主题：2022读书笔记之一 -- kmy1810

China memoirs, Chiang Kai-shek and the War Against Japan - Owen Lattimore, Compiled by Fujiko Isono - 1990

P56 - p63

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In the meantime, I found a young Swede, Effie Hill. He was the son of missionaries, had never been out of China, and spoke very fluent Chinese. He was also a good motor mechanic. Because of his abilities he had been employed by the Sven Hedin Expeditions through Inner Mongolia to Sinkiang. By this time the Hedin Expeditions had been completed, and he was running a private business in Sian with a car of his own, an American car, for hire, while also making a bit of money repairing cars for Chinese car owners. We hired him with his car to take us to Yenan. Because of all this semicivil war atmosphere, he was not doing much business and jumped at the chance.

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One fine day, we all piled into his car. We did not give up our rooms at the hotel, saying we were just going out to see some tombs. When we got out of the city, we just kept going and reached a border post between the Sian troops and the Red Army. The Swede, being a local man, knew where the warlord troops were fraternizing with the Communists, so we passed through without any trouble. As soon as we reached the Communist side, everything was fine. They were very hospitable, there was no trouble at all, and we got up to Yenan all right.

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There was a rather amusing episode about this journey to Yenan. Mao Tse-tung was very eager to persuade our driver, the Swede, to stay in Yenan. Effie was born and brought up in a district of the Inner Mongolian frontier a bit east of Kueihua. I never visited the place myself, but all along the Chahar, Suiyuan, Ninghsia, and Kansu borders of Inner Mongolia, the number of Chinese dialects is astonishing. They are mutually understandable; but they are very, very different. This is probably related historically to different periods when the Hsiung-nu, and later the Turks, surrendered to the Chinese dynasties and settled there. The way they learned Chinese must have affected the Chinese dialects of the region. Now, the dialect of the place where this young Swede came from was considered by everybody else to be in itself extremely comic, and the moment you heard a man talking in that dialect, everybody would start to laugh. The Swede, while he knew standard Chinese, could speak that dialect perfectly.

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In the evening in Yenan, they had entertainment gatherings. The big men, Mao, Chou, Chu Teh, and other top leaders would all be there, sitting in the audience, without any privileged seats, just mingling with the crowd. This was one of their very important ways of getting the feel of how people thought about things. On these occasions people from different parts of China would get up on the stage and sing folk songs from their regions or tell stories. This young Swede, one evening, pushed his way up and got onto the platform. There he put on a stunt, telling stories in this comic dialect. He could also sing very well. The whole theater was rocking with laughter. Mao was particularly impressed and wanted to meet this young man; and the young Swede was brought to be presented to him. It then turned out that not only had he worked for the Sven Hedin Expeditions, but he had hired out his lorries to different warlords and had had encounters with bandits, and all that kind of thing. In the course of these adventures, he had become a very good motor mechanic.

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In all newly industrialized countries, when new equipment, such as motor cars, is introduced, the critical problem is that it is much easier to learn how to drive a motor vehicle than to keep that vehicle in good condition. Even before he made this sensational appearance on the stage, the young Swede, having nothing to do, went round to see things. The Chinese did not have much motor equipment, but they did have some, and a lot of it was in bad condition. The Swede would say: "Here, let me take a hand. I will show you how to fix this." In this way, he was getting a local reputation as a motor vehicle fixer, and this immediately struck Mao Tse-tung. He must have thought: "Here is a young man, a different type of foreigner, who speaks more than one dialect of the common people and gets on well with ordinary mechanics. He can explain things to a peasant who had never handled machinery and teach him how to become a mechanic. If I can persuade him to stay with us, he will be extremely valuable in a practical way. I don t give a damn about his politics." Mao Tse-tung spent a lot of time trying to persuade Hill to stay with him in Yenan.

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Everybody knows the expression "lumpen proletariat. This man Hill was a "lumpen bourgeois," if there is such a thing. He was a type of missionary son who had reacted against his pious upbringing. He drank, he gambled, and he went to the houses of prostitution, not as a foreigner but along with whatever Chinese he was working with. He took all kinds of jobs and had spent his life knocking around the interior with all kinds of Chinese; but he still retained a sort of white man's contempt for the natives and basically looked down on the Chinese. He was very poorly educated. He had heard little about the Communists and thought that they were a disreputable bunch. There was no danger that he would ever become sympathetic to Marxism. If he thought that the Chinese Communists were nothing but a gang of bandits, he would say: "Well, that's all right. I've dealt with bandits. On a man-to-man basis, I can always get along." Nevertheless, he did not want to stay in Yenan. By this time, he had quite a thriving little business in Sian, and he wanted to get back and go on with it. So he resisted all Mao Tse-tung's blandishments and went back with our party.

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One day on our way back to Sian, while we were waiting for the engine of the car to cool off, I asked Hill: "Effie, you have seen all kinds of Chinese. What do you think of this lot?" As he had been wandering about Yenan, talking to people, I wanted to get his reaction. He said: "I tell you what. I've met a lot of these Kuomintang intellectuals. I have dealt with warlords. There is hardly any kind of Chinese I've not dealt with. But in Yenan, I have seen for the first time a man who could become the new emperor of China." (That was Mao Tse-tung.)