New Forces in Old China | Page 9

exhibited; silk- weaving factories where fine
fabrics are made on the simplest of looms; feather shops where
breastpins and other ornaments are made of tiny bits of feathers on a
silver base--a work requiring almost incredible nicety of vision and
such strain upon the eyes that the operators often become blind by forty.
Another curiosity is a shop where crickets are reared for fighting as the
Filipino fights cocks and the Anglo-Saxon fights dogs. The Chinese
gamble on the result and a good fighting cricket is sometimes sold for
$100. The attendant put a couple in a jar for our alleged amusement and
they began fighting fiercely. But I promptly stopped the melee as I did
not enjoy such sport.
The river is one of the sights of China. It is crowded with boats of all
sizes. The owner of each lives on it with his family, the babies having
ropes tied to them so that if they tumble into the water, they can be
pulled out.
Altogether, it is a remarkable city. Viewed from the famous Five-Story
Pagoda, on a high part of the old city wall, it is a swarming hive of
humanity. As one looks out on those myriads of toiling, struggling,
sorrowing men and women, he is conscious of a new sense of the
pathos and the tragedy of human life. If I may adapt the words of the
Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs on the heights above Naples, at the Church
of San Mar- tino, on the way to St. Elmo--I suppose that every one who
has ever stood on the balcony of that lofty pagoda ``has noticed, as I
remember to have noticed, that all the sounds coming up from that
populous city, as they reached the upper air, met and mingled on the
minor key. There were the voices of traffic, and the voices of command,
the voices of affection and the voices of rebuke, the shouts of sailors,
and the cries of itinerant venders in the street, with the chatter and the
laugh of childhood; but they all came up into this incessant moan in the
air. That is the voice of the world in the upper air, where there are
spirits to hear it. That is the cry of the world for help.''[3]
[3] ``Address on Foreign Missions,'' pp. 178, 179.

II
DO WE RIGHTLY VIEW THE CHINESE

TOO much has been made of the peculiarities of the Chinese, ignoring
the fact that many customs and traits that appear peculiar to us are
simply the differences developed by environment. Eliza Scidmore
affirms that ``no one knows or ever really will know the Chinese, the
most comprehensible, inscrutable, contradictory, logical, illogical
people on earth.'' But a Chinese gentleman, who was educated in the
United States, justly retorts: ``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,'' he adds, ``so very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous
have I found the American that I hesitate.''[4]
[4] ``As a Chinaman Saw Us,'' pp. 1, 2.
The Chinese are, indeed, very different from western peoples in some
of their customs.
``They mount a horse on the right side instead of the left. The old men
play marbles and fly kites, while children look gravely on. They shake
hands with themselves instead of with each other. What we call the
surname is written first and the other name afterwards. A coffin is a
very acceptable present to a rich parent in good health. In the north they
sail and pull their wheelbarrows in place of merely pushing them.
China is a country where the roads have no carriages and the ships have
no keels; where the needle points to the south, the place of honour is on
the left hand, and the seat of intellect is supposed to lie in the stomach;
where it is rude to take off your hat, and to wear white clothes is to go
into mourning. Can one be astonished to find a literature without an
alphabet and a language without a grammar?''[5]
[5] Temple Bar, quoted in Smith's ``Rex Christus,'' p. 115.
It would never occur to us to commit suicide in order to spite another.
But in China such suicides occur every day, because it is believed that a
death on the premises is a lasting curse to the owner. And so the
Chinese drowns himself in his enemy's well or takes poison on his foe's
door-step. Only a few months ago, a rich Chinese murdered an
employee in a British colony, and knowing that inexorable British law
would not be satisfied until some one was punished, he hired a poor
Chinese named Sack Chum to confess to having committed the murder
and to