Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The scales, of course, being Chinese, consisted of a mere stick with marks on it; but for the same reason it would have been impossible for them to be as simple and straightforward as they looked. All such scales have two loops by which to suspend them, and Wang assured us that both of these were used at once. That was all. Even the lady down the street who had been using them all winter did not know the difference. When at last we learned the Chinese trick of the scales the missing four bags were easily accounted for; and a little more trouble, mainly for the benefit of foreign residents in general, brought the blackened cart-driver over to confess that Wang had intercepted him just around the corner from us and sold the four bags to a little coal-yard almost behind our bedrooms—the same one, of course, from which he had bought back enough to fulfil his guarantee. The night before, Wang having asked permission to go out and get his hair cut, or something of the sort, we had been startled to have all the other servants irrupt upon us over our evening lamp, smiling nervously, but saying through the cook as spokesman that they could not endure our being misled about the missing man any longer. He was keeping bad company nights, they announced with visible unwillingness; he often brought in friends to sleep on their already crowded k’ang; coppers were sticking to his fingers in a way which apparently even a cooks’ union could not approve.

Chinese servants are not in the habit of tattling against one another to their masters, and things must have come to a pretty pass to bring about this unusual scene. But we waited until we had other proof that it was not merely a case of spite; then we spoke gently to Wang as he was stirring the fire in my office next afternoon. There were four bags of coal missing from the ton of the night before, we confided to him, and as we did not wish to have the police mixed up in so small a matter we wondered if perhaps he could trace them. Then we went out to tea. That evening found us without a coolie; he had folded up his bed and departed, and he has never been back to claim the three or four days’ wages due him.

Wang is a handsome youth, to Chinese eyes, and naturally he needed more money than his older stick-at-home colleagues. Besides, he did more hard work than all the others. If he had come to me privately and whispered his troubles, I think I should have been tempted to give him a monthly bonus, if he could have convinced me that the other servants would not hear of it, rather than see him depart; for never again in this imperfect world do I hope to display such gleaming shirt-bosoms as Wang furnished me. The ama promptly introduced her husband as coolie, and he has proved satisfactory, besides being under a watchful eye that completely belies the accepted notions of the position of wives in the Chinese scheme of things. But stiff shirts go to a professional laundry now, and though a new front costs there just one-tenth what it would in New York, they have lost that final touch of perfection, of youth and genius, which Wang put upon them.

But on the whole our Peking servants are good, as human beings the world over go, for all the Wangs among them. I shall have forgotten their faults long before I forget the motherly care they have taken of my family during my long absences, the tasteful little presents they gave my wife on her birthday when I was not there to give her any myself, and the grandfatherly way they have with our small son.

I should be sorry, however, if I have given the false impression that living is on the whole much cheaper for the foreigner in Peking than at home, thereby causing our no doubt overworked State Department to be bombarded with ten-dollar bills and demands for passports. Whether it is because low prices tempt one to spend more than one could if they were high, or that the absurd cost of certain necessary things physically or mentally imported from the Western world mount up faster than seems possible, we find that we are spending quite as much in Peking as we did in New York, and we do not play bridge or the races.

The Chinese way of housekeeping, as we have pieced it together from bits of information picked up among our native acquaintances, is quite different from that of foreign residents. According to them, middle-class Chinese families usually have two servants—an ama and a cook. The ama does the washing and all the general housework, at least in the women’s apartments. Obviously the Chinese would be horrified beyond speech at the goings-on in foreigners’ houses; the “boy” of our white-haired compatriot down the hutung, for instance, lays out her most intimate garments when he judges it is time for her to change! Such an ama receives from one to two dollars a month, and a “present” of two or three dollars at each of the four principal Chinese holidays. Servants in native families are also given their rice, the monthly rice allowance for the whole household being fixed and the domestics eating the poorest quality. But they must have more income, and that is where gambling comes in. Much of this goes on in the average Chinese home, even among the women and their feminine guests in the afternoons. For every dollar staked ten cents is set aside by custom as cumshaw for the servants. Cigarettes sold at eight coppers a package around the corner cost the family and its guests ten, and so on. But gambling is the important thing. Servants in wealthy or political families, where high stakes are the rule, may get as much as a hundred dollars a month. A trustworthy Chinese informant told us that the one question always asked him by a prospective servant is some form of, “Is there gambling?” Where there is not, it is hard to get and keep good servants. In these days of comparative poverty in Peking those who cannot find places with foreigners, or have not the courage and adaptability such positions require, often have a hard time of it.

It would not be just, as well as being a sad blow to his pride, to mention Li Hsien-sheng among our servants. Mr. Li is our Chinese teacher. By our own choice he, too, speaks no English, so that our introduction to the language is by the method by which children learn one. He comes for an hour every afternoon, and carries away a ten-dollar bill at the end of each month. Yet he is something of a scholar, even if, like all his colleagues we have so far tried, not much of a teacher. However, I must not be too severe toward those numerous men of Peking who eke out a livelihood by guiding the barbarian within its gates into the mysteries of their strange tongue. At least they earn all they are paid, and if one learns to use them mainly as a dictionary, the result may be more worth while than at first seems possible. Nor is this the place to express my opinions, harsh or genial, on the incredible Chinese language. Suffice it for the moment to say that we both soon found ourselves able to express our simple desires to the servants without calling in some more experienced friend, and by midwinter could make ourselves understood to merchants keenly eager to understand us. The more diligent, stay-at-home, and mentally alert member of the family quickly left me in the linguistic background, but even she cannot keep pace with “Ha-li,” as the Chinese call my son and namesake. Though his third birthday is still ahead of him, he is already the family authority on tones and similar bugbears of the adult student of the Celestial vernacular, and I should hesitate to pit myself against him even in a test of vocabulary. I can only plead that it is an unfair advantage in acquiring a new language not to be able to speak any other when the acquisition begins.

Besides, what chance does an overworked father have compared to the opportunities of childhood? When “Ha-li” is not up on the wall discussing with the guardians who live there whatever he and they have in common, or chatting in Chinese with playmates whose mother-tongue may be that of anywhere from Brittany to Odessa, he is listening to the voices of the world outside our compound as they drift over to us. He has already picked up more hawkers’ cries than an adult ear can distinguish, and totes his basket about the courtyard shouting his wares, hand to ear in the Peking venders’ fashion, in tones so exactly those of the original outside that we often wonder what that original thinks of his echo. Daylight brings a never ending succession of these hawkers, from the cereal-man so early in the morning that surely no one could have the appetite to call him in, to the seller of sweetmeats so late at night that none but habitually hungry people could still be thinking of food. Our neighbors probably do some cooking of their own, but they save much fuel by patronizing these itinerant restaurants, the more sumptuous of them push-carts of a very Chinese type, most of them mere baskets oscillating from shoulder-poles. The people about us seem to have no fixed meal-hours, if indeed they keep any track of time at all. They eat one by one as appetite moves them or as coppers are available, and as surely as we leave home we will see a child or two, a woman, or some other solitary member of a large family squatted in the dirty little hutung beside their door engrossed in the contents of a bowl that has been rented, chop-sticks and all, from the vender who waits so patiently for the transaction to be completed that he does not seem to realize he is waiting.

Some of the street cries are almost musical, even to our Western ears; some hawkers use instruments to spare their voices. The barber twangs what looks like a gigantic pair of tweezers; the knife- and scissor-sharpener blows a long horn or clashes together half a dozen heavy steel pieces carried only for that purpose; the toy-and-candy man has his gong, the china-riveter his swinging bells, the blind man his reed pipe, or his big brass disk, and his long tapping cane, and the water-seller has, of course, his squeaking wheelbarrow. The croak of the oil-man suggests some superannuated frog; the jolly old fellow who peddles Chinese wine from a beautiful copper urn has a succession of hoarse shouts that never vary; the cabbage-man, the peanut-man, the delicatessen wagon, so to speak, even the rag-picking women, all have their own cries, distinctive, yet unintelligible until one has learned them by rote rather than by meaning, as Peking did generations ago. Even we dull-eared adults know nearly all of them now, and are conscious of something missing if they fail to come at the usual hour, which is a rare lapse indeed. One fellow sings what might almost be a bar from some Italian opera. He is the gramophone-man, carrying his box and his big tin horn, and offering to play his well worn Chinese records for those families that have the coppers to spend on mere entertainment. The seller of fritters also comes near being a singer, with a lilting refrain that stays with one long after he has passed. But all in all the cries are disappointing. Though some start off as music, even though it be of the falsetto kind beloved of the Chinese, they almost invariably bring up somewhere in a sudden raucous shout that spoils them. Perhaps, as even some foreign enthusiasts insist, our Western ears are tuned only to the simplicity of Western music; our scale of eight tones may be crude as compared with the twenty-five gradations of the Chinese. But I doubt it. I have tried to imagine that haunting street-cry which trills through the opera “Louise” ending in a shrill shout. Surely its lyric quality would not thus be improved. Yet all this does not mean that our Peking cries are displeasing. Their fascination is something subtle, and we shall be sorry to move on again out of their orbit.