The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1927-04-13
WESTERN WORLD
WHOLLY IGNORANT
OF REAL CHINESE
Ready to Believe Most Devil
iSh Thing Regarding
Oriental Race.
BY William Philip Simms

by W imam Fnlllp SImmS
Scrpps- Howard Foreign Editor
WASHINGTON. April 13.-Chinese
history begins $500 years before the
birth of Christ and 5000 years be-
fore the Romans evacuated England
leaving our ancestors prey to the
barbarians.
While Western Europeans, from
whom most of us descended, werc.
figuratively speaking, leaping nimb-
ly from limb to limb among the for
ests primeval, the Chinese were q
cultured people.
The Chinese were great engineers,
building exquisite houses, boring
tunpels through mountains, digging
canals and controlling floods; great
artists, fashioning objects beautiful
in form and color; chemists, doctors,
farmers, silk culturisis. weavers,
dyers, fishers with nets, philosophers
all before our civilization had even
begun.
Confucius, Mencius and Laotze,
three of the worlds greatest think
ers, were all products of the Chow
dynasty which flourishcd 1000 years
before medieval Europe began.
Scant knowledge
Yet today, 4,4OO years after the
beginning of Chinese history, we
know less of China and the Chinese
than we do Of darkest Africa. And
what we DO know is almost all
wrong.
We Americans talk about eating
mot dogs" Suppose the rest of the
world got the idea from, this that one
of our fayorite dishes on feast days
and picnics is boiled dog flesh. They
would be about as accurately in.
formed on our habits as most of us
are on the habits of the Chinese.
When l was in. China / thought I
might try some chop suey. l had
the utmost difficulty finding it.
Finally 1 was directed to restau.
rant run by a Chinese who had re-
turned from the United States. over
the door was a sign: american
Chop Suey." 1t seems chop suey
is not really Il Chinese dish at all.
but one invented in the United
States by a Cantonese.
Sources of Data
Our idea of what the Chinese are
like is obtained mostly in two ways:
first, out of fiction-bool1 or stage
and, second. in the local Chinese
laundry, or Chinatown, if any.
The fiction writer, often knowing
nothing at all about the Chinese,
makes him a cunning. crafty, MUIR
derous fellow who kidnaps people,
draSe them into dens in sub.cellars
under secret trap-doors, and there
drugs them, robs them, Sits their
Threats and disposes of the cadavers
through a sewer manhole.
AS boys we grow scared of the
Chinese laundryman whose writing
we, or any one We ever heard of,
could not possibly read: whose face
IS outlandish and whose speech is
fascinatingly weird. He lives in a
black hole behind the dincy counter
in his funny-smelling "office''-a
human spider, We think, waiting for
n victim.
We are told he eats rats. snakes
rotton eggs and that, not being
Christian, he has no soul.
Another View
What we do not know is that the
laundryman was probably a coolie
and extremely poor, with little or no
education; that he lives in back
streets or allies, and rattle-trap
shacks because tho rent is cheap and
he sleeps in those little. black,
smelly holes because he can't afford
to live as we do: that he not only has
Il soul, but likely enough, his heart
is as big as a barn; and that, II he
is shy and bit suspicious of every
body he has q very good reason. Had
his pigtail not been pulled habitually
by mischievous small boys of the
neighborhood and had they not n
habit of throwing bricks through his
befogged windows now and then
and of yelling "John John China
man--r-a.t-s" at him and running
away as from an ogre from another
world?
1 have yet to fiDd an American
who has lived in China and not loved
the Chinese. They are q smiling.
happy, good-natured people, hospi-
table to a fault and infinitely more
considerate of foreigners in China
than foreigners in China are con-
siderate of them.
Safe Among Chinese
American women who have acted
as missionaries, teachers, nurses or
attaches to commercial houses out
there, have told me they would not
hesitate to go home from office or
party after night, no matter how
late, alone in their rickshas. Girls
who would not dare venture alone
through the side streets of New
York, Chicago or other American
cities late at night, admit they do
so in safety in Chinese cities.
In the Marking rioting it was
charged that foreign women had had
their clothes torn from them by the
rabble. But so had the men.
1.-THE Chinese were bent on rob-
berry" observed an American naval
officer WHO has just returned to
Washington from his post with the
Yangtze patrol. Poorly dressed
themselves, the coolie class consider
the garments of an American man or
woman a very rich prize. Attacks
against women, such as are fairly
common in the United States, arc al
most unheard of in China"
The main difficulty between us
and the Chinese is, we have been
brought on the silly idea that they
are scarcely human and utterly un-
comprehensive. We quit trying to
understand them before we start
We are prepared to believe any
devilish thing about them, and the
more devilish it is, the better.