CHINA CALLING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 6

CHINA CALLING

T was a windy morning in Tokyo. The staff-car swayed across a sagging bridge on to a smelly sandbank, turned left towards a huddle of army huts. A young American artillery lieutenant came whistling out of an office: the reporter from the Stars and Stripes did the introductions. "Very pleased indeed to meet you, Mr. Uh-huh. Can I show you round?" "Thanks," I said. "But I think I know the way. I used to live here." The sign above the doorway read: "QMORI PRISON". "Is that so?" said the young lieutenant with a new interest. "Were you here as a P.O.W.? Well, well, too bad we hayen’t still got Tojo on show. We had him here with a whole bunch of his pals, but they didn’t like it. Said it was too cold. So we shifted them across to Sugamo." I nodded. I had been to Sugamo, that modern gaol-building that rises white amid the blackened ashes of Tokyo, where some 500 Japanese war criminals were awaiting trial and sentence: and where I had met some old friends. It hadn’t been a very pleasant experience for them or for me. I was trying to forget about it. Goodbye to Omori But this was my last visit to Tokyo, this trip to the prison camp where with comrades-in-arms from Hong Kong and the Philippines I had lived and worked for the Nips, and watched Tokyo burn, and seen out the last two years of the Far Eastern war. Here at Omori every window and paling spoke to me of the past. There was not a yard of this infected sand that was not soaked with human tragedy. Suffering, heroism, and endurance; the living drama of men that I had known, within these narrow walls. And now it was a U.S. army billet, and cafeless G.I.’s strode between wooden huts that for them held no gnnete.: ss... 9 We made the rounds of the camp, and the boys from the Stars and Stripes got their pictures. I tried to tell the young American officer how it had felt when we watched a burning B-29 come low above Omori, to plunge magnificently into the shallow bay. And how it felt when the first U.S. carrier-borne planes showed up after the Japanese surren‘der. I tried, and I gave it up; some things just don’t go into words. : "Only one thing, lieutenant," I asked at the finish. "I see you’ve got Japanese carpenters at work in the old guardhousd. Would you mind if I took a couple of panels from the wall, just as a souvenir?" "Why, surely! Help yourself to the whole darn camp." The Nips had knocked out two walls ‘ of my old cell; but the inner walls remained. "See those panels? I can tell you just what’s behind each one of them. Cardboard cartons there, empty Spam tins there, Sun Maid raisin wrappers!" The ligutenant’s eyes popped as I ripped off the light pinewood with a crowbar, to expose the evidence of one prisoner’s forgotten exploits. "Well, I'll. be-." The cameraman got busy again, while the lieutenant chuckled over the story of Wilfie and his Red Cross parcels.* I held up the wooden panels to the light. "See any writing there?" . Tiny characters, scratched with the point of a nail-the verses I had tried to remember and put down on the walls *See "The Listener" July 19 and 26,

of my cell during the long days of solitary confinement. Poetry has its uses; it had helped to keep me sane. And that was the only souvenir I wanted from Japan-two bits of pinewood from the wall of a cell. They could keep their samurai swords and their steel helmets. Three days later I was sitting in a room in a villa in the old French Concession in Shanghai. Outside, beyond the foreign avenues, rose the distant rumour of the Chinese city; and that curious rustling-as of thick-packed human bodies--that is in the very air of China, even in her remotest provinces. But here it was very quiet, in this room «where the portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-sen looked down from the wall, and a grave, soft-voiced Chinese woman was showing me some written scrolls. "This is the first draft of the Constitution of the Chinese Republic, in my husband’s own handwriting. . . . . This is a collection of poems he made for me: This is the first official sword worn by

the President of China." I handled the relics with the reverence they deserved -tokens of owe of the few really great men of our time. "You know my old house in Shanghai?" Mme. Sun went on. "It is being restored, and I am presenting it to the Chiriese nation as a Sun Yat-sen memorial museum. All these treasures wil! be placed there." + Then with a swift change of mood, and with a flash of the gaiety that still made her seem like a young girl-the girl who, on her way home from college in America, stopped in Japan to meet an old friend and found a life mission -Mme. Sun said to me, "But you must drink your coffee. And this is Hami melon; a pilot brought it. to me from Sinkiang. It is the best melon in the world!" China Needs Our Aid All through the long evening we talked of China, and of China’s needs.

And watching that clear, beautiful face with its tragic eyes, I marvelled again at the serenity of this childless widow of the founder of the Chinese Republic, who since her husband’s death has become the guardian of the things. he fought for, and the mother of a whole people. Chinese women have played a notable role in history, and there are many distinguished women leaders in China today, including the two other remarkable Soong sisters. But Mme, Sun Yat-sen stands a little apart from the rest. By her devotion to her husband’s memory and her loyalty to the common Chinese people, by her personal integrity and some rare inner quality of spirit that is as easy to recognise as it is hard to define, she is China: and she can speak for her people as no one else can. *I had last seen her in Hong Kong, when ,Japanese shells were falling around us, and she had only with difficulty been persuaded to leave by the last plane, just twelve hours before the airfield fell to the advancing enemy. Since then she had been in Chungking, carrying on with her relief work on behalf of China’s guerrilla fighters. Now in Shanghai she was Chairman of the China Welfare Fund Committee, still pledged to support the International Peace Hospitals that had been founded by Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian specialist who was the first foreign volunteer doctor to give his life for China on the northern battlefronts. And over the whole postwar Chinese scene, like a new nightmare piled upon past horrors, hung the shadow of civil war. "More than ever before," Mme. Sun told me, "we need the help of our friends abroad.» We need their help to prevent any further deterioration of the political situation. We need their help to relieve the terrible distress and eggs ng of the Chinese people, who ha fighting longer than anyone ‘atphinet fascist aggression." At that very moment, the Shanghai hotel where I was staying was filled with an impressive staff of UNRRA experts, and UNRRA goods and supplies were piling up in Shanghai go-downs. But complications of local authority and transport and-a good deal of plain old-fashioned racketeering, were further confusing a confused situation. Not long after this an order from Mr. La Guardia blocked the shipment of UNRRA supplies to China, pending the clearing of the ports and a review of the whole relief set-up. When I left that house in the rue Henri Riviére, I left with a private gift of the kind the Chinese make more gracefully than anyone else in the world — this was a silver cigarette-case with Mme. Sun’s own initials engraved upon it. What could I give in return? It had to be something personal, and it had to be something I valued. So I gave her one of those pinewood panels from a Japanese prison-cell, on which I had inscribed a series of quotations on freedom. It was a poor thing, but it had some meaning. "You are going back now to your own country," Mme. Sun told me as I left. "But I think you will return to China, to help us in our struggle for democracy and for peace. And I know that you will do what you can to get help from New Zealand for China in her need." . Time Off for Typing 7 Back in Auckland, after I had made my report to the Government on the Far Eastern situation, almost against, my own judgment I plunged into the writing of the book that was to tell my own

story of the war years in the Far East. Publishers were gloomy — the public, they said, had had enough of war and prison camps. A novel might sell, but even that was doubtful. Then Peg Snow, that tireless crusader, wrote from New York: "Books like yours must be written. It’s all for the record-if it doesn’t get down on paper now, it will be lost for good. Finish it off quickly and get it out of your system." A month ago I typed the last chapters, and got the manuscript off to London and New York. That was that; now it was about time for that New Zealand holiday I'd promised myself for four years and hadn’t yet got round to. But China was calling again, and calling pretty insistently. Letters from Rewi Alley, clamouring for the New Zealand sheep he didn’t get last time (sheep that are badly needed to improve the breed and the fleece of Indusco flocks in Kansu). An S.O.S. for a science man to work at the Bailie School for Indusco apprentices. Letters from Bishop Hall in Hong Kong, asking for New Zealand wool for the new co-operative factories being planned with help from Britain in South China. Finally, early in September, a letter from’ Mme. Sun asking me to join her International Promotion Committee, and giving details of the work already planned. "With all of China. liberated," she wrote, "the job we have to do is tremendous. Not only must these activities be expanded to meet the growing needs, but new projects are always appearing. "This organisation has proved that the Chinese people are fully capable of

helping themselves, but at this moment in history they need aid from the outside. They need relief and rehabilitation aid which actually gets to them." What Can We Do For China? Surely, I thought, if New Zealanders knew of a way to help China that would be direct, specific and concrete, there must be a ready response. Many people had been disturbed by reports of the UNRRA failure in China; and anyway, UNRRA was on the way out. But the need in China was greater than ever; all we needed to find was the means. I knew from many groups and meetings I had spoken to how great was the goodwill in this country towards the Chinese people; how strong the desire to help such an organisation as Rewi Alley’s Industrial Co-operatives. What is a psychological moment? It was just at this point that CORSO, the

N.Z. Council of Organisations for Relief Service Overseas, through which New Zealanders have already made a major voluntary contribution to direct relief in Greece, announced that it was moving into the China field. CORSO has received urgent requests for medical and relief volunteers to work with the International Relief Committee in China (which operates chiefly through established mission hospitals). CORSO is now appealing in New Zealand for volunteers and for funds to support and supply them. CORSO needed an Appeals Organiser for three months, I wanted to do something here for China-something about Rewi Alley’s sheep and Bishop Hall’s wool and things like the International Peace Hospitals. And so I scrapped that New Zealand holiday. But before I left Auckland to come south and start on my new job, I took out the wooden panel I had brought back from Japan and read over some of the verses on it. Among others there was the "Harper’s Song" from Wilhelm Meister-the song that has always had a special meaning to prisoners: Who never ate his bread with tears Who never, through the anxious night-time, Alone sat weeping on his bedHe knows you not, you heavenly powers.

That was it, or as near as anybody had ever come to saying it. You can never really hate prisons until you’ve been a prisoner yourself. You can never imagine what outside help means to a Chinese peasant to-day unless you’ve lived for years like an Asiatic coolie yourself — condemned like him to the risks of violence and war, to lice and disease and back-breaking toil on a diet not fit for a dog. I was lucky enough to live through that, and to come back home to these untouched Pacific islands (so beautiful that Katherine Mansfield used to feel they must have been dipped "beneath the blue waves.every night, to rise again at blink of day). Islands where the dogs have their meat bought for them, where happy people drive off to the beach for the week-ends and only the men who were overseas really know how~the rest of the world is living. ,

A Debt and a Responsibility

But no man is an island, entire unto himself. We cannot escape our cofnmitments abroad, nor can we dodge our own consciences. New Zealanders on guard duty ih Yamaguchi to-day are a reminder of how far our post-war responsibilities stretch in the Pacific. And

the fate of the Chinese people should mean something to us- those Chinese peasants who fought for eight years to help preserve our own freedom: whose reward to-day is, post-war chaos and mass starvation. A couple of questions have often been put to me by New Zealanders since my return. "How do we find out what China needs? And what tan we do to help? The answer to both is a single word: CORSO. Whatever happens to UNRRA, CORSO is going to continue its relief work overseas. After Greece, it intends to make China its chief field of operations. Full details of specific projects will soon be available. Meantime, if you wish to help, this is what you can do: (1) Make contact with your local CORSO Committee, or if there isn’t one in your town, help to form one. (2) If you want assistance, write in to CORSO Dominion Appeals Organiser, Government Buildings, P.O. Box 11, Wellington. . (3) Send a contribution to CORSO, marking it "for China." Greece called first for our help, and New Zealand responded by sending relief teams and supplies. China is ‘calling now.