Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Rain was pouring when we reached Harbin, and seemed to have been for weeks. At least never in all my wanderings have I floundered through worse sloughs of mud than in the droshke which lost itself in the inky blackness and the downpour in what looked for a time like a vain attempt to get me from the station to a hotel. By morning light there seemed no particular reason for this, for though every street was covered at least with slime, there were enough of them roughly stone-paved to carry all the droshkes with which Harbin swarms. Perhaps it was merely an example of the impracticability of the Russians, of which I was to hear so many more before I moved on.

At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself back in Europe. Unless his geography is proof against such deceptions, he might easily believe that he had crossed the line into Russia and brought up in one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture, customs, inhabitants are all on the Russian model. Instead of rickshaws there are two types of carriages,—the droshke, of barouche effect, drawn in most cases by two horses, the shaft animal under a great arched pole and the off one with its head tied down to a level with its knees and twisted well to the outside, thanks to some time-honored Russian idea of style or efficiency; then there is the amerikanka. The “American woman,” as foreign residents facetiously translate the word, is a two-wheeled cart with a plain open box on top, on a corner of which sits the driver, apparently wholly inured to the jouncing with every step of the horse and every unevenness of the road which the passenger or two beside him seldom gives evidence of enjoying. But the amerikanka is ridiculously cheap by Western standards, and the Russian who manipulates it is almost sure to be cheery and pleasant, filled with naïve tales of what is and what he believes is going on inside Russia proper, if one chances to have a companion who can act as interpreter, and in any case a relief merely as a Caucasian after months among squint-eyed Orientals. Already, however, the motor-buses which probably have by this time driven most of the leisurely Russian wielders of horse-whips out of business had begun to appear on the streets of Harbin.

The houses have double windows, with a space of two or three feet between the panes of glass; and great cylindrical stoves built into the walls from floor to ceiling, preferably in a corner where they can bulge into two, and even four, rooms, are almost as universal as in Russia. In a July heat which left one drenched after a short stroll, even by moonlight, and which made the briefest interview in any of Harbin’s dungeon-like, double-walled offices a kind of “third degree,” it was hard to believe these evidences of long winters during which, barely four months thence, it would often be forty below zero and the wearing of furs indispensable. To its residents and to most of its visitors Harbin, all Manchuria in fact, is a land of snow and ice and bitter gales; to me, who happened to be there in the very climax of the brief summer, it will always bring back memories of a climate compared to which that of the tropics is mild and invigorating. Nor can I remember meeting in all Japan such battalions of flies as helped to make life miserable in summer-time Harbin, with its brief nights and its interminable days.

I know at last why one’s hat is always snatched from him when he enters a Russian-Jewish restaurant in New York. In Russia, and equally in Harbin, it is an inexcusable discourtesy to go into an office, even for the briefest instant, wearing, or carrying, hat or overcoat. There are always flunkies waiting to take them away from you outside the door, and obviously they expect to be remembered when you leave. I am overcome with grief to think that, in my appalling ignorance, I so long fancied one of the least beloved customs of our metropolis a mere scheme to extort tips, instead of a transplanted refinement from urbane Russia. Equally Russian is the Harbin practice of shaking hands with the entire personnel, from proprietor to errand-boy, of any shop one enters, however slight the purchase one has in view. Indeed, the more genuinely well bred shake hands all around again before they leave.

Several gaudy blue, green, and gold churches of the Russian Orthodox faith rise in fantastic domes and puffed-out, cross-surmounted spires above the general level of Harbin, and religious ceremonies imported direct from pre-Bolshevik Moscow may be seen any day in the week. Funerals, for instance, were of more than daily occurrence. Most often they were those of impoverished refugees, and were brief and inconspicuous; but there were frequent processions of the elaborate, typically Russian character. I passed two such within half an hour one noonday. The first was of the wife of the Russian station-master. He had discharged a Chinese employee for negligence and “squeeze,” and the latter had returned to kill him, his bullet accidentally striking the wife instead. The second was of the head of the Harbin Gymnasium, or upper school, once a colonel and a man of great wealth in Russia, now so impoverished that his wife and children, on foot behind the hearse, as is the Russian custom, were almost in rags and virtually barefoot. Mummers in fantastic costumes, including long, light-colored robes, walked before and on either side of the deceased, who were carried in canopied vehicles gay beyond anything western Europe or the New World has to offer the dead, even the horses draped from ears to fetlocks in flowing white coverlets fancifully embroidered. But the most surprising, not to say repulsive, Russian feature of the ceremony was the public display of the corpse. In each case the heavy lid of the coffin was laid diagonally off to one side, and during all the miles from church to cemetery, with several stops for the burning of incense and priestly blessings on the way, the yellow face of the departed rolled from side to side as the open hearse jolted over the stony pavements.

It is an old saying that to scratch a Russian is to find a Tartar, but I had taken this to be a mere figure of speech until I came to Harbin and northern Manchuria, where the European and the Asiatic Orientals live side by side. The Chinese and the Russians, one quickly realized there, understand each other better than we of the real West can ever hope to understand either. They have the same complicated Oriental way of thinking, a similar point of view in such matters as “squeeze,” not very dissimilar business methods. In a Russian department-store of Harbin the purchaser gets two checks, one of which he pays at the desk under the personal eye of the owner or manager, getting the other stamped and presenting it, not to the clerk who served him, but to another so far away that collusion between them would be difficult, before he is finally handed his purchase. The mere loss of time on both sides no more worries the Russian than it would the Chinese. At every turn I found myself startled to recognize as another Russian trait what I had fancied was characteristic merely of eastern Asia. Every important house in Harbin had its private policeman, usually a Russian ex-soldier, and wherever one attempted to enter a gate watchmen and domestic hangers-on sprang up from all sides as thickly as at the entrance to a Chinese residence or yamen. Perhaps the greatest surprise was the discovery that the Russian uses the abacus or swan-pan for doing his arithmetic, just like the people of Japan, Korea, and China, except that with him the contrivance is much larger, as if his heavier fingers needed wooden balls worthy of their strength. Mental arithmetic seemed to be as impossible to him as to a Chinese shopkeeper or to the subjects of the mikado. On my first visit to a dining-car on the C. E. R., it being two or three hours before dinner-time, I had merely a glass of tea and some Russian form of pastry. The bill of fare announced these as costing 15 and 45 sen respectively—Japanese money is most widely used now in the Russianized zone of Manchuria. The ikon-faced man at his desk in a corner of the car, his mammoth black beard looking like a wig that had fallen from its place on his utterly hairless head, solemnly picked up his counting-board, rattled the balls back and forth for a full minute, and finally wrote down with an air of intellectual triumph the total of the two items on my check before him. No Westerner can ever hope to sandwich himself in between two peoples who prefer the abacus to pencil and paper for their arithmetical problems.

Yet the Russians are white men, and thereby hang certain problems that are sure to thrust themselves upon the visitor to northern Manchuria in the present days of Russian upheaval. It was a distinct pleasure to find myself again where Westerners were not incessantly stared at, even though it was useless to attempt to speak a word with men and women who would have looked perfectly at home on the streets of any large American city. But it was quite otherwise suddenly to realize that some of the weaknesses of our Western civilization are much more conspicuous, or at least more public, than similar flaws in Oriental society. Neither China nor Japan are model lands in many respects, but during all the time I had spent in the Far East I had not seen a fraction of the open indecency, the unashamed vulgarity, the deliberate flaunting of sexual wares that raged in the several conspicuous café singing-halls of Harbin. It was almost a shock even to see white women again in any number; to find them dressing and behaving as no Japanese geisha, no singsong-girl of Korea or China, would ever think of doing outside her semi-domestic circle, was more impressive, more suggestive of the vices of our civilization, than the average of us would have called to his attention during a lifetime of Western residence. The contrast, added to a little knowledge of the point of view of the Oriental as to the proper place of the sex appeal in life, made such things stand out with the vividness of electric sign-boards. As Westerners we might understand that Harbin, under undefined economic conditions and somewhat chaotic government, with overturned Russia pouring its vices and its hungers down into it, was not a normal sample of the West; to the occasional fat, smug Chinese visitors to these blatant places, and through them to thousands of their race, such parading of our vices could do more to give a false impression of Western life and the Western character than a thousand decent Occidentals, working for years to no other purpose, could correct.

Two decades ago, while I was wandering across Asia during the Japanese-Russian War, an English-speaking Hindu expressed to me his great astonishment that the white world should permit the yellow race to show its superiority over even what seemed just then the most widely disliked branch of the Caucasian family. He realized what at least the untraveled bulk of the Occident does not to this day, that every sign of weakness in any white nation, almost in any white individual, is immediately applied by the average Oriental mind to the whole white race. The effect of Japan’s victory over Russia, working like a leaven through the masses of Asia for a score of years, was quite apparent in certain general changes of attitude toward Westerners, some of them fortunate, many of them quite the contrary. Now, with the second catastrophe of Russia flooding Asia with new examples of Caucasian weaknesses, of white men reduced to a lower level than Asia had ever before seen them, one could not but feel that it behooves the Western world in general to look to the impression Russians in China are making for the Caucasian family as a whole, and to know what their treatment is at the hands of the Chinese. For while we may recognize the Russian as essentially an Oriental, really more closely allied to the Chinese than to ourselves, the latter thinks of him entirely as a Westerner, typical in his faults and his weaknesses of that other side of the earth toward which the Oriental attitude is of growing importance. I do not know whether or not the continued supremacy of the white race is best for the world at large; but I have rather strong personal opinions on that subject, and those who are like-minded would do well to look into the question of the present-day conditions of Russians in China, where at least the respect on which much of that supremacy depends is being gradually eaten away.

Along all the principal thoroughfares of Harbin squatted scores of white beggars, women and children among them, appealing to Chinese as well as to European passers-by. In the market-places of this and of other towns along the C. E. R. I saw many a Russian covered with filth, sores, and a few tattered rags, a noisome receptacle of some kind in his hands, wandering from stall to stall pleading with the sardonic Chinese keepers to give him a half-rotten tomato or a putrid piece of meat. Barefooted refugee children roamed the streets, picking up whatever they could find, including some of the nastiest of Chinese habits. Former officers of the czar, and wives who were once the grace of any drawing-room, speaking French with a faultless accent, lived in miserable pens with only ragged cloth partitions between them and their teeming neighbors, eating the poorest of Chinese coolie food, some of them unable to go out unless they went barefoot. In the so-called thieves’ market every conceivable kind of junk, from useful kitchen utensils to useless bric-à-brac of Russian ancestry, was offered for sale; any morning one might see several hundred Russian men and women shuttling to and fro there, trying to sell an odd pair of boots, an all but worn-out garment, a child’s toy, for the price of a handful of potatoes or a measure of kaoliang, or attempting to exchange something they had at last found they could do without for something their fellow refugees still had that seemed to them indispensable.

The few Americans in Harbin at least were doing what they could to relieve the needy Russians. But it was an even more complicated task than we of the West would suppose, for here again the essential Orientalism of the victims came out. Young men with fine faces, on which the signs of semi-starvation were in plain evidence, would come imploring any kind of assistance, any position that would give them enough to buy bread. “Why,” they would cry, as if they were going the utmost limit in describing their horrible state, “I will even work with my hands!” But this was merely bluff; nothing could make your typical Russian of the class which Bolshevism chased out of the country debase himself to any such degree as that, starve, beg, or steal though he must. With a plethora of hungry, yet still sturdy, Russians of both sexes all about them, it was almost impossible for the American residents to get servants, unless they took Chinese from the native city. They could get innumerable teachers of Russian, almost none of whom had any conception of how to teach, nor the persistence, patience, and punctuality which that calling requires; but when it came to washing dishes and mopping floors chances went begging in the very houses which were being bombarded with frantic appeals for help against incipient starvation. It was not merely that these former well-to-do did not know how to work; they would do anything rather than learn.