Chapter XI: China Has Her Own Ways

The Fourth of July, Christmas, and our other holidays mean nothing to the Chinese, but they do celebrate certain days of their own. The most important of these is New Year’s, though even that is not the same day as ours. For the Chinese still use the moon calendar, and their lunar New Year’s comes from three to six weeks later than our January first. Every time there is a new moon they start a new month. As it is only twenty-eight days from one new moon to another, this makes their year short. So they put in an extra month every two or three years.

They have no real names for their months, but call them “First Moon,” “Second Moon,” and so on. The extra month is not named thirteen, however, but is “tucked in,” as it were. So if you happen to be in China during one of their years of thirteen months you may wake up some morning and find the month that was finished the night before starting over again. Its name might be translated “June number two,” or something of the sort.

The years, however, have names. They are named for twelve animals—the rat, the dog, the goat, and so on. When the twelve are finished, a new start is made. Five times around forms an era, or what we sometimes call a Cycle of Cathay. Probably that is because sixty years is about the natural length of a man’s life. Also, it is easier to record dates if the years are grouped into cycles, in the same way that we group them into centuries.

If you ask a Chinese when he was born, his answer will be something like, “I appeared on the tenth day of the third moon in the Year of the Rooster.” If he is speaking of his grandfather or giving some date long ago, he will also mention the cycle or the reign of some emperor. When parents plan a Chinese marriage, a horoscoper is asked to make sure that the positions of the stars and the moon at the dates of birth of the boy and girl to be married, would be favorable. We would regard such dependence on signs as superstitious, yet other peoples, Western as well as Eastern, have similar superstitions.

In some ways the calendar of the Chinese is better, or at least truer, than ours. Their seasons are more exact, because their New Year’s is nearer the real middle of winter. The dates they call “Stirring of the Insects,” “Corn Rain,” “Sprouting Seeds,” “Small Heat,” “Great Heat,” are close to the times described by those phrases. On the other hand, in America the hottest days may come long before the middle of summer, or they may come in September; so “Great Heat” would not mean much to us.

It is convenient to be able to tell, merely by looking at the moon, what day of the month it is. Centuries ago our ancestors also used the moon calendar. But the Chinese are gradually changing many of their old customs. Since the revolution of 1911 the official government calendar is the same as ours, just as it is in Japan. Those who work for the government get two New Year’s holidays.

Among the many sorts of things sold at the Chinese New Year’s are
kites of all imaginable shapes, including those representing birds
and butterflies.
]

We saw two Chinese New Year’s days, one in Peking and the other down in southern China. They were especially good ones, for the first began the Year of the Pig, last of the twelve, and the second opened a new Cycle of Cathay. The Chinese expect all kinds of bad luck during the Year of the Pig—which the Mohammedans call the Year of the Black Sheep, because they cannot mention the “unclean” animal they are forbidden to eat. But they think all their troubles will be over when the new cycle begins. In this they are sure to be disappointed, but they have a great celebration anyway.

Feeding the Spirits of the Dead

Every Chinese who can do so, returns to his family home for New Year’s. All the ancestral graves should be cleared and redecorated then. The ancestors have to have religious services in their honor and must be given food. The Chinese think the spirits of the dead eat the aroma of the food set before their altars, and leave for the living the food itself. So New Year’s is a time of feasting, like our Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everyone wears his best clothes, brand-new ones from head to foot if possible. The children dress just like their parents, except that they may wear gayer colors.

For days before New Year’s the markets are crowded, since everyone who possibly can is buying. Besides the new clothes, one must have gifts for all his friends and relatives. New Year’s day rather than Christmas is the time to give presents in China, just as it is in France. Toys of all kinds appear in little booths built in the streets and in the temple grounds. People flock to the temples, to burn bundles of paper that they pretend is money, and handfuls of joss-sticks. More firecrackers are heard than on our Fourth of July. The Chinese think the noise drives away evil spirits. There was so much of it all about us that lunar New Year’s eve in Peking that even our little boy could hardly sleep.

The people eat all night long, one feast after another. The next day they make calls all day and eat and drink still more. The stores close, not simply for the day but for a week or more. But before you accuse the Chinese of being lazy in taking so long a holiday, as some travelers have, remember they do not have fifty-two Sundays of rest every year. Old men go out and fly kites, or take their birds for an airing. Younger men go to the theaters, or gamble at fantan or mah jong behind the closed shutters of their own or their friends’ shops. However, if you know the shopkeeper’s back door or secret entrance, you can usually buy anything you want, for the Chinese are enterprising and do not like to miss a chance to do business.

Many Days of Feasting

We wandered for days about the streets of Peking during the first week of that Year of the Pig, and still we did not see all the celebrations. There were brick walls covered with painted pictures, temple-grounds as packed as a county fair-ground, streets swarming with buyers and sellers and strollers, and lined for miles with hawkers’ stands and amusement booths. These sold only holiday things, but there were such quantities of them that the whole city looked like crisscrossed streaks of color. Not only the colors but the people were gay, and all sorts of noises that the Chinese call music rose above the happy uproar.

On the wall of every Chinese house, above the place where the cooking is done, is a paper with a picture of what the Chinese call the Kitchen God. At the end of the year this god is supposed to go to heaven and tell how the family behaved itself for the twelve or thirteen months just ended. So the picture is taken down just before New Year’s day, and burned. But before the Kitchen God is sent to heaven by fire his lips are rubbed with candy or sugar, sometimes with opium, so that he will tell only “sweet” things of the household he spent the year in! This trip to heaven and back is supposed to take seven days. At the end of that time new Kitchen Gods, in very bright colors quite different from the old smoked ones, appear everywhere.

The Chinese New Year’s is a great time for outdoor shows. These
acrobats could not ask for a more interested crowd to watch them
perform.
]

In the small, poor towns of southern China where I spent the second New Year’s, there was not room in most of the little houses to feed and worship the ancestors. So out in the narrow street before almost every door stood a table, with a cooked chicken or duck, its head tucked under its wing, and other food, as well as bowls of rice-wine. Just behind this, inside, was the ancestral altar, with a crude picture representing the dead fathers of the family.

Every hour or two the oldest living man or boy would come out into the street and kneel before the table, touching his head to the ground. Then he would stand up and burn incense-sticks and make motions with the cups of wine toward the altar inside as if he were inviting the ancestors to eat and drink. Sometimes there was only an old woman left to perform this ceremony, either because the family was dying out or because no man or boy of it could get home for New Year’s. Between these family services nearly all the people of the town spent their time gambling and refused to do any work whatever.

Guarding against Evil Spirits

It seems terrible to the Chinese to have a family die out, because then no one will look after the spirits of the members who are dead. Therefore all manner of queer tricks are used to “protect” boys from the evil spirits which the Chinese think are always trying to harm them. Many Chinese boys wear an iron or silver chain about their necks, with a great padlock on it. This is put on by a priest and is meant to warn evil spirits that the boy belongs to the temple and must not be harmed.

Often a boy is dressed as a girl, or called by a girl’s name, because the evil spirits do not bother with girls. Once I had as a servant a boy of about twelve with a ring in his nose. More exactly it was a piece of telegraph-wire twisted into a ring shape and thrust through the cartilage between the nostrils. This was supposed to prove that he was a pig—which in some ways he was!—so that invisible spirits of evil would let him alone.

If the Chinese did not have as a religion what we usually call ancestor worship, they would be able to live better. Because everyone, even beggars, must leave sons to burn incense to them after they are dead, China is terribly crowded. Because huge coffins are used to bury those who have left sons, much of China is suffering for lack of trees. Because graves must be kept for many generations, if not forever, millions of acres of land are wasted. If all the grave lands were cultivated the Chinese would have much more to eat.

Most of the Chinese are so poor that they never really have all they want to eat, except perhaps at New Year’s. There are so many Chinese that if one man leaves a job twenty will come running to get it. Therefore most jobs are sold by the man who has more than he can do himself, just as we sell goods. There are many labor unions in China, some of them hundreds of years old. But they cannot raise wages as our labor unions can, because there are too many people looking for work.

A Chinese girl making paper umbrellas. The ribs of the umbrellas are
of bamboo splints, tied together with colored strings. Tough, oily
paper, brightly colored in gay designs, is fastened to the ribs. A
number of finished umbrellas, closed, are in the rack.
]

The Hard-working Chinese

The Chinese are probably the hardest workers in the world, and certainly they are the most cheerful under hardships. No doubt that is because there have been so many more people than jobs for many centuries. They do not go around with chips on their shoulders as much as with smiles on their faces. Perhaps if we were as crowded for room as the Chinese are, we should have discovered that it is best to get along with other people as smoothly as possible, instead of picking a quarrel easily.

The Chinese are workers rather than fighters. They consider it bad manners to get angry, or at least to show anger. They call it “losing face” to be seen doing that, or anything else that makes them ashamed. They do fight sometimes, especially those of the coolie or poorer class. For even the Chinese have nerves, though they have learned to keep them under better control than we have. But like most people of Asia they do not even know how to “make a fist.” They fight by scratching, or still more by shouting. The man who can call the other the most names or get the crowd about them to laughing at the other wins the fight, by making the other “lose face.”

“Losing Face”

I must tell you a story to illustrate that peculiar Chinese custom of “losing face.” An American missionary doctor who has lived almost all his life in China was once giving out tracts in a country village. It was years ago, before the Boxer uprising in which many foreigners were killed, and when there was more danger of being mobbed. As he sat down in the village tea shop a woman came up and began insulting him.

“Ah,” she cried, “there is one of those wicked foreign devils who cut out the eyes of our children to make medicine, and eat our hearts to give themselves our courage!” In those days most of the Chinese believed such silly tales about foreigners, and some do yet. They could not understand modern medicine and surgery, brought to China by missionary doctors.

The doctor went on calmly sipping his hot tea. The crowd began to look angry. There seemed to be danger that the mob would fall upon the doctor. Then up walked a man without any nose! But he was smiling broadly and greeted the doctor in a very friendly way.

“Don’t you remember me?” he asked. “Don’t you remember when you cut off my nose?”

“There,” cried the woman, “what did I tell you? See what that wicked foreigner did to this man!”

Then the doctor remembered that the man had come to his hospital with cancer of the nose, and the only way to save his life was to cut the nose off. The crowd grew more and more angry, but the noseless man calmed it down, and finally the doctor, who speaks excellent Chinese, said: “Yes, we do sometimes cut off a man’s nose, and sometimes even take out an eye. But it is only when there is no other way of curing him. Now, if you people will give this woman money enough to come to my hospital, I will cut out her tongue, and your village will not be bothered any more with her scolding.”

The crowd roared with laughter, for no one likes a joke better than the Chinese. The woman, laughed at, had “lost face.” She slunk quickly out of sight, and the doctor was as safe in that village ever after as he would have been at home.

It is often said that the Chinese do things backward. But there are reasons for all Chinese customs, and if we stop to think we shall perhaps find that it is our own ways of doing things that are backward. For instance, the Chinese call the compass, which they invented, a “point-south pin.” Does it not point south as well as north? In China the women wear trousers. We are beginning to find that in some ways they are better for women than skirts. The Chinese always put the family name first and the given names after it. When we make telephone-books or directories we do the same thing. Instead of saying “good-by,” or “I must be running along,” the Chinese say “_Mant-zow_,” that is, “Walk slowly.” They consider it undignified to hurry. It is all in the point of view. The Chinese do not see a man’s face in the moon but an old man chopping down a tree. Who will say that they are wrong and we are right?