AT HOME UNDER THE TARTAR WALL
It is obvious that this chapter should be written by the head of the
house. But any husband, at least of the United States of America, will
understand perfectly what I mean when I say that persuasion is often
useless and coercion out of date. The housekeeping sex will have to bear
with me, therefore, while I do my masculine best with a subject that is
manifestly far beyond my humble qualifications. Whatever the other
faults I display in the process, I shall try not to be reticent in such
matters as the wages of servants and the price of eggs, which I conceive
to be those near the housekeeper’s heart the world over.
Neither of Peking’s modern hotels, not so much as to mention the dozen
others which are now and then astonished by the arrival of a foreign
client, was the place for a boy just reaching the running, shouting, and
breaking age to spend eight or nine months, even if his parents had not
grown to abhor the very advantages of hotel life. So we turned our
attention to the renting of a house. In Peking one does not simply buy a
morning paper, check off a hundred possibilities, and make the rounds of
them. There is an English-speaking, more or less daily newspaper, two or
three of them, in fact; but very few families could live in the
available houses which they call to the reader’s attention. Nor are
there renting agents, or many invitations to the houseless, at least
recognizable to Westerners, to be seen along the streets. One must
depend rather on chance hints, above all on asking one’s friends to ask
their friends, which is not wholly satisfactory for new arrivals with at
most a few letters of introduction and a foolish, perhaps, but
ineradicable tendency to cause the rest of mankind as little annoyance
as possible. We soon learned, however, that some things are quite proper
in Peking which are deeply frowned upon elsewhere, and vice versa.
But at least house-hunting in the Chinese capital is not at all the
physical labor that apartment-hunting is, for instance, in New York. One
steps into the nearest of the rickshaws which swoop down like hungry
sparrows upon every possible fare and is borne silently away to the very
doors of possible dwelling-places. It is almost always a disappointment
to prospective residents, this first rapid survey of Peking outside the
Legation Quarter, yet at the same time fascinating to all but the most
querulous. The narrow, unpaved _hutungs_ are so uneven, if not actually
muddy or swirling with dust; they offer so many offenses to the eye, and
to the nose; unwashed beggars, runny-nosed children, the first close
view of one’s future neighbors, are seldom pleasing even to those most
avid of local color. Almost any one with American training will be
appalled by the lowness and the apparent crowding together of the
houses. The thought of living not merely on the ground floor but
literally on the ground itself, since Peking houses have no cellars and
rarely even a single step to be mounted, may seem unthinkable. The total
absence of front yards, of grass, of even the suggestion of a sidewalk,
nothing but blank walls of bluish-gray mud bricks, here and there half
tumbled in, patched perhaps for the time being with old straw mats or
mere rubbish, close on either hand as far as the eye can see, is likely
to bring a sinking to the new-comer’s heart.
But he is not long in realizing that China is preëminently the Land of
Walls, and that what the streets and the alley-like _hutungs_ lose by
being crowded between their mud-made barriers the dwellings along them
gain in space and privacy within. Once the heavy door-leaves, bright red
in color, with a few big black characters on them calling poetically for
blessings upon the inmates, growl shut behind him, he finds the sense of
unpleasant proximity was a mere delusion. A short tiled passageway
leads, almost certainly at right angles, into the first court, from
which another, very likely with a different direction, that evil spirits
may be completely nonplussed, opens upon a second, and beyond this,
perhaps through a big ornamental gateway with brilliant flare-eared
roof, there may be a third and even a fourth courtyard; though this
would imply that the ordinary house-hunter might better discreetly
withdraw before the matter of price comes up. Usually the brick walls
and the tiled roofs of the separate buildings about these courts are of
that same blue gray that makes Peking so much more drab than the
imagination had pictured it, for all its innumerable palaces, temples,
and monuments. But the eaves and the cornices, the doors and the
passageways, with their red and green and sky-blue decorations of
Chinese motif, the bright blues and reds of the rafter-ends and corbels
under the slant of the roofs, the white-papered lattices of the windows,
make up for this. Probably, too, there is a venerable old tree rising
out of somewhere high above the place; and almost always, winter or
summer, there is that bright blue sky overhead which makes Peking so
delightful a home. What usually troubles the foreigner longest is the
lowness of the houses. A child could throw a cat over any of them; they
have no basements, no garrets, nothing but the low room or two of each
building, generally without even a ceiling, but only the roof-beams,
papered or whitewashed, sometimes painted with dragons and other things
Chinese.
I have been speaking, of course, of Chinese houses. There are many two-
and even three-story dwellings in Peking; there are big compounds full
of houses that might have been shipped intact from Massachusetts; but we
could see no reason for coming all the way to China just to live inside
a little walled-in duplicate of England or America. So we roamed the
_hutungs_. According to treaty all Westerners in Peking still live
within the Legation Quarter. But the foreign community has long since
outgrown such limited accommodations. Chinese with houses to rent,
merchants with goods to sell, every caste and variety of Pekingese who
covets some of the contents of foreigners’ plump purses, is glad to
overlook this fiction in practice, so that brass name-plates in Roman
letters, and flagpoles flaunting various Western colors, are widely
scattered within the Tartar City. We found them clustered most thickly
in the southeastern, or at least the eastern, part of it, thinning out
toward the northwest; but foreigners live even inside the Yellow Wall,
as the Chinese call the Imperial City. There seemed to be few if any in
the broad Chinese City south of the Tartar Wall, or outside that mighty
barrier at all, except for the little suburban community far out at the
race-course.
[Illustration:
Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall of the Tartar
City
]
[Illustration:
The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists of (left to
right) ama, rickshaw man, “boy,” coolie, and cook
]
[Illustration:
A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on the wall
]
[Illustration:
Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our quarter
]
I had gone to Mongolia before we found what we wanted, and therefore can
claim no credit either in the quest, the furnishing, or the selection of
that numerous personnel without which no foreigner’s household in Peking
seems to function. It had been a long search, with certain hitches that
would not have occurred across the Pacific. Legally no foreigner can own
real estate in Peking unless he is a missionary. Many do, but that is by
using Chinese as dummy owners. Some old Chinese houses as yet untouched
by foreign hands tempted us to try ours at recreating them in as
charming a way as some of our friends had done. But the eight or nine
months we could be at home in Peking were already running away, and the
process of making livable such old ancestral mansions, where courtyard
rambles after courtyard, but where former glories have faded with years
of disrepair, would have taken too large a slice out of our time. To
rent a house even from the Chinese landlord who had renovated and
improved it purposely for the occupancy of foreigners was a complicated
process. First of all there was the inevitable bargaining, the landlord
starting at perhaps twice what he would accept and the renter at half
what he was prepared to pay; for it is still a rare Chinese, even in a
city as familiar with foreigners as is Peking, who can honestly name his
price at the beginning and stick to it. Nor were these dickerings
direct, even though my wife and our prospective landlord might have a
language in common. Go-betweens must “save face” on either side in case
the deal fell through. The houses for rent by Chinese were never
furnished; they usually lacked running water, sewers, bath-tubs,
electric light, and similar Western idiosyncrasies, though in cases
where the owner had in mind renting to foreigners preparations might
have been made to introduce these improvements. But unless he was sure
of getting a foreign occupant the landlord did not purpose to go to all
this trouble perhaps for nothing; in most cases his proposition was that
the renter put in these things at his own expense, with the doubtful
probability of having his rent reduced accordingly.
If the two parties did finally come to terms, the inexperienced renter
was likely to faint at the revelation of what still lay before him.
First he must pay three months’ rent in advance, which did not at all
mean that he would not have to pay again before the three months were
up. This payment would cover the first and the last months of the
occupancy, and the other third of the sum no month at all. It went as
_cumshaw_ or “squeeze” to every one concerned in the deal—except of
course the man who paid it—to be divided among all those who had in any
way taken part—the “boy” of an acquaintance who had pointed out the
house, the caretaker who had opened the door, the servant across the
street who knew the name of the landlord, the man who had fetched said
landlord, on up through all the go-betweens to the landlord himself.
Even the most generous of us hesitates to give tips of a hundred or a
hundred and fifty dollars, though it be only “Mex.” Then the papers in
the case must be sent to the legation of the foreigner involved, which
in due time would do to them whatever is customarily done, and pass them
on to the Chinese police. In Peking some officials work with unusual
promptitude (for China), so that the documents might be complete and
back in the hands of the landlord with a celerity that would be
vertiginous in the interior of the country—that is, with good luck, so
every one told us, within three or four months!
Then all at once there appeared a little Chinese house just about our
size, which an American missionary had recently civilized and was ready
to rent in the offhand fashion of our native land. For a week,
coolies—bowed under assorted articles of furniture picked up at auction
sales, bargained for piece by piece out in the maelstrom of the Chinese
City, in shops scattered elsewhere, and as a last resort made to order
by Chinese craftsmen of adaptable ability and very reasonable
demands—wandered up the little _hutung_ to our new home. A carpenter
produced from a scanty suggestion a four-posted crib with brilliant
dragons climbing each post; another stray artist covered the face of the
nursery wardrobe with a marvelous blue forest through which China’s most
famous actor, in his usual rôle of a willowy lady, strolled with a green
deer; most of the furnishings were purely Chinese, adapted as far as
possible to foreign use, and our chief regret was that this could be
only a temporary, and must therefore be an inexpensive, abode, in which
we could not indulge in the real beauties of Chinese trappings. As it
was, something between seven and eight hundred dollars had melted away
before we were done, and still no one would have mistaken the place for
a prince’s palace. But they were only “Mex” dollars, as is always the
case when one uses the word in China, and there was a chance that some
one might give us back a few of them when the time came to abandon
Peking and push on. Besides, either of the hotels would have taken the
dollars and not left us even the furniture.
By the time I returned from Urga we were ready to move in. Our Peking
home is out in the very eastern edge of the Tartar City, so close under
the East Wall that sunrise is always a little later with us than in the
capital as a whole. It is not easily found, for it opens off a narrow
_hutung_ of its own, a nameless little lane running head on into the
mighty wall, without another foreigner for several minutes’ walk in any
direction, and—since we are to cast aside reticence for the information
of other householders—the rent is seventy-five dollars “Mex” a month,
with no Oriental jokers in the lease. Before I have occasion to mention
them again, let me say that, though their value varies daily, the
dollars of China averaged a hundred and eighty-seven to a hundred of our
own during our winter in Peking. Wherever the words “dollar” or “cent”
appear hereafter in these pages they are of this cheaper variety.
It was a great change from the carefully tended Legation Quarter, with
its macadamed streets and tree-bordered sidewalks, its wide gateways
with vistas of one great power after another—though one comes to wonder
whether in China of to-day these powers are greater than they are
impotent—to cross Great Hata-men Street and strike off into the maze of
_hutungs_ to the east of it. But there the joy of a real home was
impressed upon us; we were living as we had long planned, in a Chinese
house among Chinese neighbors in Peking, the spell of the old capital,
of the real China, weaving itself all about us. Outwardly the place
would not be inviting to American tastes. But once a quick, light
tapping of the door-ring brings a “boy” to swing back the heavy halves
of the poetic red door we enter a very world of our own, completely shut
off from all but the sounds, and occasionally the smells, of the teeming
Chinese world about us. Its voices may drift over to us, but what does
it know of us within?
A Chinese house turned out to be a very pleasant place to live in. There
was pleasure even in having no stairs to climb, especially after being
on the top floor of a hotel where the elevator too often bore the sign
“No currency”; the delightful feeling of being at home as soon as the
red doors closed behind us was more real than we had ever felt it in any
of our Western abodes. Ours is a simple dwelling, to be sure, as befits
mere rolling stones. It has only one court, perhaps thirty feet square,
paved with gray mud bricks and surrounded by four separate little
low-browed houses of two rooms each, their roofs of curved tile slanting
down in a protective way, as if presaging hot summers or bitter winters.
Their bare backs are turned to the neighbors who crowd us on every side,
and their windows all face the court, take up all four sides of it, in
fact, for on the inside there are nothing but windows. At the top these
are lattices covered with the flimsy white paper so general in China,
easily renewed and much more adequate against heat or cold than one
would think; but foreign influence has put real glass in the lower
panes. One is not long in discovering that in Peking the main house
always faces south. If the compound is on the north side of the street
the best rooms are at the far back of it; if it is on the south side
they back up against the street wall, and so on. This most important
building almost always has a low wide porch, like ours, with a
pergola-roof over which plants rooted in the unpaved strips of earth
along the sides of the court can clamber. In summer it is the Peking
custom to have the courtyard covered by a _pêng_, a huge reed mat on
pole legs, high enough above the whole establishment to shade it without
cutting off the breeze—and always rented, by the way, from the
_pêng_-gild, which refuses to sell. But summer was waning when we moved
in, and for eight or nine months a year it would be a sacrilege to shut
out the brilliant blue sky that tents Peking, often without the tiniest
rent in it for weeks at a time. Even when the dry cold of a Peking
winter was at its sharpest we never regretted the separation of our
little houses which necessitated crossing the court and having another
glimpse of that unsullied blue sky and a breath of the outdoor air
whenever we went from one room to another.
The collecting of the requisite staff of servants was the mildest task
of all. In Peking, as in all China, human beings swarm so thickly that
the mere rumor of a desire for services is enough to bring many fold of
applicants. The wise thing for the new-comer is to hire his servants
through the servants of his friends, or in some such linked-up way. They
will no doubt have to pay their informants a certain “squeeze” for the
job, but one is protected from fly-by-night domestics whose antecedents
and family roots are unknown; though compared with the opportunities
which Chinese servants have for fleecing foreign employers they are
honesty personified. A staff thus recommended to us lined up for
inspection. There was an engaging-looking little cook nearing middle
life, a round-faced, too youthful “boy,” who, having once served in a
Japanese hotel and learned unpleasant habits, soon departed in favor of
a man from the interior of the province, and a tall, handsome Shantung
coolie. Then there came a wrinkled old rickshaw-man, one of the swiftest
runners in Peking for all his age, and finally, after more careful
picking, we chose the only feminine member of the staff, an _ama_ for
the most important task of all,—pursuing the younger generation. Then,
with a dose of interpreted orders, we were off.
For on one point we were adamant: we would not have an English-speaking
servant in the house. Chinese domestics who have even a smattering of
the language of their employers, we had already noted, are likely to be
impudent, to be experts in the matter of “squeeze,” and to demand what
in Peking are fabulous wages. Life is much simpler, too, when one can
talk freely without being understood by the servants. But the really
important motive was that we wished to learn Chinese, above all to have
the son who had lost his second birthday in crossing the Pacific learn
it, and not the atrocious Pidgin-English which constitutes the
linguistic lore of so many “boys” and _amas_. Looking back upon it we
can testify that there is no more direct road to a speaking knowledge of
even the Chinese language than living in the unbroken midst of it.
Down in the Legation Quarter people pay their servants two or three
times what is customary in the rest of Peking, to say nothing of the
“rake-off” which careless auditing and boastful living give them. Our
new staff named their own wages, but they named them on an uninflated
basis, so that both sides were satisfied. All except the _ama_
considered ten dollars a month a suitable return for their services,
though the rickshaw-man, of course, had to have eight more for the use
of his shining carriage, housed just within the outer door. The woman
stood out for fourteen, something more than the average in that quarter,
but she proved well worth it, for not only was hers the most responsible
job but the many other tasks that fall to an _ama’s_ lot made her
specially valuable. Besides their wages, Chinese servants get nothing,
legitimately, except the _k’ang_ they sleep on in their cramped
quarters, a basket of coal-balls now and then in the colder months, and
sometimes a garment used exclusively in their employer’s service. Their
food is their own affair. Thus our staff of five cost us sixty-two
“Mex,” or, to put it into American money, about thirty-five dollars gold
a month. In addition to this they expected cash presents at our
Christmas, their New Year, and when we should break up housekeeping,
totaling approximately an extra month’s wages.
Chinese servants have their faults, but when these are all summed up I
doubt whether they exceed those of domestics even in Europe, to say
nothing of our own land. Certainly life runs more smoothly under their
ministrations than the most willing and efficient of “hired girls” can
make it. Whether it is their natural temperament or merely a pride of
their calling, a surly face or manner, the faintest breath of impudence
or “back talk,” even when the lady of the house has been alone with them
for weeks at a time, have been as unknown in our circle as has a protest
against any task assigned them. They have their own ways of doing
things, but even these we have succeeded in changing where it was
essential to do so. The division of work is left to them, for this is a
matter in which one quickly finds it wise not to attempt to interfere.
If any of them has ever felt that he was being imposed upon by the
others, it was settled among themselves, and the matter never came to
our ears. There are no such things as afternoons off among Peking
servants; like their fellows, ours work, or at least are on call,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Once in a while the “boy” or
the coolie interrupts our evening reading for an instant by asking
permission to go out, but we have never known them to be missing when
next they are wanted. The rickshaw-man asked perhaps three or four times
during the winter to go and have something done to his vehicle, but only
in a few cases of misunderstanding was he not on hand when we wished him
to trot away with us, until with the coming of the Chinese New Year he
decided that he had held a steady job long enough. The _ama_ has two
small daughters, not to mention a husband and the inevitable
mother-in-law, at her home not half an hour away, yet though she has
never been discouraged in doing so I doubt whether she has gone to see
them a dozen times during the winter, and whenever she does she brings
back some gay and not always inexpensive Chinese toy to her appreciative
charge, as if to make up for the presumption of leaving him. It is
really more than that, of course, like the constant kindnesses of all
the servants toward him, for nowhere could a small boy be more royally
treated than among the child-loving Chinese.
Though we have never gone deeply into the matter, the work of each
servant seems to be definitely fixed by custom. The rickshaw-man sweeps
the court in the morning, unless he is busy with his chief duty, and
keeps an ear on the door-knocker. The “boy” combines the lighter tasks
of butler and chambermaid, and in general acts as a buffer between us
and the outside world. The coolie does most of the rough labor,
including the floors, the stoves, the washing, both of dishes and
clothing, and the ironing, producing dress-shirts that would make the
best steam-laundries in the United States blush with shame, if they were
capable of any such display of emotion, and pressing even feminine
evening frills with the deft hand of a French maid. In the time left
over from her chief duty the _ama_ does much of the sewing and many of
those little odds and ends which in other lands make up the drudgery of
a housewife. Since a daughter joined us in the spring she has performed
her augmented task with the same ever cheerful efficiency.
The cook is more of a free lance, with very definite duties, including a
daily trip to market. In China as a whole the _tsoa-fan-ti_ and the
mistress have a frequent meeting over his account-book, but in Peking
there is a wide-spread custom euphonistically known as “boarding with
the cook.” It simplifies the task of keeping him in hand, especially for
a _tai-tai_ speaking a very limited amount of Chinese, to set a fixed
price for the day’s food and leave the rest to the Celestial kitchen. We
adopted this custom, and have found it not only satisfactory but as
economical as our friends report the other method to be. For Rachel and
myself we dole out a dollar a day each, and half as much for the
youngster. This includes everything that comes to the table except the
morning bottle of milk and those nefarious products of France and Italy
in similar containers with which I or our guests choose to flout our
constitutions and that of our native land. The spenders among the
foreign colony of Peking will undoubtedly, if it ever comes to their
attention, sneer at the paucity of this sum; perhaps those who have
deigned to accept our hospitality will say, “I thought so.” But I have
promised to be frank. We are simple people, with tastes which do not
daily require such viands as are commonly symbolized as quail on toast.
As a matter of fact we often do have just that, for there is probably no
capital in the world where game is more plentiful and cheaper than in
the Peking markets. Certainly we never go hungry, and what that cook can
do for a whole day with a sum that would not leave enough for a tip
after a single luncheon in a very modest New York restaurant would give
an American the false impression that the high cost of living has never
come to China.
We live mainly on Chinese products, augmented by such foreign delicacies
as cocoa, coffee, canned milk, imported butter, spices, jam, bacon, and
the like, all furnished out of the cook’s stipend. Eggs, I believe,
reached the height of an American cent each during midwinter; a chicken
of moderate size costs from fifty to sixty coppers, which is not more
than sixteen cents in real money. The far-famed Peking duck, which dot
with white the moat just over the wall from us, would be a more serious
acquisition, being in great demand among Chinese epicures; but squab,
plump and tender, sells for the equivalent of a nickel each, and the
succession of snipe, pigeons, partridge, pheasants, and wild duck that
have graced our board would be luxuries to a war profiteer at home.
Vegetables are plentiful in Peking, but the choice of meat is limited.
Pork, beloved by all Chinese, foreigners eschew as a matter of course;
if they have not seen what Chinese pigs feed on they are sure to have
heard. Peking beef has the reputation of being the flesh of animals that
have outlived their usefulness as beasts of burden rather than of those
raised for food. Now and again, as the hungry militarists have boosted
octroi duties at the city gates, the sheep butchers have gone on strike,
which is particularly a hardship to Peking’s large Mohammedan
population. But fowl, wild and tame, is always on hand to make up for
any such catastrophe. We found Chinese corn meal and millet and a native
brown but excellent cream of wheat preferable to the breakfast cereals
from across the Pacific. Chinese pears, and especially the big golden
persimmons which last almost all winter, are no poor substitutes for the
California oranges sold in at least one foreign-goods grocery at three
for a dollar. Now and then “Ta-shih-fu” takes a flier in desserts. Like
all Peking chefs he prefers to make a thing which is fearful and
wonderful to behold but which is a trial of temper and skill to the
guest who has first to cut into it. There is that infamous “Peking
dust,” a wall of glacéd fruits enclosing a mound of grated chestnuts of
exactly the consistency, though by no means the splendid taste, of
sawdust, and doted on, unfortunately, by that member of the family with
most influence in the kitchen. Sometimes dinner is topped off with a
pastry-and-cake basket, handle and all, full of custard and nuts. But
all such weaknesses are amply made up for by the fact that pies worthy
of the proudest New England housewife often come from the kitchen,
usually labeled in the white of an egg with poetic Chinese characters.
These literary effusions are seldom missing on any formal dessert, if
there is space to get them in; when our first national holiday came
there appeared a brave pink and green iced cake with the greeting
“Thanksgiver Day” written boldly across it.
Our cook is noteworthy among his tribe in that he can prepare a Chinese
as well as a foreign meal, and two or three times a week this wholly
different but no less enjoyable repast adorns our table, chop-sticks and
all. In general he is given a free rein in selection, so long as he has
a certain balance in menu, and using his excellent Chinese judgment he
dines us almost too well, and no doubt, in the time-honored Chinese way,
pockets the coppers left over. We do not know that our cook “squeezes” a
cent, but if he does not he should be drummed out of the Chinese cooks’
union, if there is such a thing. For it is taken for granted by all
foreigners in China that their cooks believe a certain legitimate
“squeeze” is attached to the job, and though it takes an American
housewife some time to reconcile herself to it, old foreign residents
would be much put out to find that the rule is not general. Popular
tradition has it that all cooks put into their own pockets a certain
percentage of all money given them to spend; 5 per cent seems to be the
accepted amount among foreigners in Peking, except in the Legation
Quarter, where there are no definite limits. There are innumerable
anecdotes illustrating this custom. Missionary cooks, boasting
themselves Christians, have laid up small fortunes on their eight or ten
“Mex” dollars a month. I know of one who, from the day his service
began, made it an invariable rule to take six coppers for every person
he cooked for during the day, and he now owns two modern houses which he
rents to foreigners.
We have often wondered just how much our cook manages to lay aside.
There is no way of finding out, for the Chinese market-man is ever
faithful to his own people in any controversy with the “outside
barbarian,” and the custom is so perfectly legitimate in the cookly mind
that no pricking of conscience ever sullies the frank and smiling face
of the king of our kitchen. In overcrowded China it has been the
practice for centuries to fee any one who brings a job or a client, and
even if the foreigner went to market himself he would not save the
“rake-off”; in fact he would probably lose money. For the market-man
does not quote a foreigner the price to which a Chinese cook will
finally bring him down, and no grocer is going to tell his client when
he pays his monthly bill that 5 per cent of it will go to his cook as
soon as he comes in when there are no telltale foreigners looking on.
Yet supernatural as the Chinese are in slicing off a “cash” or a copper
where even a French eye could not possibly detect any such protuberance,
we do not see how our cook can have made a fortune on the leavings.
Including his six dollars for kitchen fuel he has eighty-one dollars a
month to feed us on when I am at home. When we go out to dinner of
course he is not the loser; extra money for invited guests gives him a
trifle more leeway; possibly he sells a tin can or a bottle now and then
to the constantly passing peddlers, though we have never seen any
evidence of stooping to such methods. Yet his wages have never been
higher than with us, at least since his youthful days as a retainer in
the Manchu court, and, for all that, he has educated two of his four
boys into fine, upstanding, well dressed young men with enough English
to take important positions with foreign firms; the third is already
well along the same road, and no doubt the youngest, who romps about all
day in a neighboring _hutung_, will be similarly provided. We have never
quite reconciled those grown sons to our little cook, still well on the
sunny side of middle age; but in China, of course, the generations
succeed themselves swiftly. We may be wronging him in assuming that he
does not spend on us all we give him for that purpose, and if so I
apologize. If we are not, he certainly is welcome to all he has kept,
for he has served us for eight months in an unobtrusive, efficient, and
most agreeable manner.
Chinese of standing have let us into a few of the secrets of life among
house servants. Most cooks, at least for foreigners, are not Peking men,
it seems, but come in from the country. Having no family to support in
the capital, those earning ten dollars a month, eating leftovers—though
few Chinese servants care for foreign food—and spending perhaps two
dollars a month of their own, can send home about a hundred dollars a
year. Those with families in Peking have to devise methods for
augmenting their wages; therefore they do not consider those methods
dishonest. One might ask, why not pay the man a living wage to begin
with and then expect him to be honest? Alas, centuries of the other plan
have made that contrary to the Chinese way of thinking. The moment you
pay a servant more than the market price he takes you for a gullible
victim or a millionaire and “squeezes” all the more. It is the Chinese
system, and many a foreigner has broken his head against it in vain.
A genuine cook to foreigners owes it to his dignity to have an
apprentice assistant, just as he must ride to and from market in a
rickshaw. Not long after we settled down, “Ta-shih-fu” asked permission
to bring into the kitchen his younger brother, whose profession of
torturing a Chinese violin seemed to be in ever decreasing demand. There
he has remained month after month, learning the rudiments of foreign
cooking, until he has gathered sufficient audacity to go and cook for
foreigners himself, thereby making his future secure. But never has it
been so much as hinted that we should pay him anything; his wageless
standing is perfectly in keeping with the Chinese scheme of things, and
no one would be more surprised than he or his brother if we offered him
money.
Whatever we can say for our cook we can testify that the “boy” who has
been with us since the second month is honest even in the Western sense.
He is, we hasten to admit, different from the rank and file of “boys” to
foreigners in Peking; no doubt they would dub him “queer.” He comes from
somewhere ’way down the province, well off the railroad, and seems
deliberately to refuse to learn the tricks of the capital. Down there he
has a wife of seventeen, perhaps forced upon him by his parents in the
customary Chinese manner; at least he has never shown any desire to go
home, not even at New Year’s. But then, he is past forty. His service is
so constant that we have sometimes urged him to go out more often, but
he replies with a smile that he has few friends in Peking and nowhere to
go. Once or twice a month he calls in a passing barber, and perhaps he
has stepped out half a dozen times during the winter on a brief personal
errand—except that, as regularly as fortnightly pay-day comes round, he
goes to send a letter home. The extent to which Chinese families pool
their incomes, with some grandfather or mother-in-law as treasurer,
would take almost any American’s breath away. We have many a time caught
this extraordinary “boy” carefully avoiding chances to “squeeze,”
passing on to the other servants buying errands assigned him, lest we
suspect him of taking a commission. Once a tourist couple dropped in for
tea, and having traveled too fast to orientalize the point of view of
their native Chicago, surreptitiously slipped a silver dollar into the
“boy’s” palm as he opened the door at their departure. He did not faint;
hence we might never have known of that social blunder if the “boy” had
not rushed back as soon as the door was closed, his outstretched hand
offering us the coin. I warned you he was queer; I am not sure but that
the normal “boy” of Peking would not consider him downright crazy. But
honesty and diligence, alas, are not always sufficient in this miserable
world. When we move on we despair of finding this “boy” another place
more than any of the others, for his stock of self-confidence is as
scanty as his integrity is unusual.
The normal Peking “boy,” particularly if he knows some English, is
usually the general factotum of a foreign household. Many foreigners
never speak to their other servants but transmit all orders through the
“boy,” or, if the staff is large, through “number one boy.” Some of the
older and more experienced of these take on the efficiency and the
manner of old English butlers; they can arrange anything, from a
dinner-party on Christmas to a picnic out at the Temple of Heaven by
moonlight, at a mere hint from their socially busy mistresses. But we
much prefer our type of “boy.” Though they may succeed in keeping their
own employers in ignorance of that fact, the observant guest can hardly
fail to see that these efficient head servants grow scornful toward
their subordinates and often despise foreigners in general and the
family they serve in particular. Obviously their “squeeze” increases
with their importance and their opportunities. Some of them make
fortunes out of the peddlers and shopkeepers whose patronage they
recommend, and positions under them are not had for the mere asking. The
“boy” of an American official in Peking came to his mistress one day and
insisted on giving her a present worth easily his year’s salary, saying
he had become a Christian and hence was “ashamed for the much money” he
had been given by those who sold things to the family and to their many
tourist guests—and begged her to accept this customary percentage on his
winnings. How the _t’ing-ch’ai_, or topmost “boy” in a foreign legation,
makes use of his opportunities is a story worth telling, but that would
be trespassing into the realms of high finance.
The long, handsome Shantung coolie, who laundered dress-shirts and
pressed georgette evening-gowns with such amazing skill, turned out to
be a contrast to the “boy,” and was destined to depart suddenly about
the middle of January. At first the _tai-tai_ used to “call the coal,”
but Wang had gradually taken over the task and was getting it for as low
a price as she—I am sure I am not doing Wang an injury by mentioning his
name, any more than I should by specifying an American called Smith. The
coal, however, seemed to burn up faster and faster, and each alleged ton
piled against the wall of the little back court at the front of our
compound looked smaller. One day we questioned its size, and Wang
promptly guaranteed to make it last the month out. That would have been
physically impossible, yet last it did. Other suspicious little things
began to gather about the tall handsome coolie. None of them were
definite, however, and Wang might be with us yet but for the other
servants, though I fancy he would have hanged himself alone in time. A
whisper from the _ama_ caused Rachel to “call” the next ton herself, and
to borrow scales from an American friend down the _hutung_. It was a
cold evening when the ton arrived, but we persisted in watching it
unloaded, weighed, and carried in. But why were there not sixteen sacks,
as the silky Chinese dealer just outside Hata-men had promised, and why
did twelve sacks total five hundred _chin_ more than a ton? It took us
until next day to find out.
The scales, of course, being Chinese, consisted of a mere stick with
marks on it; but for the same reason it would have been impossible for
them to be as simple and straightforward as they looked. All such scales
have _two_ loops by which to suspend them, and Wang assured us that both
of these were used at once. That was all. Even the lady down the street
who had been using them all winter did not know the difference. When at
last we learned the Chinese trick of the scales the missing four bags
were easily accounted for; and a little more trouble, mainly for the
benefit of foreign residents in general, brought the blackened
cart-driver over to confess that Wang had intercepted him just around
the corner from us and sold the four bags to a little coal-yard almost
behind our bedrooms—the same one, of course, from which he had bought
back enough to fulfil his guarantee. The night before, Wang having asked
permission to go out and get his hair cut, or something of the sort, we
had been startled to have all the other servants irrupt upon us over our
evening lamp, smiling nervously, but saying through the cook as
spokesman that they could not endure our being misled about the missing
man any longer. He was keeping bad company nights, they announced with
visible unwillingness; he often brought in friends to sleep on their
already crowded _k’ang_; coppers were sticking to his fingers in a way
which apparently even a cooks’ union could not approve.
Chinese servants are not in the habit of tattling against one another to
their masters, and things must have come to a pretty pass to bring about
this unusual scene. But we waited until we had other proof that it was
not merely a case of spite; then we spoke gently to Wang as he was
stirring the fire in my office next afternoon. There were four bags of
coal missing from the ton of the night before, we confided to him, and
as we did not wish to have the police mixed up in so small a matter we
wondered if perhaps he could trace them. Then we went out to tea. That
evening found us without a coolie; he had folded up his bed and
departed, and he has never been back to claim the three or four days’
wages due him.
Wang is a handsome youth, to Chinese eyes, and naturally he needed more
money than his older stick-at-home colleagues. Besides, he did more hard
work than all the others. If he had come to me privately and whispered
his troubles, I think I should have been tempted to give him a monthly
bonus, if he could have convinced me that the other servants would not
hear of it, rather than see him depart; for never again in this
imperfect world do I hope to display such gleaming shirt-bosoms as Wang
furnished me. The _ama_ promptly introduced her husband as coolie, and
he has proved satisfactory, besides being under a watchful eye that
completely belies the accepted notions of the position of wives in the
Chinese scheme of things. But stiff shirts go to a professional laundry
now, and though a new front costs there just one-tenth what it would in
New York, they have lost that final touch of perfection, of youth and
genius, which Wang put upon them.
But on the whole our Peking servants are good, as human beings the world
over go, for all the Wangs among them. I shall have forgotten their
faults long before I forget the motherly care they have taken of my
family during my long absences, the tasteful little presents they gave
my wife on her birthday when I was not there to give her any myself, and
the grandfatherly way they have with our small son.
I should be sorry, however, if I have given the false impression that
living is on the whole much cheaper for the foreigner in Peking than at
home, thereby causing our no doubt overworked State Department to be
bombarded with ten-dollar bills and demands for passports. Whether it is
because low prices tempt one to spend more than one could if they were
high, or that the absurd cost of certain necessary things physically or
mentally imported from the Western world mount up faster than seems
possible, we find that we are spending quite as much in Peking as we did
in New York, and we do not play bridge or the races.
The Chinese way of housekeeping, as we have pieced it together from bits
of information picked up among our native acquaintances, is quite
different from that of foreign residents. According to them,
middle-class Chinese families usually have two servants—an _ama_ and a
cook. The _ama_ does the washing and all the general housework, at least
in the women’s apartments. Obviously the Chinese would be horrified
beyond speech at the goings-on in foreigners’ houses; the “boy” of our
white-haired compatriot down the _hutung_, for instance, lays out her
most intimate garments when he judges it is time for her to change! Such
an _ama_ receives from one to two dollars a month, and a “present” of
two or three dollars at each of the four principal Chinese holidays.
Servants in native families are also given their rice, the monthly rice
allowance for the whole household being fixed and the domestics eating
the poorest quality. But they must have more income, and that is where
gambling comes in. Much of this goes on in the average Chinese home,
even among the women and their feminine guests in the afternoons. For
every dollar staked ten cents is set aside by custom as _cumshaw_ for
the servants. Cigarettes sold at eight coppers a package around the
corner cost the family and its guests ten, and so on. But gambling is
the important thing. Servants in wealthy or political families, where
high stakes are the rule, may get as much as a hundred dollars a month.
A trustworthy Chinese informant told us that the one question always
asked him by a prospective servant is some form of, “Is there gambling?”
Where there is not, it is hard to get and keep good servants. In these
days of comparative poverty in Peking those who cannot find places with
foreigners, or have not the courage and adaptability such positions
require, often have a hard time of it.
It would not be just, as well as being a sad blow to his pride, to
mention Li _Hsien-sheng_ among our servants. Mr. Li is our Chinese
teacher. By our own choice he, too, speaks no English, so that our
introduction to the language is by the method by which children learn
one. He comes for an hour every afternoon, and carries away a ten-dollar
bill at the end of each month. Yet he is something of a scholar, even
if, like all his colleagues we have so far tried, not much of a teacher.
However, I must not be too severe toward those numerous men of Peking
who eke out a livelihood by guiding the barbarian within its gates into
the mysteries of their strange tongue. At least they earn all they are
paid, and if one learns to use them mainly as a dictionary, the result
may be more worth while than at first seems possible. Nor is this the
place to express my opinions, harsh or genial, on the incredible Chinese
language. Suffice it for the moment to say that we both soon found
ourselves able to express our simple desires to the servants without
calling in some more experienced friend, and by midwinter could make
ourselves understood to merchants keenly eager to understand us. The
more diligent, stay-at-home, and mentally alert member of the family
quickly left me in the linguistic background, but even she cannot keep
pace with “Ha-li,” as the Chinese call my son and namesake. Though his
third birthday is still ahead of him, he is already the family authority
on tones and similar bugbears of the adult student of the Celestial
vernacular, and I should hesitate to pit myself against him even in a
test of vocabulary. I can only plead that it is an unfair advantage in
acquiring a new language not to be able to speak any other when the
acquisition begins.
Besides, what chance does an overworked father have compared to the
opportunities of childhood? When “Ha-li” is not up on the wall
discussing with the guardians who live there whatever he and they have
in common, or chatting in Chinese with playmates whose mother-tongue may
be that of anywhere from Brittany to Odessa, he is listening to the
voices of the world outside our compound as they drift over to us. He
has already picked up more hawkers’ cries than an adult ear can
distinguish, and totes his basket about the courtyard shouting his
wares, hand to ear in the Peking venders’ fashion, in tones so exactly
those of the original outside that we often wonder what that original
thinks of his echo. Daylight brings a never ending succession of these
hawkers, from the cereal-man so early in the morning that surely no one
could have the appetite to call him in, to the seller of sweetmeats so
late at night that none but habitually hungry people could still be
thinking of food. Our neighbors probably do some cooking of their own,
but they save much fuel by patronizing these itinerant restaurants, the
more sumptuous of them push-carts of a very Chinese type, most of them
mere baskets oscillating from shoulder-poles. The people about us seem
to have no fixed meal-hours, if indeed they keep any track of time at
all. They eat one by one as appetite moves them or as coppers are
available, and as surely as we leave home we will see a child or two, a
woman, or some other solitary member of a large family squatted in the
dirty little _hutung_ beside their door engrossed in the contents of a
bowl that has been rented, chop-sticks and all, from the vender who
waits so patiently for the transaction to be completed that he does not
seem to realize he is waiting.
Some of the street cries are almost musical, even to our Western ears;
some hawkers use instruments to spare their voices. The barber twangs
what looks like a gigantic pair of tweezers; the knife- and
scissor-sharpener blows a long horn or clashes together half a dozen
heavy steel pieces carried only for that purpose; the toy-and-candy man
has his gong, the china-riveter his swinging bells, the blind man his
reed pipe, or his big brass disk, and his long tapping cane, and the
water-seller has, of course, his squeaking wheelbarrow. The croak of the
oil-man suggests some superannuated frog; the jolly old fellow who
peddles Chinese wine from a beautiful copper urn has a succession of
hoarse shouts that never vary; the cabbage-man, the peanut-man, the
delicatessen wagon, so to speak, even the rag-picking women, all have
their own cries, distinctive, yet unintelligible until one has learned
them by rote rather than by meaning, as Peking did generations ago. Even
we dull-eared adults know nearly all of them now, and are conscious of
something missing if they fail to come at the usual hour, which is a
rare lapse indeed. One fellow sings what might almost be a bar from some
Italian opera. He is the gramophone-man, carrying his box and his big
tin horn, and offering to play his well worn Chinese records for those
families that have the coppers to spend on mere entertainment. The
seller of fritters also comes near being a singer, with a lilting
refrain that stays with one long after he has passed. But all in all the
cries are disappointing. Though some start off as music, even though it
be of the falsetto kind beloved of the Chinese, they almost invariably
bring up somewhere in a sudden raucous shout that spoils them. Perhaps,
as even some foreign enthusiasts insist, our Western ears are tuned only
to the simplicity of Western music; our scale of eight tones may be
crude as compared with the twenty-five gradations of the Chinese. But I
doubt it. I have tried to imagine that haunting street-cry which trills
through the opera “Louise” ending in a shrill shout. Surely its lyric
quality would not thus be improved. Yet all this does not mean that our
Peking cries are displeasing. Their fascination is something subtle, and
we shall be sorry to move on again out of their orbit.
[Illustration:
At Chinese New Year the streets of Peking were gay with all manner of
things for sale, such as these brilliantly colored paintings of
native artists
]
[Illustration:
A rich man died in our street; and among other things burned at his
grave, so that he would have them in after life, were this
“automobile” and two “chauffeurs”
]
[Illustration:
A neighbor who gave his birds a daily airing
]
[Illustration:
Just above us on the Tartar Wall were the ancient astronomical
instruments looted by the Germans in 1900 and recently returned, in
accordance with a clause in the Treaty of Versailles
]
There may be a gauntlet a block long of merry but habitually unwashed
children, chanting their incessant “Ee mao ch’ien! Ee mao ch’ien!” (“One
dime money!”) as often as they catch sight of us, and the daily beggar
of our section, with his “Lao yea tai-tai! Lao yea tai-tai!” (“Old
gentleman lady!”) that wheezes down the scale in so persuasive a manner,
is frequently out-shouted by his poaching rivals; but once the gate of
the nearest wall-ramp is locked behind us by the keeper who jogs down at
the tinkling of his little bell we are as free from such annoyances as
from the dust and the forgotten garbage along the _hutungs_. For the
Chinese are not allowed on the wall. That is, the great rank and file
are not, and those of the better class who care that much for physical
exercise are few, so that the top of the great Tartar Wall is almost a
foreigners’ private promenade. None of our servants, not even those born
in Peking, had ever been admitted to it until they appeared at the foot
of our ramp with “Ha-li” as a passport. For that matter nearly all those
wonderful monuments which even the three-day tourist has visited are
closed to them, either by rule or by the high cost of admission.
Scandalous, no doubt, from the Western democratic point of view;
pathetic when we imbue our servants with our own feelings. But it never
seems to have occurred to them that it is unjust—if it is. For to throw
open the wall to the general public of Peking for a single week would
make it an impassable stretch of filth, sleeping beggars, and jostling
coolies; and in a month even what is left of its parapets would have
been thrown down for the building of new hovels inside it or out.
When we came at the end of summer the top of the wall was a jungle, in
places almost impassable, gay with morning-glories and other flowers, a
broad hayfield even in its least fertile portions. By December
hay-makers and fuel-gatherers had made it a wind-swept concourse almost
fit for an automobile race, half a dozen cars abreast, except for that
short piece of it between Hata-men and the gate by which the emperor
once came and went, where it is in the hands of the foreign legations
below. On the brilliant spring Sunday not long ago that I made the
circuit of the wall this autumn’s harvest was already promised in the
delicate green that was spreading along it, as it was across the great
tree-topped city it encloses. That stroll of twelve or thirteen miles is
almost a complete course in Chinese life and history, at least of recent
centuries; but what lies outside our immediate neighborhood is another
story. From that bit of the wall just above us which is our principal
playground there is enough of interest within plain view, from the
courtyards of our neighbors below to the distant range of the Western
Hills half enclosing the plain of Peking, to make it a loafer’s
paradise. The streets down below may seem mere miserable lanes to those
of us from the West, and the dwelling-places drab and uninspiring; but
inside the compounds trees are general, so that Peking from aloft is
pleasantly, almost thickly, wooded. Every city, from incessantly
grumbling New York to the hillside town with its church- and cow-bells,
has a voice of its own, and that of Peking resembles no other I have
ever heard. It is made up mainly of street-cries, from venders,
rickshaw-men asking right of way, from shouting carriage out-runners,
never completely blending together but still retaining a certain
individuality, so that from the top of her wall Peking sounds like the
tail-end of some great football game, with the victorious rooters still
sporadically shouting their pæans of glee as they disperse to the four
points of the compass.