Hemingway in China

According to a speech he gave during a visit to Seattle, Washington in September 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping is a big fan of American author Ernest Hemingway – and of Hemingway’s preferred drink, the mojito. But “Papa” Hemingway’s connection with China stretches back long before enthusiastic reviews of The Old Man and the Sea from “Xi Dada.”

Hemingway published For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 and married the renowned war correspondent Martha Gellhorn that same year. He’d hoped to enjoy his newfound good fortune, but Gellhorn wanted to cover the war and had already written to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, expressing support for the Kuomintang and her hope that the United States wouldn’t “sell out the Chinese” as the British had done. In Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn, Peter Moreira describes a phone call Hemingway had before the trip with the chief aide to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who asked Hemingway to collect intelligence while in China, specifically information about traffic patterns along Burma’s Irrawaddy River.

In Hong Kong, Hemingway met with reporters from the South China Morning Post and Hong Kong Daily Press, pouring them champagne and talking little about the importance of writing truth and plenty about how much money he was making doing it. While there, he fell hard for the Chinese. He admired their bravery, their loudness, their love of fireworks (Moreira says Hemingway started lighting them in his hotel room), and their food. That last inclination predated his visit to China; while living in Havana, Hemingway’s favorite restaurant wasn’t a smoky dive serving bloody steaks and mojito pitchers, but a Chinese spot called El Pacifico.

After enjoying the Hong Kong high life, Gellhorn and Hemingway flew to the southwestern city of Kunming. Gellhorn later wrote that their pilot was “flying the plane as if he were riding a horse,” swooping between mountains to hide from the Japanese, with an almanac on his lap and the window open to gauge his speed. The Japanese bombed Kunming daily, and the ruin of the city’s remains was worse than anything Gellhorn had ever seen. When Hemingway bought tickets for a flight south, closer to the front lines, they got bumped at the last minute by some military officials and Hemingway was outraged. He tracked down the pilot, demanding an explanation.

The pilot, explaining that they could still take a freight plane that same night, replied, “Ernest, if you are going to object to sitting on a box instead of a cushion, I shall be very disillusioned.”

“Swell,” Hemingway said with a smile, “let’s have a drink.”

They later flew to Kwantung, modern-day Liaodong, a peninsula that lies between Beijing and Korea, where they stayed for over two weeks before journeying into nearby war zones by boat and then horseback. Their guides were two Kuomintang officers, a fat man named Mr. Ha and another, Mr. Ho, who knew the terrain like the back of his hand, spoke a little French and said he was Catholic. According to Moreira, one day as they rode through an open field, Mr. Ho looked across at the devastation before them and said, “The world is stupid,” then wondered aloud whether God was angry.

In a June 1941 article for Collier’s, Gellhorn wrote of their meeting with the commander in chief of the Chinese 12th Army, General Yu Hanmou. Yu gave them a warm welcome and then tried to outdrink Hemingway. It didn’t go well for him.

“The general began to sweat profusely,” Gellhorn wrote, “and two staff officers turned a beautiful mulberry color and the interpreter stammered and swayed and found it hard to translate a toast about glorious armies and final victory, which Ernest had happily invented… Ernest drank on undismayed until the general said in Chinese that they were plumb out of liquor… and the contest was over.”

For Hemingway, the trip to China was perhaps the culmination of a lifelong dream. The great Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker wrote in Ernest Hemingway about a time when Doctor Willoughby Hemingway and his family visited young Ernest’s parents in the summer of 1911. Willoughby had worked as a missionary surgeon in Shanxi province, and according to Baker, “Uncle Will” regaled the family with the story of his meeting with the Dalai Lama. Indeed, in The Young Hemingway, Michael S. Reynolds writes that Hemingway “could remember his cousins speaking Chinese and the exotic Christmas presents” he received from Uncle Will and the family. No doubt this left a lasting impression, but not so much as experiencing China itself.

Returning home, Hemingway granted a May 23, 1941 interview with the St. Louis Star-Times, sharing his optimism about China’s future. He showed the reporter a photograph of Chinese workers mixing concrete with their feet, using no machinery.

“What a people!” he said.

On June 9, he sat down with Ralph Ingersoll for an interview later published in PM Magazine as “Story of Ernest Hemingway’s Far East Trip.” Hemingway spoke of his love for snake wine and the scenery of Guilin, which he said looked like a painting “made up out of an artist’s imagination.” Hemingway also expressed his sense that Imperial Japan’s days were numbered.

During their time in China, he and Gellhorn had met with Zhou Enlai, whom they both liked. Gellhorn later described Zhou, the future first premier of the People’s Republic of China, as “the one really good man we’d met in China, and if he was a sample of Chinese Communists, then the future was theirs.”

The feeling was mutual. In Hemingway in China, Renjing Yang notes that, after that encounter, Zhou telegraphed Mao Zedong and discussed placing more diplomatic agents in Hong Kong. In other words, Hemingway may have influenced early Chinese Communist politics.

But not all their interactions went as smoothly. In her memoir, Travels with Myself and Another, Gellhorn says their encounter with Madame Chiang Kai-shek was going swimmingly until she mentioned that she’d seen lepers, abandoned by society.

“She blew up,” Gellhorn would recall, telling Gellhorn Chinese were “humane … unlike Westerners” and that “China had a great culture when your ancestors were living in trees.”

Hemingway remained polite, and after they’d left, he “laughed like a hyena” and said, “I guess that’ll teach you to take on the Empress of China.”