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“brilliantly colored dresses” cut to highlight their curves. Dancing remained forbidden, Mel wrote, but the students got around that by attending parties in private homes, where invitees danced around gramophones, or taking jaunts to Hong Kong.
    These trips didn’t just give Mel a more balanced look at Chinese society than what he’d been exposed to by the sheltered heirs he met at Lingnan or the poor crowds who plied the river near campus; they also gave Ka Yik a glimpse at modern culture. During their trips into the city, it was Mel who, though sometimes a bit reserved at home himself, nudged Ka Yik to open up in social situations, especially with young women.
    â€œRoommate Chan danced for the first time last night andhas been telling me all the details including the fact he talked to the girl while he danced,” an amused Mel reported to his family that spring. Such casual conversation between genders, he said, was a thrilling change of pace from tradition.
    As much as Mel was having fun and beginning to feel at home in southern China, he still wanted to see more of Asia. As the semester at Lingnan drew to a close, he finalized plans for a trip through the interior of China, then on to Japan. Traveling through Russia or going to Angkor Wat and elsewhere in Southeast Asia no longer seemed feasible.
    â€œI have kept in mind the one point that I want a balanced view of the Orient although necessarily delivered in a hurry,” Mel said as he finalized his itinerary.
    Finally, on June 23, 1937, with a lump in his throat, Mel watched Hong Kong recede over the horizon as the SS Szechuan left the harbor.
    â€œI rather disliked leaving South China last week although I most certainly shall be glad to get home,” Mel wrote. “I know what it is people feel towards the Orient but I can’t exactly describe it. That I will return some day or the other I am more than certain.”
    The slow freighter continued up the Chinese coast, ultimately bound for the heavily Westernized metropolis of Shanghai. After a few days in that city—where Mel was disgusted by the “fat-bellied foreigners who are kings among themselves and servants” and where he visited red-light cabarets “so well policed that nothing was worth sticking around for”—he continued to Nanking, then China’s capital, before heading to China’s interior with another Lingnan exchange student originally from Hollywood, Harry Caulfield.
    After celebrating Independence Day at the U.S. embassy inNanking, Mel and Harry began a two-day, two-night train ride to Sian. Centuries earlier, Sian had been China’s capital, but more recent events interested Mel and Harry: it was only seven months earlier that Chiang Kai-shek had been kidnapped just outside of Sian.
    Getting to Sian was hardly comfortable. Mel and Harry sat on a cushionless bench in a corner of their third-class railcar. Heavy scents of garlic and more obnoxious odors wafted in each time someone entered. Armed guards, better equipped than anyone Mel had seen in southern China, regularly patrolled the car. The ride was so bumpy that Mel’s fingers slipped off his typewriter keys as he wrote an unusually typo-laden letter to his mother and stepfather. A group of small children, amazed by the sight of foreigners, crowded into the compartment and watched raptly as Mel typed.
    â€œWow, I wish this long night would end sometime,” he wrote. Outside the rattling windows passed a landscape of cornfields, dusty plateaus, cave dwellings, and historic sites such as Kaifeng, a town known for its ancient population of Chinese Jews.
    It was early on the morning of July 7 when Mel and Harry arrived at Sian. Mel relished the hot, dry air after his months in the south’s stifling humidity. Walking along paved but dust-covered streets, they passed armed sentries stationed at three huge archways in Sian’s forty-foot-thick, six-century-old walls. Many