When I attended the University of Hawaii in the late '30s, I took part in a fundraising campaign to help students in China who were carrying universities on their shoulders in moving inland from the coastal area to the hinterland. They were escaping the Japanese invaders. I wrote a guest column in Ka Leo, the campus newspaper, and an article in a downtown daily in appealing for funds.
In the university's Oriental Institute library, I read literature on the valiant struggle of Chinese students and I was impressed by stories and illustrations of students studying in caves in a place known as Yenan. I wrote about the cave classrooms in the Ka Leo column, not having the faintest idea that Yenan was the capital of Red China and that I would be there about five years later as an army G-2 personnel member.
Yenan was just as I had seen it in pictures at the university library—a long valley with bordering hills pockmarked with tiers upon tiers of caves.
Stilwell Wanted To Use The Guerrilla Forces
The U. S. Army Observer Section in Yenan to which I was assigned in October 1944, was probably the farthest U. S. military outpost in the Pacific war. It was established when Chiang Kai-shek finally gave in to American pressure to allow U. S. observers into Chinese Communist-led, liberated and guerrilla territories. Chiang's army in China was lying down in anti-Japanese resistance, and it was General Joseph Stilwell's idea to bring the partisan forces into the orbit of allied strategy under him and supply them with necessary light equipment to fight the enemy.
When American observers first arrived in Yenan, they were not sold on reports of Communist China's popular democracy or all-out anti-Japanese resistance. They saw in Yenan a broad representation of the people in government and machinery provided for even the illiterates to vote. Earthern jars were placed behind candidates or their pictures, and the voters cast their ballots by dropping beans or grain in them.
A Different China From the One He Knew
I recall a long talk I had with an OSS captain shortly after I arrived in Yenan. He spoke Chinese fluently and he was getting around quite a bit by himself, making personal observations among the people. He had been brought up in China and he was one of several observers who spoke one or more dialects.
He told ma that Yenan and the Communist liberated and guerrilla bases behind the Japanese lines were different in many respects from the China he had known from childhood. He said that once the partisans liberated an area from the Japanese, they reduced land rent from 50 or 60 per cent of the crop to 371/2 per cent, encouraged the peasants to increase production, established governments, organized schools for the young and old, put a stop to begging and prostitution by rehabilitating people, and wiped out usury.
I Was Told To Lean Backwards In My Reports
"You can't write a straight report of what you observe here," the OSS captain told me. "The social values of people here and life in general don't seem Chinese, and we haven't seen anything like this in China. You've got to lean backward to write reports with extreme objectivity."
Otherwise, he said, my superiors in the Chungking headquarters who accept graft, begging and prostitution as a part of life, especially in Asia, would discredit my observations as propaganda.
Some Americans said Yenan was "window dressing" and began going behind Japanese lines to see for themselves in guerrilla territory. Raymond Ludden, experienced foreign service officer of our State Department, went on such a trip. When he returned to Washington after an extended trip into guerrilla China, he reported the Communist-led troops suffered from an acute shortage of supplies, but that "they would put to good use any material they got." He added that the mass support the Communist troops enjoyed everywhere he went "was on too large a scale and too widespread to be merely window dressing."
In time, I also moved around and saw the popular support which the Communists, their troops and civilian workers enjoyed among the peasants.
My Assignment With the Japanese and Koreans
But in the early days of my assignment in Yenan, my work was cut out to strictly surveying Communist psychological warfare. I began going to the Japanese Workers and Peasants School and to the headquarters of the Japanese People's Emancipation League. The students and members of the league were prisoners of war who had been converted against Japanese militarism. They were living normal lives without guards, owned a cooperative store in Yenan, produced food and spun cotton to partly pay their expenses. They lived better than the Chinese soldiers, and the soldiers and government officials told me that good treatment was essential in helping them turn away from militarism and prepare them for a life in postwar, democratic Japan. Furthermore, they said the Japanese standard, of living
was higher and so they were used to better food than the Chinese. Beyond the bill with caves, which were the living quarters, classrooms and offices of the prisoner converts, was a valley occupied by Korean patriots who had their school and their Independence League. The leaders of the Korean league were veterans of the independence movement, fighting the Japanese subjugators from the underground of cities in Korea, Manchuria and China. Some had joined the guerrilla forces in Manchuria, beginning with the late '20s, to attack the Japanese forces ruling Korea. Here, too, like the Japanese organization, the majority were prisoner converts.
No One Called Us "Hi, Joe!" As In Chungking
As I walked to and from these organizations every day, I had ample opportunity to watch the Chinese people going about naturally in performing their everyday activities. Sometimes, walking all alone on the valley floor, I felt the strange absence of voices calling "Hi, Joe!" and the sight of grinning souvenir vendors or pimps who followed GIs in India and in Nationalist China. No one in Yenan offered to buy GI cigarettes or lighters or chocolate. There were no money changers. This was because of the non-existence of a black market.
This indifference of the Chinese populace towards Americans, who received overwhelming attention from the poor in India, and Nationalist China, made a strong impression on me through an unforgettable incident. It happened about a week after my trip into Yenan.
We Took a Lessen In Horseback Riding
A State Department official and I were returning from the school for Japanese. From the eaves where we had spent the day, we walked down into the valley. When I tried to ride my horse, the saddle slipped under his belly, since a well-meaning Chinese had loosened the belts of our hitched horses. My horse began kicking. This agitated the other horse. When the State Department official mounted his horse it started off at a trot.
He yelled: "Whoa! Whoa!" and yanked the bridle with all his might.
His horse ran faster and faster and broke into a gallop. He jumped off, rolling in the dust, arid miraculously escaped injury.
A Chinese caught the runaway horse and rode back to us. His riding form was most unusual. He leaned backward, pulling the bridle back with legs in stirrups stretched out front and outward. The horse trotted beautifully.
The Horse Did Not Understand Our Language
The Chinese looked at the great big white man, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and covered with dust. In sign language and in his dialect, he tried to explain to us that the horse did not understand our riding habits. He demonstrated that to stop a horse, the rider had to yank only one side of the bridle to turn the horse's head clear around so that it could not see in front. We said to ourselves that these horses were broken in Mongolian fashion, to trot at a fast pace.
The Chinese interrupted us, pointing to his lips which gave off this sound: "Bl-l-l-l-l, Bl-l-l-l-l," and he made a sign that meant saying "Whoa!" is wrong horse language.
We thanked the man and we walked, leading our horses by their reins. We did not want to get thrown off. Although the American compound was only 20 minutes away, we could not find it by nightfall. We tramped around the narrow, barren valley for almost two hours.
We Kept Asking: "Where Are the Americans?"
We stopped every Chinese on the road to ask for direction to our headquarters. We walked into an army garrison and into private compounds, but people did not seem to know what we wanted.
We kept repeating over and over to everyone we met: "Mei kuo jen ts'ai na ri? (Where are the Americans?)"
Peasants and merchants laughed at us and finally we had to laugh with them. They spoke to us and asked questions in their dialect. We couldn't understand them so we walked on, thanking them, and they continued with whatever they were doing.
In India or Kunming, we said, we would be swarmed by people by this time, trying to do business with us. And they would know where the Americans lived.
The People Were Not Chasing After U. S. Dollars
But here we were lost in a narrow valley because the people were not chasing after GI dollars. Finally a soldier guided us back to our compound. I was thoroughly tired and exasperated.
That night after I had washed and finished supper, I recapitulated our experience. It became extremely humorous, the more I thought of it. I wrote it down in my diary as the second unique experience. The first was when the American colonel told the officers and men to unload their prophylactics because there were no prostitutes in Yenan.
Up to then my experience was that everywhere Americans went, the native people catered to them, making GIs feel they were the most important people, and taking their dollars which the soldiers squandered with a flourish.
But here we had asked among the valley people: "Where are the Americans?" for two solid hours and some had reacted as though to ask: "Are the Americans here?"