Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

by Carl Crow

  But the most serious hurdle he faced was one which the lonely and enamored bachelor would never suspect - one that I would have thought possible only in a fiction story unless I had known personally of so many instances, a few of them affecting my friends. Since these little personal tragedies, which only become doubtfully humorous with the passage of years, are motivated by feminine fickleness, let’s start with the psychological analysis of the girl at home who is coming out to get married. She is usually taking her first ocean journey and for the first time is completely independent. There is the dangerous hiatus between transplanting from one family to another, from the duties of a daughter to the responsibilities of a wife. The old life is on one side of the world’s broadest ocean, the new life on the other side and the conventions of neither obtain on board a ship. The old social restraints are absent in form and strange new scenes make them dim in memory. The Chinese social system would never allow a poor weak female to be faced with a situation like this. When the Chinese bride-to-be leaves her ancestral home she is locked in a curtained chair and the key is carried posthaste to the home of the prospective bridegroom who alone can release the imprisoned girl. If the steamship companies could do something like this they would be performing a very useful service.

  The fact that she is going to China to be married naturally singles the girl out for the attentions of all the young men on board. A mild flirtation seems to her to be the most harmless thing in the world. She will be married in a month and will probably never see this nice young man who is going out to Zamboanga. It will be the last chance and there are plenty of opportunities in strolls about the deck or in the gay cocktail parties which usually mark transpacific voyages. She is devotedly in love with John, but she hasn’t seen John for a long time, is lonely for him. What more natural than that she should visualize John in the person of the handsome young man who is at her elbow. He soon appears to possess all the remembered charms of John plus his own and becomes a more desirable mate. So far as he is concerned the old caveman instinct to steal some other man’s woman asserts itself. Too often the bride who was traveling to marry John in Shanghai married shipmate Bill in Yokohama and wrote John a letter. I don’t know whether or not the psychologists have a name for it, but they should.

  It finally became the custom for the young-men from the China Coast to meet their sweethearts in Yokohama. No one of them ever thought his girl would run out on him like that but as soon as his friends heard of the prospective marriage, they would begin pointing out to him the advantages of a wedding in Japan. No one ever mentioned the real reason but there were specious arguments presented in an attempt to protect the lovesick swain from female fickleness. After a long and lonely sea trip it would be unfair to make the girl wait four or five days longer before seeing him. He could show her the sights of Japan, protect her against the probable rudeness of Japanese policemen. By bringing her to Shanghai as his wife instead of a lone and inexperienced traveler he could relieve her of the bother of passing the customs examinations and dealing with the wharf coolies. By these and other crafty arguments in which the real reason was never hinted at they usually managed to convince the prospective husband that he would be lacking in all sense of decency if he did not arrange for the marriage to be performed in Kobe or Yokohama, and this finally became the social custom..

  It did not entirely put a stop to the pilfering of brides. Many a girl whose heart should have been near the bursting point with happiness at first sight of her beloved felt herself sink into the depths of despair as she saw him from the rail of her steamer. He did look funny in his China-made clothes and that hat he was wearing was out of fashion two years ago. Could it be possible that he had put on a little weight? Were those pouches under his eyes natural? Were they there before? Or had John forgotten his promise to cut his drinking down to reasonable proportions? Oh, well, it’s too late now and she had to say farewell to her charming shipmate. Sometimes the ship romance had gone too far and John met his girl only to learn that she had changed her mind.

  There is one classic and unexaggerated story of the curdled romance of a young American who was proprietor of his own business in Moukden. He had left a girl behind him in Iowa and the only hindrance to their marriage lay in the difficulty he had in saving enough money to set up a housekeeping establishment and meet the rather heavy cost of transportation. Finally his savings were augmented by drawing a lucky number in a sweepstake and he joyfully mailed a draft with a detailed letter of instructions. He had reserved passage on a specified steamer from Seattle and he would meet the steamer in Yokohama where they would be married and spend their honeymoon on the beautiful Inland Sea of Japan. As the steamer schedule did not allow time for any further correspondence, she was to cable him a single code word which would mean that she had received the letter and would be on the boat.

  John received the cable and was in Yokohama for the arrival of the boat but there was no Mary among the passengers who crowded the rail. Her name was not on the passenger list and she sent him no message. Full of anxiety he sent her a cable and in reply received a message:

  “Letter in Moukden.”

  The letter didn’t arrive until several weeks later and read as follows:

  Dear John:

  I know you are going to he very disappointed and may be angry with me, but it can’t be helped. I did intend to marry you like I said I would, but it was a long time ago and I never knew for sure whether you were going to be able to save up the money or not. After you went back to China the last time I began going with Sam and he wanted me to marry him and I told him I wouldn’t but he kept asking me just the same and was jealous every time I got a letter from you.

  When your letter came with the money in it and I sent you the message I told him about it and he felt awful bad. He said he didn’t have nothing more to live for and talked about committing suicide. I felt very sorry for him.

  Then he told me what a terrible place China was to live in and how the Chinese eat rats and kill all their girl babies and a lot of other things you never told me about. He said I would be lonesome there because I wouldn’t know anyone but you, and I guess I would of been but I hadn’t thought of it before. We’ve got the dandiest crowd here now and the boys have organized a string quartette and we have a dance at the Odd Fellows Hall every other Saturday night. The boys pay the rent for the hall and the girls bring the supper. It’s lots of fun - more fun than when you were here because the boys hadn’t started their orchestra.

  Well, Sam and I talked it over a long time. I said I was sorry for you and he said I shouldn’t be because you very probably had a Chinese girl, which I hadn’t suspected you of after all the things you wrote me about how funny looking the Chinese girls are. I saw one of them in Des Moines, and how any white man would have anything to do with them I can’t understand.

  Sam said you had given me the money to do what I liked with and that if I would marry him he would pay it back to you so that you would have some money coming to you that you didn’t expect. So that is what we did and Sam will begin paying the money back after the first of the year. There wasn’t quite enough to pay on the rugs and the refrigerator. Sam says we ought to be awful grateful to you, and we are.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Mary

  (Mrs. Samuel H. Jones.)

  The last time I saw John in Moukden he was still a bachelor and the framed letter occupied a prominent position over his cocktail bar.

  XXI

  Foreign devils at play

  “Men in a hurry from dawn until sunset do not live long.”

  Until comparatively recently foreigners traveled out to China within the restricted confines of the sailing ship. The voyage was long and tedious and the quarters small. When they arrived at the port which was to be their home for the next several years they did not entirely escape the cramped atmosphere of the ship. In Canton they were confined to the small factory quarter almost as rigidly as they had been confined to the narrower deck s
paces. In Foochow, Ningpo, Shanghai and all the other ports there were not only restrictions about travel beyond the settlement limits but always a certain amount of danger and inevitable discomfort.

  So far as amusements were concerned the foreigners were left to their own resources just as they had been on board ship. They had the choice of growing morbid and melancholy through boredom and loneliness or organizing games, tournaments and parties which would help them to pass the time in the long waits between the infrequent calls of ships which would bring new faces and letters from home. Conditions were ideal for the development of a life which is peculiar to the China Coast. There was leisure and loneliness, cheap and efficient servants and cheap food and drink.

  The organization of sports and establishment of multitudinous clubs followed. They were a social necessity for it was only through them that the human contacts provided by friends and relatives and acquaintances at home could be established. In his office the business man was surrounded by a wall of Chinese employees. A great many foreigners who were selling goods only to the Chinese, or buying produce from them, would not come in business contact with other foreigners once a week. While this condition existed in Shanghai, there was even greater isolation in the outports where employees of the tobacco and oil companies might not see another foreigner in their offices from one year’s end to the other.

  Most of these employees - all of the younger ones - were bachelors with the freedom and loneliness of a bachelor’s life. When their office work was over the only home they could go to would be their house and the only person they had to talk to was the Chinese houseboy. The natural solution of this problem was the organization of clubs, even in such small places that not more than a dozen members could be mustered. A club was looked on as such an essential institution that the first ones took the name of the port in which they were organized. There is the Shanghai Club, the Tientsin Club, the Canton Club, the Hankow Club and so on down the list of all the ports in which white men lived. All of the foreigners in the offices of the big hongs were members. One belonged to a club or became a hermit and usually began to grow a little queer. Junior employees might occasionally drink too much at the club but that caused the taipan less worry than the youngster who kept to himself and moped about in moody isolation. He was the man who was likely to crack up and have to be sent home before the expiration of his contract.

  In the smaller places where foreigners were so few in number that they found it difficult to support clubs they were frequently subsidized in one way or another by the big companies and many of them enjoyed free quarters. The club was not a place that the members occasionally visited. With a very large proportion of them the daily rendezvous with cronies at the club bar was a customary routine that could only be disturbed by illness. With clubs playing such an important part in the lives of the foreigners club management became a very important matter. Indeed any historian of the future who studies the reports of club meetings will probably find it very difficult to understand why so much time and rhetoric had been expended on the discussion of matters which in historical perspective appear to be of no great importance.

  Rarely was an annual meeting a cut and dried affair. Usually the entire membership was pretty well represented and a great many of them found occasion to get up and say their say about something or other. It was almost invariably an occasion for fighting over some old issue or the introduction of a new one. The question of whether money should be spent on trapping the greens or on improving the fairway, what fees should be paid to the caddies, how far we should give in to the constantly increasing demands of the lady players were perennials at the Shanghai Golf Club.

  The price charged for drinks was a matter of controversy at almost every club in town. As the price of Scotch increased, a few of the smaller and poorer clubs introduced a measuring system and the member got the tot he paid for, no more and no less. The suggestion that this system be introduced into the Shanghai Club made some of the old members purple with anger.

  “If the men of this Club can’t drink like gentlemen and have to have their drinks measured out for them,” said an old fellow member to me, “then it’s time we quit calling it a club. We’d better turn it into a pub and cater to the sailor trade.” Although a too generous helping might make the sale of an individual drink an unprofitable transaction, the tot was never introduced there or at the American Club. Any suggestion that this be done was certain to bring up a bitter argument.

  At the American Club the most troublesome controversy for years was over the rule requiring members and guests to wear coats in the public rooms. The Shanghai Club was adamant not only as to coats but also as to ties and though there may have been some who disliked the rule no one ever made an issue of it. Some rebellious members endorsed the rule insofar as it applied to coats and observed it meticulously but obeyed only the letter of the law regarding ties. The thinnest and narrowest possible ties encircled their collars but were never completely tied. Many of us carried ties in our pockets and completed our toilets as we went up the club steps. The only person I ever heard of who went into the club both coatless and tieless was a guest of mine, a United States Senator, and an old personal friend. There was nothing I could do about it because he was garbed that way when I picked him up at the jetty. But the only reason I didn’t get a sharp letter from the committee was because I anticipated their censure and wrote a letter of explanation before they had time to write to me.

  The controversy over coats in the American Club came up every summer, about the Fourth of July which was traditionally the first genuinely hot day of the year. The most ardent supporters of the coatless policy were newcomers experiencing the moist and depressing China Coast heat for the first time. As a member of the committee over a long period of years it was often my duty to defend the rule and attempt to bring the rebels into line. The stock argument was that, with the exception of coolies, all Chinese wore jackets even in the hottest weather. The club servants were required to wear jackets and tape their trousers at the ankles and therefore it was, to say the least, infra dig for club members to be dressed like beachcombers while the boys who served drinks and meals were dressed in the style appropriate to those who cater to the wants of gentlemen. The logical and inevitable rejoinder made by the rebels was that they had been served at many restaurants in America where the waiters had dinner jackets with black ties or even tail coats with white ties and the guests were dressed as they damn well pleased.

  And so the argument raged over a period of years with one committee bending before the storm and relaxing the rule and succeeding committees enforcing it. The issue played a vital part in the club elections. On several occasions the controversy waxed so bitter that members openly threatened to resign from the club if the rule was enforced and the supporters of the rule said go ahead and resign and be damned to you. But no one ever did.

  The detached historian having all the data in hand might come to the conclusion that we were by nature a particularly contentious people or that, having little else to do, we gossiped and bickered like a lot of idle women. It was only in the clubs to which we belonged and at the annual meeting of ratepayers that we could exercise our democratic rights of self-government. It gave the ferment of democracy an opportunity to work and the controversies which often appeared so bitter left us more united than before. We came from many countries and from widely separated parts of each country. The matters we fought over were of no importance to the outside world but they were of great importance to us and through the controversies, decisions and compromises we more or less unconsciously worked out modes of life and conduct by which we could live together.

  While their isolation drove the foreigners together to form clubs, there was never any tendency to throw down the bars. Clubs naturally followed certain social classifications. In the older and more exclusive organizations office employees were eligible if proposed by the taipan of the hong in which they were employed. It is not quite correct to refer to any
of these clubs as being exclusive. It was taken for granted that business men were eligible for membership unless there was something personally objectionable. Tide waiters, godown superintendents and all other outdoor employees were not elected to membership nor were the proprietors of retail shops. As these underprivileged classes grew in number they organized clubs of their own. In big places like Shanghai, Hankow and Tientsin, nearly all social grades were represented in these clubs so that there were few foreigners who did not belong to one or more of them. The standards of some were not very high but each maintained a balloting committee which carefully investigated each candidate for membership. In most cases the candidate was a newcomer and few of us knew anything about him. In every club there was at least one objectionable member whose presence made us careful to see that no others were elected. With some of the older British clubs the ordeal of proposing a member and securing his election was a long and trying one. The candidate’s name was posted for six months, during which time he was supposed to pass the inspection of the members of the balloting committee who would look him over and come to a decision.

  There was but one place to meet the members of the committee and that was in the bar and the one standard procedure was to buy each a drink. With more than twenty members of the committee a simple calculation shows that a great many drinks had to be bought. Sometimes one was fortunate enough to find two or three members of the committee at the same spot and so make a cleanup with one round of drinks. On the other hand members were forgetful and when time came to vote they might not remember that they had met a certain candidate and so would not vote for him. If enough members voted against him that was the end of it and he was pilled. The matter would be gossiped about from Harbin to Hong Kong.