Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

A few lucky mortals have names that can be put into Chinese just as they stand, not only leaving them audibly recognizable to their compatriots but saving their given names from the scrap-heap. There is Mr. Fay, of course, Mr. Howe and Mr. May, and obviously Mr. Lee is orally at home anywhere in China, whether the scholarly see him as a “pear” or “clear dawn.” On the other hand there are names that cannot possibly be put into Chinese even faintly resembling themselves,—Messrs. Smith and Jones, for instance. It is quite as necessary to know the Chinese name of the friend you wish to find in China as to be able to speak Chinese; more so, in fact, for while the Celestials are the antithesis of their island neighbors in the rapidity with which they grasp an idea from signs and motions, it is difficult, unless some outstanding personal characteristic is involved, to express a proper name by a gesture. You may go up and down a Chinese city in which he has lived for twenty years shouting for your dear old schoolmate Kelly, shepherding a flock of Chinese in the general direction of heaven now, and never find a trace of him unless chance puts you on the track of his new appellation. Luckily there are but a hundred or so family names in all China, and as many characters fit to be used as such, so that one may soon become fairly expert at guessing.

One must have a Chinese name, not only because one would otherwise be unmentionable, on respectful occasions, even to one’s own servants, but because a plentiful supply of visiting-cards is absolutely indispensable. Fortunately these can be had in China at a fraction of what they cost at home; because not only are cards exchanged on the slightest provocation, but one of those hastily printed scraps of paper is just as important and just as final anywhere within the once Celestial Empire as in South America. Without a card a millionaire in evening-dress is a mere coolie; with one the most disreputable foreign tramp who ever seeped back into the interior from the treaty-ports is a gentleman fit to dine with a Tuchun.

In the olden days of not so long ago Chinese name-cards were red, the color for happiness. To have a white card meant that one’s father or mother had died within the past three years; those mourning the recent loss of a grandparent had yellow or blue ones. The size of the card determined the importance of the one whose name it bore, or vice versa, so that the card of a viceroy or a generalissimo was of the size of a sheet of foolscap, a blood-red splash that could be seen half a mile away. Colors and size both cost money, however; moreover China has become, in name at least, a republic. White cards are now in quite general use, therefore, and though they still vary in size, I have never been handed one larger than a coat-pocket. Some remain red on one side and white on the other, especially among the formal and the wealthy; the ultra-modern have their English name on one side and Chinese on the other, like foreign residents. The custom of using both sides seems to be an old one. Often the formal or “business” name appears on the front, sometimes with the rank or calling, while on the back, in much smaller characters, are the hao and the yuan-ch’i, the name used only by intimates, and the ancestral birthplace—which even the father of the man represented may never have seen. Not a few Chinese use two different cards. One of them bears the characters meaning, “This is only a friendly exchange-card”; in other words, it has no import in serious or business matters. If a Tuchun graciously gives you his “exchange-card” that does not mean that you can use it to give orders to his soldiers or borrow money in his name at a bank, though his official card may still have almost the potency of the signet-ring of a king in the days of ruffles and feathers.

A play modeled more or less on Chinese lines which went the round of the English-speaking world some years ago has familiarized us with some of the peculiarities of the Chinese theater—or, from their point of view, with those of our own. At least those of us who had the pleasure of attending that performance know that on the Chinese stage a banner held aloft by two coolies at opposite ends of it stands for a city gate, and that when a man has been histrionically killed he gets up, wipes his nose, and saunters off the stage, quite as invisible to the audience as are the property-men incessantly wandering about among the actors with the ultra-bored expression of men more completely surfeited with things theatrical than all the first-nighters and dramatic critics of Christendom rolled into one. But the Chinese stage has other points which were not included in that delightful effigy of it, partly because to make it too Chinese would have been the surest way to drive away any Western audience, partly because invention advances day by day. I enjoy the casual, lackadaisical, “invisible” property-men of the Chinese theater, but I find the man with the thermos bottle still more beguiling. For “props,” dressed not in black, as the imported version of Celestial theatrical life would have us believe, but in the hit-or-miss costume of the Chinese laboring-class, with blue denims very much the favorite, is after all at home in the theater and soon becomes even to the foreign eye as natural a part of the decorations as does the omnipresent coolie in or out of doors. I wonder if their property-men are not really invisible to the Chinese, for do they not always have servants and attendants flocking incessantly about them anywhere, everywhere, on the most solemn as well as the most trivial occasions? But I have never quite gotten used to the thermos-bottle man and able to look upon him with complete equanimity. He is no theater employee, but the personal servant of this or that important actor, which actor often does not remain more than an hour or two at a time in one theater; hence, at least in Peking in the winter season, the man who brings his master his indispensable tea at the climax of every histrionic flight wears overcoat, fur or knitted cap, and all the rest of the midwinter equipment, so that, bursting suddenly but casually in upon a court ceremony or a battle scene set in the color-splashed days to which Chinese dramas hark back, he suggests an experienced and unexcitable arctic explorer come to succor with the latest contrivance a group of Martians enjoying an equatorial holiday.

The thermos bottle was, of course, unknown to those actors of some generations or centuries back who refused to be deprived even for the length of a scene of the national beverage, and at the same time wished to impress upon the audience, itself engaged in satisfying the inner man quite as freely as if seated at home, that they, for all the low rank of players, were just as important, thereby establishing a custom that is all but universal on the Chinese stage. Old-fashioned actors, or those less generously subsidized by the box-office, also have their tea at the end of every crisis; but it is brought, not in the latest triumph of science and by a personal retainer, but by one of the omnipresent “props,” by a disengaged “super,” or by one of the beggarly loafers that seem always to be hanging about behind the scenes—if they can be called such—of a Chinese theater. They, too, sip the uninebriating cup held up to them while half turning their backs or holding an edge of their always voluminous costumes over a corner of the mouth, a conventional pretense which is supposed to make the act invisible to the audience, and which so far as outward appearances go seems actually to do so. Besides, why should an act as general and almost as continuous among the Chinese as breathing attract the attention of a generation that has probably associated it with every dramatic climax since the oldest man among them first paid an admission fee? If so slight a thing as this brought inattention to the play, what would not the orchestra accomplish in the way of distracting from the plaudits due the actors, scattered as it is about the stage itself, maltreating its strange instruments or refraining therefrom in the most casual manner, to light a cigarette, to scratch itself, to ply a toothpick, or strolling individually on or off, in any garb at any moment of the afternoon or evening that happens to suit the individual fancy.

There is a theater in the heart of the Tartar City completely Westernized in architecture and general arrangements, yet where perfectly Chinese plays are given; but the foreigner who wishes to get the complete atmosphere must go “outside Ch’ien-men” into the Chinese City. For after all it is the audience and what takes place in front of the stage as much as what goes forward upon it that repays the Westerner for visiting a Chinese theater. In this busiest part of Peking, among the blocks where the singsong-girls ply their popular trade, are scattered many genuinely native playhouses, and farther on there are numerous makeshift ones hastily thrown together of boards, mats, and sheet-iron, stretching beyond the T’ien-ch’iao, the “Heavenly Bridge” with its swarming outdoor markets, across which emperors were carried for centuries to the near-by Temple of Heaven. Out there one may hear much of the play and more of the “music” than he cares to, while merely riding past in the afternoon—for genuine Peking theaters are in full swing from about noon until long after midnight.

Perhaps on the whole the visitor will get the most for his money at any of those playhouses lost in the maze of narrow streets not far outside Ch’ien-men, without earning the ill will of his rickshaw-man by driving him ’way out to the Heavenly Bridge. Here he will find himself, though perhaps not without Chinese help, entering what looks much like a warehouse or a wholesale establishment, a roofed court overcrowded with crude, narrow, painfully upright benches black with time and the food and drinks that have been spilled upon them for generations from the little shelves protruding along the back of each for the use of the row behind. The foreigner is so far out of the orbit of his kind in one of these establishments that, though the Legation Quarter is barely a hop, skip, and jump away, just beyond the mammoth Tartar wall, and those two of the Peking railway stations out of which emerge almost all foreign visitors to the capital are still nearer, he will probably not be seated before what looks like a coolie comes to ask his name, preferably to get his card, explaining, if there is any common denominator of words in which to do so, that every wai-guo-ren who enters the place must be reported at once, so that a policeman may be sent to protect him. Yet it is years since a foreigner has needed individual police protection anywhere within the Chinese City half as much as the unpaid gendarme who will keep an eye upon him throughout the performance needs the tip which he will not refuse if it is properly forced upon him.

Strictly speaking the foreign visitor does not find himself a seat, any more than he discovers the theater without help. He is, ipso facto, a “possessor of money,” and nowhere that he stirs in China, least of all in a theater, are there lacking men eager to take as much of that commodity away as can be bluffed or wheedled out of him. Hence the conspicuous new-comer is beset from the very entrance by a flock of men in the all too familiar garb of unwashed coolies, each eager to lead him to some different section of the house. If he is easily led he will find himself installed before he knows it in a rickety chair in one of the little pretenses of boxes around the narrow balcony, the only part of the house where women spectators may sit. The prices are higher up there, and the inevitable rake-off of his guide correspondingly larger. If he is wise he will insist upon remaining in the pit, not too near the uproarious orchestra and not so close to the back as to interfere with the throwing arms of the towel-men. When at last he has settled down as the protégé of a man who seems suddenly to grow superciliously patronizing toward him the moment he is sure of keeping him in his own section, and has apparently made lifelong enemies of all the others who tried to seat him elsewhere, he becomes at once the prey of the innumerable hawkers of this and that who wallow and shout their way through the audience quite irrespective of a possible interest in the stage. Perhaps it occurs to him that he bought no ticket, and was asked for none at the door. No one does as he enters the purely Chinese theater. By the time each auditor has adjusted himself as well as his bodily bulk will permit to the impossible seats behind the tippy shelves, a man comes to sell him a ticket and to take it up with one and the same motion. Prices are not high, sixty to eighty coppers at most, including the percentage that is almost sure to be added out of respect for his alien condition; even in the Westernized theater within the Tartar City a seat anywhere in the pit or parquet rarely reaches the height of a “Mex” dollar. Then a man who thinks he chose his seat for him must also have his “squeeze,” but this by no means amounts to the sum subtracted by the old ladies who pose as ushers in the theaters of Paris. Long before these formalities are concluded, simultaneously with his sitting down, in fact, the countless dispensers of food and drink are taking his patronage for granted. A tea-cup sadly in need of an hour’s scouring with sand is placed top down on the unwashed seat-back before him, soon to be followed by a tea-pot the spout of which, if he is observant, he has probably seen some unsoaped neighbor sucking a moment before, now refilled with boiling water. Little dishes of shriveled native peanuts, of pumpkin-seeds, of half a dozen similar delicacies which he has often seen along the outdoor markets and in the baskets of street-hawkers without ever having felt a desire to make a closer acquaintance with them, probably also a joint of sugar-cane, will likewise be set in front of him before he can say his Chinese name, unless he waves all these things aside with a very imperative gesture. None of the hawkers catch the meaning of this at once, at least outwardly, and when they finally do their resentment often reaches the point of what sounds unpleasantly like more or less subtle vituperation. Whoever heard of going to a theater without sipping tea and cracking pumpkin-seeds? Why does this wealthy barbarian come and occupy a seat if he is going to cheat the men who supply that part of the house out of their rightful and time-honored selling privileges?

By and by one may be able to turn one’s attention to the stage, though one has certainly not been unconscious of it, auricularly at least, since entering the door. The stage is nothing but a raised platform with a low railing on all four sides, such as might have been the auction-place in the days when the building was perhaps the warehouse it looks as if it must have been. Whatever serve as dressing-rooms at the rear, which according to the space there cannot be much, are separated from the stage by an alleyway across which the exiting and entering players hop. The antics on the stage are in no noticeable way different from those at the Westernized Peking theaters regularly patronized by foreigners. The masks and wigs and terrifying costumes are probably cruder, less splendid, and worse adjusted; the lean and bathless coolies who come on at frequent intervals in orderless groups undisguised as soldiers, courtiers, and who-knows-what are if anything a trifle more abject and bovine; there may not appear a single thermos bottle during the whole evening, though there will be as incessant a consumption of what passes for tea among the great mass of the Chinese. Certainly there will be no scenery in the Western sense, though there may be a few curtains half shutting off the inadequate dressing-room space, and some pretenses of city gates, thrones, and the like improvised on the spur of the moment by the bored property-men out of strips of cloth and half-broken chairs. The conventionalized things which take the place of scenery, the strange whips carried by those who are supposed to be mounted, and the something which tells the audience that the bearer is riding in a boat are somewhat the worse for wear, while the cushions which “Props” disdainfully throws out in front of the stars when it is time for them to kneel are almost slippery with the grease of generations. But the tumbling and the juggling which imply that one of the frequent battles is going on will be quite the same, except that it will not be so well done, as inside the main city, and the uproar will be just as constant and if anything a trifle more deafening.

One theater outside Ch’ien-men has only female players; but they appear in the same rôles, in exactly the same time-honored plays, as the all-men casts in other theaters, and act as nearly as possible in the same way, equally dreadful even in the atrocious falsetto which is the Chinese actor’s specialty, as noises from the pit of the stomach are of those of Japan. There may be many a guttural “Hao!” from the men in the audience for the juggling feats of the stars, winning their battles thus after the time-honored manner of stage generals or emperors; perhaps even greater signs of approval for some fine point skilfully rounded in the old familiar themes, which escapes the foreigner entirely; but there is never a suggestion of the thought of sex, not a hint, except in their general appearance, that the players are women and not men. Some of the unwashed girls who fill out the cast, looking like nothing so much as kitchen wenches in odds and ends of old finery, are quite as clever acrobats, in battle-scene tumbling at least, as the men at other places, though they get less a month than a Broadway chorus-girl spends on chewinggum in a week.