Chang and Ai and Pai

To most U.S. newspaper readers (who know about it mostly from pictures) hilly Chungking is an incredibly crowded motley of mud huts and bomb-wreckage, peopled largely by the Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kaishek. To most U.S. readers Brooks Atkinson, if known at all, is a Broadway man, one of the most erudite of drama critics.

Sage, Harvard-bred Brooks Atkinson has been in Chungking and China 16 months--by his own choice as war correspondent of the New York Times. By last week he had become the clearest window through which U.S. readers might see a vivid Chungking, peopled by understandable people doing understandable things. To the limited audience (circ. 419,447), tireless 47-year-old Brooks Atkinson was delivering a highly unusual daily picture of China, the Chinese, the fabulous difficulties under which anyone lives in Chungking's expanding inflation. Pipe-smoking Atkinson in recent weeks had run the gamut from international analysis to the difficulties of getting smokable tobacco.

Last week came a personal touch in a three-quarter column story about one of China's millions of unknowns, a happy, dazzlingly polite little man of 31: Chang Lin-chu. He is Correspondent Atkinson's courier at the Press Hostel in Chungking. He brews tea, stokes the fire; his main task is to run copy a half-mile to the U.S. Army censor and to Chinese censors, who are stationed 50 yards away but are seldom there. Chang is a master at finding Chinese censors--so proficient that he was joint courier for the Times's Atkinson and TIME'S Theodore H. White.

Blue Gown. When Correspondent White left Chungking seven weeks ago Chang was paid $500 Chinese a month plus food & lodging. Now he had come to Atkinson "amid smiles and many minor Chinese courtesies" to tell him that $500 was no longer enough to live on. "For instance," reported Atkinson, "it would cost him $2,000 to buy another gown like the faded blue ankle-length garment that keeps him warm and decent . . . and also makes him look like a citizen of self-respect." Atkinson quoted Chang: "When Pai Hsien Sheng [meaning White, Mr.] went to America, he said he wanted to find me here when he came back. I should not like to leave when he is depending on me."

Touched by this loyalty to TIME'S White, the Times's Atkinson (Ai Hsien Sheng) pledged a $100 increase to Chang, who at once pledged himself to turn down a $2,500 job. Wrote Atkinson:

"I should not like to lose Chang. . . . He is an honest, intelligent, faithful messenger who uses his own judgment with the censor, never gives in and does not 'squeeze' inordinately. Oh, if I give him bus fare downtown he invariably walks and saves the money, but that is his business and does no harm. ... He has not seen his family [wife, baby and widowed mother on a farm two days' walk away] for more than a year.

"Chang's real value ... is his beaming personality. He radiates good will. He has enthusiasm for everything, particularly for the sleek photographs of movie queens in LIFE. . . . He touches them gingerly with his fingers as if he expected them to be red-hot. . . . We get on together remarkably well and are amused by one another ... I am glad that out of loyalty to Pai Hsien Sheng he is not going to leave."

Touched by both Chang's and Ai's fealty, TIME'S Pai (who expects to return to Chungking in two months) cabled the Times's Ai authority to up Chang's salary to $1,500 a month and to buy him a new ankle-length blue gown. In Chungking's spiraling inflation, Chang's 1,500 Chinese dollars pay amounts to about 15 U.S. dollars.

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