Though we have never gone deeply into the matter, the work of each servant seems to be definitely fixed by custom. The rickshaw-man sweeps the court in the morning, unless he is busy with his chief duty, and keeps an ear on the door-knocker. The “boy” combines the lighter tasks of butler and chambermaid, and in general acts as a buffer between us and the outside world. The coolie does most of the rough labor, including the floors, the stoves, the washing, both of dishes and clothing, and the ironing, producing dress-shirts that would make the best steam-laundries in the United States blush with shame, if they were capable of any such display of emotion, and pressing even feminine evening frills with the deft hand of a French maid. In the time left over from her chief duty the ama does much of the sewing and many of those little odds and ends which in other lands make up the drudgery of a housewife. Since a daughter joined us in the spring she has performed her augmented task with the same ever cheerful efficiency.
The cook is more of a free lance, with very definite duties, including a daily trip to market. In China as a whole the tsoa-fan-ti and the mistress have a frequent meeting over his account-book, but in Peking there is a wide-spread custom euphonistically known as “boarding with the cook.” It simplifies the task of keeping him in hand, especially for a tai-tai speaking a very limited amount of Chinese, to set a fixed price for the day’s food and leave the rest to the Celestial kitchen. We adopted this custom, and have found it not only satisfactory but as economical as our friends report the other method to be. For Rachel and myself we dole out a dollar a day each, and half as much for the youngster. This includes everything that comes to the table except the morning bottle of milk and those nefarious products of France and Italy in similar containers with which I or our guests choose to flout our constitutions and that of our native land. The spenders among the foreign colony of Peking will undoubtedly, if it ever comes to their attention, sneer at the paucity of this sum; perhaps those who have deigned to accept our hospitality will say, “I thought so.” But I have promised to be frank. We are simple people, with tastes which do not daily require such viands as are commonly symbolized as quail on toast. As a matter of fact we often do have just that, for there is probably no capital in the world where game is more plentiful and cheaper than in the Peking markets. Certainly we never go hungry, and what that cook can do for a whole day with a sum that would not leave enough for a tip after a single luncheon in a very modest New York restaurant would give an American the false impression that the high cost of living has never come to China.
We live mainly on Chinese products, augmented by such foreign delicacies as cocoa, coffee, canned milk, imported butter, spices, jam, bacon, and the like, all furnished out of the cook’s stipend. Eggs, I believe, reached the height of an American cent each during midwinter; a chicken of moderate size costs from fifty to sixty coppers, which is not more than sixteen cents in real money. The far-famed Peking duck, which dot with white the moat just over the wall from us, would be a more serious acquisition, being in great demand among Chinese epicures; but squab, plump and tender, sells for the equivalent of a nickel each, and the succession of snipe, pigeons, partridge, pheasants, and wild duck that have graced our board would be luxuries to a war profiteer at home. Vegetables are plentiful in Peking, but the choice of meat is limited. Pork, beloved by all Chinese, foreigners eschew as a matter of course; if they have not seen what Chinese pigs feed on they are sure to have heard. Peking beef has the reputation of being the flesh of animals that have outlived their usefulness as beasts of burden rather than of those raised for food. Now and again, as the hungry militarists have boosted octroi duties at the city gates, the sheep butchers have gone on strike, which is particularly a hardship to Peking’s large Mohammedan population. But fowl, wild and tame, is always on hand to make up for any such catastrophe. We found Chinese corn meal and millet and a native brown but excellent cream of wheat preferable to the breakfast cereals from across the Pacific. Chinese pears, and especially the big golden persimmons which last almost all winter, are no poor substitutes for the California oranges sold in at least one foreign-goods grocery at three for a dollar. Now and then “Ta-shih-fu” takes a flier in desserts. Like all Peking chefs he prefers to make a thing which is fearful and wonderful to behold but which is a trial of temper and skill to the guest who has first to cut into it. There is that infamous “Peking dust,” a wall of glacéd fruits enclosing a mound of grated chestnuts of exactly the consistency, though by no means the splendid taste, of sawdust, and doted on, unfortunately, by that member of the family with most influence in the kitchen. Sometimes dinner is topped off with a pastry-and-cake basket, handle and all, full of custard and nuts. But all such weaknesses are amply made up for by the fact that pies worthy of the proudest New England housewife often come from the kitchen, usually labeled in the white of an egg with poetic Chinese characters. These literary effusions are seldom missing on any formal dessert, if there is space to get them in; when our first national holiday came there appeared a brave pink and green iced cake with the greeting “Thanksgiver Day” written boldly across it.
Our cook is noteworthy among his tribe in that he can prepare a Chinese as well as a foreign meal, and two or three times a week this wholly different but no less enjoyable repast adorns our table, chop-sticks and all. In general he is given a free rein in selection, so long as he has a certain balance in menu, and using his excellent Chinese judgment he dines us almost too well, and no doubt, in the time-honored Chinese way, pockets the coppers left over. We do not know that our cook “squeezes” a cent, but if he does not he should be drummed out of the Chinese cooks’ union, if there is such a thing. For it is taken for granted by all foreigners in China that their cooks believe a certain legitimate “squeeze” is attached to the job, and though it takes an American housewife some time to reconcile herself to it, old foreign residents would be much put out to find that the rule is not general. Popular tradition has it that all cooks put into their own pockets a certain percentage of all money given them to spend; 5 per cent seems to be the accepted amount among foreigners in Peking, except in the Legation Quarter, where there are no definite limits. There are innumerable anecdotes illustrating this custom. Missionary cooks, boasting themselves Christians, have laid up small fortunes on their eight or ten “Mex” dollars a month. I know of one who, from the day his service began, made it an invariable rule to take six coppers for every person he cooked for during the day, and he now owns two modern houses which he rents to foreigners.
We have often wondered just how much our cook manages to lay aside. There is no way of finding out, for the Chinese market-man is ever faithful to his own people in any controversy with the “outside barbarian,” and the custom is so perfectly legitimate in the cookly mind that no pricking of conscience ever sullies the frank and smiling face of the king of our kitchen. In overcrowded China it has been the practice for centuries to fee any one who brings a job or a client, and even if the foreigner went to market himself he would not save the “rake-off”; in fact he would probably lose money. For the market-man does not quote a foreigner the price to which a Chinese cook will finally bring him down, and no grocer is going to tell his client when he pays his monthly bill that 5 per cent of it will go to his cook as soon as he comes in when there are no telltale foreigners looking on. Yet supernatural as the Chinese are in slicing off a “cash” or a copper where even a French eye could not possibly detect any such protuberance, we do not see how our cook can have made a fortune on the leavings. Including his six dollars for kitchen fuel he has eighty-one dollars a month to feed us on when I am at home. When we go out to dinner of course he is not the loser; extra money for invited guests gives him a trifle more leeway; possibly he sells a tin can or a bottle now and then to the constantly passing peddlers, though we have never seen any evidence of stooping to such methods. Yet his wages have never been higher than with us, at least since his youthful days as a retainer in the Manchu court, and, for all that, he has educated two of his four boys into fine, upstanding, well dressed young men with enough English to take important positions with foreign firms; the third is already well along the same road, and no doubt the youngest, who romps about all day in a neighboring hutung, will be similarly provided. We have never quite reconciled those grown sons to our little cook, still well on the sunny side of middle age; but in China, of course, the generations succeed themselves swiftly. We may be wronging him in assuming that he does not spend on us all we give him for that purpose, and if so I apologize. If we are not, he certainly is welcome to all he has kept, for he has served us for eight months in an unobtrusive, efficient, and most agreeable manner.
Chinese of standing have let us into a few of the secrets of life among house servants. Most cooks, at least for foreigners, are not Peking men, it seems, but come in from the country. Having no family to support in the capital, those earning ten dollars a month, eating leftovers—though few Chinese servants care for foreign food—and spending perhaps two dollars a month of their own, can send home about a hundred dollars a year. Those with families in Peking have to devise methods for augmenting their wages; therefore they do not consider those methods dishonest. One might ask, why not pay the man a living wage to begin with and then expect him to be honest? Alas, centuries of the other plan have made that contrary to the Chinese way of thinking. The moment you pay a servant more than the market price he takes you for a gullible victim or a millionaire and “squeezes” all the more. It is the Chinese system, and many a foreigner has broken his head against it in vain.
A genuine cook to foreigners owes it to his dignity to have an apprentice assistant, just as he must ride to and from market in a rickshaw. Not long after we settled down, “Ta-shih-fu” asked permission to bring into the kitchen his younger brother, whose profession of torturing a Chinese violin seemed to be in ever decreasing demand. There he has remained month after month, learning the rudiments of foreign cooking, until he has gathered sufficient audacity to go and cook for foreigners himself, thereby making his future secure. But never has it been so much as hinted that we should pay him anything; his wageless standing is perfectly in keeping with the Chinese scheme of things, and no one would be more surprised than he or his brother if we offered him money.
Whatever we can say for our cook we can testify that the “boy” who has been with us since the second month is honest even in the Western sense. He is, we hasten to admit, different from the rank and file of “boys” to foreigners in Peking; no doubt they would dub him “queer.” He comes from somewhere ’way down the province, well off the railroad, and seems deliberately to refuse to learn the tricks of the capital. Down there he has a wife of seventeen, perhaps forced upon him by his parents in the customary Chinese manner; at least he has never shown any desire to go home, not even at New Year’s. But then, he is past forty. His service is so constant that we have sometimes urged him to go out more often, but he replies with a smile that he has few friends in Peking and nowhere to go. Once or twice a month he calls in a passing barber, and perhaps he has stepped out half a dozen times during the winter on a brief personal errand—except that, as regularly as fortnightly pay-day comes round, he goes to send a letter home. The extent to which Chinese families pool their incomes, with some grandfather or mother-in-law as treasurer, would take almost any American’s breath away. We have many a time caught this extraordinary “boy” carefully avoiding chances to “squeeze,” passing on to the other servants buying errands assigned him, lest we suspect him of taking a commission. Once a tourist couple dropped in for tea, and having traveled too fast to orientalize the point of view of their native Chicago, surreptitiously slipped a silver dollar into the “boy’s” palm as he opened the door at their departure. He did not faint; hence we might never have known of that social blunder if the “boy” had not rushed back as soon as the door was closed, his outstretched hand offering us the coin. I warned you he was queer; I am not sure but that the normal “boy” of Peking would not consider him downright crazy. But honesty and diligence, alas, are not always sufficient in this miserable world. When we move on we despair of finding this “boy” another place more than any of the others, for his stock of self-confidence is as scanty as his integrity is unusual.
The normal Peking “boy,” particularly if he knows some English, is usually the general factotum of a foreign household. Many foreigners never speak to their other servants but transmit all orders through the “boy,” or, if the staff is large, through “number one boy.” Some of the older and more experienced of these take on the efficiency and the manner of old English butlers; they can arrange anything, from a dinner-party on Christmas to a picnic out at the Temple of Heaven by moonlight, at a mere hint from their socially busy mistresses. But we much prefer our type of “boy.” Though they may succeed in keeping their own employers in ignorance of that fact, the observant guest can hardly fail to see that these efficient head servants grow scornful toward their subordinates and often despise foreigners in general and the family they serve in particular. Obviously their “squeeze” increases with their importance and their opportunities. Some of them make fortunes out of the peddlers and shopkeepers whose patronage they recommend, and positions under them are not had for the mere asking. The “boy” of an American official in Peking came to his mistress one day and insisted on giving her a present worth easily his year’s salary, saying he had become a Christian and hence was “ashamed for the much money” he had been given by those who sold things to the family and to their many tourist guests—and begged her to accept this customary percentage on his winnings. How the t’ing-ch’ai, or topmost “boy” in a foreign legation, makes use of his opportunities is a story worth telling, but that would be trespassing into the realms of high finance.
The long, handsome Shantung coolie, who laundered dress-shirts and pressed georgette evening-gowns with such amazing skill, turned out to be a contrast to the “boy,” and was destined to depart suddenly about the middle of January. At first the tai-tai used to “call the coal,” but Wang had gradually taken over the task and was getting it for as low a price as she—I am sure I am not doing Wang an injury by mentioning his name, any more than I should by specifying an American called Smith. The coal, however, seemed to burn up faster and faster, and each alleged ton piled against the wall of the little back court at the front of our compound looked smaller. One day we questioned its size, and Wang promptly guaranteed to make it last the month out. That would have been physically impossible, yet last it did. Other suspicious little things began to gather about the tall handsome coolie. None of them were definite, however, and Wang might be with us yet but for the other servants, though I fancy he would have hanged himself alone in time. A whisper from the ama caused Rachel to “call” the next ton herself, and to borrow scales from an American friend down the hutung. It was a cold evening when the ton arrived, but we persisted in watching it unloaded, weighed, and carried in. But why were there not sixteen sacks, as the silky Chinese dealer just outside Hata-men had promised, and why did twelve sacks total five hundred chin more than a ton? It took us until next day to find out.