Eve of a Hundred Midnights Read Online Free Page B

adventure, George andKa Yik were able to expose their American roommates and friends to Chinese experiences that might otherwise have been inaccessible. Both young men came from influential families. Until shortly before the semester started, George’s father had been the mayor of Canton. George had been born in Berkeley, California, while his father studied at the University of California.
    Ka Yik’s father was a wealthy landowner. His brother was a high-ranking military officer who advised Pai Chung-hsi (Bai Chongxi). A onetime rival of China’s Nationalist leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), Pai became one of the Generalissimo’s key strategists. In the southwestern province of Kwangsi (Guangxi), Ka Yik’s family owned vast tracts of agricultural property that his father administered from a sprawling home just east of Jintian * village.
    With their Chinese roommates as guides, Mel and a handful of other Americans shared many adventures in and around Canton. Through a complicated series of trades and purchases involving a camera, a chair, bicycles, a blanket, and a subscription to Time, Mel obtained a year-old motorcycle that he hoped would help him explore farther afield. He hoped to see the China beyond Lingnan’s cloistered campus. Meanwhile, as the school year progressed he started paying more and more attention to the saber-rattling between China and Japan, the shake-ups in China’s fragile national government, and other increasingly chaotic political and international events. Other students, among them Hugh Deane, also took notice.
    â€œFor most of the American students at Lingnan, the experience was a superficial adventure,” Deane wrote after describing how some of Lingnan’s Chinese students wanted Chiang’s Kuomintang (Guomindang) Party to focus less on Communists and more on Japan, which had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and continued to threaten other parts of northern China. “We shopped for ivory and jade, visited Macao [Macau] for a bit of sin, and monasteries in the Kwantung [Guangdong] mountains for climbing and an exotic change. We accepted the misery around us, bargained with rickshaw pullers whose life expectancy was five years. But a few were caught up by the struggle going on in China, tried to understand it, and became involved in one way or another.”
    Mel, Hugh noted, was among those few.
    Early that December, when Mel scrawled his letter from his moonlit dorm, China and Japan were racing toward war, and he wondered if, instead of staying at Lingnan after winter break, it made more sense for him to leave the school. Some classmates decided to drop out of the program to explore Asia. Mel criticized them at first, but reconsidered around the holidays. While he liked Lingnan, he felt that its academic offerings were limited and wondered whether he might be better served exploring other parts of China. He wanted to stop in Peiping (Beijing) and “see it before the Japanese [wreck] it,” visit Japan itself, and perhaps even travel across Russia.
    â€œI’m far from a Bolshevik, but I do believe Russia is worth looking into and really seeing what’s what,” he said.
    Whatever Mel decided about the school year, he made one clear assertion about his future.
    â€œAs for me writing anything for publication, I don’t want to ever do that,” Mel wrote. “So please get that out of your mind. There are hundreds of other people here in the Orient from theStates who see just what I see and most of them have written about it. Why should I contribute a little more trash?”
    In the middle of December, Chiang Kai-shek traveled to Sian (Xi’an) to confer with Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang)—also known as “the Young Marshal.” The Young Marshal had inherited control of Manchuria after Japanese agents assassinated his father. But he was forced out after Japan invaded Manchuria and set up the