Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

Now the contradictory element in the Chinaman’s character comes out particularly strong in connection with this national defect of untruthfulness. A lie to him has no moral side, it is simply a display of cleverness, and the more perfectly it succeeds the greater is the applause it elicits; and yet there are occasions when the Chinaman’s word is as good as his bond, and is as much to be relied upon as that of an Englishman who may have gained a reputation for integrity and honour.

A Chinese merchant, for example, makes a contract months before to deliver so many chests of tea at a certain rate. The market in the meanwhile rises, a dearth has suddenly occurred in the foreign trade, and the buyer finds that if he keeps his engagements he will lose thousands of dollars. He never for a moment hesitates as to what he shall do; he does not even attempt to get the purchaser to make an advance upon the terms agreed to. The tea comes down the river from the mountain side on which it is grown, over rapids and down through whirling gorges, and away from the pure breezes of the hillside, and it is brought to the city where the merchant lives, and is handed over to him with as scrupulous a care as though he were being paid the advanced price that the later teas are getting.

It is no uncommon thing for foreign merchants to bear testimony to the perfect honesty of the Chinese with whom they may have large business transactions, and one manager of a banking concern even declared in public that, though business extending over hundreds of millions of taels had been transacted with Chinese, the bank had never suffered by one single defaulter. This is all the more extraordinary, and is one of the startling perplexities in the Chinese character, since we know that in ordinary business life one has to keep one’s weather eye open or he will find himself cheated most unmercifully.

In spite of the complex nature of the Chinese, and the veiled way in which that mysterious brain of his works, there is no doubt but that there is a fascination about him to the men of the West such as none of the other nations of the East possesses. It is not because he is handsome, for, taking the ordinary run of Chinese that one sees in the streets, they are entirely wanting in all the elements of beauty that constitute the standard of the West.

The features of the face, with the exception of the eyes, have not a single good one amongst them. The cheek-bones of the typical Chinaman are high and protruding; the nose is flat, as though the original progenitor had had his bruised by falling on a fender and had transmitted it flattened and disfigured through successive generations, and the mouth, too, is large and sensuous looking. In addition to all this there is a yellow strain that lies as a foundation colour through all the others that nature or the burning sun lays on, and the effect is not at all a pleasing one. That there are really handsome women in common life and amongst the more refined classes, and that there are good-looking men in all grades of society is undoubtedly true, but they are by no means common. The great mass of the people are exceedingly plain-featured and unattractive, and they are wanting, too, in those delicate and refined graces that of themselves are sufficient to give a charm even to a personality that is otherwise anything but pleasing.

The attraction lies in the people themselves, and without any effort on their side the foreigner feels himself drawn by a kind of hypnotism towards them. You cannot explain this and you cannot tell the reason why. A rude, rough-looking coolie comes in, and you do not feel repelled by him as you would were the person a countryman of your own who had suddenly appeared out of the slums. A man has cheated you, and you know that he has, and though you may at first feel indignant, it is not long ere you are laughing at the whole affair because of the grotesque side that almost invariably accompanies such a transaction. A person comes to see you about whom you are suspicious. You stand on your guard, and you put on your coldest and most reserved air, as you ask him to be seated. The Chinaman acts as though he were quite oblivious of your state of mind. There is a smile upon his face that travels over the rough hollows of his expansive countenance, and spreads to the back of his neck, and seems in some mysterious way to vanish down his long tail. No amount of coldness can long resist the eyes that are flashing with good humour and the features that are lighted up with such a pleasant look. Insensibly you begin to thaw, and before you are aware of it you are talking with him on the most friendly terms. You laugh and chat with him, and when he leaves, you accompany him to the door, and with the usual polite phrase to the parting guest, you entreat him “to walk slowly, and come again as soon as he can.” Ten minutes after he has gone, your old suspicions revive, and you wonder at yourself in being such an egregious fool as to give yourself away as you have done. The fact is, it was the nameless something about the man that worked the miracle, and now that the bright black eyes have gone, and the moorland of smile has vanished, and the hypnotism no longer works, you come back to the old thoughts that you had before, which you are certain after all are right.

Circumstances of this kind are of exceedingly frequent occurrence. You go into a bank that has a large business. The manager is an energetic, shrewd business man. He is full of schemes and plans to promote the interests of the establishment, and people speak of him as being the cause of the prosperity that is now giving it a golden reputation. The real man who lies at the back of all this success is the Chinese compradore. He is a most unpretentious man, and if you visit him in the little room that he uses as an office, you would be anything but struck by him. His clothes are of a very common description, rather slovenly and untidy, and his shoes are slipshod. He is perhaps smoking a long bamboo pipe of vile-smelling native tobacco, but this quiet, unassuming Chinaman is the force that lies behind the business that brings in such large dividends to the shareholders. He has the whole of the markets in his brain, he knows which of the clients of the bank are prosperous and which are tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. He finds out to whom amongst his countrymen loans may be made with safety, and he will know by a single glance at documents that have been drawn up in the hieroglyphic language of the Chinese of what value they are for the purpose of negotiating large monetary transactions. No bank in China, and no large business firm could exist for a month without its compradore.

The hypnotic influence of the Chinaman is seen in almost any direction in which you like to turn. The mistress of a home is as wax in the hands of her cook, whose words, as far as the table is concerned, are a law that even she would be very chary of opposing. A foreigner engages a Chinese teacher, and ere long he comes so thoroughly under his influence that he will accept every word that he says about Chinese subjects, will repeat his very mistakes, and will refuse to listen to any criticism that outsiders may make either regarding his scholarship or his methods of teaching.

Perhaps the most conspicuous instance of the dominating influence of the Chinaman is seen in the foreign Consulates. In each of these there is a Chinese official employed that is called a writer. He is a gentleman and a member of the literary class. His duties are to write dispatches in Chinese to the mandarins and to be the one connecting link between the native authorities and the particular foreign Consul in whose service he happens to be. All petitions or complaints from the Chinese have to go through his hands, so that his position is one of great responsibility and power.

If the Consul happens to be a man of strong, independent character he will hold his own, and the business of the Consulate will be in a large measure under his own control. If he is, however, easy-going or of average intellectual ability, he comes at once under the hypnotizing influence of the wily self-contained Chinaman, who before long becomes the master spirit in the office. This fact is so far realized by the leading mandarin of the place that he actually subsidizes him to influence the policy of the Consul to be favourable to him. A hostile writer could so easily influence his mind against the former, and cause such strained diplomatic relations, that he would incur the resentment of his superiors and be dismissed from his office.