Part 16 (1/2)

We emerged from this underground chamber upon another thoroughfare, pursuing which we came upon an open, unused plot. Here a circus had attracted a crowd. A three-year-old baby, a pretty little sister, a feminine father, and a masculine mother were the entertainers. They were acrobats. A family row--which, it would seem, is not unknown in China--was enacted without any of the details being omitted; nor did they stop at coa.r.s.e and vulgar acts which would have brought the police down upon them in America. Yet the audience seemed highly amused, while some of the spectators might easily have posed for paintings of Chinese bearded saints, or have been models for some of the sacred effigies which, not more than a block away, were idols in the temple.

These are the high spots in Chinese City, a city into which I was urged not to venture alone. That human life should be considered of little worth here is not marvelous; but that any one there should consider the prolongation of his own a bit worth the taking of mine, is one of the inexplicable marvels of the world.

Is this China? By no means. It is merely the back-wash of the contact with European life which has been imposed on China without sufficient chance for its absorption. It is no more typical of China than our metropolitan slums are really typical of American life. True, they are the result of it, but where the rounding out of relations.h.i.+ps and conditions have been accomplished there follows a graduation of elements to where good and evil obtain side by side. And Chinese City is but the worst phase of Chinese slums plastered upon Shanghai.

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Poverty in Chinese City is one thing; in Shanghai it is another. It is all a matter of the background. Buddha the beggar is still Buddha the Prince.

After I came out of Chinese City I took much greater note of the details of the life of the coolie, the toiler in Shanghai proper. I was out on the Bund. The stone walls hemming in the river Whang-po rise at a level round the city. For five feet more the human wall of coolies shuts out the tide of poverty and despair from a world as foreign to China as water is alien to stone. From both walls a murmur reaches the outer world: the swish of the tide, the hum of coolie consolation. I let myself believe that they chant beneath their burdens to disguise their groans. Up and down the Bund they course, here at exporting, there at importing. Their gathering-places are at the G.o.downs, and in and out they pa.s.s up and down inclined planks, each with a sack, or in couples with two or more sacks hanging from their shoulders, never resting from these rounds.

At another point they are delivering mail to the s.h.i.+p's launch. Two cart-loads arrive. Coolies swarm about the carts, waiting for orders.

Some are mere boys, but already inured to the tread. As each lifts a bag of mail he pa.s.ses a j.a.panese, who hands him a stiletto-shaped piece of wood with some inscription on it,--painted green to the hilt. He takes two steps and is on the gang-plank, two more, and he has burdened himself with three bags of mail, and returns; he received and returns three sticks. That is the way count is kept of the mail. I couldn't understand this close precaution. Could the coolie possibly abscond with a bag of mail under the very eyes of an officer?

Two small boys eagerly rushed a distance on, to pick up some bags that had been left there. They were acting without order,--spontaneously.

They would have saved themselves some labor in that way. But the officer in charge shrieked his reprimand at them. One, in his enthusiasm, ignored the command. The officer rushed after him and boxed his ears.

The boy received the punishment, but went right ahead with his burden.

Hardened little sinner! calloused little soul! poor little ant!

One youngster came up, chanting the sale of some sweet-cakes. Looking into his face, I wondered what he was thinking just then. He must think!

No one could be so young and have such a cramped neck, such sad eyes, such furrowed brows without hard thoughts to make them so.

In the slush and rain, under semi-poverty and dest.i.tution, barefoot, ragged, and in infinite numbers,--still they toil. Yet against the background of st.u.r.dy Shanghai, their labor and their travail does not hurt as much as it does in Chinese City. The perplexities of life--national, racial, of caste--pervaded my thoughts. Why has China remained dormant so long? Why is she now waking? How will she tackle the problem of poverty? To me it seems that nations rise and fall not because fluctuation is the inherent law of life, but simply because universally accepted glory and prestige are positions generally paid for by accompanying poverty and disease. No nation can dominate for a long time with such coolieism as that in China.

China has standards all her own. We come with our ways and claim superiority. China grants it, yet goes her own way. And when we see her sons we like them, though we may criticize, condemn, and try to change them. This is the oneness of China and the consensus of opinion is that it is lovable. People come, employ Chinese as servants, and try to train them. They may take that which they think you do not need, carry out their own and not your ideas. You in turn rave and roar, but in the end they are still there as servants and you as master. But they have educated you, you have not changed them. And when you leave China you long for them as did that American woman I met in Honolulu who fairly wailed her longing aloud to me. China has done this with whole nations, and, to the very end of time, whatever nation sets out to rule and conquer that new republic must make up its mind to be lost.

And so behind Shanghai is Chinese City, and behind that there is China, out upon the flat plains. There is another China yet beyond, and still another and as many as there are billows on the sea. Build modern buildings and cities, and the Chinese take them and turn them inside out, and they are what he wants them to be. This plastic people,--what is their destiny? And what, still, is there awaiting the world as they fulfil that destiny?

How strange it feels to call her republic! Yet China has taken to republicanism as though it had been brewing in her these thousands of years. From outward appearances one would never know that she is a republic to-day. Some say she really isn't. Coolies still are coolies, and Chinese, Chinese. And I dare say she is both empire and republic, two in one.

For centuries China has lain dormant as though stung by a paralyzing wasp. Centuries have been lost in sleep. But what are centuries, when waking is so simple and is always possible? China has wakened. She is rising. An hour's work has been accomplished in the first fresh flush of the new dawn. Perhaps that is all that will be done that day, the house put in a little better order. To-morrow is time enough for real work. A Chinese junk comes out of its night-mist retreat with its own dim lights. A shrill whistle of a pa.s.sing launch echoes across the flat plains about Shanghai. The rain of yesterday remains only as a sorry mist. A vision of clearer day s.h.i.+mmers through, but soon grows dull again. China seems to have shaped her climate in her own image.

A two-days' steam to Moji, j.a.pan, on the bosom of that heaving mistress the China Sea, and my journey was over for a long while. The sea was black, the sky somber; even the sun was sad as it stooped that evening to kiss the cheek of j.a.pan good night. I did not know just then that I was to say farewell to the sea for two and a half years,--a farewell that resulted in _j.a.pan: Real and Imaginary_.

CHAPTER XII

WORLD CONSCIOUSNESS

_The Third Side of the Triangle_

... For surely once, they feel, we were Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain-- Oh, might our marges meet again!

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