Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

by Carl Crow

  About this time a newly appointed American postmaster - or very probably his wife - began making trouble about his rank. As the postmaster’s duties were so light that he usually held a second job as American jailer no one had ever thought about his rank, and the previous incumbent had never bothered so long as there was plenty to eat and drink. The new incumbent had ambitious ideas. He contended that because he was the only employee of the post-office department there could be no question but that his rank should equal that of the judge, the consul general or any mere admiral who happened to be in port. The postmaster general, he contended, was just as important as any other member of the cabinet, and so far as Shanghai was concerned, he was the whole American post-office department. Then we sent to the State Department and got a ruling - pages and pages of it. This ruling fell into the hands of an American who declined to give it up, and for years we had to appoint him on all banquet committees because no one else knew how to seat the guests. Then he went home and took the papers with him and we were helpless.

  A few years after this I served as the chairman of a committee of that sort and made a sorry and historic mess of things. We were entertaining at a community dinner a newly appointed governor general of the Philippines who was en route to his post in Manila. It was not exactly a public function for the guest list was limited to Americans. So I did not take very seriously my duties as chairman of the committee on seating. I was also chairman on the committee on refreshments and entertainment which I thought at the time to be the more important of the two responsibilities. As only Americans were to be present I thought it was just a family affair and that it didn’t matter very much where anyone sat, so long as the food was well served and the drinks adequate. There were only about a dozen people at the speaker’s table, and I arranged their place cards in what I thought was the orthodox manner and gave the remaining two hundred cards to a Chinese boy and told him to put them around the table just as they came.

  As the dinner progressed I got a lot of dirty looks and a consul sitting next to me called my attention to the fact that a lowly vice-consul was nearer the head of the table than he was. As a matter of fact I was also nearer the head of the table myself, through no design or desire on my part but solely because the cards had fallen that way. But the big uproar was at the speaker’s table. There was an admiral present, a very famous admiral, and I had made a very serious mistake. When you have a governor general of the Philippines, an American consul general, a judge of the United States Court for China and an American admiral to place at the same table there are problems of precedence that are difficult for anyone to solve.

  At the conclusion of the dinner the marine band played “Hail Columbia” and the chairman of the affair started shaking hands with the distinguished guests. When he approached the admiral the latter clasped his hands behind his back and said:

  “You have not only insulted me, but the entire American navy! I shall report the matter to my department.”

  And he did, at great length. We didn’t hear the last of the matter for months.

  A mistake such as I made would have been practically impossible in Peking. The diplomatic set always took itself very seriously and even the houseboys were authorities on the questions of seating arrangements. Under similar circumstances in Peking the boys would have seated every one correctly and would have rectified my mistake - if it was a mistake - in the seating of the admiral. During the first World War I was the representative in China of the Committee on Public Information, having charge of American war propaganda, and on my first visit to Peking I found that I had official rank though no one knew what it was and it was finally determined in a rather peculiar manner. My office was in Shanghai and there I paid no particular attention to my official position and neither did anyone else. I was just doing a job of work. My Shanghai office was barely organized before I was summoned to Peking for a conference with the American Minister, and in preparation for the calls on Chinese newspapermen I intended to make, I had some official cards printed rather hastily. My title was long and by the time I added the street address, cable address. etc., the card was a large one. When I reported for duty at the legation, I did not send in my card to the minister but to the third secretary, an old friend from Tokyo. He came out to greet me holding my card by the tip of one corner as if it were a vile object he did not like to touch.

  “My God,” he cried in a fine pretense of horror. “What are you trying to do? Aren’t there enough troubles in the world, don’t we diplomats have to work hard enough without your coming up here to start new international complications?”

  “What is the trouble?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your card, man, your card. Don’t you realize that it is bigger than the minister’s card - probably the biggest official card in all Peking? You haven’t left any of these monstrosities lying about, have you, or called on any of the other legations?”

  “No. This is the first one I have taken out of my pocket.”

  He was half-joking and half-serious about this, and I could see that my card did presume an official importance which was entirely unjustified and would certainly be looked on as a display of bad taste. However, I thought it extremely funny that so much fuss shored be made about the size of a card, and attempted a few jokes on the subject, but I soon found that no one in Peking thought there was anything funny about it. My friends didn’t laugh or smile but just looked at me with pained expressions. I learned that in that tight little diplomatic community it made all the difference in the world whether or not you outranked certain other persons, and the size of your card is of more social importance than good manners, and that our supposedly democratic Americans were about the fussiest of the lot.

  The third secretary had promised to see just what my rank was, but I heard nothing from him and concluded that he was afraid of creating a precedent. In the meantime, I had to have an official card of some kind, and decided that if no one else would create a precedent for me, I would do it for myself. So after waiting a few days, I took my cards to a Chinese printer with a third secretary’s card as a sample and told the printer to cut them down to the same size. This meant cutting off the address. When I examined the cards and compared them with the third secretary’s card, I found the printer had made a mistake and that my card was actually slightly the larger of the two. I really hadn’t intended this, but since fate had willed it, who was I that I should interfere?

  The third secretary had already supplied me with a list of the 134 cards I was supposed to leave at the legations and other official establishments so I gave the list and the cards to a hotel boy who was expert in such matters, together with a few dollars for ricksha fare. Two days later all my calls had been paid and my mailbox in the hotel began to fill up with cards, most of them with one corner deceitfully turned down, just as my cards had been, to indicate that the call had been paid in person. These formalities having been observed, I became a member of the Peking diplomatic set, which meant that whether I liked it or not I had to attend innumerable dinner parties and listen to stupid Peking gossip as detailed by fat old dowagers.

  No one ever questioned the rank which the Chinese printer had given me, though it did not make me very popular with third secretaries and assistant naval attaches who thought I should have been placed in the rank of a vice-consul. Those in the higher brackets of official rank didn’t care what rank I had so long as it was lower than theirs, while those in the lower brackets might resent the size of my card but assumed that I must have some political pull and so were afraid to say anything about it. I had not taken the subject of my rank very, seriously but I soon found that it did serve some very useful purposes, especially when dealing with the officials of other governments. The size of my card made a very fine impression on Chinese officials and I had no trouble seeing anyone of importance I wanted to see.

  I was congratulating myself that, for a greenhorn who knew nothing of diplomatic usage, I had got along very well in Peking, when
my self-satisfaction got a very rude shock. I knew most of the American newspapermen either personally or through mutual friends and had either met them in the Peking Club or seen them in their offices a few days after my arrival. Then, having some business to discuss with the head of a British news agency, I went to see him. He met me with no cordiality, and unable to restrain his indignation, finally blurted it out. He was the oldest journalist in Peking, therefore the doyen of the journalists, just as the senior minister was the doyen of the diplomatic corps. I should have called on him before calling on any other journalists. Instead, I had called on all the others, thereby offering him a slight so gross as to be almost insulting. I tried to explain but nothing would condone my conduct, and he hated me up to the day of his death.

  By old custom the governor of Hong Kong was accorded many special privileges. One is that a special seat is reserved for him on the Peak Tramway though he may not use it more than once a year. Another one was that his chair was always carried by six coolies, while the chairs of ordinary people are carried by two, three or four coolies. The only time that arrangement was upset was on the occasion of the official visit of Governor General Taft of the Philippines. The authorities of Hong Kong were faced not only by problems of precedence but also the physical problems presented by the great weight of the visitor. His rank merited four coolies, but his tonnage demanded six. It was felt that it would be a mistake to present the governor general of the Philippines as a man equal in importance to the governor of Hong Kong, and so for several weeks before the Taft visit the latter was ostentatiously carried around by eight coolies. This made it possible to place six coolies on Taft’s chair without doing violence to old custom. After the Taft visit had become a memory two of the governor’s coolies were discharged and his prestige was adequately maintained by the employment of six.

  One of the famous characters of Shanghai a quarter of a century ago had achieved such fame in his profession that he did not need a personal name. Everyone referred to him as “the German butcher” and everyone knew who was meant. There were several German butchers but he was the German butcher. Horses were his hobby and he kept a large stable. As he was far too fat to ride, he maintained the finest traps in town and drove frequently through the crowded streets. As he had a large stable and a number of stable boys, he one day conceived the idea of making these drives a little more spectacular. The stable boys, dressed in appropriate uniforms, were mounted on extra horses; and four rode in front of him and two behind. It made quite an impressive entourage, and the daily afternoon drive was one of the sights of Shanghai. But one of the consuls didn’t enjoy the spectacle, in fact several of them were irritated by the sight of the German butcher riding around in such ostentatious style. It was really none of their business, but they stirred up trouble with the taotai who was the ranking Chinese official. On his official calls he often had so-called “body guards” who rode fore and aft of the carriage. The consuls convinced the old gentleman that for a German butcher to ride about in such grand style was derogatory to his prestige, and he finally registered a formal protest with the German consul general who told the butcher he had to stop riding around town like a Chinese viceroy.

  The German butcher retaliated by taking his daily drives seated on a high trap from which he handled the reins of four horses. No taotai or consul general, not even a minister plenipotentiary could do that!

  XVI

  West meets east and likes it

  “Mutual confidence is the pillar of friendship.”

  Most foreigners went to China for the first time prepared to be sorry for themselves and carried a fair amount of self-pity with them. They also took with them a normal amount of moral indignation which was often used up and seldom replenished. Many of them found plenty of use for self-pity in the first few weeks, or months of their arrival for they came face to face with life for the first time. At home we divide life into grooves and compartments which isolate us from our less fortunate fellow beings. They do not live on the same streets, therefore we seldom see them and are un-conscious of their existence. This is not true in China. No matter where one lives he is surrounded by a sea of poverty and human misery. We seem to be engaged at home in a desperate effort to conceal the ugliness and the cruelties of life and so lack the mental background of the Chinese who for so many centuries have adjusted themselves to their surroundings instead of attempting isolation. Thus many foreigners who go to China come into intimate contact for the first time with poverty, filth and cruelty. During their lives at home they have only read about these things in the papers.

  There is something terrifying about it and especially about the huge masses of humanity - because at first it is difficult to think of these strange-looking people as human beings like ourselves. I will never forget the first stroll I ever took in a Chinese city. It was the second day of my arrival in Shanghai and I started out alone to explore the place, wandering about on an aimless route. Soon I found myself on a crowded street with no English signs and no white faces - there was no one who even remotely resembled the people with whom I had lived from the time of my birth. It was a July day and many of the small tradesmen were sitting in front of their shops stripped to the waist, comfortably fanning their fat stomachs. Everywhere I looked there were people, people, people - strange people - all of whom seemed to be converging on me. The air was full of the strange odors of camphor wood and hot peanut oil.

  Today, almost thirty years later, a whiff of either gives me a little pang of homesickness for China but on that July day the odors were strange and only added to my feeling of isolation. All about me were peculiar sounds of street cries and an undertone of conversations in words I did not understand. I was suddenly terrified and wondered if I knew my way back to the hotel. I never felt exactly that way again but have seen the terrified and worried looks of hundreds of visitors to whom I have from time to time shown the sights of some crowded Chinese city. Because I never knew exactly what it was that frightened me, I always tried to find out what terrified them but they were as vague as I about the cause. I presume it was nothing more than the nightmare terror of strange surroundings - a sudden realization of the fact that for the first time in their lives there were no familiar signposts about - nothing to reassure them that they were still living on mother earth.

  The actual incidents of the Boxer uprising were horrible enough to give the Chinese a sinister reputation, but were as nothing compared to the stories told by the amazing number of foreigners who were living in Peking at the time and had enjoyed miraculous escapes. All this provided a new stage setting and a new set of characters for the writers of mystery and crime. If the plot for a particularly atrocious crime didn’t fit any other national scene it was convenient to give it a Chinese setting. As this was unknown country to both writer and reader, their imaginations were as unhampered as in the realms of fairyland or nightmare. The result was to give the good-natured inoffensive Chinese the reputation of being throat-slitting villains. That was the mental picture I had of them when I received a telegram offering me a job in Shanghai and didn’t know whether I had to travel by the Atlantic or the Pacific to get to China.

  The tourist is hungry for excitement he can enjoy from the safety of the hotel and many of them have this hunger falsely satisfied by the same exciting experiences I enjoyed during the first week I spent in Shanghai. Just at daybreak I was awakened by the noise of shots, that sounded like the rattle of machinegun fire, followed by more rifle shots. The scene of battle appeared to be less than a block away. I immediately thought of a bloodthirsty clash between warring tongs - of dead bodies in alleyways and the wounded staggering through the, streets. I had come to China as a reporter and here was a big story breaking right under my nose. I had covered a lot of murder trials in Texas and had witnessed one fatal gun battle, but nothing like this promised to be. I dressed and hurried out with my camera. The Indian watchman at the hotel door was asleep, but I didn’t need to ask directions from anyone. As I stepped
out of the door there was a new burst of gunfire; and I moved cautiously in its direction, using what shelter I could against stray bullets. When I got on the Garden Bridge I found that the battle was on Soochow Creek just beneath me.

  No wonder the Indian watchman had slept all through it for it was old stuff to him as it later was to me. Two boat-men, comprising the officers and crew of a small craft, were setting off strings of firecrackers in order to scare away the devils, as is done every morning by every boatman in China before he starts out for the day’s work. After that experience the firecrackers at daybreak never disturbed me, but I have heard many a tourist’s tale of deadly gun battles to which he had listened through the night. A well-known export sales manager once telephoned me to ask if I thought it would be safe for him to leave the hotel to keep his appointment with me. He said there had been a desperate gun battle just outside the hotel and although no shots had been fired for several hours, he was afraid the battle might break out again. Many who have listened to these firecracker battles return home none the wiser and have a good story they can tell of the dangers of life in China.