I walked along and the street lights came on in Harlem, and the smell of pork chops cooking with onions—a poor but a savoury dish—made well-nigh visible figures against the blue night air. And the atmosphere was very rich and husky, suggesting, in amazing juxtaposition, the warmth and humbleness of home, and the plaintive, alluring sadness of life’s farthest exile . . . a dimmer, vaster captivity than the Babylonian one. . . .
6
My interview with Mr. Allen ended without satisfaction. The vacancy which he had and which I had hoped to fill must not be given to a Negro or an Oriental, he told me frankly, precisely because his branch was up in Harlem. And I left, reflecting bitterly.
Under a street lamp, I consulted my next best letter, the address of Mr. Jum, a Korean who had left Korea some time ago, and who lived now in New York—he gave out—permanently. He was not allied with the missionaries; he was one of the few Koreans in America who were not. I had not yet met Jum, though we had corresponded through a mutual friend. The understanding was that I should look him up as soon as I came to New York.
I had hoped to appear before George Jum as one already possessed of a job. I saw it was not to be. The hour was late. I must look him up without delay. I found his place after more walking . . . a respectable-looking dark house on 72nd Street with only a surface-car track between it and Central Park. I rang the bell. Nobody came. I rang and rang. A very fat, short lady with broad, pale face almost the color of her faded fuzzy hair, answered the door. Fifty perhaps, she was built like a barrel and was wearing a one-piece pink-and-tan pajama with big flowers. She spoke a broken English. (I later found she was Hungarian.) All I could make out was that Mr. Jum was away. Whether temporarily or forever I did not know. He had left no word for me and no address. The lady closed the door abruptly, though otherwise not unkindly, and again I was alone.
And since there was nothing else to do, I went on walking. I had in my suitcase introductions to two other Koreans, but from none had I expected so much as from George Jum. It was too late anyhow to look them up. I entered Central Park. I walked and walked. What a wide, dark park! As big, it seemed, as all the city of Seoul. Here were trees and grass and winding asphalt. The trees rattled stiffly in the March wind, and the shaking sound of traffic was almost left behind. I stiffened too, tightening myself. . . . Here you could pick no roses in December. . . . To combat the cold, I had to keep on walking. I searched my brain. There seemed no way to get a room and something to eat with only ten cents. Anyway water is free. . . . I took a large drink from the concrete fountain bubbling there for any passerby. But it takes a long time to starve anyone, I knew from experience.
Out of the darkness of the grave, tense park, into the lighted jungle of concrete and steel again. . . . By chance I issued on Fifth Avenue. I read the signs. I saw the tall green buses, still more suggestive of joys than gondolas in Venice, and realized where I was. Fifth Avenue. My spirit echoed. My head lifted, my tired feet worked more firmly. A man should be aristocratic here. Magnanimous. And wound up again to my dreamlike tune of New York, I walked, still without running down. Koreans are walkers, always.
Fifth Avenue eventually brought me out at Washington Square Park, small, dark, urbane and rather still. The motor cars rolled curtly, deftly by, making no more noise than possible. My feet ached dully. I did not blame my body but my shoes. To the east of the park was a large building, one of those in which many years later I was to become a teacher in New York University. Close to this building, several people were lying on newspapers, with newspapers to cover them. I went up to them, and picked out an unoccupied place against the wall. I had escaped the homelessness of Battery Park, only to become one of the waifs in Washington Square. The wind seemed to take a real satisfaction in blowing. Merciless and businesslike, it attacked newspapers, trees and men.
We were all miserable and benumbed. I could not make out the figures or the features of my companions, and they could not make out mine. Every man was silent, hunched down. Every once in a while, as wearily as a dead leaf, a man left the cluster and drifted down the dim street, seeking some more sheltered spot, or some mean refuge known only to himself. Most went in silence. One man proved an exception. He muttered something.
“Too cold,” he said. “I’m going!”
“Where?” I asked.
“To a room I know. It’s too cold here.”
“May I come?”
“It’ll cost you a nickel.”
A nickel I had, two in fact.
“I have,” I told him eagerly.
I watched him gather all the newspapers he could, in spite of the curses of the other men, whom he treated like dead bodies.
“Why?” I asked, indicating the newspapers.
“It’s cold there, too.”
After some time my guide led down into a large basement of a tall, dark house in a desolate slum district. Down in this cellar was a vestibule with a desk. On the desk was a shoebox with a slit. As you went in, you had to deposit a nickel there. Two or three men were just going in as we arrived. Behind the desk was seated a weary, tired-looking man slightly better fed and better dressed than the rest. Not much, though. If he had been in among them, he would have been able to pass as one of the insiders. The place was unheated and while on duty he wore his shapeless old-fashioned hat and wrinkled overcoat. His hands trembled as he received the nickels and put them in the box, as if he were a man past the time of active work. He was a little bit deaf, so you had to shout to make him hear; but he had good eyesight—so good that nobody could pass without his “O.K.” I knew, because my guide got into loud argument—louder, because the other man was deaf. My friend was trying to get by on three cents. He said he had no more. He turned his pockets inside out. At last he was allowed to enter on credit.
We passed into “the room.” And room was all it was, nothing but floor. Men lay thickly on the floor. From a bracket on the clammy wall an open gas jet flared. Nothing bad must go on during the night. My guide warned me in a frank, loud tone about thieves. “They steal the hat off your head here,” he said bitterly, “so hold on to it. They’ll change it while you’re asleep, if your hat’s better than theirs.” Oh, the smell of the place! Sour alcohol, sickness, stench from decayed clothes! Misanthropes withdrew to corners and tried to get away by facing the walls. Others huddled up together. One or two had brought shoe-shining boxes, emblems of an unsuccessful trade. Nobody took any notice of me, except a very tipsy man, who was carefully mixing the contents of two bottles. He offered me a drink. I grinned, spread my hands, pretending I knew no English.
The only experience I have had to compare with this was in a prison of the Japanese. But the people—Korean revolutionists—had been put there for a single integrated feeling, a hard bright core of fire against oppression. These men were like pithless stalks, and the force that swept them here, the city’s leavings, was for the most part the opposite one, a personal disintegration. And yet I clutched to a new world of time, where individual disintegration was possible, as well as individual integration, where all need not perish with the social organism, or, as in Japan, all rise in savage blood, a single fighting man.
. . . During the night one tried to sing and others cursed him. There was no spirit of brotherhood in endurance as in my Japanese prison, though each man looked like another under that dim light, unshaven, frail and gray. I distinguished individuals only by their voices. This voice was drunk, that bitter and jeering, that other suffering, and that voice so much like a woman’s that I jumped, while the rest laughed, addressing it as “Violet.” Some wretched sleep must have gone on, for there was snoring. I put my head down on my suitcase, as the bootblacks theirs on their boxes, and rested my tired legs. Without trying to form plans, I waited stolidly for the night to pass. And in the end I slept quite soundly, for I was very strong and young, carrying still the heritage of another age. . . .
7
I awoke very
early, while the lost men around me were still sleeping, a crypt of roughly piled bodies. I crept out. The man who had taken my nickel was asleep at the desk. His mouth was open, his neck bent crookedly. He looked like a corpse. Outside I drew a deep breath of keen new air, brought to this part of the world by its servants, the morning winds.
“Well, you find that better than the Salvation Army, eh?”
I glanced around and there was my friend of the night before hurrying after me. He chuckled and ended up coughing. I saw he was tall, thin and pale in the close look—black in the far look because he was unwashed and unshaven. Only his pinched nose had the faint pink of real blood. He wore a shirt without a collar, which once perhaps was white. The lapels of his threadbare coat were turned up, for he had no overcoat. One fairly good shoe he had, but the other was completely worn out, and both very likely he had picked up from the garbage can. As for socks he wore none, but a bloody rag was tied around one of his ankles to serve the purpose.
“What is the Salvation Army?” I questioned.
“You don’t want ever to go to the place!” he emphasized with disgust. “It costs 35 cents. That there’s a flophouse,” with his thumb he indicated the building from which we had just issued. “It costs only a nickel, and you don’t have to pray inside. Want some free coffee now?”
I saw he was a bum of long standing. Gesturing for me to follow him, he shuffled along cheerfully, though he was bending his back to the wind and shivering. (I didn’t see how he could last long; he trembled like paper.) On the way we passed by a massive stone water trough for horses. He paused to drink from the trough by means of an empty bottle; offered it to me, and I drank too. He sopped a small dirty rag around there with trembling hand and washed himself feebly. I did the same with my handkerchief. After that we both felt better. He led the way, spreading his dirty rag out on his hands to dry in the sun. I did the same with my handkerchief. We talked as we went along. He couldn’t see how I had never heard of Chinatown (which was where we were going).
“Where all the Chinee people live? Ain’t you Chinee?”
I couldn’t make him understand about Korea.
Pretty soon we came to a tangle of tracks. El’s, subways, at the juncture of the great Manhattan Bridge. Turning off to the right, in the shadow of a three-story el, lay the winding alleys and lanes of Chinatown, with their intricate signs in Chinese characters.
Our destination was not so much Chinatown as a certain rescue league which maintained a bread line there. The bread line advertised itself. Down a narrow, crooking street, in gloomy shadow even now by day, stretched a herd of coughing men looking like hungry goats. Chinese signs overtopped them high on either side, and above, the el was so near it seemed to rumble over our heads, fenced by the scrolling network of unlit tin calligraphy.
We had to go to the end of the line. Here two men were fighting over a cigarette stub, unusually long, smoked evidently by a luxurious smoker, perhaps one of the prosperous young men who had been through on a slumming party the night before. Both claimed to have seen it on the street first. I pointed out this scene to my guide. He shrugged and fished out of his own pocket a handful of butts, all very short, none much larger than a good-sized fingernail. He politely offered me to choose. But I did not know how to smoke yet.
We came to the soup window at last, and my friend received a plate of thin soup, a slice of bread and some coffee, but I was refused. Like every New York executive, the soup-kitchen preacher was evidently a businessman, grim, with the eyes of a lynx and an alert and legal manner. He said he couldn’t give me soup unless I had a soup ticket, with my name down on a charity organization in some other part of New York. But the junior attendant sympathized with me. All I had to do, he said in an excited and emotionally thrilled voice, was to go get a soup ticket. He emphasized with paper and pencil. When I came back, there would still be coffee and bread left. And he wrote down full directions to somewhere many blocks away, requiring nothing else but carfare money. He struck me as one who would have been at the front in five world wars, although I believe he was too young to have been in the last one.
I dropped out of line and stood on the pavement with his slip of paper in my hand—another letter of introduction, this time to a charity organization. Up and down the streets were rows of Chinese restaurants. Every house in fact was a Chinese restaurant! They served something more than coffee and bread, neither of which yet seemed like food to me. I thought a bit. Contrary to what one might suppose, being a New York bum required training, recognition. It was hard work to be one; and to be a good one, still harder. It might take as much time as a bank president’s work.
I gripped my suitcase again and entered a Chinese restaurant. A Chinese waiter brought me the Chinese menu at once, not the American one. It was good to be able to read that bill and to know what I was getting. I ordered something thick, honest and humble. It was soup, filled up with Chinese vegetables slightly cooked, and big pieces of cow’s stomach. I ate two huge bowls of steaming rice with it. To appreciate this sort of thing, one should fast for two meals. I took time in eating, after the first bowl, and began to think how I could “save face” without any way to pay for what I had eaten.
The proprietor lounged on a stool behind the cash register; as tranquil as a mossy stone. He looked like a fat magnanimous man. I asked him for a sheet of paper. Taking, as theme, lines from a famous Fu on vegetable soup, “Alas! why is it that my life is poor and narrow as of a hare in flight? How can the Muse of Poesy descend upon me with my bowels a core of vibrant thunder?” I wrote a poem in Chinese characters. The characters and the rhymes were in classical Chinese, but the poem was my own and had a modern signification. I spoke of the tired wanderer in a foreign wilderness who finds the remote kinsman home, and when he is given the same food eaten in China Land, through the vapor, out of a sea of soup, rises Li Tai Po’s old playfellow, the moon. The ideas were not much, but the form and calligraphy fairly good. I gave it to the waiter, and he, as I expected, showed it to the boss.
I had written my own letter of introduction. So strongly is the Chinese classical culture ingrained in the East that the educated man is at once noted by the assurance and deftness of his strokes in writing. And the classical gentleman, says Confucius, is to be the “measuring rod of Heaven and Earth.”
Well, the proprietor came over and talked with me. I knew only a Northern dialect, he only the Cantonese, in spoken language, so we conversed in writing to help out the English. He sympathized with me that I was Korean. The Chinese always regard Korea as a part of China, although the Koreans do not, for Korea has had a long, independent history before it was taken by Japan. He knew the Koreans had a hard time with the Japanese. He, too, wrote a poem in Chinese, one of Li Tai Po’s. He apologized for his lack of skill in calligraphy. But his writing was not without feeling, for one of so little training as he had had. I asked him then if I might eat in his restaurant by the month and run up a bill. That was all right, he said. I asked him, too, if he could recommend me a room. He promptly gave me a number not far away. I left my suitcase in his restaurant while I looked it up.
The address that had been given me was not exactly in Chinatown. It was in the Italian quarter which enjoys the Chinese elbow to elbow. The landlady was a broad-bosomed, fiery-eyed Italian. She knew very little English, but it was wonderful how we could communicate without any language. She held up fingers, and I could understand the price of the room. I nodded my head to say yes, and pointed to the name of the Chinese restaurant man on the card he had given me, indicating that I was a friend of his. I arranged that I would not need to pay for a while there either.
8
It was a ghostly world to be lost in, this town that was neither in America nor in China. Certainly Chinatown is less American and more segregate than any other foreign colony in New York. The Chinese elect their own mayor, administer their own justice, and their houses and their homes are to the outs
ider impenetrable. The Japanese, in spite of their fanatic patriotism, do not live like this in one great organism. Koreans abroad of course are too small in number to admit of much generalization; later I found that on the whole (though with exceptions) they do stick together rather closely, but with none of the formidable breastworks of the Chinese. They do not have the money or the American footholds, as have these Chinese merchantmen, who practise Westernization with such inviolability that sons are still sent back for education, marriage, death. I found myself still in the shadow of the Confucian world. The unreality of it in New York, and my own helpless immobility filled me with a curious trance-like despair, as I waited, penniless, for George Jum.
But I talked with many Chinese businessmen, touching little on the vulgar topic of money, mostly on the glories of Li Tai Po. I walked and observed a good deal, not only around Chinatown, but throughout lower New York. I could not improve my English—the Chinese, tenacious of old ways, spoke little English. I am reminded of the story of a Chinized Korean, who, living in Canton, doing business there, wished to visit New York also on business. He knew no English, but on his return three months later, reported in the most glowing terms that he had not needed it. Americans spoke Chinese. It seems, on landing, he hailed a taxicab and said “Chinston,” which really means, in Chinese, town of the Chinese, and being driven promptly to Chinatown, he had no difficulty there in conversing fluently in the Canton dialect.
Yet if I had not been so worried about the future, I must have vastly enjoyed Chinatown. However gloomy and impassive, Chinatown is one of the most picturesque quarters of New York. Before you approach Chinatown, you can smell it—the incense, the rice cakes, the Oriental perfumes, the cold, earthy smells of giant turnips and strange green vegetables, the teas, the musty smell of sawdust out of China, and through all a peculiar kind of dirt, more discrete than Western dirt, fainter, less frank, yet there. And much of the smell is due to salted shrimps. You are struck by colors everywhere, colors which are not exactly Chinese and not exactly Western, but are a mixture, an exotic hybrid of the East and West. The shades of these colors give you a sense of uncomfortableness, yet once in a while they are strikingly effective in their combination. As you enter Chatham Square, you begin to hear the sounds of the Chinese language. Newsmen pass by with a peculiar shamble, shouting in the American style, but their words are in Chinese. Later, as the day progresses, there will be the tinkling of distant musical instruments behind the shuttered upper balconies, the clash of cymbals thin and high, the shrilling dissonance of strings.
East Goes West Page 6