[excerpt] ...

[...]

Then we came to a large hand pump under a small water tower. There we saw a husky, grinning British engineer, stripped to the waist even though the dusk was cold, furiously pumping water into the tower. As I watched him making his long, steady strokes, I suddenly realized what his presence at that pump meant. We ourselves would have to do all the work in this camp; our muscles and hands would have to lift water from wells, carry supplies in from the gates. We would have to cook the food and stoke the fires—here were neither servants nor machinery, no running water, no central heating. Before we passed on into the men’s room, the British pumper, whose back was rising and falling rhythmically, fixed us as best he could in that situation with a cheerful and yet hostile eye, and reminded us with as much authority as his gasps would allow, “Every chap will be taking his full share of work here, chaps, you know!” As we entered the door of the men’s room, the stench that assailed our Western nostrils almost drove us back into the fresh March air.

To our surprise, we found brand-new fixtures inside: Oriental-style toilets with porcelain bowls sunk in the floor over which we uncomfortably had to squat. Above them on the wall hung porcelain flushing boxes with long, metal pull- chains, but— the pipes from the water tower outside led only into the men’s showers; not one was connected with the toilets. Those fancy pipes above us led nowhere. The toilet bowls were already filled to overflowing—with no servants, no plumbers, and very little running water anywhere in camp, it was hard to see how they would ever be unstopped.

We stayed there just long enough to do our small business—all the while grateful we had not eaten the last thirty-four hours—and to wash our hands and faces in the ice-cold water that dribbled out of the faucets.

[...]
[excerpt] ...

With so many people living in such unsanitary conditions and eating dubious food at best, we expected a disaster in public health any day. The greatest need was for a working hospital. The doctors and the nurses among us grasped this at once, and so began the tremendous job of organizing a hospital more or less from scratch. Perhaps because the mission hospital building had contained the most valuable equipment, it was in a worse state than any of the others.

The boilers, beds, and pipes had been ripped from their places and thrown about everywhere. The operating table and the dental chair were finally found at the bottom of a heap at the side of the building. None of the other machinery or surgical equipment was left intact. Under these conditions, considering that there was as yet no organization of labor in the camp, it is astounding that these medics and their volunteers were able to do what they did. Inside of eight days they had the hospital cleaned up and functioning so as to feed and care for patients. In two more days they had achieved a working laboratory. At the end of ten days they were operating with success, and even delivering babies. This was, however, not quite quick enough to save a life. Four days after the last group arrived, a member of the jazz band from Tientsin had an acute attack of appendicitis.

Since the hospital was not yet ready for an operation, he was sent to Tsingtao six hours away by train, but unfortunately he died on the way.

Another serious matter was the simple problem of going to the toilet. For a population of about two thousand, there was at first only one latrine for women and three for men—the Japanese had expected a great preponderance of men over women. In each of these latrines there were only five or six toilets, none of them flush toilets.

Needless to say, the queues for this unavoidable aspect of life were endless. When the poor internee finally reached his goal after a long and nervous wait in line, he found the toilet so overflowing that often he felt sick and to his despair had to leave unrequited. I recall clearly my relief that a providential case of constipation during the first ten days of camp saved me from having to test the strength of my bowels.

The sole contact the average urban Western man has with human excrement consists of a curious look at what he has produced, a swirl of water, and a refreshing bar of soap. Consequently the thought of wading into a pool of his fellow man’s excrement in order to clean up a public john not equipped with flush toilets is literally inconceivable. And so the situation grew progressively worse. It would have continued so had not some Catholic priests and nuns, aided by a few of the Protestant missionaries, tied cloths around their faces, borrowed boots and mops, and tackled this horrendous job.

This doughty crew stayed with it until some of the camp engineers, taking hold in a professional way, freed us all from this daily horror. After huddling long hours over this emergency— unrehearsed at M.I.T. or the Royal College for Engineers—they devised a means of hand-flushing the toilets after each use with a half bucket of water.

But of all the basic needs of life whose resolution had to be organized, the most vital and difficult was the problem of eating. The camp had to keep right on feeding itself while it was learning to do so. In the area of health and sanitation we had trained personnel in the camp, but practically none of our two thousand people knew much about quantity cooking in cauldrons for six or seven hundred, or baking in coal ovens for two thousand. Legend has it that a restaurant owner from Tsingtao taught the raw volunteers in their kitchen how to make soups and stews, and that in our Peking group’s kitchen, an ex-marine cook introduced our workers to the finer mysteries of the culinary art. Our food those first two weeks certainly substantiated the latter story!

Meanwhile, the bakery was also struggling to get underway. For the first week we were provided with bread baked in Tsingtao. Since this supply was to stop on a set date, our own bakery operation had to be organized in a hurry, for bread was the only solid food in our life. Our population, luckily, happened to include two aged Persian bakeshop owners from Tientsin. These men spent forty-eight hours straight training two shifts of green recruits to mix, knead, and bake the four hundred daily loaves necessary to feed everyone. Within another week, these amateur bakers had mastered the essentials of their craft. Thereafter, while the good yeast lasted, our camp bakery turned out what we all proudly assumed to be the best bread in China.

Thus it was with all the labor in the camp during those first days. Jobs which had to be done were at first taken in hand by experienced people who alone knew how to handle them, and therefore alone saw the real need.

Later, when work was organized and every able person was assigned a task, inexperienced people were trained in the new crafts. Thus bank clerks, professors, salesmen, missionaries, importers, and executives became bakers, stokers, cooks, carpenters, masons, and hospital orderlies.

There was also a great deal of heavy unskilled work such as lugging supplies from the gates to the utilities and cleaning up the compound. Work of this sort, while largely voluntary at first, was soon organized so that in a short while everyone had a set job with a routine and regular hours. With such a thoroughgoing organizational plan, the most vital material needs of these two thousand people soon began to be met. The first rude form of our camp’s civilization started to appear.

For about the first six months, this sudden dive into the world of manual labor was for the majority of us perhaps the most valuable experience. All manual labor in China, skilled and unskilled, was done by Chinese. Therefore the foreign population in that land included no “working force.” The majority of internees were either men accustomed to executive work in offices or women used to the help of innumerable Chinese servants around the house. To be forced to do hard physical labor, often outdoors, was a new experience. We all discovered what it was like to be worn out from work with our muscles and to return black and grimy, our clothing ripped and torn, from a day of hard labor.

In many ways, of course, this regime was good for all concerned, especially for those—and they were many—who had spent the last decade imbibing too many highballs on the club porch. Men with too much fat and sagging jowls soon found themselves lean again, tanned and hardened. At the other end of the scale, a derelict such as Briggs the junkie, lost his green color, put on weight and muscle, and looked a fine figure when he left camp in the repatriation of some Americans in August, 1943.

Suddenly we had all become equally workers of the world, and although many of us were not apt to admit it then, most of us enjoyed it.

As a Peking student, now a prominent professor of Chinese studies at Yale, said to me, “At least from now on I won’t have to wince every time I carry my suitcases in the station!”

[...]

[excerpts] ...

Since no one could buy new clothes, since everyone had to do his own laundry, and do it with little water and less soap—how I hated that chore—after a few months every tweed looked threadbare, every shirt was equally tattered and dirty. All trousers looked alike, unpressed and baggy. There were some men with girl friends who laundered their shirts and hand-pressed their army shorts. These had an edge over the rest — but such romantic aids knew neither class lines nor old school ties. Everyone was entitled to the same basic rations and the same amount of living space. And above all, everyone was required to do the same sort of work, according to his physical abilities. If a British banker and a Eurasian waiter were weak and sickly, both washed vegetables or were cutters of bread. If an American professor and a cockney were sturdy and able, both had to bake or stoke.

In such a situation, the more basic human virtues suddenly claimed their rightful place. A man’s excellence was revealed by his willingness to work, his skill at his job, his fundamental cheerfulness. On a kitchen shift or kneading dough in the bakery, any sane man would rather have next to him an efficient hard worker who could laugh and be warmly tolerant of his fellows, than to have there the most wealthy and sophisticated slacker or grumbler.

After working or living beside a man for months, who cared — or even remembered — whether he was Belgian, British, or Parsee? Thus in a very short time people became to us personalities, pleasant or unpleasant, hard working or lazy, rather than the British, Eurasians, or Americans that they were when we first met them. The three hardest-working and most valuable men in our kitchen were two ex-British seamen—one from a Yorkshire farm and the other a cockney—and an American tobacco-leaf expert raised on a North Carolina farm and, as he used to say of himself, “barely able to read the funnies.” Correspondingly, the laziest man on my cooking shift was an executive from a shipping company with “fine blood” and a privileged education. Bored with everything about his life in camp, he was neither cooperative nor charming and so of little use to anyone.

Perhaps the greatest value of this experience, as of almost all war experiences, was that we worked our way through the false barriers of the world at large to reach our common humanity. In time, we were able to see our neighbors for what they were rather than for what they had.

At this point, then, we were an uncoordinate mass of humanity. We had to tackle together certain basic problems if we were merely to survive.

[...]

[excerpts] ...

Since no one could buy new clothes, since everyone had to do his own laundry, and do it with little water and less soap—how I hated that chore—after a few months every tweed looked threadbare, every shirt was equally tattered and dirty. All trousers looked alike, unpressed and baggy. There were some men with girl friends who laundered their shirts and hand- pressed their army shorts. These had an edge over the rest—but such romantic aids knew neither class lines nor old school ties. Everyone was entitled to the same basic rations and the same amount of living space. And above all, everyone was required to do the same sort of work, according to his physical abilities. If a British banker and a Eurasian waiter were weak and sickly, both washed vegetables or were cutters of bread. If an American professor and a cockney were sturdy and able, both had to bake or stoke.

[...]

[excerpts] ...

The other interest, besides our personal relationships, that fills our human days whether we be in a city, on a farm, or in a camp, is work. Work and life have a strange reciprocal relationship: only if man works can he live, but only if the work he does seems productive and meaningful can he bear the life that his work makes possible. The work in the camp was, then, central to each of us. All of this coordinated activity kept us alive by providing the services and goods necessary for our existence. And however dull it seemed, it gave a focus of interest and energy to a life that otherwise by its confinement and great limitations would have been overwhelmed by boredom. Perhaps the best way to describe what our work was like is to tell my own experience of it.

After six months spent in the wearing and bruising conflicts of the Quarters Committee, both Shields and I felt that we and the camp needed a change, and so in September, 1943, I chose to do manual rather than office work. For a time I was the assistant to the camp mason. He was an American technician from Tientsin —tough, cool, and capable. Masoning was good for the muscles, but in the end I found mixing mortar for this good man boring, and so I applied for a job in the kitchen.

Kitchen III, the one serving the Peking group, was the ideal place to be introduced to camp cooking. This had been the liveliest of the three kitchens. Serving only three hundred people, this kitchen was small enough for its cooks to be teams of women. They were able, for example, to make and fry small hamburgers, a process that was then inconceivable in a kitchen serving eight hundred.

Above all, filled as it was by the educational and missionary personnel who had been centered in Peking, this community had a cooperative spirit which was unmatched elsewhere. The cooking teams were thus able to call on ten or fifteen more women to help them when there was extra work to do, and so to pioneer in experimental ways with our strange Chinese equipment. When the American evacuation of August, 1943, took place, however, and most of the Catholic fathers went as well, this community’s food standards dropped noticeably, and a British pall seemed to settle over our menus.

It was at this point that I became an assistant cook, hardly knowing then how to boil an egg. My boss was a gay and talented bachelor named Edwin Parker. With graying hair and a round face, he had been a curio and art dealer from Peking. Edwin knew how to cook, but he hated to boss anybody or to organize his meals too carefully.

As a result, our life was filled with confusion and laughter, but also with frequent culinary triumphs. My job was to keep the pans and cauldrons clean, to cut up meat, stir soups and stews, fry leeks, and braise meat—in other words, all the routine chores, while Edwin, as chef, planned, directed, and seasoned the menu.

Since we both wanted to live on as good food as possible, we worked hard. Although we were not the best of the three cooking teams in our kitchen (each one worked every third day), ours came to have a growing favorable reputation among our ordinarily disgruntled diners. As the first winter closed in, I liked to come to work before dawn, to watch our stoker (an insurance man from Peking) coax the fires into life under the cauldrons, to start cooking the cereal in the large guo (caldron), and to fry people’s black-market eggs on our improvised hot plate. Then, after spending the rest of the day preparing lunch and supper, I would return in the dark to the hospital and an evening with Alice, tired but full of the satisfaction of one who has worked with his muscles all day.

It was, therefore, a severe blow when word came from the Japanese that on January first (1944) we would have to move out of Kitchen III into one of the other two large kitchens. Each of these was filled with what seemed to us to be immense crowds of unfamiliar people, and from all reports, enjoyed a notoriously bad spirit and worse food. But since the Japanese insisted—they intended to house the newly arriving Italians in that section of the camp—we had no choice but to leave Kitchen III.

As luck would have it, my first day of duty in the new place, Kitchen I, came on New Year’s morning. I had never been inside the place—so much vaster than our intimate kitchen with two small guos and a team made up of only two cooks—and so I hardly knew my way around its vast interior. What made matters worse was that the night before there had been a very gay dance in the Tientsin kitchen (Kitchen II) to which Alice and I had gone and, reasonably enough, we had not got in until about 4 A.M.

So, sleepy, headachy, and angry, I groped my way, about 6 A.M., into the unknown recesses of Kitchen I. It was a cold, damp morning; the newly made fires created such thick steam that I could only dimly discern the long line of huge guos with many strange figures bending over them. Gradually, as the steam cleared, I became aware that the voice giving sharp orders belonged to the boss cook, and the feet I kept seeing under the rising steam to the six helpers on the cooking team; also I realized that I was helping to cook cereal and that others were beginning the preparation for lunchtime stew.

It took little longer to grasp that no one there was much concerned about the quality of the food we made, and no one was eager to work more than absolutely necessary. McDaniel, the boss, was a nice enough guy in a rough, indifferent, and lazy way; but we knew that his sharp-tongued wife told him what to cook. He used to run home in the middle of most afternoons because he had forgotten what she had told him about supper!

Beyond carrying out these orders, he knew little and cared less about cooking. For my first two months there, I felt frustrated about the job we were doing. There must be some way, thought I, of pepping things up and turning out better food. And so I began to look around for others who might feel the same way, but who, unlike myself, knew how to cook.

Gradually as I worked in that kitchen and learned to know it, its strangeness and size diminished. I even found myself enjoying my hours every third day on duty. There was a sunny courtyard just off the main kitchen, and on good days, when we could prepare the food for stews out there and eat our lunch at the big table, there was an atmosphere of rough, ribald fun that I heartily enjoyed. As this sense of at- homeness grew, I found that the functioning of the kitchen as a complex of coordinated activities came to interest me—for it really was a remarkable organization.

This organization began outside the kitchen when food supplies were brought into camp on carts by Chinese. They were distributed by the Supplies Committee proportionally to each of the two main kitchens. Then the supplies gang carried them in wooden crates to the kitchens—vegetables to the vegetable room and meat to the butchery. At this point the two cooks for the following day looked glumly over the meager supplies they had been given for their eight hundred customers, racked their brains for some new ideas for a menu, and then told the vegetable captains and the butchers what they wanted in the raw preparation of these supplies.

That same afternoon and into the next morning, the two butchers sliced, cubed, or ground the meat (this would be the winter procedure; they boiled it in summer in order to ensure its keeping at least over night without refrigeration). Teams of some fifteen to twenty women diced carrots, peeled potatoes, and chopped cabbage, while middle-aged men helped them by carrying the vegetable baskets around and by cleaning the produce in a pair of old bathtubs taken from the residences in the “out of bounds” section of the compound. The next day the two cooks and five helpers came on duty about 5 A.M. They prepared breakfast cereal if there was any, and then lunch and supper for that day. A pan washer on my shift (actually a scholar of Chinese literature, and now a professor at Cornell University) washed the containers we used in preparing the food and from which we ladled out the dinner. Then women servers distributed the food to the waiting lines collecting food for our eight hundred people.

They were checked and watched over by elderly men counters who made sure no one came in twice, and kept tabs on how fast the food was running out.

Girls then passed tea—if there was any—around the tables in the dining room. Men tea servers poured it into flasks for the majority who, being families preferred to collect their food in covered containers and to eat it ‘en famille’ in their rooms.

Near the serving tables was the bread room where five or six older men sliced two hundred loaves of bread daily and distributed to each his ration. And finally, two teams of women dishwashers cleaned up the dishes after the meal of those who ate in the dining hall. All of these groups got time off depending on the hours and heaviness of their work.

Cooking food and boiling water, however, required heat. For this purpose, coal and wood were brought to the kitchen yard from the supply house in carts. In our yard two men were always chopping wood while others molded bricks out of the coal dust that made up most of our usual coal issue. Two stokers got up the fires and tended them, one in the cooking area and the other where water was boiled for drinking. Stoking was a job which called for great skill since the coal was poor and the cooks extremely demanding about the level of heat they had to have under their precious stews.

To keep this intricate organization running smoothly, there was at first only an informal structure, headed by the manager of the kitchen, who seemed to do everything, and two women storekeepers. The latter kept an eye on our small stores of sugar and oil; also they purchased raw ginger, spices, and dried fruits when they were available in the canteen; and generally functioned as advisers of the manager on his many problems.

[...]

[excerpts] ...

Besides stoking at the ovens, working in the kitchens, tending the boilers, pumping water into the water towers at kitchens and showers, and hauling supplies to and fro, the other heavy work was carried on in the carpenter and fitter’s shop.

Surprisingly, a crew of some thirty men was kept busy continually, repairing utensils, supply crates, rooms, windows, etc., which hard usage had rendered unusable. The men in the shop also rebuilt much of the hospital, one of the kitchens, and redid the boilers that gave us hot water. They did this work wholly with materials “scrounged” here and there in the compound, and refashioned for this new use. The equipment with which the camp was originally furnished consisted of next to nothing.

Besides kitchens, bakery, hospital, and shop—what we called our “utilities”—there were many other forms of work necessary for our common life. There was the leisurely, comradely, but otherwise unappealing task of keeping the three men’s latrines clean. The two-man crew in charge of the one near our dorm consisted of a middle-aged American missionary and a retired British banker. The casual naturalness with which they went about their job showed the radical changes camp life had wrought in attitudes. Instead of being horrified at their work, these men made the most of its friendly, social possibilities. They laughed and joked with each client—and everyone was their client!

Often that retired banker with his white mustache and twinkling eyes would complain to me that we cooks had given them more business than they really wanted that day—or to the baker that the bread had been unusually heavy. As a result, he and his partner had seen no one at all after breakfast—and “How the hell am I to get the news of the world if no one comes in?”

Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, no women in camp would take on as a steady job the cleaning of their latrines. All the able-bodied ones had to take it in turn, therefore, each one doing her bit of cleaning about one week during the year. Although it was admittedly an unpleasant enough job, most of the men suspected they relished its opportunity for conspicuous martyrdom, for without fail, one could always tell who was on that week.

And the gayer ones had a fine time with it. Clad in long boots and carrying a large mop—symbols of their trade—they would greet every male they met with a cheery wave and ask, “Guess what job I’ve got this week! Why not come along and give me a hand with the heavy work?”

Most fascinating of all about these strange (to men) female arrangements was the fact that the only women in camp who deliberately avoided this latrine duty were two Russian women married, respectively, to a wealthy American and a wealthy Briton.

The point certainly was not that they were Russian. They hired other Russian women to do these chores for them, paying them in coffee sent in to them by relatives in Tientsin. And it was a wonderful Russian woman, married to the British Professor of English at Yenching, who voluntarily took on the odorous and bruising task of running this cleanup crew for the women’s latrines.

Obviously the cause of their refusal was that they were both hoping to move up socially into colonial society and out of the nothingness of refugee society. They had, one could not but guess, married these well-to-do men for their wealth and their prestige. They did not intend to lose all this newly gained social status by falling back into the kind of life they had left behind them. For them, if there was any one symbol of that old life, it was the job of taking care of women’s conveniences!

The irony of this was intensified by the fact that the socially prominent wives of high-ranking British business officials would never have dreamed of refusing to do this work, once it became a recognized form of community service. While the two women who aspired to grandeur were too proud and too insecure to do it, the British possessors of status were too proud and too secure to refuse.

The mind of the refugee Russian woman, working her way up, was dominated by precisely those values lacking in the social milieu she had just quitted. Refugee society in the Orient was dismal: abysmally poor and protected by no government of their own, they were the most vulnerable of any foreign group to every economic or political upheaval. They had been badly misused by the Japanese, who had forced them into all sorts of unwelcome labor. Anyone with energy would do almost anything to leave that society.

Among the values idolized by this group were, therefore, material security, personal cleanliness, escape from lower-class life and its humiliating chores, and so on. To do this work of cleaning toilets was to repudiate every value of one’s new existence. A woman dare not do it for fear of falling back and so losing her one hope of being a lady. In her own mind, she was still a poor refugee. Work like this, so perfectly fitting her inward assessment of her status, frightened her.

To the secure British woman of the colonial upper class, on the other hand, who had been placed at the top by birth and breeding, this job held no social threat at all. Even in dirty, refuse-covered boots, she felt and knew herself to be a “lady.” This job was merely a role adopted for the moment; it did not fit either her inward assessment of herself or the way she thought others would assess her and so it held no terrors. Moreover, she was also conforming to the subtler standards and requirements of that upper class, namely to be a sport, to do your share, to cooperate willingly even though it was distasteful.

These standards she dare not ignore, however uncomfortable the job might prove to be to her. Only such a person well within an upper-class group would even be aware of those standards—not someone looking longingly up from below.

The Russian women had no idea at all that they had broken those rules. In this situation, a lack of “breeding” did seem to hurt, but it did hurt only those women desperately wanting to be considered well born, and in their very desperation proving to all and sundry that they had not been.

There were innumerable other jobs, although none of them so unusual. One of them was in the shoe repair shop. No new shoes were available in Weihsien. Since many people had arrived with only the well-worn pairs bought on the last trip home years before, four men were kept continually busy rescuing dilapidated shoes from nonexistence. Finally, next door to the watch repair and barber shops, was the sewing room where a crew of women tried to patch together the tattered garments of the camp’s bachelors.

One pair of undershorts of mine brewed up quite a metaphysical storm in our dormitory. Since the shorts were so covered with patches that only the band around the middle contained some of the original cloth, a nice philosophical point was raised: was it now the same old pair of shorts, and if not, at what point had it become another pair?

Day in and day out, the camp was a small hive of activity, most of it manual and vigorous. Everyone became more efficient in dealing with the practical problems of life than he had been when he came in. Men who had never used a hammer put up shelves on their walls.

Others who had never seen a mason’s trowel built clever brick stoves in their rooms; these stoves had an oven inside so that they not only heated the room, but also baked a modest cake or cookies. In summer everyone constructed elaborate awnings of mats bought in the canteen, and thus provided pleasant shade for the patio in front of their room. After we had been there a year or so, an exhibit was held of the artifacts that ingenious people from all professions had made. They were almost unbelievable to one not blessed with technical or inventive gifts. They included the fanciest of brick stoves, sliding screen doors and windows, homemade cooling systems, elegantly fitted cabinets, and beautifully wrought oil lamps. Most fascinating to me was an intricate and finely balanced system of shelves that would, at the mere touch of a finger, disappear on ropes to the ceiling and thus free half the floor space of a small room.

The display drove home to me the truth that no practical situation, however unwieldy or difficult, was too much for human ingenuity.

This group of humans had been faced with the total lack of all the comforts to which they had been accustomed, and for once they were unable to purchase gadgets ready made. Thus all the intense technical creativity that resides in any group of men became active. Each in his own way embarked with energy and skill on the task of raising ever higher our level of material comfort.

We came to realize, however, that a community of people needs more to keep them going than the bare necessities. We all felt this as early as the first dreary week, when we crowded into the church on Saturday night and sang our throats out, as a talented monk and a Salvation Army captain led us in familiar songs. Encouraged by this visceral response to even the simplest form of entertainment, some of us from Yenching University started to work up a few topical skits.

[...]

[further reading] ...
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/Gilkey/BOOK/Gilkey-BOOK(WEB).pdf

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