Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 12

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[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA.]

The building of the Great Wail, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, leaves us no room to boast over the Panama Ca.n.a.l.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHINESE WOMAN'S RUINED FEET.]

The lower picture shows the terrible deformity produced by foot-binding.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: CHINESE SCHOOL CHILDREN.]

The upper picture suggests a word about the amazing fertility of the Oriental races--the j.a.panese, for example, increasing from their birth-rate alone as fast as the United States from its birth-rate plus its enormous immigration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE AMERICAN CONSULATE AT ANTUNG.]

A great need of America in the East is better consular buildings.

Witness this one at Antung.

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Now, when this happened, the friends of the mistreated man began to murmur. Failing to do anything with the magistrate, they appealed to the magistrate's father--for though you may be fifty or seventy years old in China, if your father is living you are as much subject to his orders as if you were only ten; this is the case just as long as you both live. But when the father spoke about the complaints of the people the magistrate lied about the jar somehow, but not in a way entirely to deceive the old fellow. He decided to do some investigating, and went blundering around into a dark room in search of the jar, and before he saw what he was doing came upon it and fell into it. Whereupon he cried to his son to pull him out.

The son did come, but when he pulled out one father, behold there was another still in the jar--and then another and another and another. He pulled out one father after another till the whole room was full of fathers, and then he filled up the yard with fathers, and had six or eight standing like chickens on the stone wall before the accursed old jar would quit! And to have left one father in there would naturally have been equivalent to murder.

So this was the punishment of the unjust magistrate. He had, of course, to support all the dozens of aged fathers he pulled out of the jar (a Chinaman must support his father though he starve himself), and it is to be supposed that he used up all the wealth he had unjustly piled up, and had to work night and day as well all the rest of his life. Of course the jar, too, had to be returned to its owner, and in this way the whole community learned of the magistrate's unfairly withholding it.

This story is interesting not only for its own sake, but for {150} the light it sheds on Chinese life--the relations of father and son; the unjust oppression of the people by the officials in a land where the citizen is without the legal rights fundamental in American government; and, lastly, the "Arabian Nights" like flavor of this typically Chinese piece of fiction.

One of the funny things among the many funny things I have encountered in China is the peculiar way of buying or selling land, as reported to me by Rev. Dr. R. T. Bryan. If you buy land from a Chinaman, about Shanghai at least, without knowing the custom of the country, you may have to make him three additional payments before you get through with him. For, according to the custom, after the first payment he will give you a deed, but after a little while will come around sighing, regretting that he sold the land and complaining that you didn't pay enough. Accordingly, you will pay him a little more, and he will give you what is called a "sighing paper," certifying that the "sighing money" has been paid. A few days or weeks pa.s.s and he turns up again.

You didn't pay him quite enough before. Therefore, you make another small payment and he gives you the "add-a-little-more" paper showing that the "add-a-little-more" money has been paid. Last of all, you make what is called the "pull-up-root" payment, and the land is safely yours.

Of course, the impatient foreigner hasn't time for this sort of thing, consequently he pays enough more in the beginning to cancel these various dramatic performances. Doctor Bryan's deed certifies that the "sighing money," "add-a-little-more money," and "pull-up-root money"

have all been settled to start with.

"Pidgin English," or the corruptions of English words and phrases by means of which foreigners and Chinese exchange ideas, is also very amusing. "Pidgin English" means "business English," "pidgin"

representing the Chinaman's attempt to say "business." Some of the Chinese phrases are very useful, such as "maskee" for our "never mind." Other good phrases {151} are "chop-chop" for "hurry up,"

"chin-chin" for "greeting," and "chow-chow" for "food."

"Have you had plenty chow-chow?" my good-natured Chinese elevator-boy in Shanghai used to say to me after dinner; and the bright-eyed little brats at the temples in Peking used to explain their failure to do anything forbidden by saying they should get "plenty bamboo chow-chow"! Bamboos are used for switches (as well as for ten thousand other things), and "bamboo chow-chow" means the same thing to the Chinese boy as "hickory tea" to an American boy!

A Scotch fellow-pa.s.senger was telling me the other day of the saying that "The Scotchman keeps the Sabbath day, and every other good thing he can lay his hands on." Now, the Chinaman, unlike the Scotchman, doesn't keep the Sabbath, but he does live up to all the requirements of the second clause of the proverb. Nothing goes to waste in China except human labor, of which enough is wasted every year to make a whole nation rich, simply because it is not aided by effective implements and machinery. The bottles, the tin cans, the wooden boxes, the rags, the orange peels--everything we throw away--is saved. And the coolies work from early morn till late at night and every day in the week. Their own religion does not teach them to observe the seventh day, and this requirement of Christianity, in China as well as in j.a.pan, is regarded as a great hards.h.i.+p upon its converts.

Buddhism in China, as in j.a.pan, it may also be observed just here, is now only a hideous mixture of superst.i.tion and fraud. As I found believers in the j.a.panese temples rubbing images of men and bulls to cure their own pains, so in the great Buddhist temple at Canton I found the fat Buddha's body rubbed slick in order to bring flesh to thin supplicants, while one of the chief treasures of the temple is a pair of "fortune sticks." If the Chinese Buddhist wishes to undertake any new task or project, he first comes to the priest and tries out its advisability with these "fortune sticks." If, when dropped to the {152} floor, they lie in such a position as to indicate good luck, he goes ahead; otherwise he is likely to abandon the project.

Let me close this chapter by noting a remark made to me by Dr. Timothy Richard, one of the most eminent religious and educational workers in the empire.

"Do you know what has brought about the change in China?" he asked me one day in Peking. "Well, I'll tell you: it is a comparative view of the world. Twenty years ago the Chinese did not know how their country ranked with other countries in the elements of national greatness.

They had been told that they were the greatest, wisest, and most powerful people on earth, and they didn't care to know what other countries were doing. Since then, however, they have studied books, have sent their sons to foreign colleges and universities, and they have found out in what particulars China has fallen behind other nations. Now they have set out to remedy these defects. The comparative view of the world is what is bringing about the remaking of China."

In China, no doubt, the men who have brought the people this "comparative view of the word" were criticised sometimes for presuming to suggest that any other way might be better than China's way; but they kept to their work--and have won. Doctor Richard himself did much effective service by publis.h.i.+ng a series of articles and diagrams showing how China compared with other countries in area, population, education, wealth, revenue, military strength, etc. Such comparisons are useful for America as a country, and for individual states and sections as well.

Hong Kong, China.

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XVI

WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES

Of the cruelty of Chinese punishments I have already had something to say, but there is at least one thing that should be said for the Chinese officials in this connection: No matter how heinous his crime, they have never sent a criminal from Hong Kong to Manila in an Indo-China boat in the monsoon and typhoon season.

Dante could have found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the voyage as I made it. From Sat.u.r.day morning till Sunday night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost completely to one side, s.h.i.+vered, trembled, and recovered itself, only to yield again to the wrath and fury of mountain-like waves hurled thundering against it and over it.

The crack where the door fitted over the sill furnished opening enough to flood my cabin. In spite of the heat not even a crack could be opened at the top of the window until Monday morning. A bigger s.h.i.+p a few hours ahead of us found the sea in an even more furious mood. The captain stayed on the bridge practically without sleep three days and nights, going to bed, spent with fatigue and watching, as soon as he came at last into sight of Manila. Two weeks ago the captain of another s.h.i.+p came into port so much used up that he resigned and gave his first mate command of the vessel, while still another vessel has just limped into Manila disabled after buffeting the storm for a brief period.

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At any rate, the trip is over now, and I write this in Manila, with its tropical heat and vegetation, its historic a.s.sociations, its strange mixture of savage, Spanish, and American influences. The Pasig River, made famous in the war days of '98, flows past my hotel, and beautiful Manila Bay, glittering in the fierce December sunlight, recalls memories of Dewey and our navy. But the moss-green walls about the old Spanish city remind us of days of romance and tragedy more fascinating than any of the events of our own generation. In the days when Spain made conquest of the world these streets were laid out, and the statues of her sovereigns, imperious and imperial, still stand here to remind us that nations, like men, are mortal, and that for follies or mistakes a people no less surely than an individual must pay the price.

Nor let our own proud America, boasting of her greater area and richer resources, think she may ignore the lessons the history of her predecessors here may teach. The statue of Bourbon Don Carlos in his royal robe that stands amid the perennial green of the Cathedral Park--it may well bring our American officers who look out daily upon it, and the other Americans who come here, a feeling not of pride but of profound and reverent humility:

"G.o.d of Our Fathers, known of old.

Lord of our far-flung battle-line.

Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine.

Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget!"

In order to see what the Philippine country looks like, I left Manila Thursday and made the long, hot trip to Daguban, travelling through the provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Pangasinan. The first four of these are known as Tagalog provinces; the fifth is inhabited by Ilocanos and Pampangans. Three dialects or languages are spoken by the {155} tribes in the territory covered. Not far beyond Daguban are savage dog-eating, head-hunting tribes; taos, or peasants, buy dogs around Daguban and sell to these savages at good profits.

The provinces I travelled through are typical of Filipinoland generally. Rather spa.r.s.ely settled, only the smaller part of the land is under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high tigbao or Tampa gra.s.s, or covered with small forest trees. Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo is most in evidence; but the broad-leaved banana ranks easily next. The high topknot growth of the cocoanut palm and the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papaya afford a spectacle unlike anything we see at home. About Daguban especially many cocoanuts are grown, and the clumps of trees by the Agno River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River Nile in the time of Pharaoh--especially when I looked at the plowing going on around them. For the Filipino's plow is modelled closely on the old Egyptian implement, and hasn't been much changed. A properly crooked small tree or limb serves for a handle, another crooked bough makes the beam, and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, some of the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A piece of wood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another piece like U with the p.r.o.ngs pulled wide apart serves as a singletree. Then, with two pieces of rope connecting primitive hame and single-tree, the Filipino's harness is complete.

Before going into any further description of the plows, however, let us get our picture of the typical country on the Island of Luzon as I saw it on this hot December day. Great fields of rice here and there, ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring little brown men and women cutting the crop with old-fas.h.i.+oned knives and sickles; the general appearance not unlike an American wheat or oat harvest in early summer. Bigger fields of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper two feet green, the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some of it ta.s.selling, some that will not be in ta.s.sel before the last of {156} January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small freight boats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed out of single logs.

Most striking of all are the houses in which the people live, cl.u.s.tered in villages, as are farmhouses in almost every part of the world except in America. Surrounded in most cases by the ma.s.sive luxuriance of a banana grove, the Filipino's hut stands on stilts as high as his head, and often higher. One always enters by a ladder. In most instances there are two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12 feet, and a sort of lean-to adjoining, through which the ladder comes.

A one-horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the larger Filipino home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, but of bamboo--the ever-serviceable bamboo--which, as my readers probably know, strongly resembles the fis.h.i.+ng-pole reeds that grow on our river banks. The sills, sleepers, and scaffolding of the house are made of larger bamboo trunks, six inches or less in diameter; the split trunks form the floor; the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat like that of which we make our hamper baskets and split-bottom chairs; the roofing is of _nipal_, which looks much like very long corn shucks.

In short, imagine an enormous hamper basket, big enough to hold six or eight hogsheads, put on stilts, and covered with shucks: such in appearance is the Filipino's house. Around it are banana trees bent well toward the ground by the weight of the one great bunch at the top, and possibly a few bamboo and cocoanut trees. For human ornaments there are rather small and spare black-haired, black-eyed, brown-skinned men, women, and children in clothing rather gayly colored--as far as it goes: in some cases it doesn't go very far. The favorite color with the women-folk is a sort of peach-blossom mixture of pink and white or a bandanna-handkerchief combination of red and white. Bare feet are most common, {159} but many wear slippers, and not a few are now slaves enough to fas.h.i.+on to wear American shoes. The men, except the very poorest, wear white, nor is it a white worn dark by dirt such as Koreans wear, but a spotless, newly washed white.

Nearly every Filipino seems to have on clothes that were laundered the day before. A sort of colored gauze is frequently the only outer garment worn by either men or women on the upper part of the body.

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