by Yunte Huang
Indeed, the business of trying to understand a foreign nation with a foreign culture, especially one so different from one’s own as China’s, is usually not for the mortal man. For this work there is need for broad, brotherly feeling, for the feeling of the common bond of humanity and the cheer of good fellowship. One must feel with the pulse of the heart as well as see with the eyes of the mind. There must be too a certain detachment, not from the country under examination, for that is always so, but from oneself and one’s subconscious notions, and from the deeply embedded notions of one’s childhood and the equally tyrannous ideas of one’s adult days, from those big words with capital letters like Democracy, Prosperity, Capital, and Success and Religion and Dividends. One needs a little detachment, and a little simplicity of mind too, that simplicity of mind so well typified by Robert Burns, one of the most Scottish and yet most universal of all poets, who strips our souls bare and reveals our common humanity and the loves and sorrows that common humanity is heir to. Only with that detachment and that simplicity of mind can one understand a foreign nation.
Who will, then, be her interpreters? The problem is an almost insoluble one. Certainly not the sinologues and librarians abroad who see China only through the reflection of the Confucian classics. The true Europeans in China do not speak Chinese, and the true Chinese do not speak English. The Europeans who speak Chinese too well develop certain mental habits akin to the Chinese and are regarded by their compatriots as “queer.” The Chinese who speak English too well and develop Western mental habits are “denationalized,” or they may not even speak Chinese, or speak it with an English accent. So by a process of elimination, it would seem that we have to put up with the Old China Hand, and that we have largely to depend upon his understanding of pidgin.
The Old China Hand, or O.C.H.—let us stop to picture him, for he is important as your only authority on China. He has been well described by Mr. Arthur Ransome. But to my mind, he is a vivid personality, and one can now easily picture him in the imagination. Let us make no mistake about him. He may be the son of a missionary, or a captain or a pilot, or a secretary in the consular service, or he may be a merchant to whom China is just a market for selling sardines and “Sunkist” oranges. He is not always uneducated; in fact, he may be a brilliant journalist, with one eye to a political advisorship and the other to a loan commission. He may even be very well informed within his limits, the limits of a man who cannot talk three syllables of Chinese and depends on his English-speaking Chinese friends for his supplies of information. But he keeps on with his adventure and he plays golf and his golf helps to keep him fit. He drinks Lipton’s tea and reads the North-China Daily News, and his spirit revolts against the morning reports of banditry and kidnapping and recurrent civil wars, which spoil his breakfast for him. He is well shaved and dresses more neatly than his Chinese associates, and his boots are better shined than they would be in England, although this is no credit to him, for the Chinese boys are such good bootblacks. He rides a distance of three or four miles from his home to his office every morning, and believes himself desired at Miss Smith’s tea. He may have no aristocratic blood in his veins nor ancestral oil portraits in his halls, but he can always circumvent that by going further back in history and discovering that his forefathers in the primeval forests had the right blood in them, and that sets his mind at peace and relieves him of all anxiety about studying things Chinese. But he is also uncomfortable every time his business takes him through Chinese streets where the heathen eyes all stare at him. He takes his handkerchief and vociferously blows his nose with it and bravely endures it, all the while in a blue funk. He broadly surveys the wave of blue-dressed humanity. It seems to him their eyes are not quite so slant as the shilling-shocker covers represent them to be. Can these people stab one in the back? It seems unbelievable in the beautiful sunlight, but one never knows, and the courage and sportsmanship which he learned at the cricket field all leave him. Why, he would rather be knocked in the head by a cricket bat than go through those crooked streets again! Yes, it is fear, primeval fear of the Unknown.
But to him, it is not just that. It is his humanity that cannot stand the sight of human misery and poverty, as understood in his own terms. He simply cannot stand being pulled by a human beast of burden in a rickshaw—he has to have a car. His car is not just a car, it is a moving covered corridor that leads from his home to his office and protects him from Chinese humanity. He will not leave his car and his civilization. He tells Miss Smith so at tea, saying that a car in China is not a luxury but a necessity. That three-mile ride of an enclosed mind in an enclosed glass case from the home to the office he takes every day of his twenty-five years in China, although he does not mention this fact when he goes home to England and signs himself “An Old Resident Twenty-Five Years in China” in correspondence to the London Times. It reads very impressively. Of course, he should know what he is talking about.
Meanwhile, that three-mile radius has seldom been exceeded, except when he goes on cross-country paper hunts over Chinese farm fields, but then he is out in the open and knows how to defend himself. But in this he is mistaken, for he never has to, and this he knows himself, for he merely says so, when he is out for sport. He has never been invited to Chinese homes, has sedulously avoided Chinese restaurants, and has never read a single line of Chinese newspapers. He goes to the longest bar in the world of an evening, sips his cocktail, and picks up and imbibes and exchanges bits of sailors’ tales on the China coast handed down from the Portuguese sailors, and is sorry to find that Shanghai is not Sussex, and generally behaves as he would in England. He feels happy when he learns that the Chinese are beginning to observe Christmas and make progress, and feels amazed when he is not understood in English; he walks as if the whole lot of them did not exist for him, and does not say “sorry” even in English when he steps on a fellow passenger’s toes; yes, he has not even learned the Chinese equivalents of “danke sehr” and “bitte schön” and “verzeihen Sie,” the minimum moral obligations of even a passing tourist, and complains of anti-foreignism and despairs because even the pillaging of the Peking palaces after the Boxer Uprising has not taught the Chinese a lesson. There is your authority on China. Oh, for a common bond of humanity!
All this one can understand, and it is even quite natural, and should not be mentioned here were it not for the fact that it bears closely on the formation of opinions on China in the West. One needs only to think of the language difficulty, of the almost impossible learning of the Chinese writing, of the actual political, intellectual, and artistic chaos in present-day China, and of the vast differences in customs between the Chinese and the Westerners. The plea here is essentially for a better understanding on a higher level of intelligence. Yet it is difficult to deny the Old China Hand the right to write books and articles about China, simply because he cannot read the Chinese newspapers. Nevertheless, such books and articles must necessarily remain on the level of the gossip along the world’s longest bar.
There are exceptions, of course—a Sir Robert Hart or a Bertrand Russell, for example—who are able to see the meaning in a type of life so different from one’s own, but for one Sir Robert Hart there are ten thousand Rodney Gilberts, and for one Bertrand Russell there are ten thousand H. G. W. Woodheads. The result is a constant, unintelligent elaboration of the Chinaman as a stage fiction, which is as childish as it is untrue and with which the West is so familiar, and a continuation of the early Portuguese sailors’ tradition minus the sailors’ obscenity of language, but with essentially the same sailors’ obscenity of mind.
The Chinese sometimes wonder among themselves why China attracts only sailors and adventurers to her coast. To understand that, one would have to read H. B. Morse and trace the continuity of that sailor tradition to the present day, and observe the similarities between the early Portuguese sailors and the modern O.C.H.’s in their general outlook, their interests, and the natural process of selection and force of circumstances which ha
ve washed them ashore on this corner of the earth, and the motives which drove, and are still driving, them to this heathen country—gold and adventure. Gold and adventure which in the first instance drove Columbus, the greatest sailor-adventurer of them all, to seek a route to China.
Then one begins to understand that continuity, begins to understand how that Columbus-sailor tradition has been so solidly and equitably carried on, and one feels a sort of pity for China; a pity that it is not our humanity but our gold and our capacities as buying animals which have attracted the Westerners to this Far Eastern shore. It is gold and success, Henry James’s “bitch-goddess,” which have bound the Westerners and the Chinese together, and thrown them into this whirlpool of obscenity, with not a single human, spiritual tie among them. They do not admit this to themselves, the Chinese and the English; so the Chinese asks the Englishman why he does not leave the country if he hates it so, and the Englishman asks in retort why the Chinese does not leave the foreign settlements, and both of them do not know how to reply. As it is, the Englishman does not bother to make himself understood to the Chinese, and the true Chinese bothers even less to make himself understood to the Englishman.
III
But do the Chinese understand themselves? Will they be China’s best interpreters? Self-knowledge is proverbially difficult, much more so in a circumstance where a great deal of wholesome, sane-minded criticism is required. Assuredly no language difficulty exists for the educated Chinese, but that long history of China is difficult for him also to master; her arts, philosophies, poetry, literature, and the theater are difficult for him to penetrate and illuminate with a clear and beautiful understanding; and his own fellow men, the fellow passenger in a streetcar or a former fellow student now pretending to rule the destiny of a whole province, are for him, too, difficult to forgive.
For the mass of foreground details, which swamps the foreign observer, swamps the modern Chinese as well. Perhaps he has even less the cool detachment of the foreign observer. In his breast is concealed a formidable struggle, or several struggles. There is the conflict between his ideal and his real China, and a more formidable conflict between his primeval clan-pride and his moments of admiration for the stranger. His soul is torn by a conflict of loyalties belonging to opposite poles, a loyalty to old China, half romantic and half selfish, and a loyalty to open-eyed wisdom which craves change and a ruthless clean-sweeping of all that is stale and putrid and dried-up and moldy. Sometimes it is a more elementary conflict between shame and pride, between sheer family loyalty and a critical ashamedness for the present state of things, instincts wholesome in themselves. But sometimes his clan-pride gets the better of him, and between proper pride and mere reactionism there is only a thin margin, and sometimes his instinct of shame gets the better of him, and between a sincere desire for reform and a mere shallow modernity and worship of the modern bitch-goddess there is also only a very thin margin. To escape that is indeed a delicate task.
Where is that unity of understanding to be found? To combine real appreciation with critical appraisal, to see with the mind and feel with the heart, to make the mind and the heart at one, is no easy state of grace to attain. For it involves no less than the salvaging of an old culture, like the sorting of family treasures, and even the connoisseur’s eyes are sometimes deceived and his fingers sometimes falter. It requires courage and that rare thing, honesty, and that still rarer thing, a constant questioning activity of the mind.
But he has a distinct advantage over the foreign observer. For he is a Chinese, and as a Chinese, he not only sees with his mind but he also feels with his heart, and he knows that the blood, surging in his veins in tides of pride and shame, is Chinese blood, a mystery of mysteries which carries within its biochemical constitution the past and the future of China, bearer of all its pride and shame and of all its glories and its iniquities. The analogy of the family treasure is therefore incomplete and inadequate, for that unconscious national heritage is within him and is part of himself. He has perhaps learned to play English football, but he does not love football; he has perhaps learned to admire American efficiency, but his soul revolts against efficiency; he has perhaps learned to use table napkins, but he hates table napkins; and all through Schubert’s melodies and Brahms’s songs, he hears, as an overtone, the echo of age-old folk songs and pastoral lyrics of the Orient, luring him back. He explores the beauties and glories of the West, but he comes back to the East, his Oriental blood overcoming him when he is approaching forty. He sees the portrait of his father wearing a Chinese silk cap, and he discards his Western dress and slips into Chinese gowns and slippers, oh, so comfortable, so peaceful and comfortable, for in his Chinese gowns and slippers his soul comes to rest. He cannot understand the Western dog-collar anymore, and wonders how he ever stood it for so long. He does not play football anymore either, but begins to cultivate Chinese hygiene, and saunters along in the mulberry fields and bamboo groves and willow banks for his exercise, and even this is not a “country walk” as the English understand it, but just an Oriental saunter, good for the body and good for the soul. He hates even the word “exercise.” Exercise for what? It is a ridiculous Western notion. Why, even the sight of respectable grown-up men dashing about in a field for a ball now seems ridiculous, supremely ridiculous; and more ridiculous still, the wrapping oneself up in hot flannels and woolen sweaters after the game on a hot summer day. Why all the bother? He reflects. He remembers he used to enjoy it himself, but then he was young and immature and he was not himself. It was but a passing fancy, and he has not really the instinct for sport. No, he is born differently; he is born for kowtowing and for quiet and peace, and not for football and the dog-collar and table napkins and efficiency. He sometimes thinks of himself as a pig, and the Westerner as a dog, and the dog worries the pig, but the pig only grunts, and it may even be a grunt of satisfaction. Why, he even wants to be a pig, a real pig, for it is really so very comfortable, and he does not envy the dog for his collar and his dog-efficiency and his bitch-goddess success. All he wants is that the dog leave him alone.
That is how it is with the modern Chinese as he surveys Eastern and Western culture. It is the only way in which the Eastern culture should be surveyed and understood. For he has a Chinese father and a Chinese mother, and every time he talks of China, he thinks of his father and his mother or of the memories of them. It was a life, their lives, so full of courage and patience and suffering and happiness and fortitude, lives untouched by the modern influence, but lives no less grand and noble and humble and sincere. Then does he truly understand China. That seems to me to be the only way of looking at China, and of looking at any foreign nation, by searching, not for the exotic but for the common human values, by penetrating beneath the superficial quaintness of manners and looking for real courtesy, by seeing beneath the strange women’s costumes and looking for real womanhood and motherhood, by observing the boys’ naughtiness and studying the girls’ daydreams. This boys’ naughtiness and these girls’ daydreams and the ring of children’s laughter and the patter of children’s feet and the weeping of women and the sorrows of men—they are all alike, and only through the sorrows of men and the weeping of women can we truly understand a nation. The differences are only in the forms of social behavior. This is the basis of all sound international criticism.
LAO SHE
(1898–1966)
Born Shu Qingchun to an impoverished Manchu family in Peking, Lao She had a difficult childhood marked by violence, poverty, and exclusion. In 1900, his father was killed by the foreign soldiers who rampaged through the capital, and one-year-old Lao She survived by sleeping soundly under an overturned chest. Determined and diligent, Lao She eventually worked his way up and became a successful teacher and then administrator in the young republic, living a life of luxury and indulgence until he converted to Christianity and soon resigned from the government post. In 1924, through connections with British missionaries, he was offered a lectureship at the University of L
ondon, where for five years he taught Chinese and wrote fiction. Returning to China in 1929, he taught for a few years until he resigned and devoted himself exclusively to writing. In 1936 he published his magnum opus Luotuo Xiangzi (variously translated as Camel Xiangzi, Rickshaw Boy, or Rickshaw), followed by the novel Four Generations Under One Roof (1944). During the first seventeen years in new China, he was much admired as a writer, appointed to important government positions, and continuing to be productive, until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution brought him down along with other literary giants of his generation. In 1966 he was said to have drowned himself in a lake, although his death remains a mystery.