My course of studies was unexacting. This left ample time for basketball, track, and convivial association with other male undergraduates. I was cautiously reserved with the women students lest, in a still strait-laced society, offense be taken, or jealousies and ill feeling aroused. I made frequent visits to nearby Peking and once met there a diplomat, O. Edmund Clubb, then a junior official in the American Legation. I regarded this as something of an event because, never having met one, I held diplomatists in some awe and was consequently relieved to find Clubb unassuming and friendly.
Political activism had periodically swept Chinese campuses, usually in the form of demonstrations against some act of foreign aggression, but the academic year 1929–30 was relatively quiet. The exhilarating National Revolution of 1926–27 had subsided, far short of its goal of unifying the country. And the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, beginning Tokyo’s attempt to conquer China, was more than a year away. The Communist movement did not have the broad appeal that it came to exert during World War II; it was riven by doctrinal squabbles and rivalry between those underground in the cities and those, including Mao Tse-tung, with a fledgling “Red Army” holed up in the mountains of Central China. I was told that there were Communist students at Yenching, but I do not recall having met any. Certainly, they were inconspicuous. The majority of the students at this conservative school were then preoccupied with preparing for careers.
Following final examinations in June 1930, I journeyed to Inner Mongolia where I visited construction of an irrigation project on the Yellow River, north of the Ordos Desert. This was frontierland—steppes, horsemen, and camel caravans.
Later in the summer, Gordon and I returned to the United States by way of Manchuria (much of which was still a land for pioneers), the interminable trans-Siberian railway, and western Europe. We traveled in the company of Maxwell S. Stewart and his wife. A recent member of the Yenching faculty, Stewart had five years earlier taught me mathematics at the Shanghai American School. He was now embarked upon a journalistic career. We crossed the bleak Manchurian-Mongolian-Siberian borderland and at the frontier encountered our first specimens of Soviet Man, the border guards. They were large, forbidding fellows who did not radiate goodwill. The smaller, scruffier functionaries and attendants on the train were no more genial. At first I thought that their sullen attitude toward me was because I was regarded as a member of the capitalist class. But then it became evident that they treated their proletarian compatriots in much the same or worse fashion—in such contrast to the outgoing, demonstrative behavior of the émigré Russians I had known and observed in China.
The Stewarts, Gordon and I traveled in the cheapest category, “hard class,” on bare wooden benches. We bettered our sleeping conditions by renting bedding rolls. Food tickets for sparse, badly cooked meals in the dining room were exorbitantly expensive. I subsisted therefore on several large bars of chocolate that I had brought along as emergency rations and loaves of sour black bread bought from wizened peasant women at stops along the way. The staff of life fermented in the belly, so when I arrived in Moscow after of week of this diet I was in a state of bloat.
There was little else but black bread—and only occasionally that—at stations. 1930 was a hunger year, for Stalin was collectivizing Soviet agriculture. Consequently, food production and distribution were in deep decline. The people along the railway were shabbily dressed, much of the housing was old log cabins, and most of the roads visible from the train were mud. The Soviet Union seemed more backward than feudalistic China.
Through his journalistic contacts, Stewart arranged for Gordon and me to stay at the Moscow apartment of Anna Louise Strong, who was out of town. I regretted not being able to meet Miss Strong, as she was a celebrity—an American author of pro-Soviet articles and books and a firsthand reporter of revolutionary events in China during 1927. Her apartment was a gratifyingly economical and convenient base from which to explore Moscow, which, aside from Red Square and the inaccessible Kremlin, was either dilapidated or being excavated for new construction. After a day or two of wandering about, mostly looking for a restaurant or food shop where we could get something to eat, Gordon and I were ready to move on to western Europe.
The travel authorities, however, wanted to know when we had arrived in Moscow and where had we been since that time. There was no record of our presence in the city. Very suspicious. It took a couple of days to get from an acquaintance of Miss Strong an acceptable written statement that we had lodged in the Strong apartment. Only then were we permitted to leave.
Crossing the border, from the socialist paradise to Pilsudski’s Poland, was a move from the grim and leaden, where the only decorative color was red, to good cheer and kaleidoscopic colors. In a spick and span little station restaurant I celebrated with a double order of ham and eggs.
Columbia University was next in my itinerant education. Gordon went on to McGill and a distinguished career in medicine. My credentials were so unorthodox that I was accepted as a university, not Columbia College, undergraduate. This meant that I had a wide range of studies to choose from and that most of my classes were at night. I had abandoned my superficial decision to be a newsman because my free-lance efforts out of Yenching were discouraging and I doubted my ability to become a successful reporter. I decided to try for the Foreign Service. To that end I took a course of international law under Philip Jessup.
My most pressing problem was money. From their meager income my parents contributed some. So did my aunt, Florence Davies. I had to earn what I could. Through the good offices of International House, my name was placed before Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. as a candidate for tutoring her son David. She received me graciously and drew me out on my life accomplishments. A few days later I received a telegram: AS IT SEEMS IMPORTANT THAT OUR SON SHOULD BE ENTHUSED OVER ATHLETICS WE HAVE DECIDED TO ENGAGE THE MAN WHO NOT ONLY IS STRONG IN ATHLETICS BUT SHARES DAVIDS INTEREST IN ENTOMOLOGY I THANK YOU FOR COMING TO SEE ME AND REGRET NOT TO OFFER YOU THIS POSITION MRS JOHN D ROCKEFELLER JR
So I took the next available job. It was as a dishwasher in a Dixie-style restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue run by a genteel Southern woman whose staff, aside from me, was entirely Japanese, up to their elbows in corn pone and succotash.
After graduation from Columbia in 1931, I took the Foreign Service examinations. While awaiting word of the results, I stayed with my maiden aunt Flossie in her little house near the Art Institute in Detroit. She offered shelter to Donald and me any time we needed it because our parents were in China and we had no home in the United States. Aunt Flossie was then art editor of the Detroit News, a woman of abounding emotion, at once warmly outgoing and vulnerable. But she prided herself on being a true newspaperwoman, frightfully hardboiled. In practice this meant no more than that she was a woman of considerable common sense.
Aunt Flossie’s friends were varied and entertaining—newspaper people, artists, museum curators, automotive engineers. Through her I met at one time or another Diego Rivera, hard at work on a turgid mural; the calmly droll Swedish sculptor Carl Milles; and Eero Saarinen, the architect, gingery and taciturn, both of whom lived near Detroit. Similarly, at Dearborn I participated in an evening of sycophantic square dancing at which the host was the original Henry Ford, spare and aloof in this one of his several ineffectual efforts to retrieve the lost simplicity of American life.
The Department of State notified me in November that I had passed the Foreign Service examination. In January 1932 I went abroad—a dime ferry ride across the river to the American Consulate at Windsor, Ontario— for probationary duty as a Foreign Service Officer, Unclassified (c) with a princely stipend of $2,500 a year. A year of in-job training and I was transferred during the last days of the Hoover administration to Washington for three months of tutelage in the Department.
We were fifteen novices, lectured to by Foreign Service and departmental officials on the various categories