Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

I had gone to Mongolia before we found what we wanted, and therefore can claim no credit either in the quest, the furnishing, or the selection of that numerous personnel without which no foreigner’s household in Peking seems to function. It had been a long search, with certain hitches that would not have occurred across the Pacific. Legally no foreigner can own real estate in Peking unless he is a missionary. Many do, but that is by using Chinese as dummy owners. Some old Chinese houses as yet untouched by foreign hands tempted us to try ours at recreating them in as charming a way as some of our friends had done. But the eight or nine months we could be at home in Peking were already running away, and the process of making livable such old ancestral mansions, where courtyard rambles after courtyard, but where former glories have faded with years of disrepair, would have taken too large a slice out of our time. To rent a house even from the Chinese landlord who had renovated and improved it purposely for the occupancy of foreigners was a complicated process. First of all there was the inevitable bargaining, the landlord starting at perhaps twice what he would accept and the renter at half what he was prepared to pay; for it is still a rare Chinese, even in a city as familiar with foreigners as is Peking, who can honestly name his price at the beginning and stick to it. Nor were these dickerings direct, even though my wife and our prospective landlord might have a language in common. Go-betweens must “save face” on either side in case the deal fell through. The houses for rent by Chinese were never furnished; they usually lacked running water, sewers, bath-tubs, electric light, and similar Western idiosyncrasies, though in cases where the owner had in mind renting to foreigners preparations might have been made to introduce these improvements. But unless he was sure of getting a foreign occupant the landlord did not purpose to go to all this trouble perhaps for nothing; in most cases his proposition was that the renter put in these things at his own expense, with the doubtful probability of having his rent reduced accordingly.

If the two parties did finally come to terms, the inexperienced renter was likely to faint at the revelation of what still lay before him. First he must pay three months’ rent in advance, which did not at all mean that he would not have to pay again before the three months were up. This payment would cover the first and the last months of the occupancy, and the other third of the sum no month at all. It went as cumshaw or “squeeze” to every one concerned in the deal—except of course the man who paid it—to be divided among all those who had in any way taken part—the “boy” of an acquaintance who had pointed out the house, the caretaker who had opened the door, the servant across the street who knew the name of the landlord, the man who had fetched said landlord, on up through all the go-betweens to the landlord himself. Even the most generous of us hesitates to give tips of a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars, though it be only “Mex.” Then the papers in the case must be sent to the legation of the foreigner involved, which in due time would do to them whatever is customarily done, and pass them on to the Chinese police. In Peking some officials work with unusual promptitude (for China), so that the documents might be complete and back in the hands of the landlord with a celerity that would be vertiginous in the interior of the country—that is, with good luck, so every one told us, within three or four months!

Then all at once there appeared a little Chinese house just about our size, which an American missionary had recently civilized and was ready to rent in the offhand fashion of our native land. For a week, coolies—bowed under assorted articles of furniture picked up at auction sales, bargained for piece by piece out in the maelstrom of the Chinese City, in shops scattered elsewhere, and as a last resort made to order by Chinese craftsmen of adaptable ability and very reasonable demands—wandered up the little hutung to our new home. A carpenter produced from a scanty suggestion a four-posted crib with brilliant dragons climbing each post; another stray artist covered the face of the nursery wardrobe with a marvelous blue forest through which China’s most famous actor, in his usual rôle of a willowy lady, strolled with a green deer; most of the furnishings were purely Chinese, adapted as far as possible to foreign use, and our chief regret was that this could be only a temporary, and must therefore be an inexpensive, abode, in which we could not indulge in the real beauties of Chinese trappings. As it was, something between seven and eight hundred dollars had melted away before we were done, and still no one would have mistaken the place for a prince’s palace. But they were only “Mex” dollars, as is always the case when one uses the word in China, and there was a chance that some one might give us back a few of them when the time came to abandon Peking and push on. Besides, either of the hotels would have taken the dollars and not left us even the furniture.

By the time I returned from Urga we were ready to move in. Our Peking home is out in the very eastern edge of the Tartar City, so close under the East Wall that sunrise is always a little later with us than in the capital as a whole. It is not easily found, for it opens off a narrow hutung of its own, a nameless little lane running head on into the mighty wall, without another foreigner for several minutes’ walk in any direction, and—since we are to cast aside reticence for the information of other householders—the rent is seventy-five dollars “Mex” a month, with no Oriental jokers in the lease. Before I have occasion to mention them again, let me say that, though their value varies daily, the dollars of China averaged a hundred and eighty-seven to a hundred of our own during our winter in Peking. Wherever the words “dollar” or “cent” appear hereafter in these pages they are of this cheaper variety.

It was a great change from the carefully tended Legation Quarter, with its macadamed streets and tree-bordered sidewalks, its wide gateways with vistas of one great power after another—though one comes to wonder whether in China of to-day these powers are greater than they are impotent—to cross Great Hata-men Street and strike off into the maze of hutungs to the east of it. But there the joy of a real home was impressed upon us; we were living as we had long planned, in a Chinese house among Chinese neighbors in Peking, the spell of the old capital, of the real China, weaving itself all about us. Outwardly the place would not be inviting to American tastes. But once a quick, light tapping of the door-ring brings a “boy” to swing back the heavy halves of the poetic red door we enter a very world of our own, completely shut off from all but the sounds, and occasionally the smells, of the teeming Chinese world about us. Its voices may drift over to us, but what does it know of us within?

A Chinese house turned out to be a very pleasant place to live in. There was pleasure even in having no stairs to climb, especially after being on the top floor of a hotel where the elevator too often bore the sign “No currency”; the delightful feeling of being at home as soon as the red doors closed behind us was more real than we had ever felt it in any of our Western abodes. Ours is a simple dwelling, to be sure, as befits mere rolling stones. It has only one court, perhaps thirty feet square, paved with gray mud bricks and surrounded by four separate little low-browed houses of two rooms each, their roofs of curved tile slanting down in a protective way, as if presaging hot summers or bitter winters. Their bare backs are turned to the neighbors who crowd us on every side, and their windows all face the court, take up all four sides of it, in fact, for on the inside there are nothing but windows. At the top these are lattices covered with the flimsy white paper so general in China, easily renewed and much more adequate against heat or cold than one would think; but foreign influence has put real glass in the lower panes. One is not long in discovering that in Peking the main house always faces south. If the compound is on the north side of the street the best rooms are at the far back of it; if it is on the south side they back up against the street wall, and so on. This most important building almost always has a low wide porch, like ours, with a pergola-roof over which plants rooted in the unpaved strips of earth along the sides of the court can clamber. In summer it is the Peking custom to have the courtyard covered by a pêng, a huge reed mat on pole legs, high enough above the whole establishment to shade it without cutting off the breeze—and always rented, by the way, from the pêng-gild, which refuses to sell. But summer was waning when we moved in, and for eight or nine months a year it would be a sacrilege to shut out the brilliant blue sky that tents Peking, often without the tiniest rent in it for weeks at a time. Even when the dry cold of a Peking winter was at its sharpest we never regretted the separation of our little houses which necessitated crossing the court and having another glimpse of that unsullied blue sky and a breath of the outdoor air whenever we went from one room to another.

The collecting of the requisite staff of servants was the mildest task of all. In Peking, as in all China, human beings swarm so thickly that the mere rumor of a desire for services is enough to bring many fold of applicants. The wise thing for the new-comer is to hire his servants through the servants of his friends, or in some such linked-up way. They will no doubt have to pay their informants a certain “squeeze” for the job, but one is protected from fly-by-night domestics whose antecedents and family roots are unknown; though compared with the opportunities which Chinese servants have for fleecing foreign employers they are honesty personified. A staff thus recommended to us lined up for inspection. There was an engaging-looking little cook nearing middle life, a round-faced, too youthful “boy,” who, having once served in a Japanese hotel and learned unpleasant habits, soon departed in favor of a man from the interior of the province, and a tall, handsome Shantung coolie. Then there came a wrinkled old rickshaw-man, one of the swiftest runners in Peking for all his age, and finally, after more careful picking, we chose the only feminine member of the staff, an ama for the most important task of all,—pursuing the younger generation. Then, with a dose of interpreted orders, we were off.

For on one point we were adamant: we would not have an English-speaking servant in the house. Chinese domestics who have even a smattering of the language of their employers, we had already noted, are likely to be impudent, to be experts in the matter of “squeeze,” and to demand what in Peking are fabulous wages. Life is much simpler, too, when one can talk freely without being understood by the servants. But the really important motive was that we wished to learn Chinese, above all to have the son who had lost his second birthday in crossing the Pacific learn it, and not the atrocious Pidgin-English which constitutes the linguistic lore of so many “boys” and amas. Looking back upon it we can testify that there is no more direct road to a speaking knowledge of even the Chinese language than living in the unbroken midst of it.

Down in the Legation Quarter people pay their servants two or three times what is customary in the rest of Peking, to say nothing of the “rake-off” which careless auditing and boastful living give them. Our new staff named their own wages, but they named them on an uninflated basis, so that both sides were satisfied. All except the ama considered ten dollars a month a suitable return for their services, though the rickshaw-man, of course, had to have eight more for the use of his shining carriage, housed just within the outer door. The woman stood out for fourteen, something more than the average in that quarter, but she proved well worth it, for not only was hers the most responsible job but the many other tasks that fall to an ama’s lot made her specially valuable. Besides their wages, Chinese servants get nothing, legitimately, except the k’ang they sleep on in their cramped quarters, a basket of coal-balls now and then in the colder months, and sometimes a garment used exclusively in their employer’s service. Their food is their own affair. Thus our staff of five cost us sixty-two “Mex,” or, to put it into American money, about thirty-five dollars gold a month. In addition to this they expected cash presents at our Christmas, their New Year, and when we should break up housekeeping, totaling approximately an extra month’s wages.

Chinese servants have their faults, but when these are all summed up I doubt whether they exceed those of domestics even in Europe, to say nothing of our own land. Certainly life runs more smoothly under their ministrations than the most willing and efficient of “hired girls” can make it. Whether it is their natural temperament or merely a pride of their calling, a surly face or manner, the faintest breath of impudence or “back talk,” even when the lady of the house has been alone with them for weeks at a time, have been as unknown in our circle as has a protest against any task assigned them. They have their own ways of doing things, but even these we have succeeded in changing where it was essential to do so. The division of work is left to them, for this is a matter in which one quickly finds it wise not to attempt to interfere. If any of them has ever felt that he was being imposed upon by the others, it was settled among themselves, and the matter never came to our ears. There are no such things as afternoons off among Peking servants; like their fellows, ours work, or at least are on call, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Once in a while the “boy” or the coolie interrupts our evening reading for an instant by asking permission to go out, but we have never known them to be missing when next they are wanted. The rickshaw-man asked perhaps three or four times during the winter to go and have something done to his vehicle, but only in a few cases of misunderstanding was he not on hand when we wished him to trot away with us, until with the coming of the Chinese New Year he decided that he had held a steady job long enough. The ama has two small daughters, not to mention a husband and the inevitable mother-in-law, at her home not half an hour away, yet though she has never been discouraged in doing so I doubt whether she has gone to see them a dozen times during the winter, and whenever she does she brings back some gay and not always inexpensive Chinese toy to her appreciative charge, as if to make up for the presumption of leaving him. It is really more than that, of course, like the constant kindnesses of all the servants toward him, for nowhere could a small boy be more royally treated than among the child-loving Chinese.