CHINA'S EUROPEAN CAPITAL
1
Under the benign influence of a Salvation Army captain, my feet were
guided safely through some of the lesser evils of Shanghai. The greater
could not be fathomed in the short time allotted to me in the European
capital of China. Miss Smythe, who resented being called Smith, in a
manner that revealed she had long since ceased to be shy of mere man,
belonged to New Zealand by birth and heaven by adoption. She chose
Hong-Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo as temporary resting-places. It was her
task, every five years or so, to make a complete tour of the Orient to
collect funds for the Salvation Army. Hence her captaincy.
I was walking along Queens Street, Hong-Kong, somewhat lone in spirit,
when a rickshaw passed quickly by. The occupant, a fair lady, bowed
pleasantly to me and disappeared in the mêlée. I could not recall ever
having seen her face and wondered who in Hong-Kong she could be. Then it
struck me that she wore a hat with bright red on it. Later that day, as
I stepped into the launch to be taken across to the _Tamba Maru_, who
should appear but this selfsame lady. We greeted each other, both
surprised at the second meeting and at the coincidence of our joining
the same ship.
"I thought I had met you when I greeted you on the street this morning,"
she said.
All the way from Hong-Kong to Shanghai she was as busy going from class
to class as she was on shore, spreading the faith, placing literature
where it could be found and read, organizing hymn parties and
discouraging booze. The Japanese on board took her good-naturedly. She
spoke their language fluently, but I could not see that they drank one
little cup of saké the less for her.
When we arrived at Shanghai she would have nothing else but that I
should go with her to some friends of hers for dinner. Into one rickshaw
she loaded her bags, into another me, with the manner of one handling
cargo, and then deposited herself in a third. The train made its way
along the Bund and out of confusion. And that was the way I was
shanghaied.
Somewhere in a street that might for all the world have been in Chicago,
our train drew up. It was quiet, had a little open park in it, where two
streets seemed to have got mixed and, scared at losing their identity
like the Siamese twins, ran off in an angle of directions. Here at a
brick-red building with balconies and porticoes, and a dark, damp door,
we made our announcement and were received. Now what would the world
have thought if a Salvation Army man had picked up a strange young woman
on a steamer and haled her into a strange house? None but a Salvation
Army Lassie could have done what Miss Smythe,--not Smith, mind
you!--dared to do. We were welcomed as though the appearance of a
stranger were in the usual course of events, and I was asked to stay for
dinner. The hostess, a quiet woman, with her pretty young daughter, kept
a boarding-house, and was always prepared for extra folk.
It was a boarding-house like any I should have expected to find in
America. The rooms were spacious, hung with framed prints, and dark and
slightly damp, according to Shanghai climate. There was something
haunting about the house, but to a homeless vagabond like myself it
seemed the acme of comfort. And to one who had had no real home meal in
five weeks or more, but only ship's food, the spread we sat down to was
delicious.
Miss Smythe did not enjoy her dinner as much as I did, for she feared
all along that she would not be able to get to church on time. Then it
was too late for me to regain my ship, so I was invited to spend the
night under a roof instead of a deck.
The next day I wandered off by myself, but not till I had promised to
return for Chinese "chow." In the meantime Miss Smythe had spread my
fame among others of her profession, and made a date for me to go to a
"rescue house" or some such place that evening. It was a mission home
for Japanese, run by a woman who, if she wasn't from Boston, I'm sure
must have come from Brookline. The only thing Oriental about that
mission was its Japanese. A sumptuous dinner was served which, despite
the fact that I had had "chow" only twenty minutes before, I was
compelled to eat. With two heavy meals where one is accustomed to berth,
accommodations were somewhat crowded.
Everything would have gone well if I hadn't promised to give the
residents a talk on my travels. I began. Miss Smythe felt that I wasn't
emphasizing the presence of God in the numerous regions I had visited. I
took His omnipresence for granted, but she kept breaking into my talk at
every turn. Two meals inside of two people who both tried to lecture at
once didn't go very well, especially at a mission in China run by
Europeans and attended by Japanese. It seemed that there was not
over-much love lost on the part of the sons of Tenno for those of the
Son of Heaven, nor did the European missionaries at this place encourage
the intermarriage of these illustrious spirits. The Bostonian in exile
on more than one occasion spoke disparagingly of the cleanliness of the
Chinese, much to the satisfaction of the Japanese. But then, she was
winning and holding them to the Son of God, and when they reached heaven
they would all be one. Miss Smythe afterward apologized to me for
interrupting me during my talk, and we parted as cordially as we had
met. Some months later I found her roaming the streets of Kobe, Japan,
as active as ever in the militant cause. Her insinuations about what
goes on in Japanese inns seemed to me unjustifiable. So I asked her
whether it was fair to the Japanese and Chinese for her to be forever
repeating hearsay when she would resent it were I to repeat what I had
heard about the morality of the Australians. It took her aback, but I am
sure that she is still pursuing vice and drink and irreverence, aided
and abetted by the dollars which she extracts from foreign business men
and reprobates throughout the East.
2
But I must get back to Shanghai, even though Miss Smythe is so
attractive. As long as I remained under her wing I had taken virtually
no notice of China. So it is in Shanghai; one cannot see the Orient for
the Occidentals. For if Hong-Kong is an example of adulterated British
imperialism, Shanghai is one of European internationalism grafted upon
China. At Shanghai the forces of two contending racial streams meet,
like the waters at the entrance of Port Philip, and here, though the
surface is smooth and glassy, there are eddies and whirlpools within,
which are a menace to any small craft that may attempt to cross.
How strange to wander about streets and buildings quite European but to
see only here and there a white face! It is an ultra-modern city built
upon a flat plain. The streams of Chinese that come wandering in from
regions unknown to the transient, give him a sense of contact with a
vast, endless world beyond. They might be coming from just round the
corner, but their manner is of plainsmen bringing their goods and
chattels to market. In comparison with the Southern Chinese, these are
giants, but still dirty and most of them chestless. In constant turmoil
and travail, beggars pleading for a pittance with which to sustain
their empty lives, limousines making way for themselves between
rickshaws and one-wheeled barrows, coolies pulling and carrying loads,
some grunting as they jig their way along, others chanting in
chorus,--yet all in the "foreign" settlement, amid buildings that are
alien to them, and largely for men who see only the gain they here
secure. I wonder if the Chinese say of the Europeans as Americans are
often heard to say of Italians and Orientals,--that they come only to
make money and return to spend it?
Yet the white have built Shanghai. Shanghai is not Chinese. Had it not
been for the white men, the plain would still be swampy, would still be
a litter of hovels with here and there a mansion flowering in the mud.
The mud still messes up the edge of things in Shanghai. The creek is an
example. There are the sampans and barges, some loaded with pyramid-like
stacks of hay, some with heavy, thick-walled mahogany coffins, the
myriads of families huddling within the holds, and the murky tides
washing in and washing out beneath them. Here the sexes live in greater
intimacy, it seemed to me, than in Hong-Kong. I actually saw one woman
place her hand in what I was sure was an affectionate way on the
shoulder of a man: and some were mutually helpful. But otherwise,
despite the great conglomeration and greater coöperation, in the entire
mass one cannot see how ancestor-worshipers can show so little regard
for one another.
In the market-place the confusion is more orderly. Here even white women
come to stock up their kitchens, and here Japanese women move about,
sober by nature and by virtue of the superiority they possess as
conquerors in their husbands' rights. Two girls are quarreling
vociferously and the more self-controlled look on both sympathetically
and antipathetically. The washed-down pavement of the market floor is no
place, however, for a serious bout.
Through the long hours of early evening I wandered into one street and
out the other. I had become more or less reconciled to the alien aspects
of Shanghai, to good stores selling good goods, to fashionable hotels
and spacious residences, but one thing was inalienably alien to it, and
that was a second-hand book-shop. It had not occurred to me that
foreigners in China would part with their books if they ever got hold of
them. And for a moment I was altogether transported, and my magic carpet
lay in San Francisco, in Chicago, in New York all at once. But it was
chilly and the rain made the city worse than a washed-down market, for
it depopulated the streets, leaving me as dreary in heart as in body. I
was glad when the hour came for me to make my appearance at the kind
woman's house for chow.
Though I was sorry to hear the missionary at the mission decry the
Chinese to the satisfaction of her Japanese patrons, and felt that it
turned me slightly against both, still both Japanese and missionaries
were kind and attentive to me. In the evening, a young Japanese business
man called for a motor-car and took us out in the bleak, wet night to
see the great white way of Shanghai. The rain deflected the strange
glimmers of electric light through the isinglassed curtains of the car.
For a time we skidded along over slushy streets, turning into the
theater district as the attraction supreme. Here the gonfalons drooped
in the watery air, while Chinese mess merchants stood in out of the rain
with their little wagonettes of steaming portions. In a whirl we were
through the cluttering crowds and making for the residential districts.
Then wide avenues opened out in serpentine ways, shaggy trees dripping
overhead, the slippery pavement swinging us from side to side as our
dare-devil Chinese driver sped on to Bubbling Well. For an hour we rode,
I did not know whither, but everywhere at my right and left were
palatial Chinese and foreign residences. Without knowing it we had
turned and were back in Shanghai, and presently within doors again,--and
asleep.
3
Next day, this same Japanese business man volunteered to escort me to
Chinese City. I would have gone by myself, but every one looked
horrified at the idea; so I accepted this knightly guide. At the
appointed time I presented myself at his office. He had asked his
Chinese clerk to accompany us for protection, and ordered three
rickshaws. Though he had lived in Shanghai for years, he had never gone
to see Chinese City, and was glad to avail himself of an excuse for
doing so now. The Japanese is a natural-born cicerone.
In a few minutes we had left the international section of the
settlement--that jointly occupied by Britain and America--and wobbled
into the French district. Suddenly we stopped, and our carriers lowered
their shafts to the ground. We were at a narrow opening three or four
feet wide, and I could not understand why we should pay our respects to
it. "From here we have to walk," said the Chinese, and in single file we
entered, dropping out of Shanghai as into a bog. That was real China,
but only as little Italy in New York is real Italy.
The whole of Chinese City can be summed up hastily and in but a few
words. Narrow, dirty little thoroughfares laid out in broken stone
paving, tiny shops where luxuries, necessities, and coolie requisites
are sold,--dark, dirty, open to the damp! What destitution is the
inheritance of these thousands of years of civilization!
The first thing to greet us, standing out against the general
wretchedness, was not beautiful. To one accustomed to hard sights and
scenes, to one not easily perturbed by human degradation, that which
passed as we entered was sufficient to unnerve him. Upon the wet, filthy
street rolled a legless boy. He had no crutches; his business required
none. He was begging: howling, chanting, and rolling all at the same
time. I could not say "Poor child!" Rather, poor China, that it should
come to this!
Immediately after, though having no business connections, came an old
man. Came? Walked crouching, bowing his gray head till it touched the
filthy pathway. He was kotowing before the menials of China, not its
empress.
The third was the worst of all. One old, ragged, broken beggar was
carrying on his back what might have been a corpse, but was another
beggar; the two--one on top of the other--were not more than four feet
above the ground.
I felt as though Mara, the Evil One, was trying to frighten me by an
exhibition of his pet horrors so that I might not go farther. I was not
being perturbed, the horrors ceased.
But what beauties or treasures were they meant to guard? What was there
that I was not to see? What ogre dwelt within? Nothing but a bit of
business, so to speak, in a social bog.
Beside a tideless creek, advertised as a lake, stood a pagoda-like
structure, just a broken reflection imaged in the mud. As we approached
we were immediately taken in charge by a Chinese guide and led along a
path crudely paved with cobblestones into an "ancient" tea-garden. The
wall around it was topped with a vicious-looking dragon that stretched
around it. A tremendous monster of wood, it lay there; and perhaps it
will continue to lie there long after China shall have forsaken the
dragon. Then from chamber to chamber we strolled, past tables of stone
and shrines and effigies, and into the heart of China's superstitious
soul. Though in itself not ancient, what a peep it afforded into
antiquity,--dull, dead, yet powerful!
For within these secret chambers there were displayed endless numbers of
emperors and their dynastic celebrities. In one chamber, blue with smoke
and stifling incense, lighted with red candles, burning joss-sticks,
behung with lanterns, and crowded with lazy Chinese, we found several
"emperors" with red-painted wooden effigies of their wives. To me the
smoke was choking; not so to them. The incense was sweet in their
nostrils, and nourishing. And in payment for the sacrificial generosity
and the prayers of fat, wealthy Chinese women who fell upon their knees,
rose, and fell again, bowing and repeating incantations, they were to
make the husbands of these women--too busy to come themselves--meet with
success in business. Seriousness and earnestness marked the features of
these women, and who can say their faith was ignored?
We emerged from this underground chamber upon another thoroughfare,
pursuing which we came upon an open, unused plot. Here a circus had
attracted a crowd. A three-year-old baby, a pretty little sister, a
feminine father, and a masculine mother were the entertainers. They were
acrobats. A family row--which, it would seem, is not unknown in
China--was enacted without any of the details being omitted; nor did
they stop at coarse and vulgar acts which would have brought the police
down upon them in America. Yet the audience seemed highly amused, while
some of the spectators might easily have posed for paintings of Chinese
bearded saints, or have been models for some of the sacred effigies
which, not more than a block away, were idols in the temple.
These are the high spots in Chinese City, a city into which I was urged
not to venture alone. That human life should be considered of little
worth here is not marvelous; but that any one there should consider the
prolongation of his own a bit worth the taking of mine, is one of the
inexplicable marvels of the world.
Is this China? By no means. It is merely the back-wash of the contact
with European life which has been imposed on China without sufficient
chance for its absorption. It is no more typical of China than our
metropolitan slums are really typical of American life. True, they are
the result of it, but where the rounding out of relationships and
conditions have been accomplished there follows a graduation of elements
to where good and evil obtain side by side. And Chinese City is but the
worst phase of Chinese slums plastered upon Shanghai.
4
Poverty in Chinese City is one thing; in Shanghai it is another. It is
all a matter of the background. Buddha the beggar is still Buddha the
Prince.
After I came out of Chinese City I took much greater note of the details
of the life of the coolie, the toiler in Shanghai proper. I was out on
the Bund. The stone walls hemming in the river Whang-po rise at a level
round the city. For five feet more the human wall of coolies shuts out
the tide of poverty and despair from a world as foreign to China as
water is alien to stone. From both walls a murmur reaches the outer
world: the swish of the tide, the hum of coolie consolation. I let
myself believe that they chant beneath their burdens to disguise their
groans. Up and down the Bund they course, here at exporting, there at
importing. Their gathering-places are at the godowns, and in and out
they pass up and down inclined planks, each with a sack, or in couples
with two or more sacks hanging from their shoulders, never resting from
these rounds.
At another point they are delivering mail to the ship's launch. Two
cart-loads arrive. Coolies swarm about the carts, waiting for orders.
Some are mere boys, but already inured to the tread. As each lifts a bag
of mail he passes a Japanese, who hands him a stiletto-shaped piece of
wood with some inscription on it,--painted green to the hilt. He takes
two steps and is on the gang-plank, two more, and he has burdened
himself with three bags of mail, and returns; he received and returns
three sticks. That is the way count is kept of the mail. I couldn't
understand this close precaution. Could the coolie possibly abscond with
a bag of mail under the very eyes of an officer?
Two small boys eagerly rushed a distance on, to pick up some bags that
had been left there. They were acting without order,--spontaneously.
They would have saved themselves some labor in that way. But the officer
in charge shrieked his reprimand at them. One, in his enthusiasm,
ignored the command. The officer rushed after him and boxed his ears.
The boy received the punishment, but went right ahead with his burden.
Hardened little sinner! calloused little soul! poor little ant!
One youngster came up, chanting the sale of some sweet-cakes. Looking
into his face, I wondered what he was thinking just then. He must think!
No one could be so young and have such a cramped neck, such sad eyes,
such furrowed brows without hard thoughts to make them so.
In the slush and rain, under semi-poverty and destitution, barefoot,
ragged, and in infinite numbers,--still they toil. Yet against the
background of sturdy Shanghai, their labor and their travail does not
hurt as much as it does in Chinese City. The perplexities of
life--national, racial, of caste--pervaded my thoughts. Why has China
remained dormant so long? Why is she now waking? How will she tackle the
problem of poverty? To me it seems that nations rise and fall not
because fluctuation is the inherent law of life, but simply because
universally accepted glory and prestige are positions generally paid for
by accompanying poverty and disease. No nation can dominate for a long
time with such coolieism as that in China.
China has standards all her own. We come with our ways and claim
superiority. China grants it, yet goes her own way. And when we see her
sons we like them, though we may criticize, condemn, and try to change
them. This is the oneness of China and the consensus of opinion is that
it is lovable. People come, employ Chinese as servants, and try to train
them. They may take that which they think you do not need, carry out
their own and not your ideas. You in turn rave and roar, but in the end
they are still there as servants and you as master. But they have
educated you, you have not changed them. And when you leave China you
long for them as did that American woman I met in Honolulu who fairly
wailed her longing aloud to me. China has done this with whole nations,
and, to the very end of time, whatever nation sets out to rule and
conquer that new republic must make up its mind to be lost.
And so behind Shanghai is Chinese City, and behind that there is China,
out upon the flat plains. There is another China yet beyond, and still
another and as many as there are billows on the sea. Build modern
buildings and cities, and the Chinese take them and turn them inside
out, and they are what he wants them to be. This plastic people,--what
is their destiny? And what, still, is there awaiting the world as they
fulfil that destiny?
How strange it feels to call her republic! Yet China has taken to
republicanism as though it had been brewing in her these thousands of
years. From outward appearances one would never know that she is a
republic to-day. Some say she really isn't. Coolies still are coolies,
and Chinese, Chinese. And I dare say she is both empire and republic,
two in one.
For centuries China has lain dormant as though stung by a paralyzing
wasp. Centuries have been lost in sleep. But what are centuries, when
waking is so simple and is always possible? China has wakened. She is
rising. An hour's work has been accomplished in the first fresh flush of
the new dawn. Perhaps that is all that will be done that day, the house
put in a little better order. To-morrow is time enough for real work. A
Chinese junk comes out of its night-mist retreat with its own dim
lights. A shrill whistle of a passing launch echoes across the flat
plains about Shanghai. The rain of yesterday remains only as a sorry
mist. A vision of clearer day shimmers through, but soon grows dull
again. China seems to have shaped her climate in her own image.
A two-days' steam to Moji, Japan, on the bosom of that heaving mistress
the China Sea, and my journey was over for a long while. The sea was
black, the sky somber; even the sun was sad as it stooped that evening
to kiss the cheek of Japan good night. I did not know just then that I
was to say farewell to the sea for two and a half years,--a farewell
that resulted in _Japan: Real and Imaginary_.