Day by Day in Peking

I

YESTERDAY I went with some tourists to the Heavenly Bridge to see the coolies’ playground. In this wide vacant space north of the Temples of Heaven and Agriculture has grown up the business of amusing, feeding, and clothing the laborers of the city.

This vacant space was once marshland with growing reeds, but here for scores of years the ashes and garbage of the city have been dumped. And on this waste ground has collected a motley assemblage of houses and sheds made of box boards, tin cans, and cotton sheeting. These buildings are arranged with some semblance of squares, but with not too much insistence on order. Two-story theatre buildings are set haphazard, and around them cluster stalls, like lighters around an ocean freighter.

No one lives here, yet the place is always inhabited. The small tradesmen come with their wares at break of day, and some sooner; the amusement seekers throng throughout the hours of light; and for a few hours of darkness the place is in the hands of the caretakers, abandoned and scarce human, friendless old men.

There is a jumble of sheds to which secondhand-clothing merchants bring their wares every morning. Among the sleazy silk garments, or those of halfworn grandeur cast off by the rich, can be found occasionally some piece of rare old embroidery or tribute silk. Shoe stores are spread on the ground with only a canvas umbrella for shelter. The brocade slipper of a grand lady telling in its fading colors of dinners and Mah Jongg parties sits beside the leather-patched cloth shoe of the laborer, stitched into board-like stiffness. Under awnings are stretched tables flanked by benches and portable stoves. Here coolies sit and eat interminable bowls of Chinese macaroni. They drink sour bean soup while eating wheat cakes garnished with sesame seeds. They eat rice-flour dumplings in which a little red sugar has been hidden. They eat crullers and steamed meat pies, and bean-starch jelly garnished with vinegar and celery and sweet herbs. Great kettles of boiling tripe stand on the stoves. Paper-like pancakes of unleavened bread a foot in diameter are lying in piles waiting to be eaten with the boiled-off bits from the heads of sheep and pigs. The coolies sit at the tables eating and exchanging gossip, and make remarks about the passers-by.

The din is terrific. The secondhandclothing men, standing within six feet of each other, try each to outsing his neighbor. Garment by garment they lift and wave before the passing crowd, chanting meanwhile the garment’s virtues.

‘Here is a coat that’s scarcely been worn, and all for two dollars and fifteen cents.’

‘This skirt of the latest fashion, pure silk and only three dollars.’

Occasionally there is a wag among them, but usually they are content to sing the ware and its price. It is the rhythm and cadence of the song that matter, and the rhythmic swing of the garments from one pile to the other, broken only by a customer. They are brothers of the mediæval apprentices in Europe, with their continuous cry of ‘ What do you lack, what do you lack?’

Beggars whine, ‘Oh, ladies and gentlemen, have pity on me! Give me a few cash. I have not eaten to-day,’ and buzz most irritatingly at your elbow. There is no way to cope with them. If they are not given money, their patience is longer than yours and they follow from place to place. If you give the money, another beggar promptly takes the vacated place.

Barkers standing outside the doors of theatres and side shows shout the names of the performances going on inside, and the amazingly small price of the admission ticket. And through and above and below all the din is the sound of wooden drums and clashing cymbals and shrieking fiddles from the theatres and the singsong houses — in no way diminished by the match-box wooden walls.

II

Selecting the nearest tall building that was bursting with sound, we steered toward it. On the way we refrained from stepping on dogs, bumping into beggars purposely dodging in front of us, or rapt yokels not watching where they were going. We stepped across patches of mud and around a display of felt hats spread upon the ground, and came to the theatre.

‘Come right in, the show is excellent. Come in.’

We paid twenty coppers apiece and entered. The ushers showed us to seats. As we were men and women, and the theatre old style and conservative, we all sat in the centre or men’s portion. In the big modern theatres in the more fashionable part of town they now let men and women sit together in the women’s part. In the most modern theatres, one may sit in any part. These coolie theatres, however, are traditional.

The play on the boards was a classic from the historical novel, The Three Kingdoms, and was being played in the classic way. A young warrior was telling the audience, by means of a very beautiful dance, of his extreme fatigue, perturbation, and anxiety. He was dressed in white quilted and goldstudded armor, and fastened to his shoulders were the fluttering flags which tell of military rank. He was Chao Yun, the Chinese Bayard, Balder, Cid, the epitome of knightly valor and beauty, who had followed faithfully, for years, the fortunes of Liu Pei, the founder of the latter Han dynasty.

In this play, Chao Yun, at great danger to himself, presses through the enemy’s lines and rescues his master’s son. The distracted and wounded mother, carrying a doll, limps across the stage. He does not see her; he still frantically hunts for her. While she stands in the corner, he, mid-stage with his back to the audience, takes a drink of tea. Meanwhile the enemy march in. They are represented by about fifteen men and boys dressed in ragged red embroidered uniforms. They come through one door, make many furious passes, circle the stage many times to show numbers and distance, and then march out again through the other door.

The interlude over, the hero finds the mother and child. He sings his joy, and she her pain and fear. He urges her, by trying to present her with a whip, to mount his horse. She refuses, pointing out that she is too sorely wounded to ride. He refuses to believe her. Then, hearing the enemy near by, he rushes off to fight them and drive them away. This gives the mother her opportunity. She lays the child on the ground, and the hero comes back in time to see her disappearing down a well. This is managed by laying a chair on its side, over which she jumps, and as she jumps attendants peel off her outer coat, leaving her to run off the stage clad in gray to show that she is now a ghost.

In spite of the noise of the approaching enemy, the hero fills her grave with rocks to protect the body of his master’s wife from defilement. This again is a beautiful dance, as he springs and dashes at the imaginary rocks with his spear. Then, with the heir apparent stuck tenderly in his belt, he dashes off the stage on his horse — that is, waving his whip. During most of this act the orchestra has been very noisy, with much beating of wooden drums and clashing of castanets, for this is a military play.

The story of The Three Kingdoms, China’s feudal period, acted on every stage, told by every story-teller, known to every man, woman, and child, literate or illiterate, is the woof to the warp of their minds, their picture gallery of heroes, the stuff of which their ideals are made. There is difficulty in following the multitudinous characters in its episodic form of composition, but it well repays the reading, and often gives, besides, the cue to many of the words and deeds of the modern war lords.

The next play started off very slowly, apparently with some long-drawn-out misunderstanding, as two civil magistrates sat and sang interminably at each other. We went out. Passing through the food stalls, we came to the amusement tents. The first tent was but a hollow square formed by a single row of benches on which some of the audience sat. It was roofed over by a tent top, and inside the square two small boys, acrobats and contortionists, were tying themselves in knots and grotesque figures. We watched a minute, threw in a few coppers, and passed on. In the next enclosure a bear and a monkey were tied. The bear, at sight of us, was made to do the kowtow, for which we rewarded his master, he, poor brute, getting a clout on his nose for not kowtowing again quickly enough. The beggars were crowding against us as we stood by the benches, and as a particularly noisome woman, whose face had mostly disappeared, pressed too closely, we went on.

III

At the next tent the audience was chiefly women and children, who were sitting quietly. A tired, dispirited man of forty-odd was whacking a large packing case and telling the audience that nothing possibly could happen unless there were more coppers in the ring. He whacked the box in an absentminded way, looking as if he wished he were home following a plough. One could see in his eyes the gourd vine over the home well, and almost hear the creaking of the windlass as the old ass turned it in his interminable circling; and the old grandfather sitting under the sunny wall telling endless stories to who would listen. We threw in a tencent note, hoping to hasten the dénouement; we were curious to see how these peasants managed the old box-and-boy trick. The man took up a small dull dagger, stuck it carefully, at an angle, into the box through several holes, giving meantime some dispirited patter. A few more coppers were thrown in. The audience was now told that half the money necessary was in hand. We debated throwing in another ten cents, but decided it was not worth while, and passed on. Other tents housed wrestlers or jugglers, and in one was a man selling some sort of court-plaster made from some part of the snake’s anatomy. He had about a dozen snakes, which he pulled out of a box as quickly as they crawled to shelter.

Across an open space was a tent with a cotton-sheeting wall from within which came the sound of fiddles and drums. A man stood at the entrance shouting. Twenty cents admission — this was high. Down a sheeting lane, around a corner, we went. Benches and tables were arranged against the wall and separated by a railing from the ring. In the ring a dozen fat ponies were going round and round. At sight of the augmented audience, a pleasantfaced peasant who was riding one of the horses jumped up in the saddle and gave a mild whoop. He then struck with his whip another horse, on which rode a plump peasant wife, and made it go a shade faster. He urged again; eventually some speed was achieved. Then suddenly we knew that we were watching a ‘Wild West Show’ in Chinese. Some enterprising person had seen a movie or a circus, or perhaps both. Faithfully our brave alternately beat and chased the horse carrying the fair. Leaning far over, he turned his head toward her with his best imitation Hollywood leer. He was so amused with himself that only half his muscles were able to leer; the rest registered humor, gleeful humor. He was like a small boy, who has just begun to outgrow the game, playing Indians. Lustfully, gleefully, he chased the stolid peasant wife, dressed like a mission schoolgirl. She rode on with never a change of expression, as though she were sitting on the home mat sewing a shoe sole. With one last amused whoop the brave stopped the troop. Stiffly the fair got down, and with obvious relief walked off to the family, sitting around the centre pole of the tent, and picked up a baby.

In this group were several half-grown children and one lassie of about eighteen who answered the barker’s patter. He stood on a platform above the entrance, and she shouted her retorts automatically when her cue fell on her. Her mind was busy watching everything that went on around.

A couple of men now picked up a small black object which they placed on a table. After much patter it was unveiled, disclosing a midget, a tiny woman. She was led around the ring to show that she was real; scarce three feet high, she told all and sundry that she was forty-eight years old, and at the showman’s bidding opened her mouth to show her few snaggly teeth.

It was time to go; also my quarrel with the harpy-like bench women had reached a stage that made departure advisable. They had started whining for their tips the moment we arrived and gathered an army of their sisters to help. Nor did the ordinary tip quiet them.

We now steered toward a row of tents farther on. We were entreated to look into peep shows which from experience we knew contained pictures of battles or bedroom scenes; we were urged to buy patent medicines warranted to take off all freckles, to have a gold tooth mounted or an ordinary one pulled. The row of tents sheltered story-tellers. A denser crowd than we had seen anywhere else sat or stood around, quiet, listening intently. These audiences were mostly men.

One story-teller stood by his table, teapot, and cups. On the other side sat a lad with a fiddle to accompany him. The story-teller accented his tale by the click of the wooden castanets in his left hand and illustrated it by the gestures of his right hand. He wore, as is usual, the clean white coat and trousers and the neatly fitting black shoes of the gentle classes. Enthralled by his art, we listened and watched. We could catch only occasional phrases, not enough to get the drift of the story. The drama, however, was evident. He told the story with his whole body, with the castanets, the fiddle, and the table and boy besides. He stepped forward, he crouched, he bent back. His right hand gestured and his left clattered the castanets. But his face — smooth, mobile — expressed each change of mood with the precision and ease of a perfect instrument. We were fascinated and could have watched him for hours. But the beggars, like flies, had settled on the gallant major in our midst, and we moved on.

It reminded me of our first storyteller, whom we saw in a town on our way to the Great Wall. After our early dinner in the Chinese inn, we had wandered out to see the town. Down the street, lit only by the stars, we went, and came suddenly upon a silent group of people around a hollow square. At one end of the square was a lamp on a table. Its dim glow cast a large shadow on the wall behind, which accented and enforced the gestures of the tense man in front. Rapt in the warm gloom, the audience listened as he told them of the siege of Peking in 1900, of the Allies and of the Boxers.

IV

After the crudity of the side shows it was a pleasure to linger by each storyteller in turn, enjoying the finish and perfection of this most ancient of the arts.

We were getting tired, but one thing more was to be done — tea and the singsong girls. Piloted by our amused and interested rickshaw coolie, we walked up the stairs and found ourselves in a medium-sized room in which were placed many small tea tables. At one end of the room was a raised platform on which the girls sat in a row. The obsequious proprietor guided us to our seats and served us with tea and watermelon seeds and hot napkins. A boy with a basket of sweets tried in vain to lure us. On the stage a girl was singing. She was moderately pretty and neatly dressed. The long bangs and straight-cut clothes and direct glance would, however, proclaim her anywhere as a singsong girl. She beat at intervals on a small wooden drum standing on a tripod before her, and a spotty-faced young man accompanied her with a fiddle. The ballad was long.

When she had finished, the proprietor brought the fan on which the girls’ names and their repertoires were written, and asked us to choose the next number. As we could not read sufficient Chinese, we looked at the stage and picked the prettiest girl. She had a roving eye and a dimpled cheek, and a long sleek braid of hair. We had picked well. The audience shouted, ‘Good!’ and she answered with smiles.

It was a small audience. Near the front sat an old man who, after carefully disposing of his fan, his hat, and the skirts of his gown, leaned back, closed his eyes, and with an expression of perfect joy on his face beat time to the music. His face was fine, sensitive, and cultured. Perhaps he enjoyed the emotions called forth by the story of the ballad. The girl may have been singing of the noble general carried captive to Mongolia, who, when tending his enemies ’ sheep, sang of home; or it may have been the ballad of the daughter of Meng and Chang, at the end of whose faithful search the Great Wall opened to return to her the bones of the husband torn from her side by the great tyrant Chin to help in building his masterpiece, the Great Wall. Perhaps it was an even more remote emotion that swayed the old man. Perhaps it was the music, the technique, the composition, the rendering. We leave him happy in his world of controlled sound.

At the back of the room was a man of thirty-odd, with an intelligent, guileless face. He might have been a headmaster in a small school, or a suburban merchant, secretary, perhaps, of a guild, a respected man of small affairs — a family man, spending his life between his desk and the home court, his thoughts full of his work, his recreation, and his children; a man of some minor importance in his own world, out, as we were, in a seldom-visited foreign country, aware and interested.

Three officers were sitting at a table by the door, and some nondescripts, perhaps two or three, were scattered about the room. A fat young man was sitting near the musicians, and the girl directed at him her choicest smiles. Sleek and indolent, he sat and appraised. He might have been a rich young man idling away his time. One remembered the stories of the Manchu princes frequenting these places in disguise, and scandalizing the court and the populace. But the Empire is no more, and, as the young man is alone, he cannot be very important. Perhaps he is merely the idle pensioner of an idle group. He goes up to the manager, exchanges a few words with him, looks again at the girl. They understand each other. He gives some instructions and goes away.

I thought of the rickshaws with blue cotton padded hoods in which these lassies ride alone at night, and of the bevy of bright-colored figures who had surged up the steps and chattered across the court of the general’s house next door to us. But this was a simple singsong girl, and he was probably a middle-class young man, come to bespeak her presence at some tradesman’s dinner. Perhaps she would find there some middle-aged merchant who would take her as his concubine. Such a marriage would be her highest hope. Marriage is necessarily the goal of these brotherless girls who support their parents by means of this profession. They have no dot; their fathers, poor peddlers and laborers, cannot arrange advantageous marriages; the girls must find their own husbands.

Once, on another visit, I sat and chatted with one of the older girls, while an artist friend drew their pictures. She told me that they live at home with their parents, start their apprenticeship to a master singer at about the age of twelve, and consider themselves failures if they are not married by eighteen. She said, sadly, that her younger sister had married, and she seemed to spend most of her time wondering why she had not achieved a like success. She could not have been over twenty.

As I looked at the row of girls on the stage, some plump, some thin, some pretty, some plain, some mere children, and some with the knowledge of ages in their eyes, it was obvious that some, at least, had not waited to be married.

We were now thoroughly tired, and decided that a quiet turn through the twilight, in the centuries-removed courts of a near-by temple, would take the turmoil of these hundreds of lives out of our ears and let us go home in peace.

V

It had been months since I last saw Chang Teh-fu, and I was surprised to come across him crouched on a street corner behind a basket of sweet cakes and oily crullers. It was a good corner for a peddler, as good as Peking offers. My rickshaw had difficulty in threading its way between the ranks of rickshaws parked outside the Navy Y. M. C. A. Each of these coolies is a potential customer, and a well-paying one, because the American marines are notoriously free with their money.

But Chang Teh-fu did not look as though he were sharing in any prosperity. His two garments were ragged and filthy, and his face thin and stubbly. He greeted me, however, with a charming smile, and a courtly inquiry after my broken leg. And he arrived at my house the next day to tell me that he could not make ends meet. The most he could make a day was barely enough for the food of one, and he had his old mother.

His story is very common in China and illustrates one of the reasons why the average Chinese does not show more initiative and ‘go-getting’ traits.

The first time that I saw Chang Tehfu was six or seven years ago. I was going to the bazaar to shop, and as my rickshaw touched the curb another arrived. I waited until the passenger had paid his fare, and then I spoke to the coolie. From his neck was growing a tumor as large as his head, which flopped with every step he took, and I asked him why he did not go to a hospital and have the tumor removed.

‘Does n’t it keep passengers away from you?’ I inquired.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I can’t take time off to go to a hospital. I have an old mother, and we eat each day what I earn each day.’

I gave him my card and told him that I would arrange for his mother’s care if he went to the hospital. Strange to say, he had faith and went. The tumor was removed, and he and his mother were fed and the rent paid until his strength returned. A special license to pull in a favored spot was secured for him. Soon he bought his own rickshaw, on the installment plan, and got a position as a private coolie, which placed him in the aristocracy of rickshawdom. And we thought that all was well.

Then things began to happen. He asked for advances on his pay, and for time off, and so we got the story.

As his prosperity increased, his family increased. One by one, like bees to a honey pot, his wandering brothers came at the news of his regular wages — two brothers and a half-grown cousin, expecting to be supported; and, according to Chinese custom, he could not turn them out. He managed to find a job for one brother, but this brother then promptly got married and brought his wife home for Chang Teh-fu to support.

This marriage carried an extra grievance to him, for, as he said, ‘If any one of us should marry, it should be I, as the oldest brother and the chief breadwinner.’ But the mother had always been partial to the second brother, though he had never supported her or cared for her.

Chang Teh-fu now had the privilege of working and caring for a family of six adults on a wage that was adequate for the necessities of two, and the comforts were going to another. He took the only course open to him. He gave up his regular job and took again to pulling by the trip, and kept his earnings down. His plan worked. One by one his unwanted and unworking family drifted off, until he was again alone with his mother.

Such stories are only too common. An acquaintance who is running a sewing room for women told me of her effort to increase their personal production. The women all refused to speed up, and expressed themselves as content with what they were earning.

‘If,’ said one, ‘we earn more, we shall only be required to support another person. Why should we tire ourselves? ’

Just to finish Chang Teh-fu’s personal tale, let me add that an old tubercular trouble flared up, he had to quit pulling rickshaw, and joined that next to the last resort of the Peking poor, the ranks of the peddlers, who may make a bare living by selling eatables in the streets. And as he cannot earn enough for his mother and himself, he is on the border of the last rank, that of the beggars.

VI

On my way to the office this morning, I saw a condemned criminal going to his execution. The parade was in better formation than most Chinese processions. I use the word ‘parade’ advisedly, for there was distinctly the air of one, as well as the grimness of death, traveling with that group of people. A squad of ten soldiers, well uniformed in khaki and well mounted on Mongolian ponies, trim and alert, they rode in perfect alignment. As they kept the width of the street between them, they crowded the traffic to the side of the road and forced it to a standstill. The first two soldiers had no guns, but the following eight had each a carbine slung across his shoulder. Behind them walked two squads of police, three men in each, flanking the cart, which thus had a wide open space to itself.

The cart was an ordinary Peking cart of the roofless kind, drawn by one mule. It was led by a coolie in common blue clothes, and on the shafts rode another coolie who was obviously the second driver. But bristling from all sides of the cart and seated in it and on its low wooden sides were khaki-clad soldiers armed with rifles which they held in their hands, ready for use. The cart could not have held more than four or five, but they looked like quite a dozen.

In their midst sat a man in blue coolie clothes with his hands tied and a great cotton-sheathed something strapped to his back and hands. It towered four or five feet above him, looking like a gigantic executioner’s sword in shape, and may have been intended as a symbol of what was about to happen to him. The man himself looked around with truculent defiance which ended in a hiccough and a vacant stare. He was probably drunk, as it is the custom to give condemned prisoners as much wine as they care for before starting on this gruesome journey. He was being taken to the execution ground between the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Agriculture, and an account of his sins was to appear in the next day’s paper. There had been many so-called robberies in town lately, and he was probably a thief who had not been clever enough to escape. He looked insignificant and mild, and as if he had long been undernourished.

I asked my rickshaw coolie if he had ever seen an execution. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but there is not much to see. A live man does things, is worth watching. A shot in the forehead, and he is just a piece of dead flesh. And the blood and brains are not good to look at.’

Last week one of my assistants was telling of a patient of his who had just died. The old man had a shop where he made and sold brass ware. A workman whose apprenticeship was over and who had gone out to seek his fortune came back demanding money. The old man refused it, whereupon the ex-apprentice seized a chopping knife and hacked the old man so severely that he died in the hospital a day or two afterward.

‘Have they caught the apprentice?’

‘Yes, they got him the next day.’

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that they will execute him.’

My assistant looked a little surprised, and then, being a university student and remembering that there was a difference between Chinese and foreign values, he said, ‘He will probably get several months or perhaps a year or two in prison. There was no robbery, you see.’

This little dialogue brought an overwhelming realization of the sanctity of property and the need for that sanctity. With millions living each day on what each day brings forth, — two meals or one, or none, — with millions who literally never have been really full but once or twice in their lives, while human beings teem on every hand, is this attitude any wonder? He who takes a life merely reduces the consuming population, of which there are millions too many anyway. He who takes property takes that of which there is much too little to go round.