Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

The silk you have been examining is of an inferior quality and will not cost more than sixpence a foot, the standard measure with the Chinese, as they know nothing of yards in any of their measurements. You ask to see some of their more expensive articles, and soon the clerks return with specimens from the looms of Canton, Hangchow, and Soochow, each with its own distinctive characteristics, and so exquisitely beautiful that you stand gazing upon them all with admiring looks, and with words that are quite inadequate to express your high sense of the workmanship displayed upon them. The amazing thing is to understand how the weavers, in their poor tumble-down cottages, and with looms so cumbersome and antiquated that they might have come out of the Ark, could have produced such exquisite specimens of art as these rolls of silk undoubtedly are.

We pass along this narrow unsavoury street, when we turn into one of the smaller ones that run into it. The shops here are of a decidedly meaner character, being inhabited by a much poorer class of people. In plan, however, they are very similar to the ones in the street we have already described. There are no fronts to them, and everything that goes on in them can be distinctly seen and heard by the passers-by. There is this decided difference in them, that the back part of the shop is the home of the family that are carrying on the business, which is never the case with the better ones.

Fortunately the Chinese do not believe in the privacy of the home as we do. They do not mind having the whole details of their daily experiences seen by every one that cares to look. How they live, what they eat, and even the family jars that we try and hush up from the public are things that seem to be common property, and not to belong exclusively to this particular family who are most concerned.

The impression one gets from a look into these miserable homes is that the Chinese idea of comfort differs essentially from our own, and that they can put up with a vast amount of discomfort such as would drive an Englishman mad. Their houses are filthily dirty and untidy. The wife after a few weeks of married life loses the trim, neat appearance she had as a young girl. She drops naturally into the slattern ways of the women who are her neighbours, and ere long dust and dirt and cobwebs, and frowsy and untidy garments, are the leading features of the home.

It would be unwise to infer from this state of things that the Chinese are unhappy, or that they are conscious that their surroundings have something in them to induce melancholy or discontent. The ideal of the West is cleanliness, a thing that the East never seems to aim at, or to even dream of. This great city through which we are walking is an example of this latter statement. Its streets are unswept from one year’s end to the other. Heaps of rubbish festering and fermenting in the sun and exhaling the most unpleasant odours meet you at every turn. The drains are badly made and left absolutely to themselves until, choked up, they are opened up for repairs, when the hidden compressed effluvia send their noxious vapours into the homes around.

The people are highly uncleanly in their persons. They never bathe, and even in the homes of the rich the bath tub is an unknown luxury. The face and hands are about the only parts of the body that on ordinary occasions ever make the acquaintance of water. Their clothes, too, from a Western standpoint, are anything but satisfactory. They are frowsy and wanting in the crisp cleanliness that a liberal supply of soap and water impart to them. There are always certain garments that are worn day after day and week after week, that men never dream of cleansing in any way whatever. The lower you go down in the scale of life, the more conspicuous is this disregard of cleanliness, and yet it does not seem to affect either the general health or spirits of the people. They are a laughter-loving race, and jokes and funny stories and everything that would raise a smile to the face find a ready echo in their hearts. The fact that they are surrounded by dust and dirt and untidiness such as would put the shivers into any ordinary Englishman, and dim for the time being the very light of life, have no seeming effect upon this long-lived race.

The people of this town appear to be endowed either with very good appetites, or to have very defective arrangements at home for supplying the wants of the inner man, for there seems to be an altogether extravagant number of itinerant kitchens with food already cooked stationed at various corners where the traffic is the greatest, to cater at once to the public appetite.

Here is one close at hand, and as we have a few minutes to spare let us draw near and see what it is like. It consists of two wooden stands which can be slung on to the ends of a stout bamboo pole and carried at a moment’s notice in any direction that suits the owner. Where trade is brisk at any particular spot, he remains there until his customers desert him, and then, shouldering his miniature eating-house, he goes off at a quick trot to the localities where the hungry are most likely to congregate.

On one of the stands there is a large rice pan which is filled with rice that is kept just on the boil by a fire that burns underneath. The heat must be so modulated that it will never blaze into a flame, for to allow it to do that would be fatal to the success of the enterprise. The Chinese, who are connoisseurs in the art of cooking rice, can never tolerate it being boiled to a pulp. The grains must to a certain extent retain their individuality, and though boiled to the very heart, there must be no loss of that. The man who would wish to be popular must have learned the secret of how to please the taste of the most critical. The other stand is a kind of rough dresser, where the condiments that are to allure a pleasant passage to the rice are tastefully set out. These are salted turnips of a brown, leathery look, and the most popular, because very cheap, of all the various articles that the Chinese eat with their rice. There are also bean curds and cucumbers pickled crisp and juicy, and celery and lettuce, and salted beans and plates of various kinds of fish, and different kinds of soy, which are sprinkled with a sparing hand over the bowl of rice to give it a flavour in order to induce an appetite with the first sip that the customer takes of the savoury compound.

It is interesting to watch the deft way with which the man fulfils the orders that are given him. He first of all ladles out enough rice from the pan to nearly fill one of the bowls that lies turned upside down on the dresser. He then selects with his chopsticks a bit of salted turnip and drops it into the very centre of the steaming rice. Then once more, with the eye of a connoisseur, he picks up a bit of crisp pickled cucumber about the size of a bean and drops it on the top. If his customer is extravagant and is going in for luxuries, he selects a tiny sprat that lies cooked and ready for use, and places it in a tempting position just within the lip of the basin, and resting on the rice as though it were in its native element. A little savoury soy is then sprinkled over the whole, a pair of chopsticks are daintily laid crosswise over the steaming compound, and the man whose mouth has been watering all the time this process has been going on takes it with eager hands, and without any delay proceeds to satisfy his appetite, and all for the modest sum of a little over a halfpenny.