Pastor People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
All aboard for China, the country of Confucius and chop suey! At Canton a
wonderful spectacle took place at the wharf. A sampan man had beaten his
wife and thrown her on the dock where she sat and chanted in a monotonous
voice while a hundred coolies gathered round and watched the interesting
ceremony. She referred to her husband and his ancestors, then scraped up
a little pile of dirt, spat on it, molded it into the image of a man,
addressed it with a few words, suddenly knelt and foully insulted it, and
so eased her conscience, balanced the books of honor and “saved her face.”
From the Hotel Victoria in the Shameen, or Foreign Quarter, two
cadaverous coolies carried me in a coffin-shaped sedan chair across a
stinking canal into native Canton. My guide, Ah Cum, led the way. The
streets were so narrow and the show windows so near that I could have
been a shoplifter with both hands. If hungry, there was a free lunch
counter extending along the streets with tea and rice, live fish, glazed
ducks, gory pigs, a choice assortment of fresh entrails, some dead dogs
and rats, crates of yowling cats, and huge pots of slimy soup thickened
with animal, vegetable and other matter that would make the Witches’
Cauldron in “Macbeth” look like a cup of consomme in comparison.
At the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii, where the prayers of the holy
had given way to the harangues of the politicians, I saw a gilded statue
big as life of the first European globe-trotter to China, Marco Polo.
Such a traveler was a novelty then, but now is a nuisance. I went by old
walls whose painted dragons the new Chinese had wiped out; by temples
whose only occupants were a few second-hand gods and bats; took time to
visit the water-clock tower where drops of water instead of grains of
sand mark the time of China’s millions towards the grave; passed through
gates of the old city wall to the hillside where hundreds had been shot;
looked into the graveyard where the poor common people rest after life’s
fitful fever, while the restless rich, who shunned them in life, lie
apart from them in the City of the Dead.
Like mummies in a museum, they sleep unburied in their rich caskets and
await the grafting geomancer, that oriental undertaker, who promises
the relatives to find some place in the ground undisturbed by the Great
Dragon. By the religious milestone of the five-storied, weedy, seedy
Pagoda, whose oracles are dumb, I headed for the Execution Grounds in the
pottery district where the sharp sword had sent many a man back to his
original clay.
China is becoming civilized now and stands her criminals up against a
wall and shoots them. Here was a narrow alley lined with earthen pots
covered with mats, under which were fleshless skulls. One of them seemed
to look imploringly at me, and I picked it up. Alas, some poor Chinese
Yorick! I was anxious to see the man who struck the fearful blows, and
Ah Cum called the executioner who came out with a knife estimated to
have cut off 300,000 heads in thirty years. There is a death here by
“seventy-two cuts,” but one from his sword was enough.
Bayard Taylor said China was a good place to leave, and I was not very
sorry when the whistle blew to cast off and say good-bye to the city of
dreadful sights, sounds, suffering and smells. Leaving the grotesque
outline of an old fort, a little island stained by some dark murder, a
place where pirates had scuttled a ship, a picturesque Pagoda looking
like an eight-story Easter bonnet, Grecian-bend shaped junk-boats and
sampans like big, broken barrels floating along, we sailed down the Pearl
River and at midnight reached the Portuguese town of Macao. On deck we
were surprised to find the officers embracing the coolies. Were they
trying to relieve them of their hard-earned spoils of fan-tan which they
had won during the night? No, the honest officials were only searching
for concealed arms, but found only those which Nature had allowed and
provided.
An illuminated sign, “First-class Gambling House,” drew my attention.
Gambling, next to loafing and the manufacture of opium, is the principal
occupation of the youngest and oldest inhabitants. Macao is the Oriental
Monte Carlo. Gambling here is backed by the government which gets back a
certain per cent of the earnings which it invests in hospitals, asylums
and cheap lodgings for the people who have been beaten at the game. At
this gambling-hell one could play at the big table downstairs, or drop
into the game by lowering his money in a small basket from the balcony
above. Tired of the game, the player recuperates his wasted energies here
by eating bird-nest soup and shark-fins, or drinking Portuguese wines. If
he is sleepy, he may take the opium-pipe train of thought to the Flowery
Land where every-day is Sunday.
At a “song-parlor” some Chinese dolls amused us with their squeaky voices
and knife-scraping music. It sadly recalled my visit to a Hongkong
house of pleasure whose almond-eyed inmates illustrated Confucius’
remark that “women had no souls,” and the Chinese philosophy which
attributes death and evil to Yin, the female principle in Nature.
Their artificially whitened and rouged faces were ghastly, and their
flower-and-jewel-bedecked hair glued down to the skull was anything
but attractive to an Occidental eye. Their lips were red like the
dawn of day, their complexions like congealed ointment, and their
betel-nut-stained teeth like black watermelon seeds. They unfurled
painted fans, sipped tea, nibbled sweetmeats, puffed at opium-pipes, and
looked quite flowery in their blue collars, purple tunics and bright
green trousers. I wonder if the men, whom they were entertaining,
remembered the Chinese proverb, “There is no such poison in the green
snake’s mouth or in the hornet’s sting as in a woman’s heart.”
After visiting next day a firecracker factory, temples, joss-houses,
and a tobacco plant where little children and old women were at work
sorting the leaves, I was conducted to Macao’s notorious opium factory. I
entered a low-ceiling room where men were stripped to their waists like
blacksmiths at the forge. They picked up the crude opium, shaped like a
cocoanut shell, scooped out the chocolate-looking substance, threw it
into a kind of brass wash-basin under which roared the fire, until it
steamed and blubbered like a pot of hot mush or molasses. They darted
here and there like imps with these pans. Then the liquid was poured in
porcelain boxes of various sizes. The whole place seemed like a Devil’s
smithyshop where chains were being forged for lost souls. The odor was
peculiar and penetrating. I must have absorbed some of the dope, for I
felt dizzy and was glad to get outside in the fresh air.
There is no more melancholy sight, in China’s teeming nightmare cities,
than a drug-befuddled victim staggering out in the early dawn from some
hasheesh house and tumbling down in the street where he dreams he is in
the Celestial City with his ancestors. When he is rudely awakened by a
hungry rat gnawing his hand or foot, the golden vision vanishes. In the
cold light of the morning, racked with nameless pains, he crawls off to
work at some mean job, hoping to make enough for another night’s opium
dream in which to forget the hell of this tormenting world.
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