Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

But there was no real famine in Chung-Hsin-Tien, my companion concluded. No one was actually starving—though how some of them kept from doing so on their visible means of support was beyond me. Under-nourishment was common; the only plentiful thing in town was children, especially boys, perhaps because of the custom of even the poorest of keeping the girls out of sight. For nature seems to take revenge on the Chinese for their ardent desire for male offspring. How often the traveler who has the audacity to pursue his questions far enough—for Chinese friends do not greet one another with inquiries as to the health of their respective families—will finally unearth the shamefaced answer, “All girls.” Some had sold their land—a mou, or about the sixth of an acre, at fourteen dollars “Mex” perhaps—to carry them over the winter, some their last household goods that would bring a copper; one man who was so far above the lower level as to have no hope of outside assistance answered my joking query as to the price of the most likable of his small sons with a quick, “Take him along!” But none had been reduced to the final necessity of tearing down their miserable houses in order to sell the few sticks of wood in them; hence there were deserving, but not urgent, cases.

The native helper had filled a huge sheet of red paper with the names and particulars of each family visited, to the dictation of my companion, who divided them into first-, second-, and third-class cases. The first were the most needy—the utterly possessionless, they would have seemed to Americans at home—who would be given “full assistance,” that is, a “Mex” dollar or two a month per person until the next harvest began to come in. Second class were those who still had something left—a few pounds of corn meal, a chair that might be sold, a job at a few coppers a day—and they would be helped accordingly. To be inscribed third was proof of comparative affluence; it meant that the family had a goat or a pig, perhaps even a donkey; that one of their jars was still half full of corn or millet or kaoliang, or that they had been caught in the act of smoking tobacco or of having a little handful of the weed in the house, prima facie evidence that they were really not suffering from hunger. To these, small distributions would be made if there was anything left over from the more needy cases. The two impressions, aside from the definition of the word “poverty” in China, which this canvassing left with me were, first, the unfailing cheerfulness, the hair-trigger smile and ready laughter, of even the most miserably destitute, and their tenacious clinging to custom in spite of misfortunes. It seemed never to have suggested itself to the poorest family in town that it might be well to limit the number of children it brought into the world to share its perpetual nothing; and mothers who did not have a pot or a whole garment to their names still somehow found cloths with which to bind their daughters’ feet. From their point of view of course this last effort was genuine parental sacrifice; for to leave the girl with whole feet would mean almost certain starvation without a husband instead of only partial starvation with one.

Itinerating missionaries in China can scarcely avoid living up to the biblical injunction to “suffer little children to come unto” them. For their first appearance at the edge of town is the signal for a flocking from all directions, not merely of all the boys and as many of the girls as are not restrained, but of a generous collection of men of all ages, and even some of the boldest women. Chinese and Western courtesy are diametrically opposed in some of their characteristics, and perhaps there is no wider gulf between them than the conception of proper behavior toward strangers. We consider it rude to stare; the Chinese consider it almost an insult not to stare. Like the young ladies of Spanish America, who would take it as much more than a slight on their beauty not to be ogled so brazenly that it becomes almost indecency by the young men lined up on either side of their promenade, so the Chinese high official or man of wealth would be seriously hurt by a failure of the populace to flock about him wherever he appears in public. Simple villagers cannot of course be expected to know that Westerners do not consider this attention so essential, and to that is added the most inquisitive temperament among the races of mankind, a curiosity which, though it is no exaggeration to dub it monkey-like, is probably proof of a higher grade of intelligence than that of more stolid and indifferent peoples. But it is a form of intelligence with which most travelers from the West, I believe, would very willingly dispense, for to be stared at unbrokenly hour after hour by a motionless throng becomes at times the most exasperating of experiences.

It is not of course to the advantage of a missionary to drive off the crowds that gather about him, for he has come to China mainly for the purpose of addressing crowds, and every tendency toward exclusiveness is so much set-back in his chosen work. Naturally, too, it is not fitting in the guest of an itinerating missionary to throw cups of tea or mud bricks in the faces of the compact mob through which may be scattered some of his host’s converts, however strong the temptation may become. During all our stay in Chung-Hsin-Tien, therefore, we were like kings at a levée—if we are to believe that kings were ever so thickly attended during the exchanging of their nighties for their breeches. There was a gate to the mission yard, and a padlock that fitted it; but the picking of that even from the outside seemed to be the easiest thing the town did. Besides, the yard was invaded so closely on our heels that nothing would have been gained by locking the gate. The door of the mud house that usually served as church, as well as for the sleeping-room of the local pastor and ourselves, was no barrier to the advance. Long before the preliminary tea was poured for us there was a compact wall of humanity drawn so tightly about us that we could barely move our elbows, and the sea of fixedly staring faces stretched away to infinity out through the yard. Now and then an undercurrent of discontent at inequality of proximity surged through the multitude, to break against our ribs or toss smaller urchins in between our legs and over our knees. When at length it came time to open our cots and sleeping-bags, there was still a large audience to such disrobing as we cared to do under such conditions, and it was an hour or two afterward before the most privileged characters had been convinced that they, too, should retire. Nor were we by any means out of bed next morning when there appeared the vanguard of the throng that was to wall us in all that day. It was hard somehow to understand just why a town which often saw foreigners still came to stand by the hour watching with the fixed eyes of a statue our every slightest movement, be it only the tying of a shoe-lace or the buttoning of a coat.

A large number of those about us bore famous names. Many a Chinese village is made up almost exclusively of persons having the same surname and the same ancestors, and Chung-Hsin-Tien, being no great distance from the birthplace of either, contains many descendants of both Confucius and Mencius. There was Meng the shopkeeper and Kung the cook, both Christians, right within the mission compound, and it was easy to find in any small crowd others bearing those illustrious names. Once I came upon a Mencius squatting in the dirt at the corner nearest the gate, shoveling away with worn chop-sticks a cracked bowlful of some uninviting food, and so ignorant that he fled in dismay when I suggested a photograph, refusing to have his soul thus taken from him. A little farther up the street a Confucius sold peanuts in little heaps at a copper each. Missionaries in this region say that those bearing the two famous names are so numerous that the difficulty of making converts is increased, because they are so proud of their ancestry that they will seldom risk the stigma attached to changing to a “foreign” faith. Yet there was a Confucius from this very town who was now a Presbyterian preacher, and the two names appear rather frequently on the church registers of southern Shantung.

Of late years at least it is not unduly easy to become an accepted Christian there. My companion spent half that Sunday morning in putting a dozen candidates through a long catechism, and permitted only two of them to join the church at once, baptizing them—from a tea-cup—at the morning service. It was fully as easy, too, to get out of the church as to get into it; one of the hardest and most important tasks of the missionaries is to see that backsliders are dropped from membership. Almost before we had entered the hole in the mud wall that passed for a city gate a rather addle-pated old man had appeared, hugging his well-worn Bible under his arm; and as long as we remained he hovered close about us, grinning at us upon the slightest provocation, as if to say, “We are brethren, far above this common herd.” He was about the first convert in the region—and one of the chief thorns in the flesh of the itinerator. For the latter had been forced to drop him from the church rolls years before because he had taken a concubine, and there was still no prospect of his being granted forgiveness, even though he had advanced the ingenious argument that he had been compelled to the act by his mother, lest the family graveyards be left without attendants. Yet he continued his church-going as religiously as if he were one of the principal deacons. Perhaps it was just retribution that he still had no son, in spite of his lapse from the tight missionary way. I confess that I did not quite follow the reasoning which made it quite all right to admit the concubine herself to church membership, but I have always been dense on theological niceties.

The day was delightful, and services were held out in the yard. Perhaps twoscore men and half as many women, not to mention a veritable flock of children, crowded together on the narrow little benches taken from the mud-hut church, or stood behind them. I could not but admire the endurance of the missionary, and silently congratulate him on the sturdiness inherited from his “Pennsylvania Dutch” ancestors. For it can scarcely be a mere mental relaxation to talk incessantly, earnestly, and energetically for an hour in a tongue as foreign as the southern Shantung dialect, while Chinese urchins by the dozen, from seatless-trousered infancy to devilish early youth, seemed to be doing their utmost to make life about them unbearable; and when even the adults frequently displayed habits that are not usual in our own church gatherings. Or, if this is not enough to try any man’s strength and patience, there was the frequent torture of listening to the horrible imitation of our hymns perpetrated, with missionary connivance, by the congregation. Evidently no Chinese can “hold” a tune, but he can do almost anything else to it which a vivid imagination can picture. Why their own “music” cannot be adapted to religious purposes to better advantage is one of those innumerable questions which flock about the traveler in China like mosquitos in a swamp.

Evening services of almost as strenuous a nature, and many personal conferences on religious or financial matters, plumply filled out the day, and early next morning, when the last clinging convert had been shaken off without the suggestion of violence that would have planted a little nucleus of discontent in the community, we were away again by wheelbarrow. I am in no position to testify as to how strictly the few Christians of Chung-Hsin-Tien lived up to their faith in every-day life, but they, and no small number of their as unwashed and ragged fellow-townsmen, missed mighty little of the vaudeville performance which the appearance of a foreigner or two in almost any Chinese town seems to be considered by the inhabitants. This time we had three barrow-men, one of them a first-class candidate for famine relief funds, whose insistent smile at this unexpected windfall of a job was less surprising than the mulish endurance he somehow got out of a chaff and bean-hull diet. Less brute strength is required, however, in the handling of a Chinese wheelbarrow than appearances suggest. During the afternoon I changed places for a bit with the coolie between the front handles, and while I would not care to adopt barrowing as a profession while some less confining source of livelihood remains to me, the thing ran, on the level at least, more like a perambulator than the most optimistic could have imagined. The Chinese are adepts in the art of balancing, and the wheelbarrow, like the rickshaw and the “Peking cart,” is so adjusted as to call for less exertion than the sight of it suggests. Ups and downs, sand or soft earth, sheer edges of “road,” and the passing of many similar vehicles where there is no room to pass, however, make an all-day journey no mere excursion even to a team of three barrow-men.

Women and children were scratching about here and there in the fields; the men were bringing manure in two big baskets fixed on a barrow, such as carry the night-soil of Peking out through the city gates, and were piling it in little mounds differing from the myriad graves only in size. The New Year season was visibly over, and the incessant working-days had come again. Somehow the name “Shantung” had always called up the picture of a half-wild region, in spite of the protests of reason; I found it instead very thoroughly tamed, as befits one of the most populous regions on the globe—tamed at least in the agricultural sense. When it came to such afflictions as bandits, officials, and the Yellow River there is still much taming to be done in the province of Confucius.

We passed almost incessantly through villages. High on the tops of the smooth, bare hills that grew up as we advanced were rings of what seemed to be stone, refuges built at the time of the Taiping Rebellion, which came to a standstill in this very region. They were only walls, with perhaps still a well inside, though the suspicion was growing that bandits were finding a new use for them. Once we passed close on the left an isolated stony peak that is as sacred as Tai-Shan, though much less famous. Thousands of country people climb it, especially in the New Year season, either as their only penance excursion, or as a part of their pilgrimage through all the holy land of China. It is a rough and uninviting climb, but nowhere is filial devotion more generously rewarded, if we are to believe the faithful. Therefore one may on almost any day see the son of an ailing father, dressed only in his Chinese trousers, holding his hands with palms together in front of him, a stick of burning incense between them, marching to the top of the mountain without once taking his eyes off the rising thread of smoke before him. A crowd follows close behind, and one of these carries the clothing of the devotee, whose father is certain to recover under this treatment—unless one of several hundred little incidents occur to make the penance useless.