To face p. 9.
A coolie, for example, is engaged by you to do general household work. He comes to you from an inland country where poverty is the prevailing characteristic of the whole population. Sweet potatoes are the staple food three times a day, year in, year out, helped down perhaps by salted turnip, bean curds and pickled beans—for it is only on special occasions that they have the rare happiness of indulging in the luxury of rice.
He has absolutely nothing excepting what he stands in, and so few cash that no sooner have you agreed to employ him than he at once asks for an advance to buy his next meal. The sum you promised him is princely when compared with what he could earn in his own country, and his mode of living is on a most luxurious scale, when contrasted with the meagre food he had in his native village. Now he has rice every day and fish, and luxuries brought from northern seas, no longer a vision of dreams, but realities that he indulges in every day.
Now, judging from an English standpoint, one would imagine that this poverty-stricken Chinaman, whose experience of want has been so real, would hold on like grim death upon a situation where life has been made so easy for him. But here comes in one of the surprises that often makes the Chinese character so inexplicable. A month goes by, and one day with the silent tread of his shoeless feet he sidles up to you, and he says he wants to tell you that he is going to leave you. You are astonished, and you ask him, with a look of wonder on your face, what he means and what he intends doing? He is not going to do anything, he declares, and he gives you nine reasons for his conduct, not one of which is the true one, the tenth and real one being hidden away in that mysterious brain of his, and he leaves you. A few days hence you see him loafing about with no apparent means of livelihood, and he is fast reverting to the original potatoes-fed type that he was when he left his country home.
Another point that is inexplicable in the Chinese is his amazing credulity. His character is naturally a strong one, his common-sense of the broad and robust kind. There is hardly any subject in common life where his opinion is not of a healthy, breezy description. It is one of the mysteries of the inscrutable Chinaman that at times he seems to be as credulous as the most unenlightened African that trembles before the decision of the Obi doctor.
In the early years, when the foreigner was an unknown and dreaded character, the wildest and most improbable stories were circulated amongst the common people, and more believed in. A mandarin in a large city in the northern part of the Empire, where the people were inspired with a dread lest they were going to be attacked by the English, took advantage of their credulity by putting out proclamations all over his district, which informed them that they had no reason whatever to fear the foreigners, because, as they had no knee-joints, when they fell down they could not rise up again. This was at once accepted as a truth, and the agitation and alarm from that time passed entirely away.
About the same time, in a very wide and extended district, a rumour arose that the missionaries, when any of their converts died, took out their eyes and made them into opium. The thing was so utterly absurd and the number of Christians then so very small, that it seemed as though the monstrous report must speedily die a natural death. But this was not the case. It spread with remarkable rapidity through towns and villages and hamlets, and was implicitly believed in not merely by coolies and rough, uncultivated labourers, but also by scholars of high degree and by great mandarins, and for more than twenty years it was a prime article of faith with millions of people.
It is the unexpected that so often happens in Chinese life that has given such an air of mystery to this strange and wonderful people. The very opposite virtues and vices seem to flourish and exist in the same individuals. The Chinese, for example, in ordinary and everyday life have no sense of truth. It is not that they are any worse than other nations of the East. The moment you pass through the Suez Canal and have come upon the confines of the Orient, you realize that truth as it is looked upon in the West does not exist in all the vast and glowing regions beyond.
You are in a new land, and the atmosphere of straightforward honest expression of thought has vanished, and now it seems that, except in the most trivial affairs of life, where concealment is unnecessary, you are in a world where every one has a mask on, and the great aim is to conceal the face that lies behind.
The oblique and angular way by which a Chinese loves to express the intention he has in his mind has no doubt intensified the Oriental disposition to lie, until now he seems to have absolutely no conscience on the subject. A Chinese coolie one day made some statement to me that I knew to be false. I was exceedingly annoyed at this, and so told him, and yet I could not help being amused, for the look of childish simplicity and artlessness that beamed over his face was so real and natural that I could not but admire the perfect acting of this rough, uncultivated fellow. “You are mistaken,” he said to me, “when you accuse me of telling you a falsehood, for I assure you that I never told a lie in all my life.” I instinctively thought of a picture that appeared in Punch many years ago, where two rough miners stood by the roadside, one of them having a kettle in his hand, which was to be given to the one that could tell the greatest lie. A person comes along who asks them what they are talking about? When told, he was shocked, and declared that he had never told a lie in his life, and he was rather taken aback when the kettle was handed to him, and he was told that he rightly earned it. I thought if only I had had a kettle at hand I would have passed it over to him and told him the legend.