标题: 1971.08 一个文化帝国主义者的回忆 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-11-2 02:23 标题: 1971.08 一个文化帝国主义者的回忆 Recollections of a Cultural Imperialist
"All of us have been the tools of American cultural aggression, perhaps without being wholly conscious of it."
—Y. T. Wu, Chinese Christian leader, July, 1951
By James C. Thomson
AUGUST 1971 ISSUE
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So at last it begins to happen: the reopening of China to Americans. Bizarrely, belatedly, but inevitably, a “new page” is turned in Sino-American relations.
For the real China Lobby within American society, this past spring has been a season of exhilaration. I speak of those scattered thousands throughout our country who once lived in China and are determined someday to return: the pre-1949 expatriates of the missionary, business, diplomatic, journalistic, and even military community, but especially their legions of sons and daughters. For twenty years now, inside and outside our government, nostalgia for a “land of lost content” has afflicted a small but persistent cluster of Americans. “Back-to-the-Mainland” is no monopoly of Chiang Kai-shek.
As one who belongs to this lobby, who spent his childhood in China and has yearned to go back, I share in the exhilaration. Yet the feeling is curiously mingled with twinges of anxiety. What will it be like? How will it feel? Will anything be the same? And will the memories be destroyed?
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What memories?
What follows are some random recollections of a “cultural imperialist”—Peking’s term for foreign missionaries—but a cultural imperialist junior-grade, an infant member of the species, in pre-Communist China. I offer them as a glimpse of a fast-receding era, now that we seem on the verge of a very new one.
Among the children of American missionaries in China, there persisted before the war two social divisions-the BIC’s and the BOF’s. The BIC’s were the elite, those fortunate enough to have been born in China. The BOF’s were the rest, born on furlough when their parents returned to America for their one-year-in-seven breathers. That I was a BOF pained me except that it meant I might one day be elected President of the United States, while my BIC brother and sisters very probably could not. That provided me with one major source of security.
Otherwise, I was quite insecure. I was years younger than the rest of the family. And besides, I had missed 1927, the year in which everything had happened. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops, in alliance with the Communists, had marched up from the South to overthrow the Northern warlords. My father and mother, militant pacifists at the time, had refused to budge from their Nanking home when the American Consul warned all citizens to take refuge down the Yangtze River in Shanghai. So there they sat, with three children and a grandmother; and in poured Chiang’s underfed, underclothed troops, eager to relieve foreigners of their belongings and, in a few cases, their lives. The visitors went wild for three days, and by the end of that time the Nanking Incident had taken place and I had missed it. The high point was reached when the family, looted of their last possessions, were lined up for final disposal by some trigger-happy farm boys from the South. At the last minute my father’s students saved the day by buying them off for four hundred silver dollars. The soldiers initially wanted four thousand but decided, on closer inspection, that the price was too inflated for the particular goods in question. Eventually, the U.S. Navy came to the rescue.
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But all this, as I say, was well before my time. It was not until 1933, at the age of one and a half, that I emigrated to China. And for the next seven years, China was home.
It was a splendid home, too. Not that what I came to know was really “the old China.” It was rather an interim phase that had begun with the Generalissimo’s accession to power in 1927. Pre-1927 Nanking was something I knew only from stories at the dinner table. These were countless, and in the course of their retelling, I came to cherish favorites among the pageant of heroes and villains that passed before my mind’s eye.
One special hero was the King of the Thieves. In the old days he had reigned supreme over the city’s ancient and respected guild of robbers. Each winter, on the eve of Chinese New Year, the cook would announce the arrival of the King of the Thieves, a tall, dark Northerner who then entered, bowed, and awaited his annual gift with the utmost grace and courtesy. The ten silver dollars constituted a small protection fee which kept us immune from robbery for the next twelve months. And it worked. Every once in a while a slipup might occur, and a protected household would awaken to find that the family silver had vanished in the night. But a pained protest to the King of the Thieves would always bring most of the missing loot speedily back to the doorstep, together with an explanation that some novice had pilfered the wrong house and would be sternly reprimanded. All this came to an end with the creation of the Nanking police force in the nineteen thirties. So did our immunity from thieves.
Mother of my heroes was the old warlord of Nanking. He had died some years before, and his funeral had been one of the city’s memorable events. Chinese funerals are always festive. This time the entire city came out in parade. First marched the zesty mourners and two brass bands playing the irrelevant pseudo-Western music of which the warlord was so fond. Then came an eight-horse hearse. The climax was five carriageloads of bereaved concubines, followed by a third brass band blaring forth ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.”
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This was, incidentally, the same warlord who would periodically institute, during the years of chronic disorder, a rather ineffectual system of martial law. Our next-door neighbor, Pearl Buck (who later scandalized the missionary community by publishing a novel, divorcing her husband, marrying her publisher, and winning the Nobel Prize), was out visiting friends beyond the city walls one evening. She returned by carriage somewhat after eleven to discover the city gates closed and barred because of a new curfew. “Halt, who goes there?” shouted the sentry. “Give the password!” Mrs. Buck groped for an inspiration and called out, “Hopei!” “You fool!” said the sentry, “that was yesterday’s password. Today’s is Shensi!” “Shensi,” shouted Mrs. Buck. “Pass!” said the sentry. Such incidents kept me from developing too serious a concern over the dangers of Chinese militarism.
Among the villains, on the other hand, of these dinner-table legends were wild boars and wolves. Boars were there to be hunted, outside the city walls. But wolves had the habit, it seemed, of straying through the city gates unnoticed and causing a considerable commotion. Nanking, the “Southern Capital,” had been the seat of the first Ming emperor and was once a great city. But the Taipings had wrought terrible havoc there during their curious midnineteenth-century rebellion, and afterwards it was reduced to a sleepy provincial town. It retained certain marks of imperial grandeur-among them its impressive walls, seventy feet high, twenty-six miles long, and wide enough on top for two small cars to pass. Much of the area within the walls was now rural, and wolf hunts could be good sport even inside the city limits. It was in the twenties, too, that my father used to go hunting for wild boars in the eroded and beautifully treeless countryside beyond the walls. But the boars seem to have emigrated with the coming of Chiang’s armies, so my father was left to hunt deer until the day he shot a doe who looked like my sister Nancy, at which point he put away his gun and turned to photography.
But this is not to say that the impact of China was communicated to me over the dining room table. Far from it. China was all around me-its sounds, its smells, its colors-beyond the protection of the walls which enclosed our Western-style brick house, our servants’ quarters, and our garden with its camphor, pomegranate, fig, and persimmon trees. Sometimes China even sneaked inside the walls.
My father was a professor of chemistry at the mission-sponsored University of Nanking. My mother taught school for the older missionary children. They had originally journeyed to China in 1917 as embodiments of confused ecumenism. My father was Dutch Reformed, my mother Episcopalian; they had been dispatched to China by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions to take the place of a Methodist at an interdenominational university and had occupied a house owned by the Disciples of Christ. For a while, in their first year, no one would pay their salary. But all this was past history by the time I came along. From the beginning I was certain that the true road to salvation lay through Presbyterianism, especially since the Presbyterian Board was now footing the bill. As for my father’s employment, I knew he could do wondrous things in an exciting place called his “laboratory”—like grinding wheat for our porridge, peanuts for our peanut butter, and brewing buttermilk by the vat. Other than this, I was reasonably impervious to the missionary enterprise and was left to my own devices.
These devices brought me into contact with the second most important woman in my life, namely Ch’u Sao-tzu the amah. Ch’u Sao-tzu had previously belonged to famous Pearl Buck and considered her present employment, I think, a distinct step downward on the social ladder; She was the most strongwilled female I have ever known, swore with eloquence rare even among the Chinese, chased the male servants with hot irons when her ire was aroused, and kept her poor husband, Li-hua the cook, in a state of lamblike docility. It had taken a steely hand to catch Li-hua, and Ch’u Sao-tzu had not been averse to using it. Shortly before his announcement of his desire to marry her, Li-hua had been locked in the cellar for three days by his lady, unbeknownst to the household. Many years later a childless Ch’u Sao-tzu decided it was high time she should have some heirs. So she found Li-hua a second wife, got them married, and expropriated the eventual offspring of this union.
Extraordinarily, independent of mind, Ch’u Saotzu was highly adaptable of spirit. Some years before, a’ good missionary had brought her into the arms of Christianity, and she was a confirmed and reasonably faithful member of the Chung Hua Shen Kung Hui, or Chinese Episcopal Church. At least twice a year, too, she would burn incense to her ancestors to assure good luck. Now and then she would visit the local Buddhist temple and purchase a prayer stick or two. She always stopped to pay her respects to the little images in Taoist shrines along the roads in the countryside. And to the extent that her unbridled spirit would permit, she honored the precepts of the Sage Confucius in her human relationships. Ch’u Sao-tzu was. a formidable example of the obstacles facing Christian evangelism in China. She was imbued with a wholesome disregard for metaphysics, a zestful concern for the here and now, and a boundless capacity for absorbing such trivia as credos and forms of worship.
It was through Ch’u Sao-tzu that I first knew the China beyond our brick-wall frontier. It was she who used to lift me over to the amah next door, an amiable soul well stocked with such delights as spiced dumplings and, on special occasions, almondpaste “moon cakes.” It was Ch’u Sao-tzu who would let me sample, on the sly, the forbidden wares of the street vendors-fried breads and spun sweets. It was Ch’u Sao-tzu who taught me songs and poems of an earthier nature than those I learned in school. And it was she who would tend me when I was ill, taking special care, in accordance with my mother’s instructions, to sterilize the thermometer in alcohol-after which she would lick it off just to make sure it was clean.
In fact, it was from Ch’u Sao-tzu that I derived my early skepticism about sanitation, and about germs in general. My father was to germs very much what Joseph McCarthy was to American Communists; he saw them everywhere and pursued them ferociously. But from Ch’u Sao-tzu I learned that all this was an example of Western superstition; the Chinese were above such things, but tolerated the foreigners’ eccentricity in this regard, as they did in most others. Sometimes her attitude used to worry my mother. And on one memorable occasion the missionary community decided to have a showing of a documentary film on the menace of flies for the enlightenment of all the local servants. It was. one of those awesome things in which the fly is magnified several hundred times to show its full filth and really looks appalling. Afterwards it was Ch’u Sao-tzu who voiced the audience’s sense of revelation. “Oh, T’ang Sze-mu!” she exclaimed to my mother, in Chinese, “I see why you have always made such a fuss about flies, since flies are so very large in your country. But you must not worry. You see, our Chinese flies are really tiny little harmless things.”
Teaching Ch’u Sao-tzu Western sanitation was just about as difficult as teaching the local carpenter to accustom himself to Western designs for furniture. My father once wanted a special desk built for his laboratory, so he called in this craftsman, chatted with him, and made a perspective drawing of the completed piece. The carpenter reluctantly agreed that it might be possible to produce such a desk, and came back in a week with the finished product. It was a. very curious desk; the top was in the shape of a tired parallelogram, while the rear legs were shorter than the front legs. He had followed the drawing exactly—and had constructed the desk itself in perspective.
When I was old enough to embark upon education, it was Ch’u Sao-tzu who escorted me to Chinese kindergarten. And Chinese kindergarten was a joy. Getting there involved one obstacle. Each day my route led me past the same genial policeman, and each day he would ask me my name and roar with mirth when I replied. It seems that the Chinese phonetic equivalent of my name, Jimmy, or “Chimi,” a name bestowed upon me inadvertently by my mother, had the literal meaning “Chicken Feed,” a term which unfortunately connotes no greater virility in Chinese than in English. But Chi-mi I remained, and to kindergarten I toddled daily. There I learned to salute the Chinese flag, to sing the Chinese national anthem, and to bow three times before the portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. I learned, in short, to be a useful Chinese citizen. But I was not as great a success as my brother had been before me, for he had come home from the all-Chinese school one day, to my mother’s rather mixed pleasure, with a prize for being the second-cleanest boy in the class. Anyway, after several months of this, my parents decided that it was time to train me in my cultural heritage. And so I was dispatched to an nglo-American Quaker kindergarten. It was here that I got religion, so to speak; and that was useful, too.
In the first place, it gave me and a small female friend a stimulus to play endless sessions of a game. which must be the missionary equivalent of “House”—except that instead of taking turns being Mama and Papa, we played, as I remember, a totally asexual and Presbyterian variety in which we took turns being God and Jesus. This tended to produce fierce altercations as to who had played which role longer, though I do not recall who took precedence in our hierarchy. It was also at Quaker kindergarten that I leaned to pray. This skill found special use in my continued and inconclusive battle against the carrot, a vegetable I abhorred. My greatest triumph came the day I went into the kitchen with a large black book under my arm and asked the cook and amah to join with me in a prayer meeting. This they reverently did, bowing their heads while I called upon the deity generally to preserve us from carrots and, in particular, to keep the cook from buying or preparing them ever again. The ceremony had its effect, I discovered, as Li-hua felt it would shake my youthful belief in God were he to disobey my wishes on the subject. So carrots disappeared from the menu for several months until my mother complained and learned the story. It seems she had less regard for the tenderness of my faith.
Kndergartens aside, Nanking was a lively place in the thirties. The years from 1928 to 1937 were an interval of promise as well as upheaval. The Kuomintang government, whatever its shortcomings, was infused with a good deal of youth, vigor, and idealism. It mapped out some of the most ambitious programs of modernization the country had ever known. Nanking was the hub of the new order, and there one could feel the quickening pulse of the land.
Most of this, of course, passed me by. But I do clearly recall the Generalissimo’s curious plan for national regeneration along neo-Confucian principles, something called the “New Life Movement”which, I must confess, darkly fascinated me for some time, as I was convinced that it had something to do with the excretory process. Had I been less of a prude, I should have raised the point with my parents. But prude I was, which fact indicates a staggering victory for Presbyterianism in the wilds of Asia, as there is nothing to which life in China is less conducive than prudery. A country in which the fields are periodically draped in night soil is not a country where one learns to be finicky about the more private bodily functions as in our overcivilized West. Men and women tended to relieve themselves without self-consciousness or concealment. The only problem was that Chinese children and even some less circumspect adults seemed to place a premium on the valu of observing a foreigner so performing. In later years I was to become quite blasé about the large and genuinely curious crowds which would gather around the open outhouses of country inns where I happened to be spending a night. Among Chinese children. I am convinced, that there exists a game whose title, roughly translated, reads: “Catch-the-foreign-devil-going-pee-pee.”
It should be mentioned that one thing to which Westerners in China did have to accustom themselves speedily was the fact of living in a zoo-but. not on the spectator side of the bars. As big-nosed, pinkfaced people, we were excruciatingly funny to observe, and in the course of the years, our entertainment value was immense, if at all else we failed. As foreigners we gathered swarms of spectators wherever we went outside such cosmopolitan and sophisticated centers as Shanghai and Hong Kong. We were funny when walking, we were comical when eating, and we were downright ludicrous when taking pictures, reading books, or writing letters. In later years I was often to collect crowds of as many as thirty people in the course of changing a single camera film. Once, long afterwards, in postwar West China, a friend and I overnighted in a town which had not seen a foreigner in six years and inadvertently led a parade of five hundred screaming children through the streets in desperate search of anonymity and the small, elusive inn where we had left our baggage.
Not that this particularly bothered me in the thirties. I was universally addressed by street urchins as “hsiao yang kuei-tzu,” or “little foreign devil,” but came to regard it as almost a term of endearment. Even “ta-pi,” or “big-nose,” seemed rather mild, especially in the face of such spicier epithets as “big turnip” and “turtle’s egg.” Chinese swearing was colorful, if less than overwhelming in translation. And the zoolike aspects of life in China were often diverting for a child.
And so the thirties passed, filled with the songs of street vendors and mountain carriers, with misty landscapes and soft red temples, with pagoda roofs and the smells of the Chinese alley. It was in the summer of 1937, while we played in the Lushan mountains at Kuling, that a second Nanking Incident occurred with the Japanese occupation of that city; and once again I missed the excitement. For a few months we remained refugees in our mountain fastness as the Sino-Japanese war snapped and crackled to the north of us. And then, on New Year’s Day, we walked down Kuling’s 3000 steps to the international train which whisked us south to Hong Kong, a city memorable chiefly for our refugee camp cots in the cavernous dining salon of the Peninsular Hotel. Next came Shanghai, an international enclave where we could park ourselves peacefully for two more years on the campus of the Shanghai American School. Shanghai I remember for the world’s most comfortable rickshaws, for double-decker buses, chocolate shops, White Russian cafés, and the Jessfield Zoo’s most cheerful inmate, one “Jimmy the Giant Kangaroo.” The implications of this sizable advance over the days of Chicken Feed were not lost on me. Shanghai was cosmopolitan in the extreme and a very gay place; but it was not really China. Only once did we return to Nanking, a curiously dead, gray city now in the spring of 1938.
But then came furlough time at last. By late 1939 I was on my way to the country I had never known, a paradise so clean, I was assured, that you could pick pennies off the street and pop them quite safely into your mouth.
It was nine years before I returned to China, and the China to which I returned was a rather different one. Many of the differences lay in me, for I was seeing the country through seventeen-yearold eyes. The hazy, happy memories still lingered, and they snapped into clear focus as I revisited old scenes and relived old experiences. But scenes and experiences assumed new significance, for my arrival coincided with the collapse of the regime and the way of life we had known so well in Nanking.
I traveled to China in July, 1948, with a classmate (Winthrop Knowlton, now president of Harper & Row, publishers) who was joining me for a year abroad between school and college. In the summer months we wandered in the North around Peking, the Great Wall, and Inner Mongolia, then to central China up the Yangtze River in the mountains of the Lushan range once again. In September we enrolled in Nanking University and settled down for nine months of prewar domesticity. It turned out to be a bare two and a half months. By December the Communist armies were poised a few miles above Nanking, and my parents were moving to South China. The two of us bade farewell to things academic. This was our last chance, we said; so we armed ourselves with DDT, bedding rolls, and a sense of urgency. And we took off for four months of travel through the West and Southwest. They were months which brought us to the heart of the China that lies far behind the Eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, the walls were crumbling about us.
China was a curious place in this period of turnover. During our last weeks in Nanking enormous armies were convulsed in the greatest battle of Chinese history at Hsuchow, forty miles to the north of us. But all was deceptively serene in the city itself. Elsewhere in West China, later in the year, we had stepped back a thousand years to a land in which the war a few hundred miles away had no effect on the ancient rhythm of sowing and harvesting, of giving birth and dying. The tranquil past one found in West China was as nothing I have ever known. This was the China that had vexed a score of conquerors; the glacial China that lumbered on relentlessly in its peaceful and massive way, engulfing, quelling, absorbing.
It was in the West, too, that I came to know the reality of the unchanging Chinese spirit. We traveled a great deal as “yellow fish”—illegal paying hitchhikers—on the tops of antique postal buses and trucks, clinging to the sides of mailbags, market baskets, and freshly butchered hogs. We stopped for meals and lodgings in towns, remote villages, and sometimes Buddhist monasteries. Our fellow “fish” were provincial businessmen and farmers moving from town to town. They gaped at us, they guffawed at us. (China was still a zoo.) But almost never were we able to pay for a night’s lodging, almost never for a meal. Whenever we asked for the bill in the small mud-floor lamplit restaurant, the proprietor would reply that a gentleman at another table had already paid for us. Invariably this would be one of our fellow wayfarers, a countryman whose Confucian ethic had long ago taught him to show kindness to the stranger traveling through his land. We tried to repay by distributing peanuts and tangerines to the others during the ride. In the midst of misery they could be the most gracious and generous people on earth.
West China was an eye-opener in other ways. It instructed me further in the nature of Chinese governance. Here, after nearly forty years of nominal republican rule, the central government maintained control only through a careful network of alliances with powerful local warlords who still retained private armies.
And here it was that we encountered age-old symptoms of disorder best illustrated in the dilemma we confronted in February, 1949, when we reached Kweiyang in the Southwest on our trek back to the Coast. We had to choose, then, between a motor route southward, which was officially closed because bandits had seized a large portion of the road, and a river route southeastward, which was officially closed because pirates had seized a large portion of the river. As it was, we elected to try our luck with a narrow-gauge railway leading eastward which had been built in strips but never connected. The procedure was to journey in trucks by day, meet the railroad by nightfall, and meander through the darkness in plush prewar wagons-lits. Why had the rail sections never been linked? Because the local general had deduced from history that The Enemy always marched up completed railroads, so it would be best to construct only incomplete railroads.
And why, we asked one night, as we chugged along at two miles per hour, did the trains run so slowly? Oh, said the conductor, because if the train went any faster, the locomotive usually jumped the track. But, he added, there was one other problem: when the train ran slowly, bandits would walk aboard, rob all the passengers, and walk off again. It was a hard life, he sighed.
Were we imperialists? I suppose so—though judging by the outcome we were less than a success. And if anyone changed anyone, they changed us.
All I know is that I cried when I heard those first sounds from Peking on the television last spring.
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但是，正如我所说，这一切都比我的时代早。直到1933年，在我一岁半的时候，我才移民到了中国。在接下来的七年里，中国就是我的家。