Fungible Perception of Enemy

There was always someone here earlier than you.  A truism a decades old visitor to China is always aware of.  And Carl Crow was an older China hand than anyone alive, certainly  Arriving in 1910 he was here when Somerset Maugham made his way up the Yangze writing his “Shadows on a Screen” and some twenty seven years later, just about as long as I’ve been around he went to work near the intersection of Nanjing Road and the Bund expecting to complete an advertising proposal for a toothpaste company only to have his windows shattered with the impact of a bomb. 

The Japanese invasion of Shanghai made the city unlivable, unworkable.  He and much of the European foreign community packed up and left the city and as he suspected, in his writing, never returned.  I think I shall recall the exchange he had on the boat ride out of the city, fleeing China, with a missionary woman who didn’t want to swear, but did everything but swear in describing how she felt about the Japanese, and their bombing of the city.  Crow suggested he had a few “Texas expressions” he might suggest.   

One thinks about how fungible the perception of “enemy” was and is.  Then, a building disdain for brazen Japanese aggression that would wax into all out conflict.  Japan's progression seemed to have been inevitbile, unstoppable, something indelible in the national character, completely at odds with the Chinese character.  At that point China could only evoke fascination or pity, and within fifteen years China would become the ferocious enemy and Japan the docile, reliable ally. 

“One certainly notices in a book like “Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom” (I struggled in vain to find the source of the ‘flowery’ reference) that Americans and most foreigners were all rather fixated on drink.  Most stories find their way to the bar sooner or later.  There are missionaries and teetotalers who will not drink, there are the Chinese who aren’t allowed to drink at the Long bars and exclusive clubs and then there are the majority of foreigners who seem to care about little else once 5:00PM rolls around.  Crow probably rode out the fourteen years of Prohibition, there in Shanghai, without a care, though it must have impacted that generation for there is an unabashed promotion of alcohol as a fundamental social lubricant in this period, right after the 21^st Amendment.

Sunday, 5/12/19