Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

But while many Koreans possess an alert mentality, this is often offset by superstitions, prejudices, conceit, and the lack of initiative and perseverance. They seem to have been slaves to clan or village opinion for so long that they can seldom assert themselves individually. They learn elementary things quickly, but they are prone to run out of steam in the higher reaches. One gets the impression that they have less self-control, that they are undisciplined, both by training and temperament, compared to the Japanese. Unlike the Chinese, they will fight upon slight provocation, which may be another proof of a lack of self-control as well as of manliness. Such things as school strikes against missionaries who have given them long and unselfish service to the full extent of their resources indicate but little sense of gratitude. Even their most friendly foreign teachers admit that almost any of them will cheat at examinations if given the opportunity. Their cruelty, or at least indifference to the suffering of others, is perhaps as much an Oriental as merely a Korean trait. In the village just over the hills from Seoul near which we made our Korean headquarters an old man was found ill and half starved in a straw hut in the outskirts. If the foreign gentry who pass that way almost every day take no notice of him, the villagers evidently asked themselves, why should we? But the first information the foreigners had of the invalid or his condition was when our host happened one day to see him lying all but naked beside a muddy stream, apparently trying to drink, his skin mere parchment stretched tightly over his bones. The American gave the villagers a note to the mission hospital and paid some of them to carry the old man there on an improvised stretcher. Next morning nothing had been done. Called to account, the villagers explained that they had decided not to take him to the hospital, because he would only die soon anyway, and if they buried him themselves it would cost less, they thought, than if the hospital did so and then made the village pay for it.

It seems to be Japanese policy to keep deformity out of sight, but Korean instinct and custom work to the same end. The native teachers of a mission school vociferously objected to admitting a particularly brilliant candidate—because he had only one eye! “If this thing goes on,” one of the teachers raged, “we’ll be nothing but a collection of cripples,” and to illustrate the point he sprang up and humped himself across the floor like a paralytic, with the dramatic effect at which the Koreans are adepts. Whatever his opinion of the Japanese in that respect, no one would accuse the Koreans of having no sense of humor, though they are much more solemn of demeanor than the Chinese. An American resident who carries a massive old watch that once belonged to his grandfather drew it out one day as he was leaving a railway station—whereupon a Korean boy wearing the jiggy of the porter’s calling promptly backed up to the watch and solemnly asked if he should transport it. There is less curiosity, or at least less child- or monkey-like inquisitiveness about the Koreans than their immediate neighbors either to the east or west display, more personal dignity, one feels, and the stranger does not collect a following half as easily as even in Japan. It is true, however, that villagers poke holes in the paper walls of any inn-room housing foreigners, and missionary ladies are obliged to carry a complete curtain-room with them on their travels in the interior. Superstitions are still rife, for all the outside influence, and some of them take quaint forms. As in Haiti, it is a common thing to have a pedestrian dash across the road in front of a moving automobile just as it seems to be upon him, the idea being to get rid of the evil spirit which dogs his heels like his shadow, either by having it crushed beneath the wheels or attaching itself to the motorist. In fact, there are many little suggestions of the black man’s republic of the West Indies about Korea—Napoleon beards, little pipes, thatched market-stalls and the tiny transactions they are willing to make, the custom of sleeping peacefully at the roadside or in the roadway wherever the whim overtakes them, the same swing of the women carrying burdens on their heads, a similar carelessness about exposure of the person.

It is still an ordinary experience for a Korean bride to discover when she enters her future home that she is only her husband’s “Number 3” wife—yet all the children she may bear him are considered as belonging to Wife Number 1. Nine-tenths of the suspensions from the church, at least among Protestant converts, are for concubinage; most of the rest are for marrying “heathen.” I have already mentioned that the missionaries insist that Korean women are very modest, particularly as compared to their Japanese sisters. They seem not to consider the public display of breasts immodest, for missionaries, just like ordinary people, appear to get used to things which must at first have struck them as “dreadful.” They do not like to have them photographed, however; people at home would “misunderstand.” Women still come to church flaunting this open proof of motherhood, just as men do in their horsehair hats. Yet when Japanese women came into public baths already occupied by Korean men there was so much talk that the authorities were forced to modify a time-honored custom of Japan and order a division of the tubs by sexes. Less than two decades ago no Korean woman of the better class appeared on the streets even of Seoul in the daytime, and servant-girls compelled to do so covered their faces. After ten at night no men were expected to be abroad, for then the women, usually in sedan chairs, with lantern-bearers and followers, came out to pay their calls. In those days young men never smoked in the presence of their elders—at least of the male persuasion. No decent woman could read, but only sorceresses and keesang, the geisha of Korea. To-day things are so changed in some circles that the sewing-woman of a missionary family sent her girls to school first, saying that the boys could take care of themselves; with the result that her daughter became the wife of a vice-consul in Manchuria while her son was still a jiggy-coom, waiting at the station for a job of carrying. Points of view differ, of course, and what we of the West consider quite proper may strike the Korean as highly immodest, as well as vice versa. I remember once coming upon a group of Korean servants in a foreign house all gazing with great curiosity at the cover of one of our cheap high-priced magazines, decorated with a silly, but from our point of view harmless, picture, after the stereotyped manner of our “popular” illustrators, of a boy and girl kissing. The servant who had worked longest for foreigners was explaining to his scandalized fellows that they often did that, and held hands, too—which last dreadful vice he demonstrated by taking a hand of one of the others, by the wrist!

One should keep in mind, in considering the recent swift changes in Korea, that it was closed to the outside world much longer, tighter, and later than Japan. Yet the quaint old scholar’s cap is now as rare as the old learning. The new generation seems to have lost the poise of the old, and so far to have gotten nothing in its place. The rather flippant youths of the new schools cannot read the classics—for there is a splendid old Korean literature which is forbidden by the Japanese, so that the younger generation is growing up without it—and thus far they are not at home in the modern world that has so suddenly burst upon the ancient peninsula. One of the demands of the thirty-three men who signed the Korean “declaration of independence” a few years ago—the finest types of Koreans, according to the missionaries, and the first of whom were just being released, yellow and thin, when we were in the country—was the freedom to study things Korean, including their history. The idea of an education as the road to a government job and a lifetime of loafing still carries over from the days that are gone. Four fifths of the population is still reported illiterate, too, and even of those eager to go to school hardly one in three can get inside one. The rest can go to—well, to a Korean school of the old type, for instance. Frowsy old men keep them privately, and a dozen or a score of boys come at dawn, seven days a week, to squat on the floor of some dark and miserable little room in a back alley, their slippers in a row along the porch, and rock back and forth all day long shouting incessantly in what would be a chorus if it were not also a chaos of individual noises more often without than with meaning. Not until night falls do they unfold their legs and stumble homeward, and all the day through, as they “study,” the “teacher” in his special form of horsehair hat dozes on his knees at the head of the room, and flies beyond computation in numbers flit hour after hour from boy to boy. The Japanese officials of Korea pay a bounty on flies by the pint, but they do not seem to have done much toward wiping out their breeding-places. Yet, one recalls, while gazing in upon one of these old-fashioned schools, much of the civilization of Japan came from Korea—its culture, writing, Buddhism, pottery—and its smallpox.

A Korean church service, too, is a sight worth going to church to see. There are no seats, except perhaps a bench along one of the walls near the pulpit, for the missionaries. All others sit or squat on the floor, covered with straw matting, all in white except some of the smaller children, mainly dressed in pink. Many of the men still wear topknots, and some their “fly-trap” hats, for by Korean standards it is impolite to take these off except in one unmentionable place, where it is imperative. The sunburned breasts of women are also somewhat in evidence, though the great majority of the average congregation have adopted Western styles now in both these particulars. There may be a rare man in foreign dress, but even the native pastors almost all wisely cling to the flowing native garb of snow-white grass-cloth, so much more comfortable and becoming to Koreans. The men squat on one side, the women on the other, with the children in front between them, and seldom do they rise at all during the service, but merely bow their heads to the floor to pray. Now and again they sing one of our old familiar hymn tunes, with Korean words, in loud, metallic voices. Dozens of children of from two to six wriggle and talk and race about. From time to time a “Bible woman” squirms out of her place, picks up a few of the eel-like urchins, and returns them to their respective mothers, ordering them to be nursed forthwith, then wriggles back into her place again. There may be quiet during the infant dinner-hour, but the whole act is sure to be repeated several times before the service is over and the snow-white throng pours out between two unnecessarily stern-faced, sharp-eyed men in plain clothes whose habitat is the police station.

There can be no doubt of the many difficulties of mission work in a country where everything is so different from the home-land that an expression sounding almost exactly like “Come on!” means “Stop!” Among the dreadful stories one hears of missionary hardships is that of a man still in the field, who in his early days wished to preach a sermon on the text “Tam naji mara,” which is Korean for “Thou shalt not covet.” But as his command of the language was still somewhat faulty, he made the slight error of giving the text as “Dam naji mara.” Now while “tam” means “to covet,” “dam” means “to sweat,” and when the long service was over a little old Korean lady came up to say timidly to the youthful pastor, “I loved your sermon, dear teacher, but please tell me, how can we help sweating when it is so hot?”

Northward from Seoul by the railways which, broken only at the Straits of Tsushima, reach from Tokyo to Peking and beyond, lies much the same Korea as to the southward. Kaijo, or Song-do, reminds one that the ancient rulers of Cho-sen knew how to pick beautiful mountain sites for their capitals, for the landscape there rivals that about Seoul, alias Keijo. The first unification of the whole peninsula took place under the Korai—hence the name the West still uses—dynasty, which made its headquarters at Song-do and ruled for more than four centuries. When it was overthrown by one of the king’s generals, just a hundred years before the discovery of America, a new capital was established at Seoul and an ancient name for the country was restored—“Ch’ao Hsien,” roughly the “Land of Morning Calm.” The Chinese still call it Koli. Remnants of the groundwork of what must have been imposing buildings lie scattered to the west of the present Kaijo, and a great wall still climbs along the side of the mountain range that shuts it in. But the Song-do of to-day is little more than a large and very compact vista of smooth thatched roofs close beside the railway but an appreciable distance from the station. It has an American mission school famous for the ginghams made by students earning their way—un-Oriental as that may sound—in a factory in charge of a man from South Carolina; and some of the old customs have survived longer than in Seoul, the muffling from head to heels in a white sheet, for instance, of some of the women who glide through the narrow, unpaved streets.

Then, too, Kaijo is the center of the gin-seng industry of Korea. The root of this plant is credited with miraculous curative powers by the credulous Orientals and reaches prices verging on the fabulous. Cases are scarcely rare of wealthy invalids, particularly Chinese, paying as much as two hundred dollars for a single root no larger than a little forked carrot at most three inches long, though it is the wild mountain-growing species of this originally Manchurian weed that reaches such heights; the cultivated variety is much less esteemed. Throughout the Far East there is hardly a native drug-shop without its carefully hidden supply of this precious tonic, which is said to have some real value for old and weak persons, at least of the Orient; even Chinese physicians admit that it is too heating for Westerners, already too hot by temperament, according to their view. No doubt its celebrity is largely due, like that of many another commodity, to its absurdly high price. One might fancy that the growing of gin-seng would fit the Korean temperament, for it takes seven years to mature, after which the land must lie fallow, or at least free from the same crop, an equal length of time. The fern-like plant dies in the sun; so for a considerable distance along the way through Song-do district there are big brown patches on the landscape which on closer inspection prove to be fields of gin-seng in rows of little beds, each protected by reed or woven-leaf mats forming a north wall and inclining slightly to the south. Here, under the watchful eye of the government monopoly bureau, this delicate aristocrat of the vegetable kingdom is tended with far greater care than the babies of Korea, and at last is hidden away in the form of yellow-brown dried roots in the safest places known to native drug-venders.

Farther north are red uplands waving with corn and millet, and at some of the stations mammoth bales of silk cocoons, the worms within which are doomed to die a wriggling death in boiling water as their precious houses are disentangled into skeins in the thatched huts among which they will be scattered, the monopolistic eye of the alien government upon them also. Heijo, which to Koreans and missionaries is Ping Yang, has a somewhat less picturesque location than its two principal successors as capitals, and it bristles now with smoking factory chimneys. Indeed, it is quickly evident that this second city of the peninsula is more industrious than Seoul. Knitting-machines clash incessantly in hundreds of huts; yangbans and high hats and spotless white garments seem conspicuously rare to the traveler still having the capital in mind, and everywhere are evidences that here life has not been for centuries a holiday broken only by occasional languishing in government offices. Then, too, the eighteen thousand Chinese with which official statistics credit Korea are somewhat concentrated in Ping Yang and the north, and the Celestial adds to the industrious aspect of any land. These bigger and more rational-looking men do much of the hard work of Korea, such as stone-cutting and the building either of Christian schools or temples to the ancient gods. The latter seem to be losing some of their popularity in Ping Yang, for Christians are so numerous that the clatter of bells for Wednesday night prayer-meetings is as wide-spread as the sermons of Korean preachers are endless. Yet it is barely fifty years since Ping Yang went down to the river in a body and killed the foreigners who had dared to come in a Chinese junk into the Forbidden Kingdom.

In this metropolis of the north even topknots are rare and clipped heads the rule. It seems to be inevitable with the coming of Christianity to lose the picturesque; but usually the crasser superstitions go with it, and one should not, perhaps, regret the passing of anything which takes these also. Besides, there remain the roofs peculiar to Ping Yang and its region, with their high-flaring corners made of six to eight superimposed tiles, now required by law in place of combustible thatch; and the complicated cobweb of streets in the Korean section still teems with the ancient weazel-hair brushes working from ink-slabs and sounds with the busy, insistent, incessant rat-a-tat of ironing.