Shanghai – First Impressions No.9 – Hallett Abend Arrives to Start Reporting, 1926

Posted: August 28th, 2013 | 1 Comment »

I Was Wrong From The Beginning – Hallett Abend – 1926

Hallett Abend arrived in Shanghai fresh from America only to be advised by George Sokolsky to go to Guangzhou; he did, sailed into a fire fight on the Pearl River and declared in his memoirs, ‘My fifteen years in China had begun – fifteen years in which boredom was never to return.’ Abend went on to become the well known China correspondent of the New York Times. When he had arrived in 1926 he was new to China but positively ancient for a foreign correspondent having already turned 40.

Abend was burgled repeatedly and then badly beaten at gun point by Japanese thugs in his 16^th floor Broadway Mansions apartment. He reluctantly returned to the US in 1941 after repeated threats to his life.

Guessing Wrong

Trained newspapermen are supposed to be able to dive into a new environment and, no matter how murky the medium, come up briskly and triumphantly with the pearl of truth. If that is the safe general rule, then I was a shocking exception when I first went to the Far East early in 1926, for I was wrong from the beginning, and my errors of appraisal were continuous for the first two months I spent in China.

In fact I guessed wrong from the time I booked my passage from San Francisco in the old Siberia Maru (1), for I planned only a vacation jaunt, and my round-trip ticket was good for only six months. Instead of returning after half a year, China was my home for nearly a decade and half, and I did not leave until the Japanese drove me out in mid-October of 1940.

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My first impressions of China were deceiving…The ship had already entered muddy waters before nightfall of the second day out of Kobe. I was wakened at dawn by the cessation of the pulsing of the engines, and jumped up eager for the sight of a new continent. Looking out of my porthole I saw unbelievably muddy water, a flat mud bank, and a high signboard in English advertising a well known brand of American chewing gum. No pagodas, no temple bells, no spice-laden breezes. Disgusted, I climbed back into my berth and slept until we were tying up at the dock in Shanghai.

On the way south, the ship stayed only one day at Shanghai – a day of drizzling rain and premature, muggy spring heat. It seemed to me the dirtiest city I had ever seen, and the poverty evident on the streets was horrible. Even the bars at the old Astor House and Palace Hotel seemed dreary. I should have been appalled had I been told I would make my home there for more than eleven years.

My quest for background news and feature stories seemed doomed to failure until I called upon George Sokolsky (2) to present a letter of introduction from another newspaper man in Japan.

“Don’t stay here,” counseled Sokolsky. “There’s nothing going on here now, and don’t go to Peking. It’s a morgue. Go to Canton. I’m just back from six weeks down there. No, I won’t prejudice you by telling you a thing, but go to Canton and look up Li Choy. He’s the editor of the Canton Gazette. I’ll write to him that you’ll be along.”

The dreary, rainy day in Shanghai served to dull my ardor for traveling, for sightseeing, and for vacationing, but I’d reserved passage on the same ship to Hongkong, to Manila, and back to Hongkong, and I followed out my schedule.

Hongkong was even worse than Shanghai had been. Rain and mist and muggy heat; and Manila seemed neither beautiful nor interesting on that first visit, except for furnishing me my first experience of two days of incessant tropical rainfall.

We sailed back to Hongkong, and my disillusionment with the Orient was almost complete when we were landed early in the morning in a driving rain. Leaving my trunks stored in the Hongkong Hotel, I took the noon boat upriver-the old flat-bottomed Fatshan, bound for Canton. We hooted our way up the Pearl River through a drizzling fog, and at dark anchored just off the island of Shameen, the foreign concession area of Canton. The island was nearly dark, but the city beyond threw a red glow into the clouds, and close by were two trim floodlighted little war vessels-American and British gunboats, I was told.

Landing was prohibited until daylight next morning, and an evening of complete boredom seemed certain until a pleasant Scot asked me to join him in a spot of liquor in the dining room.

We sat at a table, poured our drinks, and were just raising our glasses in a mutual toast when there was a rattle of rifle fire on the river. There was a crash of a windowpane at my back, and to my amazement the raised glass of whisky and soda in my companion’s hand seemed suddenly to explode. We both stared stupidly at his right hand, from which blood was spurting over the tablecloth.

The tip of his index finger had been shot off.

Before I could grab a napkin with which to staunch the blood, the Fatshan was completely blacked out, and a machine gun on the deck of the British gunboat began to sputter and cough tracer bullets into the misty darkness.

My fifteen years in China had begun – fifteen years in which boredom was never to return.

Hallett Abend, My Life in China 1926-1941, (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1943, New York)

 

 

1) The former Pacific Mail passenger liner Siberia which transferred to Japanese ownership and was renamed the Siberia Maru in 1916. The liner became well known to many traveling the Pacific in the 1920s from San Francisco/Seattle to Shanghai via Hawaii and Japan. In 1929 the Siberia Maru changed to the Puget Sound – British Columbia – Oriental route.

 

2) Sokolsky was a famously enigmatic figure in the foreign press corps. The son of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants to America, he had studied at Columbia University’s Journalism School. At 24 in 1917 he returned to Russia and edited the Russian Daily News. He arrived in China in 1918 joined the editorial staff of the Shanghai Gazette, became close to Sun Yat-sen and involved in the May Fourth demonstrations. He later wrote for a wide range of newspapers including the North-China Daily News, often under the pseudonym ‘G Gramada’. He left China in 1931 to return to America totally disavowing his leftist past and became a right wing columnist for Hearst Newspapers. He then became a close friend of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and used his gossip column in the The Hollywood Reporter to slander actors, screenwriters and directors.

 

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