Unbound Spirit: Letters of Flora Belle Jan

8. A Straw in the Wind

128 8 A Straw in the Wind During the 1930s, the political and economic conditions in China would become increasingly unstable as the opposing forces of Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek established separate territorial control, while Japan moved to occupy northern and central China.1 However, in 1933, when Flora Jan arrived in Peiping with her husband Charles and son Hanson, life seemed promising even though the Japanese had surrounded the city. The capital city of 1.6 million people was the cultural and political center of China. It was the seat of the country’s preeminent universities and the finest medical facilities. A lively international community , representing all the countries of Western Europe and the United States,2 organized classical concerts, fine art exhibits, literary clubs, horse racing, and tennis, golf, and polo competitions. Visitors from all over the world arrived daily. Charles accepted a faculty position at the Catholic University. The family expanded with the addition of two daughters, Fleur and Fiore, born in 1933 and 1938. The household included several servants and occupied a compound containing ornamental gardens and separate buildings for living quarters, dining, study, carriage house, gatehouse, chapel, and observation tower. The buildings of brick and ornate wood carvings featured stout red columns and green glazed tile roofs in the style of palaces and were joined by covered walkways. The residence was suitable for entertaining guests. Flora and Charles invited English-speaking couples (Chinese returning students and foreign scholars, journalists, diplomats, missionaries, and businessmen) to dinner dances and torchlight barbecues . The cook prepared European- and American-style meals.3 Flora’s two most faithful correspondents were her best friend Ludmelia and her younger sister Bessie. She longed to see them and wished they could visit her in Peiping. However, both Ludmelia and Bessie married in 1935, moved away from Fresno and began raising families. Bessie’s husband James Lai (whose legal name on purchased papers was Gork Hung) operated a poultry store in San Francisco. Ludmelia had been disappointed by two former suitors: Lawrence Kennedy since high school years, and Jorgen. When at age thirty she met Dale Ralston, a forty-five-year-old bachelor, who proposed to her after an acquaintance of only three weeks, she accepted without hesitation. They moved to Yuma, Arizona, where Dale worked as a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation. He was part of the team that built the American Canal, which provided irrigation to the farms in California’s Imperial Valley. He was a World War I veteran with one glass eye.4 Their union was one of mutual affection and respect. Conditions in Peiping deteriorated as the Japanese military efforts to take over northern China and east Asia intensified. In 1937, after Japan occupied the city and changed its name to Peking, some American nationals began to evacuate the city. However, the American ambassador, Nelson Johnson, remained in Peking until the end of 1940. Thousands of British, French, German, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, and White Russian residents continued to be active as missionaries, teachers, businessmen, diplomatic staff, physicians, professors, or journalists, even while Hitler’s armies and war planes swept across Europe. Meanwhile, the number of Japanese civilians in Peking rose dramatically, from 4,647 in December 1937 to 79,137 in December 1940.5 This chapter consists of twenty-three letters written by Flora to her most devoted friend Ludmelia. Apart from domestic trauma, Flora recounted efforts spent on teaching and writing jobs. In 1939 and 1941 she gave talks at two monthly meetings of the Peking Writers’ Club, also known as the Sino-French Literary Circle.6 In 1940 and 1941 she wrote feature articles on diverse topics and initiated a weekly column on the Chinese theater for the Peking Chronicle.7 When months went by between letters from Flora, Ludy expressed her anxiety and longing in a poem “To Flora Belle in China.” The original handwritten draft of the poem was sent to me by Ludy’s daughter Elisabeth. The poem is not dated but it contains a line about “hutungs,” a term for small streets used only in Beijing. The initials LHR (Ludmelia Holstein Ralston) show that the poem was written after her marriage to Mr. Ralston. A copy of the poem is inserted after Flora’s last letter from Beijing dated May 12, 1941. A Straw in the Wind 129 [Letterhead: Yenching University] 1 West Huang Cheng Ken...