Her Lotus Year E-Book

Paul French

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 464

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The revealing story of the legendary Wallis Simpson's controversial and formative year in China in the 1920s. 'Compelling' Dr Amanda Foreman 'Fascinating' Lisa See 'Riveting' Anne Sebba 'Surprising' Anne de Courcy 'Convincing' Hugo Vickers 'Intriguing' Julia Boyd 'A book of fascinating revelations' Laurence Leamer 'Magisterial, beautifully written and impeccably researched' Alexander Larman In her memoirs, Wallis Simpson described her time in China as her 'Lotus Year', referring to Homer's Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. That year, however, was also used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment. Determined to 'save' the monarchy, the British government's 'China Dossier' of Wallis's rumoured amorous and immoral activities in the Far East portrayed her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king. But little was really known about how she spent that mysterious period in her life – until now. Paul French, the New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian of China, uncovers a completely different picture, portraying a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war. Despite the many challenges she faced, from violent riots to the breakdown of her abusive first marriage, it was there that she established her confidence and independence, developed her unique fashion sense, and forged friendships that would last a lifetime. She emerged from that year as the elegant, stylish, cosmopolitan and worldly woman for whom a king gave up his throne. Her Lotus Year takes a headlong dive into Wallis's early, formative years – and into the chaotic and thrilling China of the 1920s – to explore the untold story of a woman too often maligned by history.

Leseprobe

“Paul French has discovered a side of Wallis Simpson that few, if any, will ever have known existed . . . Her Lotus Year is a compelling exploration of a woman too often reduced to mere scandal, offering readers a fresh perspective on one of history’s most enigmatic figures.”

Dr Amanda Foreman, New York Times bestselling author of Georgiana and A World on Fire

“Rumors have always swirled about the two ‘missing’ years Wallis Simpson spent in China. Here, China expert Paul French casts a detailed light on her stay, sifting fact from fiction, with some surprising conclusions.”

Anne de Courcy, author of Husband Hunters

“Riveting and fascinating, Paul French has put flesh on the bones in his detailed account of what Wallis really did in her ‘Lotus Year’.”

Anne Sebba, New York Times bestselling author of That Woman

“I thought there was nothing left to learn about the Duchess of Windsor. But Paul French has proven me wrong in this book of fascinating revelations.”

Laurence Leamer, New York Times bestselling author of Capote’s Women

“Expertly woven into the backdrop of 1920s China, French’s new study challenges the clichés surrounding Wallis Simpson to reveal her in an intriguing new light.”

Julia Boyd, author of A Dance with the Dragon

“At last, a respected writer about China, who knows what he is talking about . . . [French] fills in the Duchess of Windsor’s year in China with prodigious and convincing research.”

Hugo Vickers, bestselling author of Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece

“Paul French’s expert knowledge of China brings a fresh and humanising perspective to Wallis Simpson, exposing some myths and filling an important gap in the literature.”

Andrew Lownie, bestselling author of Traitor King

“Wallis Simpson’s time in China between 1924 and 1925 has been too long shrouded in rumour and innuendo. Thank God, then, for Paul French, whose magisterial, beautifully written and impeccably researched account of the future Duchess of Windsor’s activities during this period should henceforth be regarded as the definitive account. Forget the so-called ‘China Dossier’, which probably never existed anyway; this is all you need to know about the woman who was never queen.”

Alexander Larman, author of The Windsors at War

ALSO BY PAUL FRENCH

City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai

North Korea: State of Paranoia: A Modern History

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China

For Beatrix Anne and Ernest James

CONTENTS

A Note on Names, Spellings, and Language

Introduction

Prologue: Back to the Beginning

  1. The Years Before and the Voyage East

  2. A Beautiful Vision

  3. An Island Amid Revolutionary Ferment

  4. The Pearl of the Orient

  5. Twenty-four Hours in Typhoid Town

  6. Chance Encounters in Peking

  7. A Hutong Heaven

  8. Jade Hunting at the Thieves’ Market

  9. Temple Weekends

10. Cinderella in the Legation Quarter

11. Romance at the End of the Great Wall

12. Cheering Ponies and Cherry Brandy

13. The Lotus-Eater’s Dream Shattered: Leaving China

14. A New Start

Plate Section

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

A NOTE ON NAMES, SPELLINGS, AND LANGUAGE

Names in this book reflect the spellings most commonly used in the first half of the twentieth century. Hence, Peking and not Beijing; Canton and not Guangzhou. Where names and spellings have changed, I have mentioned the current or commonly used name in parentheses after first use.

Where Chinese people were commonly known by Western names to foreign audiences, these are used rather than either the older Wade-Giles or the more recent pinyin systems of romanization. Additionally, I have used the best-known variations of some Chinese names rather than their more modern variants, such as Sun Yat-sen rather than Sun Zhongshan, and Chang Tso-lin as opposed to Zhang Zuolin (though, where applicable, contemporary pinyin names are included in parentheses at first use).

For Shanghai, I have used the former road and district names of the International Settlement and French Concession within the text as they were in 1924. Additionally, many roads, particularly those of Beijing’s Legation Quarter and Guangzhou’s Shamian Island, were popularly known by various European names by foreigners at the time, and I have used these. For all roads, the current name is given in parentheses after first use.

As the New Yorker writer, China sojourner, and onetime ardent “Shanghailander” Emily Hahn once commented when tackling the question of rendering Chinese into English, “This writer has done her best but knows it is not good enough, and meekly bends her head before the inevitable storm.” I too bow my head.

Wallis, as well as many of her biographers and commentators, were men and women of their times. Various outdated terms, such as coolie (meaning “laborer”), boy (meaning “servant”), and Chinaman, are used occasionally in contemporary quotes. These terms are derogatory and insulting to us now, and in using them in original quotes, I reflect the languages, assumptions, and foreign mores of the times. Such language is itself the result of colonialism and Western privilege in China and reflects the realities of the period in which the younger Wallis Spencer lived.

However, we should not think that the use of such terms at the time was wholly accepted and went unchallenged. For instance, the term Chinaman in particular must be framed and contextualized. The term was widely used in the nineteenth century as a pejorative, usually with generally derogatory overtones, but not always intended as malicious. By the 1920s, a vigorous debate was beginning to occur over the use of the term both in the United States and in Britain.

From the mid-1920s, American writers and “China Hands,” such as the Missouri-born Shanghai-based journalist and advertising agency owner Carl Crow, began to criticize people using the term Chinaman. Crow and others—academic Sinologists, Chinese students in America, and diplomats at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC—engaged with newspapers and authors as well as entering into long correspondences with the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary concerning the term.

Eventually, in 1938, the editors of the OED in England accepted the argument that Chinaman had gone out of fashion and was now a derogatory term and therefore offensive. The OED said that they would consider revising their entry. Crow was encouraged enough to fire off letters to the compilers of other English-language dictionaries in America, such as Merriam-Webster, encouraging them to alter their entries too.

What was without doubt the most delightful, the most carefree, the most lyrical interval of my youth—the nearest thing to a lotus-eater’s dream that a young woman brought up the “right” way could expect to know.

—Wallis, Duchess of Windsor,The Heart Has Its Reasons

INTRODUCTION

The many biographies of Wallis Simpson have tended to focus almost exclusively on the love affair that forced the constitutional crisis of the abdication of King Edward VIII in December 1936 and the challenging years of exile for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor that followed. The earlier part of Wallis’s life, her first disastrous marriage to Commander Win Spencer, her escape from that relationship, and the pivotal year she spent in China across 1924 and 1925 have been the subject of much rumor but relatively little close study. Her Lotus Year reveals a different Wallis Simpson from the one so often presented.

Early-twentieth-century Chinese history is complicated and undeniably confusing, while rarely being the province of royal historians. And so Wallis’s China sojourn of the mid-1920s tends to be noted solely in terms of salacious gossip and innuendo rather than her actual experiences of the country. Many nefarious stories surrounding her China sojourn emerged around the time of the threatened abdication a dozen years after Wallis had left China. They formed the substance of what would come to be known as the “China Dossier.” The elite ruling clique of the English Establishment, including the then government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the British intelligence services, sought to use Wallis Simpson’s time in China to denigrate her moral character, making prurient and baseless assertions. These were given weight by the prevailing Sinophobic narratives in British society that associated single white women in the Far East with sexual impropriety and were designed specifically to derail her relationship with King Edward VIII.

In the first half of the twentieth century, images of the “heathen Chinee,” the fleshpots of the Far East, the “Yellow Peril,” and “white slavery” east of Suez were rampant. The notion that sojourners in the East somehow jettisoned their moral compasses as soon as they stepped ashore reached the common reader and cinemagoer through countless plays, short stories, novels, and films. Travelers in the East, especially white women, went bad out there, if they weren’t already prone to moral rot and therefore attracted to the Orient in the first place.

With this image of China so prevalent in the imagination of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, it was easy for the British Establishment to perpetrate the rumors of Wallis’s supposed descent into (take your pick of any or all of the suggested rumors) prostitution, opium addiction and dope dealing, modeling for pornographic photographs, fronting for a gambling syndicate, endless love affairs (mostly with married men), lesbianism, living as a “kept woman,” drunkenness, sexual ménages à trois, exotic massage techniques to encourage ejaculation, and (perhaps most famously and endlessly repeated to this day on a thousand websites fascinated by Wallis) her supposed technique, learned in a low Chinese brothel of course, of the “Shanghai Grip.”

The rumors were used to blacken Wallis’s name in London society. Originally, the insinuations were proffered to offer some explanation (as opposed to any notion of character, style, sophistication, or fashion sense) for Edward VIII’s obsession with her. A justification for her hold over him. The lurid rumors hung around Wallis like a bad smell for the rest of her life and continue to be recycled in the tabloid press today. Crucially, however, it seems that while the gossip circulated wildly among the upper echelons of British society, Queen Mary, the then Prince Albert (later King George VI after the abdication) and his wife, Elizabeth (later better known as the Queen Mother), senior government ministers, the clergy, and so on—nobody ever actually read a physical copy or held an actual document in their hands. In fact, nobody has ever seen the purported document. Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac’s book The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana claims that Edward VIII’s close confidant and royal insider Kenneth de Courcy knew the “document” was “totally false.” The authors conclude that the dossier did not exist. Further to that, the top civil servant of his day and private secretary to three prime ministers (Chamberlain, Churchill, and Attlee), Jock Colville, had never come across the dossier.* When word of the dossier eventually reached Wallis, she understood the allegations to be “venom, venom, VENOM.”†

Her Lotus Year offers a very different account of Wallis’s time in China from the version suggested by the rumors put about by the purported China Dossier. Having written about China and the country’s convulsive interwar history between the world wars for a quarter century, I became intrigued by the fact that Wallis Simpson had spent time in China in the mid-1920s. I began to trace her footsteps, discovering her experiences of Hong Kong’s Kowloon district, Canton’s Shameen Island, the Shanghai Bund, or Peking’s ancient hutongs. I was struck by the events she would have witnessed, given what a chaotic, uncertain, and often dangerous period it was in China’s history. I would find myself in places I knew she had once stayed—Shanghai’s Palace Hotel, the old building of the Grand Hôtel de Pékin, the traditional hutong lane where she lived with friends. At these random moments, Wallis’s China sojourn would come within reach.

Rather than the rumors and allegations, casually repeated and to any China historian obviously false, the journey she took across the country in such perilous times was revealing of a fast-disappearing world of cosmopolitan glamour, political intrigue, and unashamed colonial excess. This I discovered was what was truly formative in shaping the Wallis Simpson the world would come to recognize, and far more fascinating than the tawdry rumors put about by the China Dossier.

In the summer of 1924, Mrs. Wallis Warfield Spencer, having just turned twenty-eight years of age, boarded a United States Navy transport ship bound for Hong Kong. She was traveling to the Far East in the hope she could save her failing marriage. Her husband, US Navy pilot Earl Winfield “Win” Spencer Jr., was an abusive drunk with a temper, and their marriage had been troubled for some years before he was posted east to serve with the US South China Patrol. He begged her to follow him; he swore he’d given up the booze; her family urged her to try to repair the relationship. So she went . . .

After a seemingly idyllic reunion in Hong Kong, Win soon slipped back into his old ways—drinking to excess and abusing his wife verbally, emotionally, and physically. At this point, Wallis decided to leave him. Her Lotus Year tells the story of what happened next.

Wallis left Win and Hong Kong for the cosmopolitan delights of 1920s Shanghai, where she effectively began her life over. From there, she journeyed to Peking, where she immediately became entranced with the ancient Chinese capital. She was to stay in China for approximately a year.

It was a period Wallis herself later referred to longingly as her “Lotus Year,” invoking the lotus-eaters of Greek mythology, Homer’s Odyssey, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem. Homer describes the lotus-eaters, a tribe encountered by Odysseus during his return from Troy, as having become “forgetful of their homeward way.” Pleasantly marooned on an island, in an altered state and isolated from the rest of the world, they live a life of indolence and peaceful apathy, free of practical concerns.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters,” 1832)

This was how Wallis viewed her China sojourn. It was a year that would affect her in significant ways. She discovered she could mix easily in sophisticated international company, where the conversation was immeasurably more interesting than the middle-class Baltimore dining rooms or drab US naval base society she had known previously. Over the course of her stay, she would develop a lifelong appreciation of traditional Chinese style and aesthetics, developing the exquisite taste for which she became renowned.

An adventurous, curious, active, and independent woman, she traveled across the country during a time of great political turmoil in China. In the power vacuums that followed the collapse of the 267-year-old Qing dynasty and the problematic emergence of the first Chinese Republic, warlord battles threatened to plunge China into full-blown civil war. These self-proclaimed leaders of large armies controlling vast swaths of territory skirmished and fought for power all around her as she moved from Hong Kong north to Shanghai and then farther north and inland to Peking. Even though she remained largely in the safe confines of the International Settlements in Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, and Peking, disease, natural disaster, and banditry were never far away. She made lifelong friends and enjoyed a genuine love affair.

Wallis was aware of the chaos engulfing China, the revolution of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the violent jockeying for position among the warlords, just as she was aware that most of her time in China was spent in a form of privileged isolation from the confusion and mayhem outside the enclaves of colonial Hong Kong, the foreign treaty ports and concessions of Shameen Island, Shanghai, and Tientsin (Tianjin), or the protected Legation Quarter of Peking. Looking back thirty years later, by then the Duchess of Windsor, she would write: “In later years I was to reflect upon how much I missed China.”*

* Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac, The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana (London: Atlantic Books, 2021), 345, 617–618.

† Joe Bryan and Charles J. V. Murphy, The Windsor Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), 22.

* Wallis Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons (London: Michael Joseph, 1956), 119. Wallis’s autobiography is ghostwritten. It was reputedly a rather torturous affair. The project was started with Charles J. V. Murphy, a former Washington bureau chief for Fortune magazine, who also wrote for Time and Life and had previously ghostwritten the Duke of Windsor’s A King’s Story (1947). The process was not smooth, and Wallis fired Murphy. She then hired the American author and critic Cleveland Amory, but he also soon departed the project.

Prologue

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

THE VILLA LOU VIEI

NEAR CANNES, THE FRENCH RIVIERA

DECEMBER 2–11, 1936

Don’t worry. It never happens . . .

—Wallis’s motto, according to the Duke of Windsor

FLIGHT TO OLD FRIENDS

On December 2, 1936, the long-running and much-gossiped-about affair between the American double divorcée Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII dramatically became public. Wallis, two years younger than Edward, had met the then Prince of Wales in 1931, becoming his mistress a few years later. The king demanded to marry Wallis, who had recently divorced her second husband, Ernest Simpson. A constitutional crisis of unprecedented magnitude loomed.

The traditional restraint of Fleet Street in not reporting the private lives of the Royal Family was shattered as one of the Establishment’s best-kept secrets was revealed to all for the price of a tabloid newspaper. The foreign media, free of any need to display deference to the Court of St. James’s, had been gleefully running the story for quite some time. Of course, those in the know in British society—the so-called Establishment of politicians, senior clergy, the intelligence services, as well as the aristocracy in their town houses, country estates, and London clubs—had long spoken of the affair. Largely, they had tolerated the former Prince of Wales’s infatuation with the twice-divorced American woman formerly known in her native Baltimore as Bessie Wallis Warfield, then Mrs. Earl Winfield Spencer and, until her most recent divorce, Mrs. Ernest Simpson. This tolerant attitude changed when the prince became the king.

Edward had become the monarch following his father King George V’s death in January 1936. Wallis had begun divorce proceedings from Ernest Simpson in October, received a decree nisi, and was now required to wait six months before the decree was made absolute, thereby legally ending her marriage.* She would then be technically free to marry the king.

For Wallis, the drama and media frenzy became simply too much. Edward was said to be threatening suicide (and reminding her that he slept with a gun under his pillow) if he was unable to marry Wallis.† Her photograph was magnified on the front page of every newspaper—unbearable for a woman who cared so much about her appearance. The pictures were accompanied by generally hostile captions. She received floods of hate mail; she could not easily move around the city. She needed to escape, to get away from London and the intrusions of the press. But where to go?

After careful thought, Wallis decided that there was only one place, the Villa Lou Viei—“the only sanctuary within reach,” as she wrote much later in her memoirs.‡ It was over eight hundred miles from London, a fifty-five-hour journey by car and ferry. Situated in the hills above Cannes in the South of France, the villa, a twelfthcentury converted monastery, was the stunning home of Herman and Katherine “Kitty” Rogers, a wealthy American couple. Wallis had known Kitty since before the First World War, back when she was married to her first husband, Commander Earl Winfield “Win” Spencer, a US Navy pilot, and when both Wallis and Kitty had been “navy wives.” Wallis cabled Herman and Kitty in France asking their assistance. Herman replied immediately, “Of course, you must come to us.”*

After a dash from London, a powerful Buick car arrived at the villa at two in the morning. In the front seats were chauffeur George Ladbrooke alongside Police Inspector Evans of Scotland Yard. In the rear, Wallis, in a three-quarter-length sable fur coat, crouched on the floor, a rug thrown over her by her other traveling companion, the British peer, lord-in-waiting, and close friend of the king’s, Perry Brownlow (sixth Baron Brownlow). The car sped through the swiftly opened wrought iron gates into the sanctuary of the Villa Lou Viei.

Inspector Evans made arrangements with the French police to guard the villa. Wallis’s maid, Mary Burke, had arrived ahead of her mistress to prepare. Shortly afterward, sixteen trunks and thirty-six suitcases of luggage turned up. The villa was in some disarray. The Rogerses had been in the midst of redecorating when a desperate Wallis had asked for refuge.

The next morning, Herman, with Perry Brownlow, sat down on the villa’s terrace to help Wallis compose her famous “untenable” letter on December 8. Wallis stated that she was willing “to withdraw from a situation which has become both unhappy and untenable.” It did nothing to sway the opinion of the king. Edward replied, “You can go anywhere, to China even, Labrador or the South Seas. But wherever you go I will follow.”* The king’s specific mention of China was not accidental. Wallis really had thought of fleeing to China. Perry Brownlow said he would accompany her if she so decided. But Edward had made the decision to abdicate before any such plan came to fruition, if indeed she was ever serious. But clearly the notion of escaping at a time of crisis to China was in her mind. And there was good reason for this.

This was not the first time that Wallis had sought sanctuary with the Rogerses. She had once before been a recipient of their largesse and friendship—on a freezing-cold New Year’s Eve 1924, in Peking, China. The independently wealthy Rogerses had decided to live in the Chinese capital for a few years and occupied a beautiful traditional courtyard home on one of the city’s distinctive narrow lanes, an ancient hutong.† The then Wallis Spencer was a lone woman traveling through warlord- and bandit-racked Chinese hinterlands, having finally felt compelled to leave her hard-drinking and physically abusive husband in Hong Kong.

Her funds running low, her hotel room only affordable for a few more days, the city frozen and surrounded by bandit armies and a typhoid epidemic, it was perhaps the lowest point of Wallis’s life. Until she met Kitty and Herman in Peking. The couple had been her saviors before, and so it seemed they would be again.

On December 11, 1936, the three of them and Perry Brownlow gathered around the radio to listen to the king’s abdication broadcast. Wallis recalled: “I was lying on the sofa with my hands over my eyes, trying to hide my tears. After he finished, the others quietly went and left me alone. I lay there a long time before I could control myself enough to walk through the house and go upstairs to my room.”*

Wallis would spend nearly six months at the Villa Lou Viei with Kitty and Herman before embarking on her third marriage in June 1937, when she became Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, wife of a former king. Throughout this time, she was besieged by the international press camped at the villa’s gates, a pile of mostly hostile letters arrived each morning with the breakfast tray, and her reputation was increasingly trashed in the English newspapers that arrived every lunchtime.

Wallis’s dramatic scramble from England to the Riviera was both an escape and a reunion. It’s inconceivable that once within the safety of the confines of the Villa Lou Viei, the three friends did not reminisce about their time together in China, a time Wallis was to claim had begun at a low point but ultimately became the happiest of her life. Her self-proclaimed Lotus Year.

The USS Chaumont

* A decree nisi being a preliminary statement that the court does not see any reason why the couple cannot divorce.

† Emily Chan, “How ‘Needy’ King Edward Left Wallis Simpson Trapped,” Daily Mail (UK), November 21, 2017.

‡ Wallis Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons (London: Michael Joseph, 1956), 261.

* Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons.

* Charles Higham, The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 156.

†Hutong (a corrupted borrowing from Middle Mongolian quddug, “water well”) refers to the narrow streets or alleys then to be found crisscrossing and proliferating throughout Peking. First developed during the Yuan (or Mongol) dynasty (1279– 1368), hutongs are uniquely found largely in Peking as well as some other northern Chinese locations.

* Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 278.

1

THE YEARS BEFORE AND THE VOYAGE EAST

USS CHAUMONT

THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

JULY–SEPTEMBER 1924

So be it, I thought. Win and I have failed in the West. Perhaps in the East we can find our way to a new life together.

—Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, The Heart Has Its Reasons

BEFORE CHINA

When Wallis decided to head to the Far East, she had just turned twenty-eight, hoping for adventure, but also aiming to rekindle her estranged marriage. Her husband had been posted to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong with the US Navy’s South China Patrol, and Wallis hoped their relationship might revive in a different environment, especially if her husband had, as he claimed, quit his heavy drinking. Wallis’s Baltimore upbringing had been relatively staid, a home of strict conventions, fixed opinions, and one in which divorce was not just scandalous but inevitably seen as a failure on the woman’s part. And so Wallis Warfield Spencer felt compelled to try again. She also admitted to her mother shortly before deciding to leave America for Hong Kong, “The truth is, I suppose, I still love him.”* It was ultimately to be a doomed attempt, and she was to eventually break free of the conventions of her upbringing. But she departed America with some hope.

Her father, Teackle Wallis Warfield, had died of tuberculosis in 1896, aged just twenty-seven, barely three months after Wallis was born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. She later maintained she’d been raised in “relative poverty,” though Wallis’s widowed aunt Bessie Merryman declared that it was “not exactly Tobacco Road.” Teackle was “a retiring, ailing boy who worked insignificantly as a clerk in Baltimore, but the family had what were called ‘good connections.’ ”† Until the age of six, Bessie Wallis Warfield (she dropped the “Bessie” early, so her biographer Diana Mosley claimed, as she considered it a “cow’s name”) lived with her wealthy railroad baron uncle, Solomon Davies Warfield, “Uncle Sol,” at his home, Manor Glen, eighteen miles outside of the city.‡ Later, her mother, Alice, decided they should move in with Aunt Bessie back in Baltimore.

Thanks to the continued largesse of Uncle Sol, Wallis attended the prestigious, private all-girls school Oldfields, which elevated feminine decorum over an inquiring mind. She did not excel academically but did become an accomplished equestrienne.§ Wallis formally came out as a debutante on Christmas Eve 1914, a celebration rather dampened by the start of the war in Europe.

Two years later, in April 1916, Wallis went to visit her married cousin and close childhood confidante Corinne Mustin (née DeForest Montague) in Florida.* Corrine’s husband Henry was a pioneering US Navy aviator who commanded the Pensacola air base. There she was introduced to Earl Winfield “Win” Spencer Jr. Eight years older than Wallis, Spencer was a naval aviator. Tanned and handsome, he looked good in his uniform and had an engaging smile. “I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator,” she wrote in her diary.† He was attracted by her “sapphire blue eyes and contagious laugh.”‡ It was a whirlwind romance, and they married in Baltimore that November. Wallis was just two years out of school, barely twenty, and naive. The newlyweds honeymooned at the popular Greenbrier Resort at White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia.

The son of a Chicago stockbroker, Win Spencer had graduated from the US Naval Academy, becoming a pilot, but had been (maybe due to his excessive drinking) denied an opportunity to go to the war in Europe. Instead, he was left behind in San Diego to establish the Naval Air Station North Island, training other pilots to go to France. Win’s constant griping about being left out of the war and stuck in the backwater of Coronado meant that Wallis also came to resent being stuck in California, particularly as she had to endure Win’s tantrums and ragings.

The problem was that Win drank . . . heavily. He had a quick temper, which was accelerated by his frustration at his stalled career. The couple lived in regulation married quarters for what felt like a very long four years. Wallis’s life was, she openly admitted, boring.§ Endless evenings of navy talk with other navy wives over endless rubbers of bridge (a talent that would come in useful later in China) and gin. Some of the wives became good friends. The Spencers were close to Kitty Bigelow and her navy pilot husband, Ernest. But then Ernest was posted to France in 1917, and Kitty followed him to Europe as a nurse. Wallis was left alone as Win drank and fumed about being stuck in California while other men were seeing action. The situation was not helped by the fact that Win’s younger brother Dumaresq, known as “Stuff,” was a volunteer pilot with the Escadrille de La Fayette, a unit of the French air force composed mostly of American volunteers. Dumaresq Spencer crashed and died in France in January 1918.

Coronado was a notoriously tedious place. In his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s main character, Amory Blaine (who does serve in the US military in World War I), recalls his mother spending time there: “Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown.”* It was an incestuous atmosphere ripe for combustible rows and angry shouting matches.

Wallis had first discovered Win’s temper on their honeymoon, when he’d found out the Greenbrier was a “dry” hotel. He’d had to resort to surreptitiously swigging from his silver hip flask. Win’s drinking was immense—his regular tipple was a large consommé bowl filled entirely of dry martinis.† Then in Coronado, things got worse, spiraling into what was to become an all-too-familiar cycle of anger and violence followed by abject apology and apparent remorse. Wallis would recall that Win would sometimes force her into the bathroom, lock the door, and switch the lights off, leaving her there till morning, telling her she was in “solitary.”‡ He was a mean drunk. While his behavior was intolerable, Wallis was a young woman of a certain time and upbringing, and at this point, she questioned her own, rather than her husband’s, behavior. The prevailing ethos, instilled in Wallis from childhood, was that marriage was for life and a wife should accept her condition and try harder to please her husband. But though she stayed with Win, it was clear to her that the marriage was falling apart.*

Win eventually escaped Coronado. He was assigned to the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, DC. This appointment, it seems, was probably arranged by the bureau’s first assistant chief, Henry Mustin, the husband of Wallis’s cousin Corinne, and so it is entirely possible that Wallis herself pulled some strings to get them out of the rut of Coronado.

But it didn’t improve his temperament much. The bureau was another no-flying, deskbound job. Win continued to drink heavily enough for their neighbors to complain to the management at the Hotel Brighton of their constant arguing. Still, Wallis sought to avoid scandal and stayed with Win. They fought; he took to locking her in the hotel bathroom. His drinking, the anger, violence, and occasional blackouts came to a head when he deserted Wallis for four whole months without explanation. But still Wallis couldn’t leave. She consulted her aunt Bessie in Baltimore but found little support—“Divorce! It’s unthinkable.”† Win returned, and the marriage limped along until February 1922, when he was reassigned to the US Navy’s South China Patrol stationed in Hong Kong.

With Win gone to Asia, Wallis moved back to Baltimore. But she regularly paid social visits to neighboring Washington, mingling on the fringes of the capital’s diplomatic circle, staying with cousin Corrine, and evidently enjoying her newfound freedom from Win. “I was often out quite late. Whatever the hour, my mother was always waiting for me, sitting up in bed, reading or sewing when I came in. She never failed to ask me where I had been, what I had done and with whom. I always told her.”*

But perhaps not everything that went on. Before long, Wallis embarked on an affair with a Latin American diplomat. Felipe Espil was the thirty-five-year-old first secretary at the Argentine embassy, a slim, well-dressed, handsome man, noted conversationalist, and a wine connoisseur.† Some biographers of Wallis have pondered why the debonair and stylish Espil was attracted to the relatively unsophisticated Mrs. Spencer. Yet a newspaper society page report, noting her appearance in the capital, suggests she was already keen on fashion and making a striking impression. Remarking that “Mrs Winfield Spencer is on a visit to the city while her husband is stationed in China,” Wallis is reported to be wearing “a lovely gown of cream lace and georgette . . . long bodice and no sleeves. A cane-like effect of georgette hanging from the shoulders fell into a short wispy train at one side.”‡

The liaison with Espil was intense but short-lived. He was a devout Catholic (at least in some respects) and would not consider marrying a divorcée. Wallis was heartbroken when he ended the affair.

Win had been in Asia for over two years by the summer of 1924. The US Navy’s South China Patrol was constituted of only two gunboats—the USS Helena and the USS Pampanga, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Win Spencer. The Pampanga was nominally based in Hong Kong but regularly patrolled the coast from the British colony as far as the Pearl River estuary and up to the Chinese city of Canton (Guangzhou). Unfortunately, as with Coronado and Washington, DC, the South China Patrol did not prove a happy posting for Win. Though a navy man, he was a flyer by choice and interest. While he was promoted to lieutenant commander in Hong Kong and handed command of the Pampanga, the ship was a rather aged vessel, and there was no aviation component to the job. Named after a Philippines province, it had started service with the patrol in 1919, though it had been built for the Spanish navy back in 1887 before being captured during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Additionally, Win didn’t much like the intense humidity of southern China. He found the summers brutal and complained that conditions on board the small boat were squalid and the “gobs” under his command coarse.*

Still, after his disappointment at missing out on the fighting in Europe in the Great War, he did see some action in China. There were regular anti-piracy patrols up and down the China coast and in the waters between Hong Kong and the Portuguese colony of Macao. Then, in late 1923, political agitation in the city of Canton, ostensibly over a customs dispute, meant the Pampanga was sent up the coast from Hong Kong to moor off the foreign enclave of Shameen (Shamian) Island to ensure the safety of the approximately five hundred American nationals living, working, and proselytizing in and around the city—more than any other nation at the time. Several gunboats of the Royal Navy, a squad of French soldiers, as well as a hundred US Marines deployed from Manila were ready to evacuate foreign nationals if the situation deteriorated. In the end, apart from a crowd that gathered to throw some stones and tell the “foreign devils” in no uncertain terms to leave, the situation eventually calmed. Still, a clash between French troops and Chinese nearby at the Bocca Tigris Fort on the Pearl River left forty Chinese and five Frenchmen dead.*

A few months later, things got difficult again as the Pampanga, still under Win’s command, was ordered back to Canton and then farther inland to Wuchow (Wuzhou), almost on the border with Vietnam and the French Indochinese empire. It was a challenge to Win’s navigation skills, as the river got extremely narrow as it approached Wuchow. But he had to stay at full steam if possible; it was an urgent mission. Two American missionaries, two Europeans, and twenty Chinese were being held captive by an estimated three hundred bandits in the hills outside Wuchow. They were demanding $2,000 in gold (over US$3.6 million in 2024 money), a hundred pistols, a thousand rifles, and a large quantity of ammunition. It seems the approach of the Pampanga and the prospect of armed bluejackets storming the bandit lair led the kidnappers to cut their losses and release the hostages.†

Later, in 1924, the South China Patrol and the Pampanga were back on the Pearl River again, once more heading up to Canton. In June, the crew of the Pampanga was involved in protecting the foreign enclave of Shameen after Vietnamese independence activists hurled a bomb into the dining room of the British Concession’s Victoria Hotel, attempting to assassinate the visiting governor of French Indochina.‡ A few weeks later, in August, the Pampanga was back at Shameen yet again as various warlord factions skirmished, threatening an American Baptist mission close to the city. All the missionaries and their families were safely evacuated.*

These were febrile times in Canton—labor disputes raged, factional fighting intensified, and banditry was on the rise in and around the city of two million people, surrounded by a province, Kwangtung (Guangdong), of many millions more. Win and the Pampanga were back in Canton again in September as the strikes and fighting escalated and took on an increasingly anti-foreign complexion. Several American bluejackets were wounded rescuing stranded Americans in the city.

Southern China may have been uncomfortably hot and humid for Win, but he couldn’t complain that he wasn’t kept busy and seeing his fair share of action and challenging situations. But what he wanted was for his wife to join him in Hong Kong.

Thirty years later, looking back with a certain nostalgia, induced perhaps by the passing of time, Wallis claimed that she suffered extreme loneliness after Win had left for Asia. Presumably, though, life hadn’t been all bad. The affair with Felipe Espil in Washington was followed by her first trip outside the United States, to Paris to visit her recently widowed cousin Corrine. The ever-dependable Uncle Sol paid her fare. Diana Mosley claimed Wallis did seriously consider divorcing Win in France, but it would have cost a lot of money, and she couldn’t afford it.† Meanwhile, a stream of letters and telegrams from Win arrived in Paris. He wrote that he was lonely, that he missed her. Couldn’t they try again? He vowed to Wallis in his letters that he had quit drinking in Hong Kong.

Wallis was perhaps feeling fragile after the disappointment with Espil. She couldn’t stay in Paris with Corrine indefinitely. She was still married, even if reluctantly. If she went to China, then the navy would arrange the transportation. Win wrote repeatedly claiming six months of sobriety, begging Wallis to come to Hong Kong and try again. Wallis wondered if, perhaps in a strange and exotic environment on the other side of the world, they could perhaps reset their marriage. It was a big decision. Not only the task of trying to reboot a failing relationship on the other side of the world, but with Win in China for nearly two years already, she could not have failed to see the alarming news in the newspapers of the strikes and troubles in Canton that had at times spilled over into Hong Kong, as well as the ever-present scourge of piracy in the South China Sea. The American press reported the Pampanga’s involvement in various missions; Commander Spencer was frequently mentioned. But if she had been reading the papers, the news from southern China didn’t deter her.

Wallis later wrote in her memoirs, “So be it, I thought. Win and I have failed in the West. Perhaps in the East we can find our way to a new life together.”* She agreed to sail to Hong Kong and booked passage east as a naval officer’s wife on the US Navy transport ship Chaumont.

THE SLOW BOAT TO CHINA

In her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, published in the mid-1950s, many eventful years after her Asia sojourn, Wallis looked back on herself as a relatively inexperienced young woman bound for Hong Kong on the “original slow boat to China.”† The USS Chaumont certainly wasn’t in a rush, nor was it much in the way of a stylish ride—a barebones US Navy transport ship that meandered down America’s East Coast, through the Panama Canal, and then across the vast Pacific, making stops at the American naval bases at Honolulu and Guam.

The Chaumont had been launched into service in 1921 from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Transports typically had just two classes of accommodation: first and second. As the wife of a serving officer, Wallis sailed first class, but on a navy transport, that was still fairly basic. The Chaumont was essentially a refitted cargo ship rather than an ocean liner, and so the accommodation was rudimentary. The Chaumont could, at full capacity, carry 1,300 troops with an additional couple of hundred crew and civilian passengers. In 1924, when Wallis boarded the Chaumont, it was serving as a designated transpacific troop carrier sailing between the United States and the US naval base at Manila in the Philippines.

The Chaumont embarked for its six-week voyage from the navy yards at Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday, July 17, 1924. It was scheduled to take a very long and roundabout route to the Philippines via the Panama Canal. The main cargo on this voyage was actually almost exclusively navy wives and children sailing to join husbands and fathers at their postings. Cabins were assigned according to the rank of the husband. As the wife of a lieutenant commander, Wallis was assigned a mid-rank cabin on the second deck, which she shared with two other women—the wife of a captain stationed in the Philippines and another woman traveling to China to marry an officer in the Marine Corps. The privileges, or the misfortunes, of rank extended throughout the ship. The higher your husband’s rank, the closer you were seated to the captain’s table in the dining room.

The voyage was initially a rotten experience for Wallis. She spent the first week confined to her cabin with a feverish cold and nausea. She described herself as “half-dead,” barely able to rise from her bunk, suffering terribly from seasickness. She avoided the communal areas of the ship, as everybody was smoking, which accentuated her nausea. By the time the Chaumont had crawled down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and reached the Panama Canal, Wallis was no better and had a high fever. But the ship’s doctor prescribed nothing more advanced than dry toast and ginger ale with a little chicken broth or beef tea for dinner. She continued to suffer severe seasickness all the way to Panama City.

Kay Manly, an old friend and fellow navy wife, was stationed with her husband in the Panama Canal Zone and found a physician for Wallis.* After two days’ recuperation ashore at the Manlys’ home, Wallis declared herself much improved and was able to rejoin the Chaumont for the next leg of the voyage—out across the Pacific to Hawaii, arriving for a few days’ stopover in Honolulu. On what must have been a rather slow news day, a nationally syndicated social column that ran in numerous newspapers across America noted:

Mrs Wallis Spencer has been sick for a week.†

Fortunately, after Hawaii, Wallis’s seasickness receded, and things aboard got rather better. Many of the higher-ranking officers’ wives disembarked, their husbands stationed at nearby Pearl Harbor, and so Wallis was moved up to a better-situated cabin.

By the time they completed the eleven-day transpacific voyage to the naval base at Guam in the western Pacific, Wallis and a few of the other wives had forgotten their initial seasickness but were now suffering serious cabin fever. Though ostensibly not permitted, a group of them insisted on going ashore while the Chaumont discharged supplies for the base. The adventurous gang rented a thatched hut on the beach at Apra Harbor for the two-day stopover. It may have seemed exotic, but Guam was in fact a closed port operated by the navy and more like a vast dockyard than an island paradise. The women were perfectly safe in contrast to some heightened reports that they had disappeared into the jungle and gotten lost!

In the few days the Chaumont was anchored at Guam, Wallis found time to lunch with the outgoing governor and former navy captain Henry Bertrand Price. Price was not exactly scintillating company, being quite obsessive and known to discourse at great length about his twin passions of modern highway technology and self-sufficient agricultural techniques, both of which he desired to implement on the island. Wallis was introduced to breadfruit, mangoes, and custard apples.*

Eventually, in late August, the Chaumont reached its final destination, Manila Bay. After a couple of days in the heavily American-influenced Philippines capital, Wallis transferred to a much better-appointed Canadian Pacific Steamship Company liner, the RMS Empress of Canada. In 1924, the sleek, white-painted Empress had barely been in service for two years since her construction and was by far the largest passenger vessel sailing the transpacific routes from her base in Vancouver, with stops in Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and China. Just a year before, the liner had arrived at Tokyo Harbor a day after the Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated Tokyo, Yokohama, and the surrounding hinterland. The liner immediately converted into an evacuation ship and rescued nearly a thousand refugees, transporting them to the safer port of Kobe 250 miles away from the quake zone.

Most of those joining the Empress of Canada in Manila were what the crew dismissively referred to as “Army and Oil,” either being in the military or working for one of the big American oil companies selling into China—Socony, Texaco, Asiatic Petroleum. Wallis had just two days of comparative luxury on the Empress of Canada, largely remaining in her well-appointed cabin before she stepped out on the deck and found they had sailed into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour on September 5. She had been at sea for just over six weeks.

VICTORIA HARBOUR, HONG KONG

To arrive by ship at Hong Kong in 1924 was a formidable experience. Liners approaching from the South China Sea converged into a harbor tightly packed with a veritable flotilla of similar boats, plus sampans, barges, tugs, and cross-harbor ferries, the occasional junk, packet steamers, tramp cargo ships, and warships of any one of a half dozen nations. The floating confusion forced big ships, like the Empress of Canada, to constantly blow their foghorns to alert smaller craft who risked being sunk in their wake.

Hong Kong was a dramatic harbor by any standards. The imposing cluster of European stone buildings along the Praya water frontage extended away toward the more densely populated Chinese districts of Kennedy Town and Sheung Wan.* Behind the Praya, the land suddenly rose steeply, verdant and lush, up to what the British dubbed “The Peak,” scattered with the houses of the wealthy and the colonial elite.

On the other side of the harbor lay the bustling Kowloon peninsula, dominated by the clock tower at the terminus of the Kowloon-Canton Railway that ran all the way up through the New Territories, across the border into the Republic of China, and up to the metropolis of Canton. Behind the station was the cluster of working-class districts that formed Kowloon—Tsim Sha Tsui, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, Sham Shui Po, Wong Tai Sin, and others that morphed one into another.

Over Hong Kong flew the Union Jack, the island a British Crown Colony wrenched in perpetuity from the Chinese by an unequal treaty in the aftermath of the First Opium War in 1842, with an additional ninety-nine-year lease on Kowloon and the New Territories to follow.*

The novelist Stella Benson, married to an Anglo-Irish functionary of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service in China, had arrived in Hong Kong a couple of years before. Sailing into Victoria Harbour, she captured the beauty and chaos of the scene Wallis would have experienced too: “Alive to the bland blue outlines of the Peak against the sky. Every scarlet and gold flutter of the paper prayers on the importunate sampans that raced for the liner with messages, cheap trinkets, and gifts, begging bowls . . . the heat like stagnant steam.”†

Despite the imposing gunboats and the giant billboards advertising British and European products that lined the passenger liner docks, what Wallis would have realized was that, British colony or not, she was now in the Far East. At the disembarkation dock, Win, wearing his uniform, rushed forward to greet her as she came down the gangplank. Wallis recalled he looked fit and clear-eyed. He claimed not to have touched a drop of alcohol since he’d heard she was sailing to be with him again.‡

He had organized a taxi. They were to have a second honeymoon, to ease Wallis into Hong Kong life. Win ensured that the porters gathered up Wallis’s trunks and cases and loaded them into a taxi, and he and Wallis headed for a few nights of luxury and reacquaintance before the reality of navy life in the Far East really began—dull, uninspiring lodgings, a stodgy colonial society, and Win constantly away at sea.

Win, it appeared, was genuinely trying. Attentive, sober, and having organized this romantic vacation. By the time they arrived at their exclusive hotel on the far side of Hong Kong Island, Wallis was already entranced by the East, by Hong Kong—“the almost unreal. Don’t-touch-it quality of the island itself.”*

What was to become her yearlong sojourn in China was beginning.

* Wallis Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons (London: Michael Joseph, 1956), 102.

† James Laver, Between the Wars (London: Vista Books, 1961), 205.

‡ Diana Mosley, The Duchess of Windsor (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980), 24.

§ In 2023, it was announced that Oldfields was closing after 156 years. Most reports noted Wallis as the most famous former pupil.

* Corinne was the great-granddaughter of Commodore Arthur Sinclair (1780–1831), who was an early American naval hero and who served in the United States Navy during the Quasi-War with France (1798–1800), the First Barbary War, and the War of 1812 against Great Britain.

† Caroline Blackwood, The Last of the Duchess (London: Vintage, 2012), 64.

‡ Blackwood, The Last of the Duchess, 106.

§ Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 72.

* F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Son, 1920), 4.

† Blackwood, The Last of the Duchess, 165.

‡ Blackwood, The Last of the Duchess, 165.

* Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 82.

† Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 87.

* Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 100.

† Anne Sebba, That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011), 42–3.

‡ Mary Louise Love, “Short Skirts and Many Tucks Mark Present Ultra Advanced Capital Costumes,” Corsicana Daily Sun (Texas), July 19, 1924.

* US Navy slang for an enlisted ordinary seaman.

* Junius B. Wood, “Allies May Land Men at Canton,” Wilkes-Barre Record (Pennsylvania), December 27, 1923; Junius B. Wood, “French and Chinese in Clash at Canton,” Wilkes-Barre Record (Pennsylvania), December 27, 1923. The Bocca Tigris was also known as the Bogue and now as Humen.

† “Two Missionaries are Released,” Des Moines Register, June 5, 1924.

‡ Paul French, “How Vietnamese Revolutionary Leader Ho Chi Minh Was Inspired by a Guangzhou Hotel Bomber’s Anti-Colonial Spirit,” South China Morning Post Magazine, November 19, 2022.

* “US Gunboats off to Canton,” Reno Gazette, October 16, 1924; “Fighting in China,” Orlando Sentinel, August 16, 1924.

† Mosley, The Duchess of Windsor, 23.

* Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 102.

† Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 102.

* Kay’s husband, Commander M. E. Manly, had been appointed captain of Panama City’s Balboa Port, located at the Canal’s Pacific entrance, in 1923. In the introduction to his edited collection of the letters between Wallis and Edward VIII, Michael Bloch argues that this illness was the start of a lifetime of stomach-related problems for Wallis, but it seems to be no more than regular seasickness. Michael Bloch, ed., Wallis and Edward: Letters, 1931–1937: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (London: Summit Books, 1986).

†Vermont Union Journal, October 8, 1924.

* Again, this contact with Price may have been due to his acquaintance with (the recently deceased in August 1923) Henry Mustin, husband of Wallis’s cousin Corinne.

* The Praya (from the Portuguese word praia, meaning “beach,” though used to indicate a waterfront road in Hong Kong at the time) was subsumed sometime after by land reclamation and the creation of the extension of Des Voeux Road (in today’s Central District).

* It was of course the expiration of that lease on Kowloon and the New Territories, under the Second Convention of Peking in 1898, that forced the issue of the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. The cession of Hong Kong Island was in perpetuity though ultimately proved impracticable to retain once the lease on Kowloon ran out.

† Stella Benson, The Poor Man (London: Macmillan, 1922), 155.

‡ Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 103–4.

* Simpson, The Heart Has Its Reasons, 103.

2

A BEAUTIFUL VISION

THE REPULSE BAY HOTEL

HONG KONG ISLAND

BRITISH CROWN COLONY OF HONG KONG

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 1924

Mrs E Winfield Spencer has arrived in Hong Kong, China, where her husband, Commander Winfield Spencer, is stationed.

—Announcement in the Washington, DC,Evening Star, September 6, 1924

After disembarking they took a taxi to the Repulse Bay Hotel. They left the teeming city behind, the taxi rising and dipping across the hilly terrain. Soon cliffs of yellow-and-red soil flanked the road, while ravines opened up on either side to reveal dense green forest or aquamarine sea. As they approached Repulse Bay, the cliffs and trees grew gentler and more inviting. Returning picknickers swept past them in cars filled with flowers, the sound of scattered laughter fading in the wind.

—Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), Love in a Fallen City

SEPTEMBER 5, 1924—REPULSE BAY