When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

CHAPTER XVII

THE CHINESE NEW YEAR

If one had a great many debtors and no creditors one might well wish on New Year’s Day to be among the Chinese a Chinaman.

Every Chinaman, unless he is a very Mongolian blackleg indeed, pays his debts on New Year’s Day, or on the last day of the old year, that he may start afresh with fresh books. Think what a splendid arrangement if huge sums of money were owing to one! Picture the cruel inconvenience if one were deeply in debt!

I remember one long-ago morning in old Los Angelos. I was a child. Very early I woke with a cry of terror. There certainly was a terrifying din in the town. Out of my window I saw a strange, threatening smoke, and through the window came dire, gunpowdery smells. I remember that I ran, crying, to my father, and sobbed out that the Indians or the Mexicans were coming. But I was assured that it was merely the Chinese celebrating their New Year, and that I might eat my breakfast of fresh figs and cream in the greatest security.

We had a “washee man” in Los Angelos, a long, lank Chinaman with abnormally black eyes. He was a great favourite of mine, and I taught him the alphabet (which I didn’t very well know myself) and the Lord’s Prayer. He always treated me with great ceremony and respect, and my baby mind was puffed out delightfully. I felt that I was quite a missionary light—a friend and an enlightener of the heathen. And I never could understand why my father laughed at me, and seemed unenthusiastic about John.

In America every Chinaman is “John,” or at least it was so in those days; and we were ignorant of the man’s characteristic Mongolian appellations.

He was always in our debt a few dollars. I don’t know how he managed it, but he did manage it most deftly. For one thing he never had any change, and he never came for payment when my father was at home; and as of course, my mother never had any change either, John usually carried some small amount over to “all same next time.”

“There are no roses like the roses of Southern California, and no noise like a Chinese noise,” said my father as we sat on the verandah at breakfast.

As he spoke John came slowly up the garden path. He was dressed more like a mandarin than a washerman, but his face was very sad.

“How do. Halpie New Yeal,” he said rather reluctantly. Then he laid, most reluctantly, two dollars and forty cents beside my mother’s plate.

“What is it, John?” she said.

“Chlange me owey you.”

“You can take it off next month’s bill.”

John’s bright eyes brightened, but he shook his head sadly.

“Must pay. China New Yeal. Chinaman must pay all tin. Me pay plenty yen. All me owey me pay. Too me pay Joss pidgen.” Then he seemed to shake off his sorrow at having yielded up the coin. He presented me with a box of fire-crackers and went away, with the peaceful air of a Chinaman who had done his duty.

Wherever Chinamen are, the Chinese New Year is observed in the same way. I have seen it in Los Angelos, in San Francisco, and in New York. In Melbourne, on the Australian diggings, in Calcutta, in Burmah, in the Straits Settlements, and in China it is the same. Millions of crackers fizz and explode; that is the most noticeable feature of the day. Friends and acquaintances call on each other. Strangers choose the day to pay visits of respect to Chinese notables. Debts are paid. Feasts are eaten and shops are closed.

No civilised nation keeps so few holidays as does the Chinese. New Year’s Day is the one day of national rest. It is the only day of the year on which all the shops are shut.

The Chinese New Year is not co-occurrent with ours. The festivities begin on New Year’s Eve, which falls on the 30th day of the 12th moon of the old year. All China—men, women, and children—sit up to greet the dawn of the New Year. And they do greet it with the discharge of millions and billions of crackers. I know a man in Hong-Kong who is slightly deaf. He declares that his hearing was seriously injured in Canton on one New Year’s Day. I myself have been in a Chinese city when the smoke from the New Year’s crackers was almost as dense and as disagreeable as the London fog in which I am writing.

From midnight on New Year’s Eve every Chinese house is swept and garnished for the reception of visitors. Joss sticks are lit before the family gods. The black-carved furniture is polished. Newly-cut sugar canes are placed beside the threshold, and an incredible quantity of tea is infused. The master of the house remains at home to do the Celestial honours to whoever may call. The women of the family and all the younger men leave home at an early hour, that they may get through a long list of calls.

Each caller leaves a card. It is a long slip of red Chinese paper. On it are printed the visitors’ names, titles, and addresses. Friends exchange presents of tea, sweetmeats, ornaments, and fruits. They exchange long complimentary letters, the writing of which is in China a fine art. Every guest is regaled with tea and refreshments, which range from absurd-looking sweetmeats to tinsel-decked roast pigs.

On New Year’s Day the Chinese wear their dresses of ceremony and their festival dresses. It is every Chinaman’s ambition to be a mandarin. On New Year’s Day every Chinaman apes the dress of a mandarin as closely as the law will allow. On New Year’s Day in Japan—unless we happen, as we sometimes do, to be in their bad graces—every Japanese man rushes into a frock coat and under a silk hat. But the Chinese are grandly insular always, and they borrow nothing from us in their celebration of their great national holiday. Ah Man’s beau ideal of holiday attire is a conical hat, a long silk cloak, gigantic shoes, and grotesque stockings.

Whatever the Chinese do they do thoroughly. Thoroughness is their chief characteristic. They are the most industrious people in the world and the most tireless. They rarely take a holiday, but when they do, they take it vigorously. There are no half-way measures about their merry-making. If they work, they work with a method and a muscle, a persistence and an exactness, that shames European industry. If they keep accounts, they compute the fraction of a fraction far beyond where we lose sight of it. If they drink tea, they drink it as tea elsewhere never yet was drunk. And if they have a good time, they have it in all its details. Every lantern is lit that can shed one more ray of merry light upon the festivity; every shrill instrument is played that can augment the noise and hubbub. There is only one thing that a Chinaman loves more than hubbub, and that is noise.

After noise and hubbub he adores gambling. At the New Year season he gambles excessively. Gambling is a most deplorable habit; but the Chinese gamble so well, in China gambling is such a fine art, that I must own I loved to watch them play, and could never feel, at their great national weakness, half the horror that I knew I ought to have felt. But gambling certainly is the cause of great misery in China. And the New Year tide is the gamester’s carnival. Ah well, the Chinese have so few faults that I think they can afford to plead guilty to this one—grave though it is. It is a fault born of quick brains, of strong nerves, of active fingers, and of daring natures.

Are you scowling at me because I say the Chinese have few faults? I repeat it. If you go among them as I have gone, if you will win your way with them, if you will come to know them as I have known them, you will, I think, agree with me. The Chinese are not altogether prepossessing to European eyes; but they are, I believe, worthy of all European respect and of great European confidence. You have known some very bad Chinamen, perhaps? So have I. That proves nothing. Why, I have known some bad Englishmen,—I have even known one bad American. Travelling Europeans make no greater mistake than in forming their judgment of a great and peculiar people from the few members they have slightly known of that big, national body. I was recently present when an able and eloquent man said to one of England’s greatest physicians: “I have proof of ten fever cases where the temperature has been reduced by the power of ——,” the remedy he was advocating. “Bring me ten thousand such instances, well authenticated, and I shall think that it deserves scientific investigation,” said the doctor. I thought that the acme of wise, prudent reasoning; and I wish that that eminent physician might make and record a tour of Asia. Whatever he did, he would do well—his calm exactness would make him eminent in anything. Agassiz never laid down as a truth of the swallow family what he had observed on the breast of one swallow! We make ourselves ridiculous if we judge the countless Chinese nation by a handful of inferior Chinamen whom we have known imperfectly. We might as justly say that Florence Nightingale was immoral because there are unfortunate women in London. Shall we call Tennyson illiterate because our dustman is h-less and h-ey? Shall we believe the Lord Chief Justice a murderer because Whitechapel once had a Jack-the-Ripper?

The Chinese New Year crackers must afford occupation to a vast number of poor people. The varieties of the crackers are legion, and the number fired every New Year’s Day is not to be computed by a small mind or a limited arithmetician. We were walking once in interior China. It was early in the Chinese year. We noticed at some distance a strange scarlet hillock. We went curiously toward it. Not until we were very near did we discover that it was the remnants of many thousands of crackers. The burning crackers had been thrown upon a bed of wild white roses; they had scorched the leaves and seared the stems; but that had been some weeks before. The débris of the crackers was decaying; it manured the rose roots, and the roses were pushing up among the torn scarlet-cracker bits. A thousand fragrant, waxen flowers were backgrounded against the red shreds of the fireworks.

The beauty of China and the excellence of the Chinese are vividly backgrounded by all that is grotesque or faulty in the people of China. Strangely, we seem to be blind to the flower, while we see the background only too clearly.

I have heard that the Chinese roses are scentless. That proves how much I must be the slave of my potent imagination. I thought that I had known no sweeter flower than the wild white rose of China.

There is no country that we misunderstand more grossly than we misunderstand China; but there is no country that can more afford to be indifferent to misconception.