Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

It will be an imperturbable foreign visitor, however, who can keep his attention fixed on the stage long enough to note all this at once. The goings-on in the audience will probably prove more comprehensible, certainly more amusing. Without going into endless detail it may suffice to say that the climax of all those things which a Chinese audience does and a Western one does not is the demand for hot towels during the performance. One or two towel-men stand over a steaming tub in a far corner; as many as a dozen others are scattered about the hall, though their presence may not be suspected by the inexperienced until the bombardment of towels begins, about the end of the first round of pumpkin-seeds. All at once the air overhead is crisscrossed with flying white objects, which on closer attention prove to be bundles of hot, wet towels tightly rolled together. A man near the tub is throwing them to a colleague somewhere out in the house, who relays them on to others dispersed about, these doling them out along the rows of spectators, collecting them again after they have been used—not to give the ears a respite from the ceaseless uproar but to deceive the face and hands with the ghost of a washing—bundling them together once more to start them hurtling back high over head to the point of origin. The most expert venders of double-jointed Philadelphia peanuts at our national games cannot equal Chinese towel-men in the number of throws and the narrow margins of safety without injury to a spectator. Evidently the towel-service is included in the price of admission, unless the hawkers and the section guards band together to supply their clients this apparent necessity. Therefore the foreigner who gracefully declines this gracious attention, after noting that the returned towels are merely immersed and wrung out again as a bundle and once more sent the rounds, does not win the ill will that would accrue to him if there were a copper or two of cumshaw involved, and does no other damage than to block the wheels of progress long enough for information concerning his strange conduct to be relayed back to the tub-men and commented upon at least throughout the section he makes conspicuous by his presence.

The bombardment of towels goes on periodically from early afternoon until early morning, like all the rest of the performance. Where one play ends another begins with barely the interval of a sip of tea, and though some spectators are constantly coming and going, like the casual members of the orchestra and the undisguised “supers,” the endurance of the mass of them is phenomenal. Some time between five and seven o’clock many spectators vary their incessant munching and sipping by ordering a full meal from the runners of the adjoining tea-house, and the click of chop-sticks may now and then be heard above the louder clamor. But the spectacle, both on and off the stage, goes unconcernedly on.

It would require much more Chinese than I can so far understand to catch any of the dialogue—if that is the word for it—of a typical Chinese play. The inexperienced Westerner will seldom have the faintest idea what it is all about, or even who the characters stand for, so unintelligible to him are the signs and symbols by which the native spectator recognizes them and their doings. For that matter the average Chinese would not understand much unless he had imbibed all these old stories almost with his mother’s milk. The old, poetic, and often obsolete words in which the Chinese actor speaks—or rather “sings,” to use the misleading Chinese term—would be obscure enough in a sane and ordinary tone of voice; in his successful imitation of ungreased machinery his actual speech is probably of little more import to the hearers than are the words of an Italian opera to a Chicago audience. Like the Japanese the Chinese prefer to hear the same old historical themes and see the same old pageants over and over again, however, or at most to have new variations upon them, generation after century. Hence even the illiterate can often follow a play word by word without understanding a line of it. We have discovered that by having our teacher tell us the story beforehand we can guess the meaning of a considerable part of the action, thereby finding the Chinese theater much less of a bore than most foreigners report it. To every people its own ways; certainly the attempt to ape Western theatricals which was put on during the winter by a club of native élite, with traveled young Chinese of both sexes prancing about the stage in frock-coats and scanty gowns, not to mention bobbed hair, was more terrible than anything genuine Chinese actors ever perpetrate. Personally I have even become reconciled to Chinese “music”—in the olden days plays were given outdoors, hence the deafening quality of this—and in certain moods even to enjoy it, briefly, as one sometimes enjoys a crush in the subway or a rough-and-tumble mingling with the Broadway throng; and we have both grown very fond of seeing, if not of listening to, Mei Lan-fang.

Mr. Mei—whose family character means “peach blossom” and who is related to us to the extent of including an orchid in his given name—is China’s most famous and most popular actor. Like his father and grandfather before him he plays only female rôles, and while even his falsettos may grate on a Western ear, many is the foreigner who pursues him from theater to theater merely to watch his graceful movements, his inimitable dancing or simply the manipulation of his beautiful hands. Scrawl the three characters by which he is known on the bill-board or the newspaper space of any theater, inside Ch’ien-men or out, anywhere in China for that matter, though he has no need to tour the provinces, and the man in the box-office has only to order any suggestion of vacant space filled with chairs and lean back in perfect contentment. Mei Lan-fang carries his own troupe, like a Spanish matador his cuadrilla, even his own orchestra, and the arrangement of Chinese performances is such that he can play in several theaters on the same night, from eleven to midnight inside the Tartar City perhaps, where the doors close ridiculously early, the rest of the night among the better establishments outside the main wall. Seldom does he deign to appear earlier than that, unless at some special matinée in the Forbidden City or at the presidential palace, and he is under no necessity of appearing every night merely to keep the wolf from his door. By Chinese standards his income rivals that of any opera singer.

The Chinese are fond of complications of character in their plays, and some of Mr. Mei’s greatest successes are as a man playing a girl who in turn disguises herself as a man; but there is never a moment in which the basic femininity of the part does not stand clearly forth in the hands of this consummate artist. I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with him once. His house out in the heart of the Chinese City is outwardly commonplace; but the touch of the genuinely artistic temperament is nowhere missing inside the door. The delicate, almost white-faced man still in his twenties, sometimes looking as if he had barely reached them, proved to be one of the most gracious and at the same time most unobtrusive hosts I have ever met. His manner had not a suggestion of the financially successful, the popular idol, as it would manifest itself in the West. He was as simple, as unassuming, as wholly untheatrical as are the objects of Chinese art on which he spends his surplus wealth and time inconspicuous with real distinction. Among his treasures were many thin-paper volumes of classics, of old plays, some of them several centuries old, with annotations in the margins by bygone but not forgotten actors indicating tones, gestures, movements down to the crooking of a little finger. Mr. Mei makes much use of these, though not for slavish imitation. His entourage includes a scholar of standing whose task it is to weave new stories about the old themes, and from them the actor evolves new dances—which is not the word, but let it stand—and new ways of entertaining his crowded audiences without losing touch with the distant centuries to which they prefer to be transported within the theater. Mei Lan-fang does not drink tea on the stage. It is an arrogance of the profession to which his famous family never descended. Nor, one notes, do property-men trip unnecessarily about under his feet when he is performing. I have Mr. Mei’s word for it that the throat does not suffer from the constant unnatural tasks put upon it by his profession; but only from a man of such self-evident truthfulness could I believe it. Certainly there was nothing in his soft home-side speech to belie that surprising statement, as there was nothing in his modest manner to suggest that wherever he plays the streets are filled as far at least as the eye can see by night with waiting rickshaws.

Russians have occupied the extreme northeast corner of the Tartar City for centuries. Away back in the reign of K’ang Hsi, to whom all those of the white race were indeed outside barbarians, an army of the czar was defeated in what is now Siberia, and the captives brought to Peking were made into a defense corps after the style of the Manchu-“bannermen.” Gradually the Manchu warriors disappeared from the enclosure that once housed them only, as they grew weak and flabby and penniless under imperial corruption and sold out family by family to the Chinese, until to-day the Tartar City is that merely in name and in memory. But the Russians remain just where the victorious emperor assigned them. Two garish Greek Orthodox structures thrust their domes and spires aloft from within the large walled area which makes that corner of the city somewhat less of an open space given over to garbage-heaps, rag-pickers, and prowling dogs than are the other three. The Son of Heaven was graciously moved to permit his Russian bannermen to have their own religious teachers, and the Orthodox priests sent from Russia became not only missionaries to the surrounding “heathen” but the unofficial diplomatic agents of the czar. In time, when the powers saw fit to disabuse the occupant of the dragon throne of the impression that all the rest of the earth was tributary to him, the Russians also established their official minister in the Legation Quarter, with pompous buildings and another Orthodox church within a big compound. To-day, by consent of the Chinese, representatives of the old czarist régime still informally occupy this, while the unrecognized envoy of the Soviet finds his own accommodations, like any other tourist. But the establishment in the further corner of the city survives, boasting not merely a bishop but an archbishop, and numbering by the hundred the Chinese converts clustered in that section.

A Russian church service with a mainly Chinese congregation is worth going some distance to see. Nowadays the converts hardly outnumber their fellow-worshipers, so many are the destitute Russian refugees who have drifted to that distant northeast corner of Peking. They live thick as prisoners in the stone-walled cells of the old monastery where once only Orthodox monks recited their prayers,—frail women and underfed children as well as men bearing a whole library of strange stories on their gaunt faces. Groups of refugees who came too late or have not influence enough to find room in the cells live packed together in stone cellars, some still wearing the remnants of czarist uniforms, or of the various “White” armies that have gone to pieces before the advancing “Reds,” some still unrecovered from war-time wounds and sundry hardships.

The orchestra which enlivens the nights of the more fortunate foreigners in the frock-coat section of the city huddle together here on improvised beds that would hardly be recognized as such; in these ill smelling dungeons there are men who have not garments enough, even if they had the spirit left, to go forth and look for some possible way out of their present sad dilemma.

But one’s sympathy for the dispossessed Russians in China always soon comes to a frayed edge. Their scorn of manual labor even as an alternative to starvation, the unregenerate selfishness of their exiled fellow-countrymen in more fortunate circumstances, their lack of practicality, of plain common sense from the Western point of view, in a word their Orientalism, so out of keeping with their Caucasian exterior, tend to turn compassion to mere condolences which in time fade out to indifference. Perhaps any of us suddenly come down as a nation, like a proud sky-scraper unexpectedly collapsing into a chaotic heap of débris, would find ourselves bewildered out of ordinary human intelligence; but it is hard to avoid the impression that these individual weaknesses were there before the debacle, and that they are incurable, at least in the existing generation. A few such enterprises as printing, binding, and leather tanning have been started in the former monastery, but it was noticeable that almost all the actual work was being done by Chinese. Sturdy, even though possibly hungry, young men loafed about their cells and cellars complaining that they could not hire some one to rebuild their simple brick bathing-vat and cooking-stove. Chinese officials, especially of the petty grade, have not been over-kind to the groups of refugees that have fallen into their hands; but they rank at least on a par with the Russian archbishop of Peking, who considers the northeast corner of the city his personal property and demands the abject servility of the Middle Ages toward his exalted person from those of his fellow-countrymen whom he graciously admits to floor-space there in the shadow of his own spacious episcopal residence.

These ostentatious forms of Christianity seem much more in keeping with the Chinese temperament than the austere Protestantism of innumerable sects, which has dotted Peking, as it has all China, with its schools, churches, hospitals, and missions pure and simple. It is not at all hard to find resemblances between the services of the Russians and those in the lama temple a little west of them, in any joss-burning Chinese place of worship, or for that matter between these and high mass at Pei-t’ang to the northwest of the Forbidden City. The Catholics, too, go back for centuries in the life of Peking, to Verbiest and his fellow-Jesuits who served the Sons of Heaven in secular, as well as their subjects in religious, ways.