A vast, searing revolution that will destroy all the evil, the oppression, the brutality, so that they can build anew!’ 

What I did not know was that in the vast hinterland, in the hovels of the treaty ports, in the sweatshops and foreign-owned mines, on remote mountain sides, the revolution was already seething and gaining strength; that the Chinese people had already found leaders on whom they could rely; that the young man holding high his bruised, battered head as he marched to the execution ground was typical of countless thousands of anonymous heroes who in the end were to win victory for the revolution.

【1】W. H. Scott, Eastern Horizon,Vol. V. No. 6. June 1966