As A Chinaman Saw Us | Page 2

WHO HE IS 1
II. THE AMERICAN MAN 16
III. AMERICAN CUSTOMS 40
IV. THE AMERICAN WOMAN 63
V. THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE AMERICAN 92
VI. THE AMERICAN PRESS 99
VII. THE AMERICAN DOCTOR 106
VIII. PECULIARITIES AND MANNERISMS 118
IX. LIFE IN WASHINGTON 131
X. THE AMERICAN IN LITERATURE 164
XI. THE POLITICAL BOSS 185

XII. EDUCATION IN AMERICA 200
XIII. THE ARMY AND NAVY 212
XIV. ART IN AMERICA 229
XV. THE DARK SIDE OF REPUBLICANISM 237
XVI. SPORTS AND PASTIMES 261
XVII. THE CHINAMAN IN AMERICA 279
XVIII. THE RELIGIONS OF THE AMERICANS 303

AS A CHINAMAN SAW US
CHAPTER I
THE AMERICAN--WHO HE IS
Many of the great powers believe themselves to be passing through an
evolutionary period leading to civic and national perfection. America,
or the United States, has already reached this state; it is complete and
finished. I have this from the Americans themselves, so there can be no
question about it; hence it requires no little temerity to discuss, let
alone criticize, them.
Yet I am going to ask you to behold the American as he is, as I
honestly found him--great, small, good, bad, self-glorious, egotistical,
intellectual, supercilious, ignorant, superstitious, vain, and bombastic.
In truth, so very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous have I
found the American that I hesitate. Shall I give you a satire; shall I
devote myself to eulogy; shall I tear what they call the "whitewash"
aside and expose them to the winds of excoriation; or shall I devote
myself to an introspective, analytical divertissement? But I do not wish
to educate you on the Americans, but to entertain, to make you laugh
by the recital of comical truths; so without system I am going to tell

you of these Americans as I found them, day by day, month by month,
officially, socially; in their homes, in politics, trade, sorrow, despair,
and in their pleasures.
You will remember when the Evil Spirit is asked by the modest Spirit
of Good to indicate his possessions he tucks the earth under one arm,
drops the sun into one pocket, the moon into another, and the stars into
the folds of his garment. In a word, to use the saying of my friends, he
"claims everything in sight"; and this is certainly a characteristic of the
American: he is all-perspective, he claims to have all the virtues, and in
his ancestry embraces the entire world. At a dinner at the ---- in
Washington during the egg stage of my experience I sat next to a
charming lady; and having been told that it was a custom of the French
to compliment women, I remarked that her cheeks bloomed like our
poppy of the Orient. She laughed, and responded, "Yes, I get that from
my English grandfather." "But your eyes are like black pearls," I
continued, seeing that I was on what a general on my right called the
"right trail." "I got them from my Italian grandmother," she replied.
"And your hair?" I pressed. "Must be Irish," was the answer, "for my
paternal grandmother was Irish and her husband Scotch." It is true that
this charmingly beautiful and composite goddess (at least she would
have been one had she not been naked like a geisha at a men's dinner)
was the product of a dozen nations, and a typical American.
The original Americans appear to have been English, despite the fact
that the Spaniards discovered the country, though a high official, a
Yankee whom I met at a reception, told me that this was untrue. His
ancestor had discovered North America, and I believe he had written a
book to prove it. (En passant, all Americans write books; those who
have not, fully intend to write one.) I listened complacently, then said,
"My dear ----, if I am not mistaken the Chinese discovered America." I
recalled the fact to his mind that the northwestern Eskimos and the
Indians were essentially Asiatic in type; and it is true that he had never
heard of the ethnologic map at his National Museum, which shows the
location of Chinese junks blown to American shores within a period of
three hundred years. I explained that junks had been blown over to
America for the last three thousand years, and that in my country there

were many records of voyages to the Western land, ages before 1492.
You see I soon began to be Americanized and to claim things. China
discovered America and gave her the compass as well as gunpowder.
The first Americans were in the nature of emigrants; men and women
who did not succeed well in their own country and so sought new fields,
just as people are doing to-day. They came over in a ship called the
"Mayflower," and were remarkably prolific, as I