As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home

Made when the Anglo-Saxon people were living in caves
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Copyright, 1904, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America

Since the publication in 1832 of that classic of cynicism, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Mrs. Trollope, perhaps nothing has appeared that is more caustic or amusing in its treatment of America and the Americans than the following passages from the letters of a cultivated and educated Chinaman. The selections have been made from a series of letters covering a decade spent in America, and were addressed to a friend in China who had seen few foreigners. The writer was graduated from a well-known college, after he had attended an English school, and later took special studies at a German university. Americans have been informed of the impressions they make on the French, English, and other people, but doubtless this is the first unreserved and weighty expression of opinion on a multiplicity of American topics by a Chinaman of cultivation and grasp of mind.
It will be difficult for the average American to conceive it possible that a cultivated Chinaman, of all persons, should have been honestly amused at our civilization; that he should have considered what Mrs. Trollope called our great experiment in republics a failure, and our institutions, fashions, literary methods, customs and manners, sports and pastimes as legitimate fields for wit and unrepressed jollity. Yet in the unbosoming of this cultivated heathen we see our fads and foibles held up as strange gods, and must confess some of them to be grotesque when seen in this yellow light.

It is doubtless true that the masses of Americans do not take the Chinaman seriously, and an interesting feature of this correspondence is the attitude of the Chinaman on this very point and his clever satire on our assumption of perfection and superiority over a nation, the habits of which have been fixed and settled for many centuries. The writer's experiences in society, his acquaintance with American women of fashion and their husbands, all ingeniously set forth, have the hall-mark of actual novelty, while his loyalty to the traditions of his country and his egotism, even after the Americanizing process had exercised its influence over him for years, add to the interest of the recital.