Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

You are getting annoyed by this time, not simply because all your protestations have not been believed, but because you see that the dogged persistence that lies rooted in the Chinese character will not allow the matter to drop until you have either given him a piece of your mind, more forcible than polite, or taken some plan to carry out his wishes. After a few minutes’ consideration, you remember that an acquaintance of your own has business relationships with the firm in question, so you at once write a note to him and request him as a great favour to exert himself to introduce the son of the bearer to the manager of a certain business house with which he is intimately concerned. Having sealed it up, you hand it over to the man, and direct him to take it to your friend, who may possibly be able to assist him in procuring the employment he wishes for his son.

The very next day, he once more appears, but this time with two fowls, a small basket of oranges and a tiny box of tea, and also with the most profuse thanks for getting his son that situation. You tell him that you have had nothing to do with that, and that if he is inclined to make presents, he had better take them to the friend who has really engineered the business. If the Chinese could only see the humour there is in a wink, there is no doubt but that he would express his feelings by one just now, but as he has never been taught the subtle part that the eye can take in conveying a joke, he simply smiles prodigiously, clasps his own hands instead of yours and leaves you with a profusion of the most elegant and polite phrases, such as the great Sage of China penned more than two thousand years ago for the guidance of people in contingencies such as this.

It must be perfectly understood that the man never believed from the very first that you could not have got that situation for his son, if you had been so disposed, and the fact that you procured it for him at last proved that. Your writing the letter and sending it to a friend were but little subtle by-plays to save your “face.” Acting like that is something inexpressibly dear to the Chinese, who are always posing before each other, and exhausting their histrionic powers to produce certain effects that shall redound to their credit. The one thing that was really to be admired in this Chinaman was the tenacity of purpose that caused him never to falter until he had gained the object that he had in his mind.

This distinguishing virtue in the Chinaman has unquestionably been a very large factor in the building up of their Empire, and yet on the other hand it is just as true that it has been one of the most powerful forces in preventing its progress and development.

The very persistence of character that made the Yellow race build the Great Wall of China and extend their conquests from their original home on the banks of the Yellow River, until the whole of the vast extent of territory embraced within the eighteen provinces has been subdued by them, has made them cling to old traditions and customs with a tenacity that has stayed the progress of new ideas, and has prevented them from adopting new methods that would have benefited both the people and the Empire.

The Chinese within certain limits are practical common-sense people and keenly alive to anything that will improve their worldly condition, but the moment they scent an innovation they recoil from it as though it were an enemy that was going to destroy them.

Illustrations of this abound everywhere. Take the farmer, for example. He has been accustomed to plough his fields with an old-fashioned implement that was devised ages before the Christian era. It is of the exact pattern that it was when it issued from the brain of the man who is credited with having thought it out. Through countless ages it has done the work of the Empire, but time has left it absolutely untouched, and if the inventor could come to life to-day he would see that the old clumsy thing that he had hastily thought out when the fathers of the race, tired of their wanderings, settled down on the banks of the mighty river that met them as they wandered eastwards, had never changed with the advancing fortunes of their children, but was identical in every detail with the one with which they began their first ploughing in the far-off misty ages of the past.

You talk to a Chinese farmer about the wonderful ploughs of the West, and how sometimes they were driven by steam, and in a few hours acres of land would be ready for the harrow. His eyes flash, for he is a farmer to the very tips of his fingers, and he thinks of the days of toil that it takes him to accomplish the very same thing, and for the moment he would like to have some of those ploughs to upturn the hard and rugged soil that his own antiquated implement seems so helpless to break through. He has a vision for a moment of how the monotony and drudgery of labour might be exchanged for a time of comparative rest, when nature in response to a new impulse should yield the fruits of the soil with a more generous hand. But the vision quickly dies out of his imagination, and the old conservative instinct flashes once more through his brain, and so the old plough and the hoe that have done the work of the centuries are more firmly fixed in his imagination than ever they were before.

PLOUGHING WITH A WATER BUFFALO.