by Carl Crow
But more than twenty years later during the Japanese attacks on Shanghai of 1932, there was a firecracker battle that will never be forgotten by those of us who heard it, for it was quite terrifying while it lasted, even to the old China Hands. The Japanese had been shelling the Chinese section of the city for several days, and all of us were following the progress of the battle which was being fought in the city’s back yard. With the many civil wars that had been fought around Shanghai, we were all veteran military observers and had learned how to watch a war with little less personal danger than one would face a golf tournament.
It was just before the dinner hour and almost everyone was at home listening indifferently to the banging of the field artillery and the rattle of the machine guns a mile or two away in Chapei. Suddenly these usual sounds, to which we were thoroughly accustomed, were augmented by what appeared to be the din of a heavy infantry engagement on The Bund, the important water-front street at the edge of the International Settlement. As I listened intently, it grew in volume and spread until it was soon apparent that the troops were advancing in my direction and that thousands upon thousands of shots were being fired in the Central District, which at that time was under the guard of British troops and American Marines. I got no response from the telephone, for everyone in the Western District was also trying to find out what the battle was all about. The chauffeur told the gardener and the gardener told the cook and the cook told the boy who told me that a new Japanese army had landed and was killing all foreigners as well as Chinese. It didn’t occur to me at the time that not one of these tale tellers had been off the place and so knew no more than I did about what was going on. In times of fear and excitement one will believe most anything - a psychological fact that the war propagandists fully appreciate.
I was frightened because threatened by a danger that had no logical explanation. The sound of battle approached us much faster than any line of soldiers could march. We were thinking of piling into the car and driving toward uncertain safety in the country, when a friend who had just come from downtown dropped in for a cocktail and told us what it was all about. A false report that a Japanese admiral had been killed had started a celebration; and the Chinese, in a single hour, had used up all the firecrackers they had been saving for the week’s celebration at China New Year’s. I have been in the neighborhood of a number of battles and know what it is to sit in the darkness of an air-raid shelter and listen to bombs being dropped all about me but I was never as thoroughly terrified as by this harmless but exceedingly noisy battle of the firecrackers. I was not the only one. Officers of the American navy thought a raid on Shanghai was being made by an overwhelming force and got their guns ready for action. World War veterans were as disturbed as anyone else.
A great many women get hysterical within the first day of their stay in China and imagine all kinds of terrible things. They look on the cheerful, hardworking ricksha coolie as a bandit who will murder you as soon as he gets you around the corner. They think the kindly and gentle hotel boy may slip some poison into your food just for the fiendish fun of the thing. They are unable to disassociate the natural and unavoidable cruelties of life from the people who are the victims of these cruelties. They see a menace in everything. Sometimes they carry this to laughable absurdities. One wife of a very famous American millionaire would not bathe in China except in imported bottled waters and on a houseboat trip the manager of her husband’s big company had to open the bottles himself because she didn’t trust the Chinese boys. A few work themselves up into a dangerous nervous state. I have known personally of a half-dozen American women who arrived in Shanghai to join their husbands and took the next boat back in a state of collapse.
Many fantastic stories add to the terrors of life in China. The Chinese were frightened of foreigners and the foreigners frightened of Chinese. Curiously enough each believed the other to be guilty of the crime of infanticide. One of the earliest and most persistent stories that hampered the work of medical missionaries was to the effect that they killed Chinese babies and from their eyes brewed some magical essence for the cure of mysterious diseases. Missionaries. were naturally hurt and indignant at this slanderous accusation but they generally believed the story that a large proportion of the Chinese girl babies are killed at birth and did more than any one else to perpetuate this atrocious falsehood. According to the generally accepted story the babies were killed and their tiny bodies thrown into what were usually called “baby towers.” These towers were never very accurately described, and as I was never able to find one, I have no idea what they were supposed to look like. But the general impression given by the name as well as by the purpose of the towers was that they were counterparts of the Parsee “Towers of Silence,” where according to the Zoroastrian religious rites corpses are thrown to be eaten by vultures.
This was one of the first of the many curious stories I heard about the Chinese and I accepted it at face value for several years. Then as my circle of Chinese acquaintances widened and began to include beggars, bandits and others of the submerged strata, I found it more and more difficult to believe that these people would kill girl babies just to get them out of the way. The affection which was lavished on children of both sexes made the idea absurd. So for more than ten years I made widespread and diligent inquiries about infanticide, finding always that it was not practiced in the locality where the inquiry was made but was very prevalent in a neighboring county or province. Or, as a variation, I was told that it had formerly been very prevalent but had died out. Once in a while I ran across some definite story of infanticide and on tracing it down I found that it invariably came from some missionary who got it from a convert who told of what some wicked unconverted neighbor had done. There wasn’t a single story that wasn’t flimsy.
The more elusive the story became, the harder I worked to get at the truth. Finally I sent out letters to more than one hundred missionaries of long experience in the country and living in every province, telling them of my inquiries and asking about conditions in the neighborhood in which they lived. Almost all of them answered denying that infanticide was practiced in China to any general extent, though a few did say that it had been a general practice in the past and either claimed or hinted that Christian mission work was responsible for stamping it out.
Answers to these inquiries also brought the logical explanation for the stories. There are a great many stillbirths in China especially among the poor people, who are unable to provide a decent burial. In every city and village there are benevolent societies whose business it is to take care of these burials. The bodies are placed in the “baby towers” to be collected by these societies for burial, so that the institution which has been depicted as a proof of Chinese callousness and cruelty is really one of benevolence and kindness. The “baby tower” is not a tower at all but a small cubicle where the bereaved father could place the body, a task which he usually performed in the darkness of night.
I had made inquiries about infanticide over a period of many years and come to the conclusion that there is no more infanticide in China than in any other part of the world where there is an equal amount of disease and poverty. Then quite by accident I found that a distinguished body of Sinologues had made the same kind of investigation and come to the same conclusions long before I was born. The investigation had been made by the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and the proceedings reported in full in the journal of that body. But returning travelers will still tell of having seen “baby towers,” which in a residence of more than twenty-five years I was never able to find, and a great many people believe that girl babies are killed off like unwanted kittens.
Every foreign community that established itself in China tried to reproduce in every possible way the feel and the atmosphere of the homeland and thus escape the strange environment in which they found themselves. It was pure sentiment that made the committee of the (British) Country Club ship sod from Devon for equally good sod could have been
procured from the Soochow Hills at a tenth of the cost. But no Englishman would admit that the sod was as good and he felt a thrill as he drove down Bubbling Well Road and realized that the patch of green on the left came from Old England. Wherever there are English people there are flowers, and the sailing ships brought out shrubs and trees and plants and seeds as regularly as the shipments of whisky and gin and beer. They were just as essential to the life of the transplanted Englishman as the supplies for his club bar. Anyone who listened to the conversations of the old China Hands over their chota pegs would find that very frequently they were talking about birds or flowers or the best method of caring for trees one of them had just planted on his grounds.
One of the first things the supposedly greedy Shanghai taipans did was to build a cathedral which was for many years the finest building in the city. The nonconformists among the British followed with the building of a church which was unhappily located on the edge of the red-light district. Many other churches were built and on Sunday mornings the church bells of Shanghai ring as insistently as in any New England village.
Because they were the pioneers and the most numerous, the English took the lead in the establishment of their own institutions. The Germans built a club of their own and so did the French, Swiss, Italians and Portuguese to say nothing of dozens of other clubs into which different segments of the community were organized. A Jewish club started out to be the finest of its kind in the city but interracial clashes doomed it to failure. Americans lagged behind all other nationalities partly because it was so easy for them to merge with the British, drink whisky at the British clubs and attend the British churches. But in August of 1914 this free and easy acceptance of British hospitality came to an end. The period between the beginning of the first World War and our entry on the side of the Allies, found the American community isolated for the first time. Some very prominent members of the community were refused membership in the Shanghai Club because they were suspected of sympathizing with the Germans. It was a trying time for neutrals in Shanghai.
With our joining the Allies the French and the British couldn’t do enough for us. In the very successful Liberty Loan drive the British and the French banks were much more helpful than the one American bank which had a Scotch manager. The old spirit of mutual co-operation with which the settlement had been founded was restored on what appeared to be a firmer foundation than ever before. But the American community had been conscious of itself and started in to make up for lost time and do the work that should at least have been started by an earlier generation. In a period of a very few years we built two American clubs, a very fine American school, a community church, and with generous British help, a foreign Y.M.C.A. Many graceless old sinners helped build the community church though they never went there except to attend the funeral of some departed friend.
But there was an earlier and very important American contribution to the life of Shanghai. It is because of the vision and initiative of an American that a city which depends on shipping for a livelihood and is presumed to be dominated by the greed of its white rulers presents to the newcomer such a puzzling picture. Coming up the Whangpoo from Woosung the first stretches of farmland to be seen on either side are succeeded by oil tanks and then by solid lines of wharves with ships of a half-dozen or more nationalities tied up to them or lying at anchor in the stream. Except for the gaily painted sampans, the drab beggar boats and the Chinese junks, the scene would not be very different from that presented by the harbor of any other great port.
But on rounding the point of land built up ages ago by the silt deposited at the mouth of Soochow Creek there is a park-like expanse of lawn and trees extending along the river. At the farther end of the lawn is The Bund and beyond it the famous sky line made up of Shanghai’s proudest buildings. The spacious grounds and old-fashioned buildings of the British Consulate can be seen through the trees of The Bund Garden, and about a mile away at the opposite end of the park is the modern building of the Asiatic Petroleum Company which gives the Socony-Vacuum and the Texas Company such lively competition. Between these two strongholds of British power and wealth are the buildings of the Shanghai Club, the Chinese Maritime Customs, Peninsular and Oriental Bank, Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, Palace Hotel, Cathay Hotel, Bank of China, Bank of Communication, Yokohama Specie Bank, Bank of Taiwan, North China Daily News and offices of the principal shipping and insurance companies. There are no retail shops here in spite of the fact that a number of fiction writers have sent their heroines on what must have been fruitless shopping expeditions on The Bund.
This foreshore which is given over to a pleasing but profitless lawn marks the finest water-front property in the city. If it were covered by wharves where cargo steamers could dock it would, over a period of almost a century, have saved time and money on every pound of the millions of tons of freight that has been landed at more remote points and brought into the city by lighters.
The construction of wharves here was seriously proposed once and only once. For a time it was the burning issue of the day. The leader of the opposition was Edward Cunningham, the American consul. He argued against spoiling a sky line which at that time was composed of a straggling collection of two-story houses and the destruction of a lawn which had been talked about but not yet started. Having exhausted the aesthetic arguments he descended to the material and painted a picture of the banks and other business houses moving away from the vicinity of wharves. Cunningham was the manager and one of the partners of Russell & Co. which had substantial water frontage and big shipping interests. A wharf at the lower end of Soochow Road would have been of great value to them. But he had visions of a city which would become the permanent home of foreigners, of making it a more pleasant spot for future generations. The idea that the rapacious Yankees should be willing to sacrifice profit for the sake of a beauty spot must have been disconcerting to the British community. That is the only reason I can think of for the fact that the plan to line the foreshore with wharves and godowns collapsed so suddenly. It was never revived. To the Shanghailander, foreign and Chinese alike, The Bund foreshore is as inviolate as the Bowling Green in New York or the Boston Common.
The physical discomforts which formerly encompassed the foreigner in China have entirely disappeared. The drinking water no longer has the taste of alum, though foreigners flavor it with whisky or gin. The lonely Standard Oil employee at the most remote station can pick up radio stations all over the world. Last year when I was in the most remote part of Yunnan Province I heard the well-known voice of Lowell Thomas. Shanghai offers as many comforts and luxuries as any other large city and at cheaper prices. No millionaire can enjoy more satisfactory or efficient service than that provided by a well-trained staff of Chinese servants. In fact two eras have been telescoped and while the foreigner has not lost the leisure of the sailing-ship days he enjoys all the comforts and conveniences of modern life. In spite of this the newcomer always finds it very difficult to readjust himself to the strange conditions. He imagines physical discomforts when all he is suffering is the mental discomfort of having to think along new and unaccustomed lines.
He usually begins to count the days until his contract is ended and he will be able to go back home. He often thinks of trying to find some employment that will make it unnecessary for him to return to China. Even though he is an adult, he suffers the delusions of a homesick child. The food at home was better. The people were superior. It was more comfortable. There were greater opportunities. The streets were wider and cleaner. Marco Polo was like that. When he found anything in China that he liked he said it was like Venice.
Employees of the big foreign companies in China measure time in three-year cycles, the period of the employment contract, punctuated by six months’ home leave. This is the event with which they date their lives, and in recalling past events one out of ten will refer to it as being before or after a certain home leave. Besides a chronology like that a date is a colorless number. Eastbound voyages of trans
pacific ships are very gay affairs. A very large number of the passengers are from the Far East returning home for a months’ holiday with round-trip tickets paid for by the company and a pocket full of cash or travelers’ checks. Everyone is a liberal host and an equally appreciative guest. There are many parties of the kind that used to be called “carousals.” Smart stewards make liberal tips. The west-ward voyage is not so gay. The travelers are coming back to work after several months of play and their new clothes are no longer misshapen because of bulging pockets. The steamer employees refer to this voyage as “bringing back the empties.”
With each home leave the point of view of the exile changes. The visits home are seldom as pleasurable as anticipated. Old friends have interests that are far from the China Coast and conversations are soon exhausted. To one who has listened daily to discussions of international politics it is impossible to get steamed up over who is going to be elected governor of his native state. Interests in baseball or football may continue over a period of several home leaves but when two old China Hands happen to meet at home they are much more likely to talk about the China golf championship or the duckpin bowling tournament at the Columbia Country Club. Relatives at home die or get married. By and by the exile is shocked to discover that he has more friends on the China Coast than he has at home and decides to take a trip to Europe on his next home leave. He has become an old China Hand.
During the first part of his life in China the foreigner, no matter what his nationality, clings to his homeland and looks forward to the distant day when he can retire and return to his birthplace. If he builds a home of his own it is certain to have a name reminiscent of his boyhood days. But when he finally retires and is given the rounds of farewell dinners in Shanghai or Tientsin or Hankow or a half-dozen other places he finds that he has left behind him memories more gripping than those which have survived a long life in China. If he settles in the vicinity of London he will probably become a member of the Thatched House Club, a rendezvous for old China Hands where they fore-gather and talk over affairs which have only a remote interest to anyone else in London. If he buys or builds a new home for himself he is more than likely to give it a Chinese name even though he spent most of his life in China expressing contempt for everything Chinese. Americans who come back from China to live in the vicinity of New York join the Shanghai Tiffin Club and there are similar organizations in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. They meet at irregular intervals to hear some speaker but what really attracts them is the opportunity to meet together and talk about things that only the old China Hand understands.