The Chinaman in his own stories

Introduction

...... 7 II. KINSHIP AND KINDNESS .... 17 III. THE GOOD GRADUATE . . . . . 48 IV. THE HAUNTED MELON GARDEN . . . . 80 V. THE DASHING WIFE . . . 87 VI. MADAM CROSS-GRAIN ..... I06 VII. THE NINE DEMON INCARNATIONS . . . 171 VIII. A BUDDHIST'S VISION OF PURGATORY . . . iSl THE CHINAMAN IN HIS OWN STORIES

Chapter I Introduction

THESE

translations are presented to the English reader with the idea of giving a brief glance at Chinese life through Chinese fiction. In plot the stories are primitive and puerile, and the translator has sometimes doubted whether it was worth while to print them. Chinese names always ruin a Chinese story for the average reader, and yet to give English equivalents is to destroy the piquancy of the narrative, and load it with an insufferable burden of grandiose Johnsonese. In some cases, where it has been possible, the English equivalents of the names have been given, and in other cases the Chinese forms of the names are retained. Over against the simplicity and feebleness of the ruling plots and motives of the tales must be set the fact that they contain a very percep-

INTRODUCTION.

8 tible salt of humour, and the descriptive power is not infrequently keen and graphic. If the reader should fail to realise this, the fault must be put down to the clumsiness of the translator. The stories may at least amuse children, and if any one will take the trouble to look beyond the elementary art, he will gain some little insight into the thought and life of the wonder ful populations of Eastern Asia. Perhaps one of the quickest and most accurate methods of picking up a knowledge of the manners, family and social habits and traditions, philosophies and religions of a foreign nation is to study, as opportunity may offer, its novels and novelettes. Chinese fiction is not rated highly by the Chinese themselves, and hitherto has not attracted to its pursuit minds of genius such as Scott, Eliot, Thackeray, Hawthorne, in the West.

Perhaps one explanation of this is the limited repertory of motives with which a Chinese story-teller has to deal, as well as the comparatively narrow range of know ledge and interest in a country where each individual life is lived in a groove occupied by precisely similar lives for thousands of years. The movement of a Chinese novel does not centre in courtship and marriage, for the simple reason that marriage without courtship is a proceeding in which romance other than that of the lottery is all but im possible. The sexes are rigidly separated, and young men and maidens never meet in drawing-rooms or at picnics, and discover each other's affinities in con versation which starts in metaphysic and ends at the

INTRODUCTION.

9 very opposite pole of thought. All marriages are arranged by brokers or go-betweens, who are employed by parents to discover suitable alliances for their children, and who transact the preliminaries of the betrothal. Boys and girls are pledged by their parents to marriage, sometimes within a year or two of their birth, and such covenants are inviolable. The present writer has met with cases in which it has been held illegal to break off the engagement when signs of leprosy or some other loathsome disease had appeared in one of the contracting parties. No misconduct, however flagrant, on the side of the youth at least, is held to be a release from the covenant. The go betweens consider the status of the families they represent and seek equal status, and the correspond ences between the horoscopes of those about to be betrothed are looked upon as conclusive arguments for the union.

The children are supposed never to meet or speak to each other, and it would be taste unpardonably bad were the parents representing the one side ever to discuss the subject with those of the other side. These marriage customs despoil the Chinese novelist of his most promising materials. He has to make a picture of family harmony the climax of his tale, and the ingenuities of providential retribution his chief plot. The Chinese Competition Wallah is a wonderful piece of machinery put at the service of the gods ; and the man of virtue, heroism, and filial piety always distinguishes himself in the imperial examinations. The reader will not fail to

INTRODUCTION.

10 notice the high place given to hall-marked scholarship in these stories. The man who earns a degree may appear to plead his own cause in the courts of the mandarins, and also to represent his fellow clansmen. A clan rejoicing in a large number of graduate names on its roll always feels itself strong, and puts on the airs assumed by the dependents of heroic chieftains in the old Border days. Some of these Chinaman's tales may possibly be pronounced farcical and extravagant. Men and women are killed and suicides committed upon a. scale which out-Haggards some of our own blood -and -thunder novelists. These features are unfortunately only too true to life. In some parts of the country fierce and bloody clan and family feuds go on for years, and the imperial government is too weak, corrupt, or Laodicean to interfere in the internecine strife of the villages.

Often enough, a woman gets her own way by threatening to commit suicide ; and, often enough, women who have grievances, great or small, and can not get their own way, do put an end to themselves. There was some truth in the brutal observation made to the present writer by an old American boatswain who had seen many things on a Peruvian coolie ship. " A Chinaman aire that aggrawatin', he'll lie down and die just to wex yer." When a woman who has married into a neighbouring clan dies or commits suicide, her own friends almost always assume she has been neglected in sickness or hounded to suicide, and demand blood-money. Of course there is no true

INTRODUCTION.

11 medical science in China, and no registration of deaths upon the basis of medical certificates ; and this de fect in the Chinese civilisation opens the way to interminable suspicion, heart-burning, and faction. In one of the stories the reader will see the schisms in the home which are almost inseparable from poly gamy and concubinage. The Chinaman expects that submission to the established authority of the house hold will keep the household in peace, but he forgets that he may sometimes be overtaxing the dutifulness of human nature. Some of these types of virtue are at variance with our ideals of truthfulness and independence. The characters glorified are obsequious to the point of weakness and imbecility. Perhaps we need a little more of the conciliatory spirit which has coined the Chinese proverb, " A soft tongue outlasts the hard teeth " ; but the probable verdict upon the Good Graduate, as well as the meek and long-suffering heroine in the story of Madam Cross-grain, will be that they were mere weaklings, for whom little respect can be entertained.

All the stories are of course ruled by the idea that filial piety is the first of virtues, and the duties growing up out of blood brotherhood come next. A Chinese bride must transfer her affections from her own parents, and affect to love and obey her husband's parents in preference to her own. The mother-in-law is the head of the household, and to submit is the first duty not only of her sons, but also of their

INTRODUCTION.

12 wives. The wife is married not because her husband wants a compatible companion, but to bear children and to become a servant to the husband's mother. The husband must beat his wife if his parents com mand him to do so, however well-pleasing to his own affections the wife may happen to be. If he is left a widower, he must marry again if his parents so direct him. During the lifetime of the parents the son has no theoretical right to his own earnings, and should place them at the disposal of his parents. In some cases parents may forego this right, but in the abstract a son is a serf who cannot hold property during their lifetime. If a husband seem to be loving his wife more than his father and mother, that is looked upon as vice of the blackest descrip tion. The New Testament precept, " For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife," is one of the chief stumbling blocks with which the Chinese are confronted in accepting Christianity.

A Chinese proverb says : " Parents are like the sun and the moon. If they should be blotted out of the sky, it would be impos sible to replace them. A wife is like a garment. When the garment is worn out, it is always possible to buy a new one." The stories emphasise the doctrine of providential retribution. The conception of justice, as we judge things, is just a little out of focus. The female despot, Madam Cross-grain, gets off very well indeed. Perhaps the Chinese story-teller considers that it was the

INTRODUCTION.

13 privilege of her position to make herself as disagree able as possible, and that rancour in one filling the post of authority is not the vice it would be in one under the yoke. It scarcely accords with our ideas of justice, that the child of a good man adopted by his brother, who was bereaved of his children as the punishment of his offence against the law of filial piety, should share the broken fortunes of his foster father, and that the children of this adopted child even should have but a meagre inheritance of good fortune to mark their foster -grandfather's delin quencies. The Chinese, however, are accustomed to think of the solidarity of the family and the clan in their succeeding generations rather than of the responsibility of the individual. The last translation in this series of short stories, " A Buddhist's Vision of Purgatory," will probably be found to possess several features of interest for the English reader.

It is not without its value as a testimony to the world-wide belief in a future life and the great retributions that enact themselves there. Chinese students have generally assumed that the elaborate conceptions of purgatory here drama tised for popular study came from India with Buddhism at the beginning of the Christian era, and that Buddhism borrowed the substance of these con ceptions from the old Brahmanism of India. Tauism, one of the indigenous religions of China, mysteriously adopted them without acknowledgment at an early but undetermined period, and has since taught them

INTRODUCTION.

14 as though they were its own. Not improbably a strongly defined and elaborate belief in retribution after death was part and parcel of the primitive religious tradition of the Chinese race. The defects of taste present in these delineations must not blind us to that striking belief in an unerr ing principle of judgment they illustrate. Both here and hereafter vast and mysterious powers reckon with us for our weal or woe. The reader who despises and dismisses these Chinese representations on the ground of their ghastly coarseness will betray super ficiality and narrowness, and prove himself quite unfit for the study of the great subject of comparative religion. In extenuation of the ruthlessness and brutality of these views of punishment, it must be said that local colour necessarily enters into the view of spiritual retribution and the power of conceiving it, and that the vision of the following pages is steeped in the tradition and practice of the Chinese criminal courts.

The genius of the Chinese language has much to do with the gross concrete character of the descrip tions given by this Chinese writer. Inflected and alphabetic languages produce a larger stock of terms for the expression of abstract and spiritual ideas than ideographic languages. The ideographic language we may compare to the old line engravings. They are full of sharp definition, and do not lend them selves to vague suggestions and atmospheric effects.

INTRODUCTION.

15 The inflected and alphabetic language we may com pare to the method of producing those tender and dainty illustrations which appear from time to time in some of our illustrated magazines. After the picture has been drawn or photographed, it is half sponged out, so that the fine aerial effects which excite our wonder are produced. In the non-ideographic languages it is possible for a word to lose its sharp edge and become a dim suggestion of spiritual things. In such a language as the Chinese, where a word is represented by a character in which there is a pictorial feature still present, the word cannot lose its outline, and must remain a sharp picture to the very end of its history. And it is impossible to eliminate the concreteness from an idea unless you can eliminate the ideographic element from the character which expresses it.- The sharp, abrupt, unsoftened line of the Chinese ideograph is adverse to vague mysticism of speech, and compels perhaps the gross, repulsive realism of these descriptions.

In the closing scene of this vision it will be observed that the Chinese writer anticipates the doctrine of the theosophists, and indeed of our mediæval astrologers, about the astral body. Multiplex souls are supposed to inhere in the same personality, and may become temporarily separated from each other and transported into distant realms, whilst the body continues in life and maintains its common functions. For good or for evil the consciousness may bifurcate, and one stream of it may pass into some strange

INTRODUCTION.

plane aloof from that in which the living form moves and acts. The theory has a close relation to the speculations of that occult psychology which assumes that the centre of consciousness may be transferred to some point outside the body.

Chapter II Kinship And

KINDNESS— A CHINESE FARCE WITH A MORAL PERSON Æ. Hak Tak and Tsun Tak, two brothers. Hak Tak's Wife. Cash and Pettyman, two worthless companions. TWO sons named Hak Tak and Tsun Tak (Capacity and Achievement) comprised the little family of Mr. Ming, of the Heung Shan district of Kwangtung. Through the early death of their father, these two youths came into the possession of a small estate worth four or five thousand dollars. A girl, whose maiden name was Lin, and who proved her self true, strong, and clear -judging, deferential to her lord, and affable to her young brother-in-law, became the bride of Hak Tak. Tsun Tak, who was between seventeen and eighteen years of age, at the time of this story was unmarried, and occupied himself with the work of the ancestral farm. The elder brother was on terms of effusive in timacy with two men called Ts'in and Ts'iu (Cash and Pettyman), who were fertile in plots, without settled employment, and accustomed to cultivate the forms of friendship for the food and drink that came to them in this way.

At the outset, Hak Tak was quite blind to the sordidness of their motives, inasmuch as he was hoodwinked and overborne by outbursts of affected sympathy on the part of Mr. Cash, and the gross flatteries of Mr. Pettyman. Both acquaintances had a dash of piquancy about them, and talked perpetually about " The History of the Three Capitals and the Seven States," describing, with great animation, strokes of genius and wonderful exploits and adventures. Upon receiving any imaginary slight or offence, Hak Tak, who was somewhat unamiable by tempera ment used to wax hot with indignation. Cash and Pettyman, instead of slaking down with timely supplies of water the kindling flames, only poured on oil. " You have nothing to fear. Such an affront is intolerable, and you might even venture to pommel him upon your own responsibility.

It would be the easiest matter in the world to make your grievance the ground of a successful lawsuit." Cash would then chime in that his sister's husband was a small military mandarin and had influence, and Pettyman would add that he could claim as a distant relative an official of very high rank indeed. Thereupon Hak Tak would clap his hands and say, " These things being so, we may spin the heavens round at will," pouring out with the word a full cup of wine for Cash, and addressing him as " Pink of Allies," and yet another cup for Pettyman, apostrophising him as " Pearl of Brothers." Thus the three would drink merrily together, and stretch their mouths in loud songs, rubbing their fists in menace of distant antagonists, and laughing with boisterous vulgarity. At such times Hak Tak would call out at the pitch of his voice : " My younger brothers are all come; be quick and make hot some samshoo.

If you have not time to kill and cook a fowl, beat up twenty ducks' eggs and cook them with half a pound of dried shrimps ; and mince a pound of salt pork, and make a quick fire, and wash the small rice-pan. Be sharp with that frizzle." But Tsun Tak was not entirely pleased at these proceedings and the constant visits of Cash and Pettyman, with the upset occasioned in the house ; and the torrents of vapid, unprofitable talk evidently irritated him. Little by little his displeasure began to leak out. One day, when Cash and Pettyman called, the elder brother was away from home, and the younger did not accord them a sufficiently hearty reception, from their point of view at least. A short time after, as Cash and Pettyman were drinking wine with Hak Tak, Cash said, with a smile : " You carry yourself in the world like the first-rate fellow you are.

Kindness is the one idea you keep in view, and in your intercourse with friends money seems to be no object. A downright noble soul indeed, one of a thousand." To this compliment Hak Tak made reply, "You flatter me; I do not put forward any such preten sions." Pettyman then chimed in : " To find a flaw in you would be hard indeed ; but your younger brother's disposition is the opposite of yours. Not that we have anything to complain of in his treatment of us, but in his demeanour towards you he is freezing, stolid, lacking in kindness. Does not the elder brother step into the dead father's place ? and to be unwilling to show deference to an elder brother is at variance with all orthodoxy." / " I cannot explain this distance between us," said the host. " I neither swear at him, nor use my right to punch ; and yet, old tortoise-egg that he is, he treats me as if he had very little care for me."

" I have an idea," Cash broke in, " he suspects you of using your position as an elder brother to defraud him of his due." " In what way is it possible for me to defraud him ? " asked Hak Tak. " At the most, when [friends come to call on us, there is a little additional outlay for eating and drinking from the common purse." Cash replied : " It is not in these things he mis trusts you, but he suspects you are putting into your own private purse revenue out of your father's estate. That is how matters stand." Hak Tak exclaimed, with much solemnity of manner, " My conscience is as clear as the blue sky, which fact you, my friends, know very well." " We, of course, know it," Pettyman said, " but your brother does not." " The topic is painful," whined Hak Tak. " It is such things which tempt one to say friends are better than brothers."

Cash and Pettyman then feigned the part of virtuous counsellors, and exhorted him, saying : " Well, comrade, do not vex yourself. If your brother misunderstands you, be patient, and do not let him see any outward sign of anger. But to refer to these delicate matters at all is too much like sowing strife in the family. We only spoke because your affection for us seemed to warrant our dropping a word and trying to appreciate your position." After this interview, Hak Tak felt an unconquerable recoil from his younger brother. He would swear at him whenever a word was spoken that jarred upon his own tastes, and beat him violently whenever any thing was done in which his own views were not entirely anticipated. A Curtain Lecture. One night, after Hak Tak and his wife had retired, the wife ventured to remonstrate, saying : " My father in-law had only two sons, your brother and yourself.

Can there be the same affection between mere ac quaintances as between brethren by birth ? How is it that you seem to hate with intense bitterness the sight of your brother? Have not those of our own flesh and blood an equal claim with mere companions? You behave generously enough to those who are only friends, and why should you treat unkindly the son of your own mother? This is loving the distant and slighting the near, looking to that which is outside and forgetting that which is central." " Be quiet with you. Men of his sort are useless in the world. They are not fit stuff for any kind of work." To which the wife made retort : " If it be true that your brother is utterly useless, are those two com panions so very exemplary and serviceable ? " " How can I do otherwise than take pleasure in their company, when they have said over and over again that in my cause they would dive into the depths, or puddle mud-walls, or even die for me?"

" As to dying for you, that boast remains to be proved ; but in my view, whilst friends are for social fellowship, brothers are for love. These men, if I measure things aright, simply hanker after your meat and drink, and I have my fears they may yet drag you under the stream," said the wife. " What can women know about such things ? It is as much as you can do to pick out the different qualities of pomatum with which you smear your hair. No man with a proper sense of dignity will listen to the crude babble of his wife. The reins are in my hands, and it is not for you to be prating on in this style unchecked ! " exclaimed Hak Tak. " Women there may be who concoct scandal and make it the staple of their curtain lectures, and breed schisms between kith and kin ; and some men too are nose-led by such wives.

For my part, I am only seeking to promote a proper understanding between you and your younger brother. Husband though you are, you can surely heed a sentence or two from my lips now and again. Alas that I am mated to such a stiff-necked man ! " Hak Tak stormed. " My brother is a worthless fellow, and of course I cannot pretend to care for him. How is it that you are so greatly enamoured ? " The wife could only sigh and hold her peace. It was not long after this conversation that Hak Tak drove his brother out of doors. Tsun Tak then went to a neighbouring village, and got em ployment as cook in a rice and wine shop. Cash and Pettyman now had things their own way without any one to check or vex them. Sometimes they would come once in three or five days, and have their banquet of dog's flesh and minced fish, dangling the guitar, smoking opium, and wasting time in games of chance, debauchery, and wine-drinking, till such habits began to tell a tale upon the physique.

The wife's tearful remonstrances were all in vain. A Panic. One night, after a long carouse in the ancestral temple, Hak Tak came home in a state of partial stupefaction, and his wife said, pointing at him with her finger, " You can think of little else but getting drunk every day." To this he replied, " If I did not drink, I should have nothing else to do." " Nothing to do indeed ! At last there is some thing to take up your attention." The sot angrily entered his chamber and threw himself across the bed. Bending down to his ear, the wife said in a suppressed tone : " Some one has been killed, and the corpse thrown into our back garden. Are you going to drop quietly off to sleep ? " When Hak Tak heard this, he became greatly alarmed, and his complexion turned quite livid. He could not have been more startled had cold water been suddenly poured down his spine.

Smiting the planks of his couch, he asked, " Who is the murderer?" To which his wife replied, " I do not know." " And who the victim ? " To which the same answer was returned. Hak Tak then said, " Lead me to the spot and let me see for myself." With nervous and hurried step he followed his wife into the garden. It was about the time for lighting the lamps, and the night was beginning to darken. There, prostrate upon the earth, lay, sure enough, a lifeless form. The face was difficult to distinguish, but white trousers soaked in blood shrouded the legs. Hak Tak had all along been a man of somewhat scanty courage. The first glimpse was terrifying, and all the heart went out of him. Ruefully shaking his head, he exclaimed : " We are fated to ruin. I have no idea who can have laid this deep plot against our lives."

His wife replied : " I do not know all the people with whom you may have had quarrels. You must have exasperated some one, who has brought this body here so as to cast upon us the suspicion of complicity in a murder, and involve us at the very least in a heavy money fine." Hak Tak asked, "Whatever must we do?" " You must, of course," said she, " get the body buried at once before the thing is bruited abroad. If you succeed in that, you may perhaps escape without further trouble." " Had we not better hire a coolie to assist us in the affair ? " The wife shrewdly observed : "In a crisis of this sort a hireling is not to be lightly trusted. Our secret might be betrayed, and then endless complications and embarrassments would arise. A matter of this kind can only be confided to bosom friends."

After musing for a minute or two, Hak Tak brightened up and declared, " I have hit upon a scheme that will help us out of our troubles." Unstable Friends. Taking a lighted lantern in his hand, he posted away to the house of his friend Pettyman, who, upon hearing his voice at the door, asked him to enter and be seated. Pettyman, smiling, enquired, " What happy fortune brings you here so late at night?" Hak Tak, taking Pettyman by the hand, led him outside, and said in a subdued tone : " To-night such and such things have befallen us. I want you to play the friend, and give a helping hand in burying the corpse." But, lo ! when Pettyman suddenly heard all this, he thought within himself: This is a matter in which life may be at stake. If any after-accusation arise, I may be found to have brought myself within reach of capital punishment.

He then went on to say : " Old friend, your treatment of me hitherto has been most handsome. If the matter of which you have just spoken had been of another complexion, I could have died for you. But all my life long I have had a dread of looking upon corpses, and at the very mention of such things all sort of fancies start up within me. At the deaths of my father and mother, some little time back, I had to hire people to do the last offices of affection for them, and did not venture even to the coffin side to take a farewell glance. My heart grew sick within me when you just now opened your lips on this matter. Cash has any amount of courage, and I have no doubt it will be all right if you ask him." Hak Tak then hurried away to see Mr. Cash, and upon reaching his threshold, almost battered down the door in his impatience.

Cash enquired : " What is the matter? Why this agitation? Be seated, please. Be seated." To these introductory courtesies he replied : " I have no leisure to be seated. I just want a word with you." " What have you to discuss *" asked the expectant friend. " Something good I will wager." Taking Cash into a quiet corner, Hak Tak told him all about the dead body put into his back garden. When Cash heard it, he said, " Well, what a con science a man must have, to so plot against the innocent ! " Hak Tak then went on to say, " Pettyman excuses himself, and I want you to come and give me a helping hand at this critical turn." Cash reflected that imperial justice undertakes to deal with these questions of life and death, and legal proceedings are sure to grow out of this affair. If Pettyman declines to meddle in this risky business, shall I be stupid enough to have a hand in it?