THE BAFFLING LAND

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 November 1934, Page 3

THE BAFFLING LAND

HAUNTING PICTURE OF CHINA. “A Surgeon’s China,’ by Albert Gervais, is reviewed in the London “Sunday Times” as follows:— This book is enchanting. It is rich in humanity, it runs the gamut from haunting tragedy and macabre horrore to the wittiest of farce. One story alone reveals more of the essential China than a dozen ordinary books of travel. The author , a French surgeon, wished to demonstrate anatomy' by dissecting a body. The first attempt led to an attack on the hospital by a maddened crowd crying, “Death to the foreign corpseeater! Death! Death!” On the second occasion the Chinese director of the hospital triumphantly announced that he had found a way to avoid ill-feeling. With the cooperation of the governor he would have the subject delivered alive. No one, he said reasonably, could find fault with an experiment that differed hardly at all from ordinary torture. “But the man must be dead!” insisted the doctor. The director said he had imagined that the process of dissection would in time produce the desired result. If it didn’t, any soldier would finish the fellow. When the doctor still objected he gave way: the felon selected would, he promised, be dead. But when the great day arrived, and the governor and so many notables arrived with their families that there was room for only four students, a man was led in in chains. In a fury the doctor rose to leave. Sighing at such obstinacy, the director murmured a word to the soldiery: a shot rang out, and the victim was laid on the’table, the blood running from his head. The governor’s children burst into tears. Appalling, thought the stunned Frenchman, that little children should witness such horrors! The governor raised a child on each knee: the crying ceased. “They were cross because they couldn’t see very well,” explained the director, courteously, indicating that the audience was waiting.

THE PRIEST AND THE BANDIT. In time, says Dr. Gervais, who served with a medical mission in remote Western China for six years, the foreigner trying to understand .the psychology of the people admits himself baffled, and falls back on a wise tolerance. Take the case of Bather . Tho priest kept a linger pickled in alcohol. A little souvenir, he explained. A Chinese Catholic had been robbed by bandits; in addition, they had cut off her linger to obtain her wedding-ring. This could not be tolerated; his reverence sent for the bandit chief. After two hours’ haggling the bandit restored the stolen money .and ring and paid 30 dollars compensation for the linger. And the secret of his power? It was very simple. Native banks were notoriously unreliable; the priest was the bandit’s banker.

In Szechuan, Dr. Gervais found, all values were, from the Westerner’s point of view, topsy-turvey. A man was expected to let his wife die horribly rather than offend a conservative mother who disapproved of foreign doctors. Devoted sons, beside

a father’s sickbed, thought nothing of remarking casually and audibly that the old man was just about dead. A servant accused by the doctor of selling women, indignantly denied the charge: he had, he said, merely sold his wife. The governor of the province, when cholera threatened to remove half the population, asked how many people the precautions urged by the scientists would save. “Perhaps 200,000 people,” was the reply. “Then I am afraid I cannot adopt them,” he replied. And charmingly, with remorseless logic, he explained that in Szechuan life was one long desperate struggle for the means of subsistence. 200,000 deaths from cholera would save 200,000 deaths from famine.

When cholera was not raging life was complicated by plague, floods, famines, civil wars, and banditry—all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with possibly one or two newcomers. Dr. Gervais’s friend, Morel, wished to visit a wounded general. He paid 10 dollars to the bandits’ representative, and was provided with an escort. He started. Ten shots (the precise nupiber had significance later) rang out from the roadside, a bullet narrowly missed his head, a coolie was wounded. The doctor’s first thought was that he had been double-crossed. This, said his Chinese boy, was madness. The explanation was quite honourable: this particular bandit chief was not in the union. A villainous, pock-marked fellow, he had a scar down one arm: the doctor recognised in him an' old patient. The bandit chief apologised for having held him up. He did not want to make money out of his benefactor. On the other hand, he added prudently, he did not want to lose money through him, either. It was suggested as a reasonable compromise that the doctor should pay five dollars (50 cents a cartridge) for the ammunition he had caused to be wasted. The doctor’s Chinese followers agreed that this was eminently fair, and, having offered to relieve the Frenchman of the nuisance of his wounded coolie (“we could kill him for you,” he suggested obligingly), the bandit rode away.

CHOOSING A NAME. '. Life in this remote backwater might be supposed simple. Actually it was baffling in its complexity. Dr. Gervais found a people who saw nothing strange in the young presenting the old with a coffin and the old deriving great comfort therefrom.

Even domestic arrangements were of an inconceivable complexity. A bachelor, Dr. Gervais was yet forced by public opinion and the specialisation of -labour to employ 13 servants. No water-boy could open the gate or help the cook without “losing face.” His number one boy,, he learned, was regarded as perfectly honest as long as he took only 10 per cent, commission on every purchase; this, plus a percentage of the servants’ wages, was his “squeeze,” sanctified by custom. Custom dictated, too. that foreigners should .have Chinese names: after a long conference the experts agreed that Morel should be known as Mu. But .since twenty characters at least are pronounced Moo. it became a question of choosing the right one, a character that would be elegant in writing, easy to recognise, and with a meaning that would not seem too ridiculous. Mu meaning louse, Mu

meaning mother, and Mu meaning tomb, were not suitable. Other Mus were discarded for various reasons, and there were only four Mus left in the list of possibilities: Wood, Fodder, Solemn, and—if no other would do-— Eye.

Goaded by Gervais. Morel pondered gloomily on the advantages of being Mr Fodder and Mr Eye, and decided without enthusiasm to be known qs Mr Solemn. The bewildering difficulties of Chinese ideographs arc increased by the existence of five different tones for each word, with suph radically different meanings that Gervais found he had been making a mock of his house coolie and driving him to the verge of suicide by pronouncing his name, Lao-tiri, which means “Old Nail,” in a tone that signified “Old Cuckold.”