Eve of a Hundred Midnights Read Online Free

By 1936, thirty-two students—mostly selected from the Ivy League and other elite American universities—had been invited to participate after intensive interviews, letters of recommendation, and an essay contest. They joined a Lingnan student body comprising primarily children from China’s wealthiest families, as well as a number of American-born students of Chinese descent, who generally looked down upon their counterparts whose families hadn’t left Asia.
    Before school started, many members of the Pacific Area Exchange’s 1936–1937 class traveled to China together by way of Japan. Mel didn’t join them. Perhaps hoping to transform their lingering grief about losing baby Marilyn into positive energy, Mel’s mother and stepfather offered to send him on a once-in-a-lifetime grand tour of the globe and readily funded the adventure. With their assistance, Mel bought a $500 around-the-world ticket that covered a berth on a boat from New York to London and on to Paris. It also paid for lodging in each city, and stays in Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. Included as well was space on another ship. That vessel crossed the Mediterranean, stopped in Malta, sailed through the Suez Canal to Yemen, and proceeded through India, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), and Singapore. Finally, Mel continued to Hong Kong and Canton. Additional expenses along the way totaled $600.
    A Stanford friend—a fellow Angeleno and Daily hand named John Kline—joined Mel for the journey. They crossed the Atlantic on a steamer packed with 600 other students, most from schools such as Duke, Harvard, Smith, and Princeton. Mel, who usually took pride in how he dressed, felt uncomfortable around the Easterners.
    â€œI feel like a tramp in my finest duds,” he admitted.
    Mel was happy to check off castles, museums, cathedrals, and other standard tourist landmarks, but he also took note of a world becoming unsettled: shipyards operating at all hours building warships in England, German agents trying to recruit Nazis on street corners in Switzerland, and swarms of Fascist police and military all over the Italian streets. While Mel witnessed these scenes, fighting was breaking out between Spain’s leftist Republican government and the right-wing nationalists led by Francisco Franco.
    â€œAffairs in Europe are in an awful tangle,” wrote Mel, who also encountered groups of refugees driven out by the Spanish Civil War on his journey. “It will be impossible to put off another war with all the arming & animosities now brewing.”
    Mel was not optimistic about the prospects for world peace.
    â€œYes sir, they are all waiting for the explosion over here,” he added.
    As Mel’s voyage progressed from Europe through the Middle East and on to East Asia, he clamored for opportunities to experience local culture, the less touristy the better. These experiences included watching a Malaysian wedding, visiting a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence where vultures fed on corpses, and seeing moonlight filter through cocoa palms in Singapore.
    â€œThe people I guess made it nice for us, but the tropics and Orient get a hold on you,” he wrote on the second-to-last leg of his trip. “Really, as much as I would like to be home, something is already anchored out here. It’s just plain fascinating, that’s all.”
    Finally, Mel arrived in Canton right on his twentieth birthday: September 11, 1936. At Lingnan, he and the other American students—twenty-three men and nine women—were required to live with Chinese roommates (each woman in the program had two roommates) and eat at least one meal per day in the university’s dining halls.
    Lingnan University in Canton (Guangzhou), China, in 1936. Photo courtesy Peggy Stern Cole.
    Beyond the pastoral island that housed Lingnan was a noisy harbor. A few months into his year at the school, Mel sat in an open dorm room window, listening to silence