Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

This question being settled, the next point is to secure the school-master. If there happens to be one belonging to the village, or one connected in any way with the leading men, the difficulty is then very much simplified, but if an unknown man is to be engaged, then it may mean endless complications for a whole year. He may turn out to be an opium-smoker, or he may be a vagabond and rarely be seen within the walls of the school-house; for when once he is engaged the people have no redress whatever, but must tolerate all his misdeeds and pay him the salary agreed upon without a murmur or a complaint to him personally. Any attempt on the part of the villagers to compel him to carry out his contract faithfully would simply end in their being censured and fined by the mandarin for daring to assert themselves against one of the highly-privileged classes in China. We will suppose, however, that a fairly respectable man has been obtained, and that all the arrangements for opening the school have been satisfactorily made. The usual time for the commencement of the school year is three or four days after the “Feast of Lanterns,” which takes place about the middle of February.

The school-house is usually situated in a central part of the village, and consists of a school-room capable of accommodating twenty or thirty scholars, a small bedroom for the teacher, and a diminutive kitchen also for his special use. The managers provide him with a four-poster, a high oblong table and a few chairs, and also a mosquito-net to be used during the warm weather when those plagues of the East carry on their campaign with such unceasing vigour against all animal life. They also place a table and chair in the school-room, which are to be for his own exclusive use, but beyond these they leave the furnishing of the place to the individual scholars, who bring their own stools and tables with them on the day that the studies begin. On the table are an inkstone, a diminutive water-bottle, two or three camel’s-hair pens or brushes, a stick of Indian ink, and last, though not least, a good solid piece of bamboo with which the refractory and the indolent will frequently make acquaintance during the coming months of the session. There are also a miniature teapot and Lilliputian teacups, all deftly placed on a lacquer tray, ready for use whenever the master feels that he would like to refresh himself with a few sips of the popular beverage that “cheers but not inebriates.”

The school life of a boy in China would seem to one who has not been brought up in Western methods as a dreary and intolerable one, and such as would take the heart out of any English lad and make him hate the very sight of books as long as he lived. The duties of the day begin at a very early hour, and with certain intermissions for meals last until the evening shades have entered the school-room and blurred the faces of the books so that the strange, weird-looking words cannot be recognized one from the other.

The little fellows have to rise as the dawn begins to fling its grey and trembling light across the darkness that clouds the earth, and to send its kindly messages into the homes of rich and poor. Feeling the terror of the master upon them, they quickly jump out of bed, and with no time to wash their faces or to brush their hair, they hurry along the various paths that lead to the school, where they find the teacher waiting for them, and with a frown upon his face if they should happen to be a few minutes late.

The lads never enter the school-room without a feeling of restraint. It is considered that a cold and haughty kind of bearing on the part of the master is essential in order to maintain the discipline of the school. There is, therefore, very seldom if ever any feeling of affection or devotion between the scholars and him. To them he appears to have no kindliness of heart and no human sympathies, nor any lovable thought for any one of them. He is simply there as a kind of living machine to teach these youngsters this huge Chinese language, but as for sentiment or any tender feeling for them, that is utterly out of the question.

The method in which the studies are carried on is the very reverse of what is demanded and insisted upon in the home schools. There the great aim is to secure not only perfect order but as complete silence as possible. When there is anything like noise in the school-room it means that the lads are talking with each other and not studying their lessons. An English lad can best master these by thinking over them, and in silence committing to memory the various thoughts or problems that may be contained in the book he is called upon to study.

Now it seems impossible for any Chinese boy to impress upon his mind’s eye the intricate and apparently meaningless strokes that make up the ordinary Chinese word. He seems to be able to do this only by bawling them at the very top of his voice. Efforts have been made to get the scholars in a school to learn them without raising their voices, but failure has always been the result. The consequence is, that silence amongst the lads is most displeasing to a Chinese school-master, and a stern, severe look from him will set them all off into shouts so deafening that only one great uproar can be heard resounding through the building, each lad seeming only to be contending with all the rest to see if he cannot outshout them all. The drudgery of learning to recognize the Chinese words is something that cannot be appreciated by a Western student. With English words, for example, each one is composed of so many letters, has a definite sound and definite meanings, and after a time, if a boy fails to remember any particular one, he simply spells it, and at once sound comes tripping back to his recollection. There is no such easy process to the grasping of the Chinese characters. Each one is a solemn, hard-featured picture that stands apart by itself and has no connecting link with any other one in the language. You cannot reason out what shall be the sound or meaning of any one word by analogy, for each one is complete in itself and has a solitary entity of its own. A page of Chinese print gives one the impression that one has lighted upon a series of cryptic puzzles that the inventor has made as intricate and involved as the complex and oblique mind of the Chinese could make them.

The Chinese school-masters throughout the country having realized that to grasp the sounds of these weird and unromantic figures and the meaning that lies concealed behind them would be an absolute impossibility for the youth of the country, have divided up the great attempt into two distinct efforts. The first thing, therefore, that a lad has to do when he goes to school is to shout out in all the various tones of the gamut the names of these ancient, hoary-headed symbols, and at the same time to impress upon his memory the picture of each one, with its dots and curves and minute up and down strokes, that it shall be a living picture that his mind can call up at any moment that he hears its name pronounced.

The primary process goes on for about five years, during which time he has read through most of his school-books. With one’s notions that one has got from English school life it is impossible at first to realize the stupendous work that is involved in this dreary way of being educated. The boy comes to school at early dawn, and he is kept at his desk, with the exception of his meal hours, till night is throwing its shadows over the earth. There is no intermission and no racing about the playground at certain intervals to break in upon the eternal monotony of grinding study. The playground is a Western institution that has never found its way into the East. The lads have no time for such inventions that would interfere with work. Life out here is serious and life is earnest, for the school-boy at least, and no frivolous methods must be allowed to stay the studies of this gigantic language.

The whole day, therefore, is spent in acquiring the sounds and the look of each particular word, without having the remotest idea what they mean. He comes the next day and the same grinding goes on. The spring passes into summer and summer into autumn, and one day is like another in its weary monotony, and the sounds in growing numbers clang and ring within his brain, and the weird little pictures are hung up in the picture gallery of his mind, but they tell him no story, neither do they suggest the poetry and romance that often lie hidden within so many of them.