Gone to Soldiers Read Online Free

were crushes, but when he put them together in a particular woman, it was a compelling new game, one that lasted into his first year at Shanghai University, when he began to make friends with two Chinese boys his own age and visit their homes.
    The invading Japanese army approached the city. The Chinese troops burned much of Hongkew, the Japanese bombed the rest, and the Balabans moved reluctantly into smaller far more expensive lodgings in Frenchtown until once again lane houses were rapidly thrown up. Frequent bombings shook the ground, took out blocks. The train station was bombed and the dead lay uncounted. By 1938, Shanghai was cut off from the mainland and growing less profitable. Refugees from Germany and Austria were pouring in with frightening tales. Daniel’s parents grew increasingly nervous. It was time, they felt, to return to the Bronx.
    He left China under protest, weeping openly. Judy was happy. She wanted the normal life of an American girl, she said loudly. Daniel had no desire for the normal life of an American boy, which he saw as a Saturday Evening Post cover, a freckle-faced country boy with a fishing rod. Nor did he long for fights with Italian and Polish kids on the embattled streets of the Bronx.
    He attended City College. The political upheaval fascinated him as the streets of Shanghai had. He went to meetings of splinter groups, shopping the bazaar of ideas, unable to identify with any but hopeful that some ideology would ravish him into commitment. He lived at home and commuted, although he was restless with his parents, in whom he had not confided in years. He saw them as narrow, naive, sweet but parochial. Their life had been spent in survival stratagems. He expected quite other options. He did not enjoy the company of Haskel, now in medical school, on whom their mother waited like a body servant. Each brother found the other contemptible.
    Every Tuesday and Wednesday after college, he took the IRT downtown to the Upper West Side, where there was a small community of midcoastal Chinese. There he took lessons with the owner of the Shanghai Star, upstairs in a little office overlooking the restaurant. Tuesday they had conversational lessons. Pao Chi was a big man, heavyset and bald, but his voice was melodious and gentle. He liked to discuss Taoism. On Wednesday they studied the characters. Just after the American New Year, Mr. Pao permitted him to do the calligraphy on a menu.
    His family disapproved of his infatuation with things Chinese. His father, his mother and his sister Judy had lived in China like a family of cats standing on a log in a brook, keeping dry, keeping out of the world flowing past. Daniel planned to rejoin his uncle Nat, who loved China as he did. That was his consuming fantasy.
    He fell in love with a Trotskyist and tried very hard to be one too, because her body was silky and she had a rich sexy laugh and a good hard mind he enjoyed striking ideas against. She did not enjoy the arguing as much as he did, and gave him up for someone whose politics were stronger and whose lust appeared just as strong. He was learning that love for him was like fireworks, heat and light but little damage. His lust did not diminish, although his infatuation often did. He fell in love with trivial things, a laugh, a turn of leg, a smile; no wonder that interest dissipated quickly.
    He made friends with his cousin Seymour, a year older and a Communist who tried to recruit him. “You’re a dilettante,” Seymour told him. “Nothing moves you or everything moves you.”
    Mr. Pao thought that was a reasonable way to be. “True goodness is like water. Water helps the ten thousand things without itself striving. Water flows down into the low places men despise, for water is in the Way,” Pao quoted from the Tao Te Ching .
    Daniel did not know if he truly wanted to remain so watery. He imagined wondrous passions that would obsess him for longer than two weeks. Only the wife