THE CHINAMAN AT HOME.

Otago Witness, Issue 2433, 31 October 1900, Page 63

THE CHINAMAN AT HOME.

By Joux Foster FnASiiR.

THE HUMOROUS SIDE OE THE CHINAMAN.

Of course the incidents of the past few months are so terrifying and distressing that an impression prevails that the Celestial is a bloodthirsty monster. As a matter of fact, ha has a good deal of humour in his composition.

Once, in Szetchuan, my guards quarrolled noisily among themselves respecting the division of the cash of which I had made them a piesent. They brawled and fought, so that it was necessary for me, wanting some sleep, to go out and use my fists and toes upon the crowd to keep them quiet.

Siich a method of pacification amused the small Chinese boys who had assembled to see the foreigner. When a Chinaman fights he gets hold of his adversary's pigtail, and, if he be strong enough, draws him up aiul down the sti-eet. So using toes and fists was something novel to them. Accordingly, what was my surprise the nexo morning on going into the street to find tSio little boys pushing their little Celestial fists against little Celestial no&eh, and raising their little Celestial toes to lifclle Celestial silting parts. The whole street was roaring whh. laughter.

Of course, I had no pigtail, and a joke I frequently played when I wanted to secure the good humour of the crowd, was to pietend that I" had lost mine, catch hold of some lubberly Chinaman and swear that I was going to cut off his for my own use. He generally had a fear that I would carry my threat into execution. But the crowd never failed to appreciate the situation, and enjoyed themselves immensely. I had them my friends dining the rest oi' my stay. .^ ; What, however, is rather a drawback is \ that the Chinaman always /takes things I literally. A somewhat dramatic missionary, speaking of Naaman to his converts, called out as he described the return of the cured general : " Open the gate*, the general is coming,"' which caused those sitting flNt the doors to jump up and throw the doo3M wide open. :

An Englishman giving a lantern lecture threw the picture of a louse an the screen, whereupon the audience regarded with horxor the enormous size of the English louse ! Magic lanterns are things that are not quite understood in some parts of the interior. I remember turning up at Tungchuan and finding the missionaries there m a groat fright from prospective riot. They had just hit upon the happy idea of importing a magic lantern to show pictures of what England was like. There was a tremendous crush in the missionary's house, but the moment the lights were turned down it dawned on the Celestial mind that, the only object the foreign devils had was to get them shut up in that room and kill the lot of them. There was, no exhibition that evening, and, indeed, it was some time before the missionaries regained the confidence of the people.

What is always so humorous to the Euro- ] peans in the Chinese is their topsy-tuivy way of doing things. You meet a man ail in white and think he has been to some festivity, but find he is in mourning. Sounds of sobbing and lamentation meet your ear,' but it is only f a bride about to be married. Some prisoners pass, and they wear their hair long as a disgrace. There is a frightful din of voices from a schoolhouse near. It indicates that the boys are hard at work. If you look in, the boy reciting has his back to the master. Another boy is wanted, and the master beckons him by waying him away. You are sad as you learn that a coffin being carried into a house is for the head of the family. Then you learn that the father is in excellent health ; in fact, it is his birthday, and the coffin is an acceptable present from his i SOBS.

Books in China always begin from what we consider the back end. One reads from top to bottom, starting at the opposite f-ide of the page from the plan in . reading European printing. A Chinaman shakes hands with himself on meeting you by way of greeting, instead of shaking hands with you. At a dinner party the talking is all before the meal, and not after. The dinner begins with sweets and eilds with soups. We think the Chinese dishes, bird's nest, slugs, shark's fins, and other curious dishes, rather objectionable ; but, as a matter of fact, they are exceedingly good, although it took me, personally, a long time before I got to like poached eggs soaked in treacle. Respecting eggs, the Celestials have a curious theory. They admit that they go bad, but believe that if they be put underground and left there for a year they are quite excellent to eat. On this point, however, I am unable to express an opinion.

To a Chinaman, English food is just as nauseous as we think theirs to be. I recollect an amusing little experience I had in the anti-foreign province of Hupeh. A couple of days before I had spent an evening with a, missionary, who had kindly given#me a loaf of bread and a poc of jam, which were certainly very acceptable to a man who, for months, had lived' on little other than under-cooked rice and pig that had probably died a natural death. The Mandarin of the little village where I halted brought his son, about six years old, to see me, in very much the same way as an English father would take his boy to &cc the animals at the Zoological Gardens. The Mandarin had met Europeans before, and was affable. His little son, however, was in a great fright, and evidently dreaded that I might want to eat him. To gain his friendship I cut a slice of loaf and smeared it with jam, and offered it to the tiny phap. He shrank with a cry to his father, who, however, pressed him to take the "bread. After a while the boy accepted it. He didn't like, however, to eat it. There was. no telling what horrible food the foreigner was offering him. But again the father brought his influence to bear, and at last the youngster put out his tongue and tasted the jam.

I shall never forget the extraordinary change that came over his. face. He took a second lick, and then a third, and in less time than it takes me to tell he was gobbling that bread and jam. He had made one great discovery — what jam tasted like ! The Chinese have a reluctance to speak plainly. In fact, there is no such thing as "plain Chinese,*' because it is not con-r-ideied good form. In front of every shop there hangs a board on which is written in Chinese characters: '"One Price Shop," meaning that the prices are fixed. Bui probably since the time the Chinese Empire was founded there never has been a single thing sold in a Chinaman's shop for the price asked. The seller always, ask^ twice as much as he expects to get, and the buyer offers half as much as he expects to pay. Then they start haggling. One comes down a little, the other goes up a little, and by the end of three-quarters oi an hour they come to an agreement. This is the rule.

It is the same with distances. The ordinary measure in China is a li, and, speaking generally, one may say that there are ten li in three miles. If J a&ked a Chinese how far it was from Ping-yang to Sungping he would tell me that it. was thirty li. Then another Chinese would say it was not thirty, it was only twenty. To which the first would reply : "Yes, but that is coming downhill." Therefore, it was always necessaiy, to calculate the distance for a journey, to ask whether the IL were long or short. You travel by stages in China, and I have asked a man how long it was from one place to another, and been told it was fdxty li. Then I would take the various stages. The first one would be perhaps seventeen li, the second twenty-three, and the third fourteen. I would point out that these only came to fifty-four, but you can't get a Chinaman to admit that. My Celestial was willing considei that the first was seventeen, the second twentythree, and the third fourteen, but accumu latively he was quite certain they made sixty !

When a wife is spoken of she has only two names, her husband's and that of her mother's family. She is the mother of So-and-so, or, if thers* are no children, the aunt of So-and-so. She may never speak of her husband by name; she generally calls him "my teacher," and I have heard of one dame who spoke of "the oilmill being out."

If a mar doesn't pay. his debts at the usual time, the New Year, his creditors carry away the door of his shop, this permitting all tlie demons and evil spirits to enter. On New Year's Day everyone tries to settle all business affairs, and scrolls are pasted above the* door with wishes, hopes and prayers on them for the gods to read. A literary man would have something like this :

"May I be so learned as to secrete m my mind three myriads of volumes.

"May I know the affairs of the world for six thousand years." Frequently the Chinese authorities give absolutely conflicting instructions, and yet can never be made to appreciate their conflict. In a western province a new gaol was to be erected, and the instructions ran :

"Clause I. — The new gaol shall be constructed out of the materials of the old.

"Clause II. — The prisoners shall in the old gaol till the new one is built."

Though tlie Chinese have a great veneration for home life, and regard parricide as the most fearful of crimes, their methods of punishment for the .latter crime have got much of the ludicrous about them. Whet'- a man kills his father, he tis not only put to death by the "slow and degrading process,"' but his younger brothers are beheaded, his house razed, the earth beneath is dug up, his neighbours are se? verely punished, his chief teacher beheaded, the district magistrate deprived of his office, and the higher officials degraded three degrees in lank. After v Chinese flogging, the offender i-s made to go down on his knees and thank the magistrate for his fatherly discipline. The greatest injury a man can do his enemy is to .commit suicide at his door. It will be, doubtful if the enemy can clear himself from a charge of murder, with its horrible penalties of death to self and others, but even if he succeed, the suicide will haunt him ever after.

The Celestial has got unlimited faith, only equalled by that of the Briton, in patent medicines. Only his patent medicines are rather different from what are s-old in this country at one shilling and three-halfpeiics the bottle. Nauseoa&ness is a great qualification in a Chinese drug, The moie horrible it is, the more likelihood there is of the patient being cured. What is left of the drug is thrown into the street, under che impression that anyone treading in it will carry off the disease. For baldness, hedgehog soup is said to be excellent. For paralysis, the claws of owls and kites. For strengthening food the lights of a pig are un^urpas-sed. The Chinese choose the doctor who shall attend them by casting lots. When once they have engaged him they oheyjfim implicitly. I remember seeing a man suffering badly from malaria. The cure the doctor gave him was to get a white cockerel, perform some rites over it. then chop off its head and insist on the hot blood being swallowed by the patient. The most common cure is to buy a piece of paper on which the priest has written some magic words, and then stick it on the part that hurts. One of the commonest cures the Chinese have for headache is to get two small pieces of paper, lick them and fasten them on each temple.

Now. this looks absurd as a cure ; but I have tried it myself, and must confess that it has. proved efficacious. If you have a headache and nothing else will cure it,

get two pieces of stamp paper, wet them sufficiently, and paste them one on each temple.

The Chinese are great readers. Some of theii novels are in 24 volumes ; their encyclopaedia is in two hundred and sixty. Its value consists in the fact that there is no article in il less than five hundred years old ! Chinese ladies, however, are not readers. Indeed, a Chinaman is rather contemptuous of his woman-kind. An enthusiastic advocate of women being educated is reported to have said, '• that even white mice could be taught to turn a wheel, so that women might possibly learn to read." Chinese fathers have as great a reluctance to send their sons to Shanghai alone a.5 an English father has to send his boy to Paris. But occasionally^ stringent measures are taken by the Viceroy to. correct manners of the leading men in that city. One of these, a composer of public memorials, had taken to rather a fast life, going a great deal to the wine shop. One day, when he was there, he saw two men dressed »in black standing by his horse outside. As he mounted they retired a little, but as he rode slowly away he heard them following. He whipped up his horse, but they were good runners. Arrived at his house he called on the guards to arrest the men. They did not move, and the mysterious men stepped up and said they had been instructed by the Viceroy to report on any officials who were leading " fast " lives. Then they disappeared.

Next day the official's pony was for sale, and the official was never seen again.

A Chinese fisherman has got common sense. He doesn't stand fooling away his time holding a rod with a piece of bait at the end of it. He tries cormorants. Two men go out in a boat accompanied by 12 cormorants. The cormorants dive to bring up fish in their bills. They throw them into the air and swollow them. But the astute . Chinaman has fastened a piece of wire round their thoats, so that the descent of the fish is arrested. One of the men gives the bird's neck a squeeze, and it disgorges the fish into a basket. With a few cormorants fishing is pretty brisk.