When You Were Absent

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communication system. One of the greatest lessons I learned in this new struggle was the similarity between our enemy's needs and ours, their hopes and ours. The Chinese proverb persistently recurred,"All men are brothers." Here were our benefactors: - a Chinese cook, Swiss, Japanese, a Spanish priest, German missionaries, and Indian wardress, Norwegians, and others. Nationality ceased to be the paramount yardstick. Global war, and yet global desire for peace amongst all except the small minorities who profit by strife and warfare, and who thrive in an atmosphere of hatred and destruction. Shortly after my arrival in Shanghai, the two Norwegian mothers with their three children, our neighbors in Hong Kong, whom I had met in a remarkable way during my captivity in Canton, arrived also in Shanghai. I immediately got in touch with them as I was told they were trying to locate me. They were staying temporarily at the Palace Hotel on the Bund at the comer of Nanking Road. While I was visiting them the Japanese Captain of the coast boat on which they had come up the coast called on them. They wondered if this would cause embarrassment to me and were rather flustered when he was ushered into the room. Here was a Japanese gentleman. The purpose of his visit was to ascertain if they had funds enough to carry them until they had made their financial contacts. The ladies had no local currency and credit was not easy to establish in the chaotic position prevailing financially in Shanghai at the time. Strangely, I have never felt at odds in the presence of mine enemies, even if the advantage of the circumstance is in their favor. I shared the perplexity of this Japanese Captain. We both had six children about the same relative ages. His anxiety concerning his career was a genuine as my own. He knew his ships were being piled up one by one on the bed of the Pacific Ocean. I knew then, regardless of the outcome of the Pacific War, British coast wise shipping on the China Coast was already a thing of the past. The Chinese could not afford the re-entry of any foreign flag into their coastal trade after the war. With the protective haven of extra-territoriality privileges gone, British flag shipping on the China Coast could not successfully operate.

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