Page:Chinese Characteristics.djvu/120

102 Foreign inability to do '.vhat any ordinary Chinese can do with the greatest ease, leads the Chinese to look down upon us. We cannot eat what they eat, we cannot bear the sun, we cannot sleep in a crowd, in a noise, nor without air to breathe. We cannot scull one of their boats, nor can we cry "Yi! yi!" to one of their mule-teams in such a way that the animals will do anything which we desire. It is well known that the artillery department of the British army, on the way to Peking in i860, was rendered perfectly helpless near Ho-hsi-wu by the desertion of the native carters, for not a man in the British forces was able to persuade the Chinese animals to take a single step!

Inability to conform to Chinese ideas and ideals in ceremony, as well as in what we consider more important matters, causes the Chinese to feel a thinly disguised contempt for a race whom they think will not and cannot be made to understand "propriety." It is not that a foreigner cannot make a bow, but he generally finds it hard to make a Chinese bow in a Chinese way, and the difficulty is as much moral as physical. The foreigner feels a contempt for the code of ceremonials, often frivolous in their appearance, and he has no patience, if he has the capacity, to spend twenty minutes in a polite scuffle, the termination of which is foreseen by both sides with absolute certainty. The foreigner does not wish to spend his time in talking empty nothings for "an old half-day." To him time is money, but it is very far from being so to a Chinese, for in China every one has an abundance of time, and very few have any money. No Chinese has ever yet learned that when he kills time it is well to make certain that it is time which belongs to him, and not that of some one else.

With this predisposition to dispense as much as possible with superfluous ceremony because it is distasteful, and because the time which it involves can be used more agreeably in other ways, it is not strange that the foreigner, even in his