China in America / A study in the social life of the Chinese in the eastern cities of the United States

by Stewart Culin

As the colony increases in numbers, a kind of society reorganizes, and though at first it may have been composed of laborers engaged as laundrymen or cigar-makers, many of them in time find other employments tributary to the mass, and take up their former occupations or new ones most congenial to them. The modifications and divergences of this society from that of the Chinese at home, due to the absence of native women and the influence of the different and aggressive civilization around it, present an interesting field for study.

Time will not permit me to dwell upon even the characteristic features of the social life of the Chinese in our cities, but there are certain questions connected with their mental characteristics and religious belief which a somewhat prolonged contact with those people enables me, more or less imperfectly, to answer.

Much misconception exists as to character of the Chinese who emigrate to America. They are generally described as the dregs of their people, given up to gambling and opium smoking and distinguished only by their vices. Some, however, who have observed their constant toil, the readiness with which they accept instruction in our language, and their willingness to profess a belief in such religious teaching as is at the same time offered to them, have greatly exaggerated their moral and mental qualities; while others who have questioned them, in the spirit of philosophical inquiry, concerning their religious belief and their knowledge of Confucius and the sages of antiquity, usually in terms quite unintelligible to them, have declared that the popular opinion as to their ignorance is well founded, and that they have little in common with the class of scholars and philosophers who have dignified and adorned the pages of Chinese history from the dawn of their civilization down to the present time.

Nearly all the Chinese in America have passed some of their early years at school, where they learned to write a few of the many characters of their language, and to read it with more or less facility. This is the case even among the Sinning people, few of whom go up at home to the district examinations, and among whom, even in China, there are few literary graduates or persons of distinction—a condition due not so much to their lack of natural ability, as to the extreme and grinding poverty to which they are subjected.

Among those from Hohshan and the country adjacent to the city of Canton are found many of considerable attainments; not men who would be considered scholars at home, or who have even obtained the degree of siu-tsai that constitutes the first step to advancement, but clerks who are able to read and understand much of the abstruse classical literature of their country, and whose sympathies and traditions are allied with those of the great literary aristocracy by which their nation is dominated. Many of their country people have attained eminence in the past, and the lists of the successful graduates at the Triennial Examinations at Canton, which are received and posted in the shops here, frequently contain names not only of students from their native villages, but of their own cousins and kindred.

This class forms a small part, however, of the great mass of the immigrants, and their literary ambitions are soon lost here in the struggle for existence, for which they seem less fitted than many of their ruder neighbors.

The latter appear to be little influenced by the classical instruction of the schools. While the books of the sages and philosophers constitute the literature, par excellence, of China, there exists a vast popular literature, quasi-historical, imaginative, and romantic, which is read by the mass of the people and more directly controls their minds than the teachings of Confucius and his disciples. Within it are enshrined the popular traditions and folk-tales, in many other countries as yet handed down orally, here amplified and embellished, and although written in the vulgar tongue, receiving many charms from their beauties of style and literary execution. Stories of the magician Chau Kung, of the heroic Kwán Kung, long since deified as the God of War; of Muk Kwai Ying, that martial heroine of Chinese historical romance, with tales of the Pát Sín (the Eight Genii), and Buddhist legends without number, all go to make up this intermingled mass of romance and tradition.

These wonder tales have fallen upon no incredulous ears in the past. Accustomed to attribute almost every phenomenon of nature to the intervention of supernatural powers, to people every rock and tree with its familiar spirit, "to hear the menace of a god in the thunder, and see the beneficence of a deity in the rain," they have had little reason to question the truth of stories in which the occult and supernatural plays little greater part than it daily appears to in the course of their own lives.

Their religion is not a system which we can define as that of Tao, Buddha, or Confucius, although all these have contributed to give form to ceremonies and observances; the worship of the spirits of the dead, with a kind of fetichism even more primitive, constitutes the principal element of their belief.

We may discover traces of Buddhistic teachings in their worship of Kwan Yin, in their ideas as to the transmigration of souls, and in their abstinence from eating beef; of Taoism, in the spiritual hierarchy under which all of their gods, buddhas, and demons are made to find a place, and of the Literary Cult, in those methods of divination and forms of worship, still practiced as in the times of Confucius and the sages, by whom they were recorded; but deeper and stronger than these is their belief in the continued presence of the spirits of the dead and their controlling influence upon the fortune and destiny of the living. Such ceremonies as are observed by the Chinese here have for their object the propitiation and expulsion of these phantoms; prayers and offerings are made to higher powers, but their aid is invoked for protection against the spirits of the dead and those malignant forces in nature with which they are believed to be often associated.