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About this time, Wu, strolling along a street in Hankow, saw in a photographer's window a picture of beautiful Miss Edith Huang (daughter of one of China's few big industrialists) displayed side by side with the picture of a movie actress. Wu was not acquainted with Miss Huang, but he gallantly marched into the shop to protest against the photographer's disrespectful act of associating Miss Huang with an actress. Three years later, Miss Huang and her champion were married.
Meanwhile, Hsia Tou-yin, warlord of Wu's native Hupeh province, had given Wu a job as tax collector. Wu went to work in Hankow, "the Chicago of China," and within six months had balanced Hankow's municipal budget. This achieve ment attracted Chiang Kai-shek's interested attention. In 1932 Chiang appointed the 28-year-old Wu mayor of Hankow.
The 20th Century brought chaos to China (and to most of Asia) as a habitual way of life. K. C. Wu—a technician of order who was also a democrat and a Christian—had begun his career of fighting chaos.
Ordeal by Fire. In 1936, when the swollen Yangtze threatened to flood Hankow, Mayor Wu conscripted 30,000 coolies to repair a broken dike, trained machine guns on them to keep them from quitting; for 13 days & nights he stayed atop the dike directing their work. Floods more terrible than the Yangtze were threatening China. The Japanese conquest forced Chiang's armies back into the interior. On the morning of Mayor Wu's 35th birthday, Oct. 25, 1938, Hankow, then Chiang's center of resistance, fell to the Japanese.
China's government—along with millions of people who bore whole industries, piece by piece, to safety—moved back country to the gorges of the Yangtze. Wu became mayor of Chungking, the new capital. For two years, the city (whose wartime population grew from 200,000 to well over 1,000,000) stolidly endured one Japanese air raid after another.
Night after night, Japanese bombs tore bigger & bigger patches out of the maze of ramshackle houses. Sewage piled up in gutters, disease spread and Chungking rats grew fat and impudent. The air-raid warning system was complicated: in addition to sirens, colored lanterns were hung from poles at night (when they were lit, it meant that the enemy was approaching; when they were suddenly dropped, it meant that the planes were almost over head). But the system worked. Night after night most of Chungking's people trudged to the big caves outside the town where most of them slept; morning after morning, they emerged to search the debris for the dead.
Stolidly, fire fighters and policemen remained above the ground in the city during the raids. Mayor Wu was usually in their midst, dashing from fire to fire, from crisis to crisis. He became a sort of glorified La Guardia; to Chungking's Chinese —and to many an American—he became a hero.