Wandering in Northern China

There is no particular plan to this book. I found my interest turning toward the Far East, and as I am not one of those fortunate persons who can scamper through a country in a few weeks and know all about it, I set out on a leisurely jaunt to wherever new clues to interest led me. It merely happened that this will-o’-the-wisp drew me on through everything that was once China, north of about the thirty-fourth parallel of latitude. The man who spends a year or two in China and then attacks the problem of telling all he saw, heard, felt, or smelled there is like the small boy who was ordered by the teacher to write on two neat pages all about his visit to the museum. It simply can’t be done. Hence I have merely set down in the following pages, in the same leisurely wandering way as I have traveled, the things that most interested me, often things that others seem to have missed, or considered unimportant, in the hope that some of them may also interest others. Impressions are unlike statistics, however, in that they cannot be corrected to a fraction, and I decline to be held responsible for the exact truth of every presumption I have recorded. If I have fallen into the common error of generalizing, I hereby apologize, for I know well that details in local customs differ even between neighboring villages in China. What I say can at most be true of the north, for as yet I know nothing of southern China. On the other hand, there may be much repetition of customs and the like, but that goes to show how unchanging is life among the masses in China even as a republic.

Lafcadio Hearn said that the longer he remained in the East the less he knew of what was going on in the Oriental mind. An “old China hand” has put the same thing in more popular language: “You can easily tell how long a man has been in China by how much he doesn’t know about it. If he knows almost everything, he has just recently arrived; if he is in doubt, he has been here a few years; if he admits that he really knows nothing whatever about the Chinese people or their probable future, you may take it for granted that he has been out a very long time.”

But as I have said before, the “old-timer” will seldom sit down to tell even what he has seen, and in many cases he has long since lost his way through the woods because of the trees. Or he may have other and 

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more important things to do. Hence it is up to those of us who have nothing else on hand to pick up and preserve such crumbs of information as we can; for surely to know as much of the truth about our foreign neighbors as possible is important, above all in this new age. In our own land there are many very false ideas about China; false ideas that in some cases are due to deliberate Chinese propaganda abroad. While I was out in the far interior I received a clipping outlining the remarks of a Chinese lecturing through our Middle West, and his résumé left the impression that bound feet and opium had all but completely disappeared from China, and that in the matter of schools and the like the “republic” is making enormous strides. No sooner did the Lincheng affair attract the world’s attention than American papers began to run yarns, visibly inspired, about the marvelous advances which the Chinese have recently accomplished. Such men as Alfred Sze are often mistaken in the United States as samples of China. Unfortunately they are nothing of the kind; in fact, they are too often hopelessly out of touch with their native land. There has been progress in China, but nothing like the amount of it which we have been coaxed or lulled into believing, and some of it is of a kind that raises serious doubts as to its direction. For all the telephones, airplanes, and foreign clothes in the coast cities, the great mass of the Chinese have been affected barely at all by this urge toward modernity and Westernism—if that is synonymous with progress. As some one has just put it, “the Chinese still wear the pigtail on their minds, though they have largely cut it off their heads.” How great must be the misinformation at home which causes our late President to say that all China really needs is more loans, thereby making himself, and by extension his nation, the laughing-stock of any one with the rudiments of intelligence who has spent an hour studying the situation on the spot. England is a little better informed on the subject than we, because she is less idealistic, more likely to look facts in the face instead of trying to make facts fit preconceived notions of essential human perfection. China may need more credits, but any fool knows that you should stop the hole in the bottom of a tub before you pour more water into it. At times, too, it is laughable to think of us children among nations worrying about this one, thousands of years old, which has so often “come back,” and may still be ambling her own way long after we have again disappeared from the face of the earth.

Though it is impossible to leave out the omnipresent entirely, I have said comparatively little about politics. My own interest in what 

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we lump together under that word reaches only so far as it affects the every-day life of the people, of the mudsill of society, toward which, no doubt by some queer quirk in my make-up, I find my attention habitually focusing. I have tried, therefore, to show in some detail their lives, slowly changing perhaps yet little changed, and to let others conclude whether “politics” has done all that it should for them. Besides, the Far East swarms with writers on politics, men who have been out here for years or decades and have given their attention almost entirely to that popular subject; and even these disagree like doctors. Some of us, I know, are frankly tired of politics, at least for a space, important as they are; moreover, political changes are so rapid, especially in the “never changing” East, that it is impossible to keep abreast of the times in anything less than a daily newspaper.

At home there are numbers of young men, five or ten years out of college, who can tell you just what is the matter with the world, and exactly how to remedy it. I am more or less ready to agree with them that the world is going to the dogs. What of it? You have only to step outdoors on any clear night to see that there are hundreds of other worlds, which may be arranging their lives in a more intelligent manner. The most striking thing about these young political and sociological geniuses sitting in their suburban gardens or their city flats is that while they can toss off a recipe guaranteed to cure our own sick world overnight, if only some one can get it down its throat, they seldom seem to have influence enough in their own cozy little corner of it to drive out one grafting ward-heeler. In other words, if you must know what is to be the future of China, I regret that I have not been vouchsafed the gift of prophecy and cannot tell you.

In the minor matter of Chinese words and names, I have deliberately not tried to follow the usual Romanization, but rather to cause the reader to pronounce them as nearly like what they are on the spot as is possible with our mere twenty-six letters. Of course I could not follow this rule entirely or I must have called the capital of China “Bay-jing,” have spoken of the evacuation of “Shahn-doong,” and so on; so that in the case of names already more or less familiar to the West I have used the most modern and most widely accepted forms, as they have survived on the ground. At that I cannot imagine what ailed the men who Romanized the Chinese language, but that is another story.

Harry A. Franck.

Kuling, China,

August 16, 1923.