Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520084241 ISBN 13: 9780520084247

Publisher: University of California Press, 1993

Synopsis

Americans have long been fascinated with European views of the United States. The many Chinese commentaries on America, however, have remained largely unavailable to the English reader. Land without Ghosts presents for the first time selections on America from Chinese writings over the last 150 years. Included are extracts from the travel diaries of nineteenth-century diplomats, a first-hand account of blacks in 1930s Alabama and of the young white Communists working to organize them.

About this title

About the Author

R. David Arkush is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. Leo O. Lee is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.

From the Back Cover

"At last we have a wonderful book which makes us privy to these Chinese images of the West and lets us see how they were formed and how they changed over the last century and a half."―Orville Schell, author of Discos and Democracy

From the Inside Flap

"At last we have a wonderful book which makes us privy to these Chinese images of the West and lets us see how they were formed and how they changed over the last century and a half." Orville Schell, author of Discos and Democracy

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present

By R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, editors

University of California Press

Copyright 1993 R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, editors
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520084241


Introduction
R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee

During his visit to the United States in 1946, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg is said to have remarked that to know a woman or a nation takes either thirty days or thirty years.1 Leaving aside the bit about women, we can see what he meant about the advantage a newcomer has in perceiving another society. The visitor's impressions of a new country are fresh and sharp; he sees with a comparative perspective and is struck by things natives in their everyday familiarity do not notice. Accounts by foreigners can sometimes be startlingly perceptive. One of the best works ever written about the United States, it hardly needs to be said, was by an aristocratic French prison inspector who spent nine months on these shores 150 years ago. Democracy in America is not, to be sure, a simple first impression; after returning to France, Alexis de Tocqueville labored eight years researching and writing his twovolume masterwork. Still, his outsider's perspective on American society has much to do with the book's insights and fascination.

The volume of European writings about America is enormous and well known. By contrast, Americans are almost wholly ignorant of the impressive body of literature in Chinese about them and their country.2 Henry Steele Commager, who had compiled an anthology of

According to the late William Nelson, who traveled with Ehrenburg as his State Department interpreter.

A partial bibliography of Chinese writing about the United States may be found in Robert L. Irick, Y. S. Y, and K. C. Liu, American-Chinese Relations, 17841941: A Survey of Chinese Language Materials at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1968), 16898. For a succinct overview of Chinese views of the United States and the West (as well as of Chinese laborers and Chinese students in the U.S.), Jerome Ch'en, China and the West: Society and Culture, 18151937 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) is excellent except for the infuriating absence of footnotes. An interesting short account is Wei-ming Tu, "Chinese Perceptions of America," in M. Oksenberg and R. B. Oxnam, eds., Dragon and Eagle: United States-Chinese Relations, Past and Future (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 87106. An early, brief discussion is W. A. P. Martin, "As the Chinese See Us," The Forum 10 (1891):67888.

largely European writings about America, once claimed that there were only two serious books about the United States written by Chinese authors: An Oriental View of American Civilization by No-yong Park (Boston, 1934) and Francis Hsu's Americans and Chinese (1953).3 Commager was speaking of works available in English, of course, and while he might have mentioned a few others, it is true there is not much. Moreover, the works written in English for an American audience by Westernized Chinese expatriates who have lived for decades in the United States are in many ways less interesting than the more truly outsider accounts intended for Chinese readers. (A surprising number of nominally Oriental views of the West in Western languages are counterfeit, but that is another story.)4

H. S. Commager, Foreword to Francis L. K. Hsu, Americans and Chinese: Passage to Difference , 3d ed. (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981), xiii. Commager's own anthology is America in Perspective: The United States Through Foreign Eyes (New York: Random House, 1947). Other books in English by Chinese on America are Chiang Yee's many "Silent Traveler" books, and No-yong Park's A Squint-Eye View of America (Boston: Meador, 1951); the ingratiating self-mockery of Park's title marks one difference between works written in English and those intended for a Chinese audience. Most recently there is also Liu Zongren, Two Years in the Melting Pot (San Francisco: China Books, 1984), and Wang Tsomin, American KaleidoscopeA Chinese View (Beijing: New World Press, 1986). There are some interesting observations, and much whimsy, in George Kao, "Your Country and My People," in B. P. Adams, ed., You Americans: Fifteen Foreign Press Correspondents Report Their Impressions of the United States and Its People (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1939), 21945. For an analysis based exclusively on Western-language materials, see Merle Curti and John Stalker, "The Flowery Flag DevilsThe American Image in China, 18401900," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96 (1952):66390.

Because these counterfeit "Oriental" views of the West have too often been accepted as genuine, they are worth mentioning briefly here. Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World: Or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the East (1762) is probably the oldest, though preceded by several dozen earlier "Oriental," but not Chinese, views of European lands. G. Lowes Dickinson's Letters from John Chinaman (1901; published in the United States as Letters from a Chinese Official: Being an Eastern View of Western Civilization ) provoked a serious reply, Letters to a Chinese Official , by William Jennings Bryan. In 1972 Dickinson's book was reissued by an American publisher as "the work of an anonymous official of the Chinese government," and the newly written introduction earnestly suggested that, on the occasion of Nixon's trip to China, "in the mirror of China we may take a fresh look at ourselves."

Opinions chinoises sur les barbares d'Occident (1909) by Comte Harfeld purports to be a translation of documents and a conversation about the West by Chinese officials and others, but scattered throughout are the telltale marks of a fraud: improbable comments (Westerners spend money on dikes instead of pagodas because they do not realize a pagoda will prevent floods) and explanations aimed at a Western audience (age fourteen in China is "really thirteen because we count from conception"). A Chinaman's Opinion of Us (1927), "by Hwuy-Ung" and "translated by" the Australian missionary J. A. Makepeace, is likewise, to us, clearly a fabrication (T. L. Yuan, China in Western Literature [New Haven: Yale University, 1958] gives the author as Theodore Tourrier), though it was excerpted by the French sinologue Roger Plissier in The Awakening of China , 17931949, trans. Martin Kieffer (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967).

As a Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home (1905), an unsigned work with a preface by Henry Pearson Gratton, seems also a patent fraud, though it is among the primary texts cited by the scholar Andr Chih in L'Occident "chrtien" vu par les Chinois vers la fin du XIXme sicle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). A different kind of forgery is The Memoirs of Li Hung-Chang (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), with two chapters on the famous official's 1896 trip to the United States; it is now known to be a fabrication by William Francis Mannix, an American journalist.

Works about the United States written in Chinese, however, are abundant. One bibliography of books and articles on American studies, though limited to items published in Taiwan and Hong Kong between 1948 and 1972, runs to no fewer than 560 pages.5 That so little of this Chinese writing about the United States has been accessible to Americans is regrettable, for these works offer a fresh perspective on America.

One approach to these materials is to compare them to Europeans' travel notes and essays on America. Immediately one notices that Chinese visitors have tended to emphasize different aspects than Europeans and to draw different conclusions from similar observations. These differences, of course, are a reflection of different cultural backgrounds. In spite of America's geographical remoteness, Europeans have always thought of the United States as a branch of their own culture, a part of the familiar "us" of the West, and this sense of shared traditions shaped nineteenth-century European travelers' expectations of the new world. They tended to anticipate finding something familiar, and when they failed to find it or when what they found failed to appeal to their tastes, their impressionsboth positive and negativeoften veiled their sense of discomfort.

Consider, for example, early European criticisms of Americans as boorish. Europeans harped on our lack of manners, our "innate crudeness," our mangling of the English language (at least to British ears). We were dirty, picked out teeth, and had no sense of propriety at meals.6 We were always putting our feet up on the table (even in Con-

Meiguo yanjiu Zhongwen tushu ji qikan lunwen fenlei suoyin, 19481972 (Classified bibliography of Chinese language books and periodical articles on American studies, 19481972) (Taipei: Danjiang wenli xueyuan, 1974).

Here, for example, is Frances Trollope's description of dinner with self-styled generals and colonels aboard a Mississippi steamboat: "The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be any thing rather than an hour of enjoyment" (Domestic Manners of the Americans [1832; rpt. London: Folio Society, 1974], 37).

gress, Charles Dickens noted); we chewed tobacco and spat incessantly, usually missing the spittoonthe Senate and House chamber carpets were ruined by this bad habit, according to Dickens, who warned against picking up anything there with an ungloved hand.7 Americans were commonly depicted as loud, brash, and above all boastful: "conceited," "vulgar," "cocksure," in Rudyard Kipling's words.8 We were perceived as not interested in the higher things in life. Even the well-disposed Tocqueville discoursed on the paucity of American artistic and intellectual achievement, and more than one European called Americans "barbarians." Though he published his remarks as Civilization in the United States , Matthew Arnold concluded that "a great void exists in the civilization over there, a void of what is elevated and beautiful, of what is interesting." In the next century, the British scientist C. E. M. Joad could not resist punning on a stereotype from Sinclair Lewis's fiction in the title of his caustic view of America, The Babbit Warren .

On the other hand, the positive side of the European commentary emphasized American egalitarianism. In his opening chapters, the aristocratic Tocqueville took egalitarianism almost as the starting point, the social basis of American democracy. Visitors from the old world were astonishedand sometimes discomfited as wellwhen waiters, hotel chambermaids, and train conductors unselfconsciously engaged them in casual conversation, asking direct questions and plainly showing that they considered themselves as good as anyone else. European accounts repeatedly stressed the self-confidence and sense of dignity of ordinary working people. Education was almost universal, they noted, and the nation's rich natural resources and economic opportunities inspired in all Americans an optimistic hope of rising to prosperity. Such observations often led to hyperbolic visions of America as the classless society. In the 1870s the Polish writer Henry Sienkiewicz declared without qualification: "Here the people of various walks of life...are truly each other's equals.... They do not stand on different

Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; Hat. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1961), 144.

Rudyard Kipling, American Notes (1899; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 124.

rungs of the social ladder, for the simple reason that there is no ladder here at all. Everybody stands on the same level."9

Another prominent theme in European accounts is the idea of America as a religious and fundamentally moral society. Tocqueville stated that religion was nowhere more important than in America, where it played an essential role in social morality and in the democratic process. Other also characterized Americans, despite recurrent political corruption and frontier violence, as essentially honest and law-abiding, remarking with surprise on such things as untended newsstands, where customers left money on the honor system, and fewer fences and locks than in Europe. Even sexual morality was viewed as generally stricter than in Europe. American women were thought to be rather virtuous on this countdespite or because of attending school with males and feeling at ease with them, and despite being bold, independent, apt to have and voice their own opinions. Indeed Tocqueville thought married American women acted more restrained than married women elsewhere, and he attributed this to religion.

These images of American boorishness, egalitarianism, and religious morality, however, though so prominent in the European view of America, are all but entirely absent from Chinese accounts. Though Chinese tradition places the highest value on social propriety and cultural refinement, these visitors seem to have been little bothered by Americans' lack of manners. The early Chinese diplomats, as we shall see, were on the contrary rather nonplussed by the etiquette demands of attending and giving dinner parties. More recent Chinese visitors have commented on the politeness of Americanson how we constantly say "please" and "thank you" even to strangers and spouses, on the frequency of compliments, on telephone etiquette, on the popularity of Emily Postand at least one thought Americans more mannerly than Europeans.10 Far from thinking of America as uncivilized, Chinese by the thousands were coming here by the early twentieth century for higher education. Of course, the Chinese were not encumbered by the European mantle of guardianship over Western civilization. Chinese approached America as an alien society and culture, and did not feel themselves to be the custodians of our civilization. They did

Henry Sienkiewicz, Portrait of America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 18.

Xing Gongti, "The Politeness of Americans," in Huang Minghui, ed., L Mei sanji (Notes on staying in America) (Taipei: Zhengwen, 1971), 21525; Luo Lan, Fang Mei sanji (Notes from a visit to America) (N.p., n.d. [Taipei, ca. 1971]), 2933.

not expect us to act like Confucian gentlemen and did not care if we fractured our Latin or Greek.

That Chinese also took little note of American religiosity and its role in American life is more surprising, perhaps, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, given the presence of thousands of American missionaries in China.11 Indeed, some Chinese visitors did note that people in America were much less religious than their earlier contact with missionaries in China had led them to expect.12 But one must remember that the prevailing intellectual atmosphere in modern China has been generally nonreligious. Neither Confucianism nor popular Buddhism in China, despite their heavy ethical emphases, was an organized religion anything like American Christianity. As a consequence of this, no doubt, modern Chinese intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have tended to be little interested in religion in the United States.

As for American social morality, one finds Chinese writers sometimes troubled by certain inhumane or immoral aspects of American social patterns. That Americans are conscientious about small matters but shockingly immoral about large ones is the paradox expressed in a Chinese cartoonist's series of panels about the sale of newspapers on the honor system (see page 189). Like European observers, Ye Qianyu found this bit of sidewalk honesty from an earlier age worthy of note; but in his cartoon the newspaper headline bears an unspeakable horrora boy has murdered his mother.

As for egalitarianism, Chinese writers have been more apt to underline the inequalities in American societyin particular the enormous distance between rich and poor, between the unimaginable luxury of America's millionaires and the misery of urban ghettos. Liang Qichao, an eminent journalist and reformer whose work on America is in some ways comparable to Tocqueville's, hardly mentioned the word equality in his travel notes, published in 1903. Liang dwelt instead on the theme of economic inequality, noting that 70 per-

Hu Shi notes the omission of religion in his foreword to Cheng Tianfang, Meiguo lun (On the United States) (Taipei: Zhengzhi daxue, 1959), a thick, scholarly opus on the United States. Cheng devotes attention to America's history, political system, economy, education, women, news media, crime, race relations, and way of life, but, like other Chinese works on the United States, Hu states, Cheng's book neglects the important topics of religion and the judicial system.

Xu Zhengkeng, in the 1920s, and Fei Xiaotong in the 1940s, both of whom had studied in American missionary schools in China before going to America, wrote of such mistaken expectations. Xu Zhengkeng, Liu Mei caifeng lu ("Things About America and Americans") (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1926), 343; and Fei Xiaotong, Chu fang Meiguo (First visit to America) (Shanghai: Shenghuo, 1946), 128.

cent of America's wealth was in the hands of one-fourth of 1 percent of the population. In New York Liang observed that immigrants were living and dying in wretched squalor, crowded into tenements without light or ventilation (see chapter II).

Chinese observers were less likely than Europeans to mistake America's social mobility and lack of aristocracy for classlessness. In the century following the French Revolution, European travelers could not fail to be struck by the absence of feudal and aristocratic traditions in America. China, however, without being egalitarian, had long been a nonaristocratic society with, at least in theory, la carrire ouverte aux talents . The Chinese aristocracy of hereditary power-holders had disappeared a thousand years ago, and while the sociopolitical structure remained hierarchical, it entailed considerable social mobility.

Timing, no doubt, is also a significant factor here: European images of America had already taken shape in the early nineteenth century, before industrialization altered the economic and social fabric of American society. The Harvard Guide to American History lists well over three hundred European travel works written between 1795 to 1865, but only about half as many titles for the much longer period since then. The Chinese case is the reverse: virtually no serious writing about America existed before 1865, and only in the late nineteenth century did educated Chinese begin to arrive in significant numbers. The America most Chinese visitors came to know, from the late nineteenth century on, was in many ways a different country altogether. America had become less egalitarian and more enmeshed in rapid technological progress and economic expansion. An emergent imperialist power playing an increasingly important role in the Pacific, America was also an immigrant society beset by ethnic conflicts and problems, some directly related to the Chinese themselves.

Racism, of course, is a kind of American inequality to which Chinese visitors have naturally been sensitive. One of the first works of American literature translated into Chinese, early in the twentieth century, was Uncle Tom's Cabin , and Chinese writing about the United States since then has seldom failed to include a description of the "Negro question." The anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, who spent a year here during World War II, for example, added an entire chapter on blacks to his Chinese rendering of Margaret Mead's The American Character , and he took her to task for not having considered them.13 To

Fei Xiaotong, Meiguoren de xingge (The American character) (Shanghai: Shenghuo, 1947), chap. 7.

be sure, Chinese concern for American blacks was not necessarily greater than that of Europeans. Chinese traveled as whites in the South, did not particularly identify with blacks, and occasionally seemed all too ready to adopt the prejudices of the dominant groupas is suggested by Liang Qichao's remarks about lynching, which curiously blend sympathy for victimized blacks with acceptance of current racial stereotypes.

But sometimes white America's treatment of blacks was discussed as parallel to the discriminatory treatment of Chinese immigrants in the United States. The awareness of this discrimination not only made Chinese writers less apt than Europeans to exaggerate the equality of American society but also constituted their central criticism of America. Harsh feelings intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the U.S. Congress enacted increasingly stringent measures to restrict Chinese immigration. In response, Chinese mounted a movement to boycott American goods, the first Chinese boycott against any foreign country.

As one would expect, many themes not prominent in European accounts surface in Chinese articles and books about America. Most obviously, a description of some American Chinatown or other is virtually de rigueur. The visitors naturally felt a kinship for these fellow Chinese and an interest in their living conditions. Nevertheless, many visitors from China felt oddly uncomfortable and estranged in American Chinatowns, where they often had to speak English with Chinese-Americans, virtually all of whom were Cantonese from the far south unable to speak standard Mandarin, and where "Chinese" restaurants featured American innovations like chop suey. The literature of the immigrant experience is now receiving wide attention, especially among Chinese-American scholars.14

America's enviable technology has been a dominant concern since the earliest firsthand accounts in 1868. These first visitors were officials and diplomats sent as part of the Qing dynasty's effort to learn more about the Western powers after China's defeat in the Opium Wars. Their accounts combine a sense of wonder with detailed descriptions of American trains, ships, factories, buildings, and military installations.

For a thorough annotated bibliography of the Chinese literature, see Him Mark Lai, A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Language Materials on the Chinese of America (Los Angeles: University of California, 1986); a companion bibliography of works in English is underway. For a succinct biographical essay on Chinese immigrants in the United States, see Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 329M31. Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming) presents translations of poems from the anthologies Jinshan ge (1911, 1913).

This fascination with American technology has never totally faded, and in recent writings one sees visitors from the People's Republic again seeking the clues to wealth and power in a postindustrial and "postmodern" American society. Thus from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, America has often seemed to be a model or even to represent the future, and the desire to learn about modern techniques has drawn many Chinese to the United States.

Yet the quest for modernization, whether in late Qing or the present, extends naturally and perhaps inevitably from technology to institutions and values. The initial accounts of America as an alien, exotic new world were soon replaced by more considered examinations of American society as both model and menace. Some of the more astute visitors realized that alongside the technological wonders were peculiarly American techniques of organization. Li Gui, a Chinese official who visited New York in the 1870s, wrote approvingly of the electric remote alarm system and horse-drawn steam-powered pumpers used by fire-fighters, but he also described the organization of people that enabled the equipment to be used effectively (see Chapter I). Later visitors have gone a step further by remarking on political institutions and traditions: the effectiveness and stability of the government, the practices of local self-rule, the makeup of Congress, the system of electing the president, and the public-spiritedness with which Americans support their institutions as responsible citizens.

But American technology and organization also have a dark side for some Chinese. The sensitive and perceptive Liang Qichao, in particular, was aware of the ominous consequences of America's economic progress. At the turn of the century Liang wrote with apprehension of those gigantic industrial and financial conglomerates, the industrial trusts, which he reported controlled 80 percent of the national capital and whose power "exceeds that of Alexander the Great and Napoleon." American capitalism, Liang noted with alarm, was likely to eventually replace England's imperialistic might and could overwhelm international geopolitics.

Despite Liang's grave warnings about the United States as an emerging world power, many Chinese wereand continue to beimpressed by the dynamism and youthful vigor of individual Americans, the same youthful energy decried by earlier European visitors as uncouthness and lack of sophistication. In late-nineteenth-century China social Darwinist ideas and a budding nationalism had turned many intellectuals to thoughts of renovation and reform, orin the more exuberant imagery that became current slightly laterof revolutionary rebirth from the ashes of an old and decayed culture. The talk

of a New People and a New China in the early twentieth century reflected the ongoing critical reexamination of the Chinese national character and the perceived need for purposeful assimilation of Western values and qualities. For the advocates of total Westernization, Americafor better or worsewas again viewed as a model for emulation. Chief among the qualities that had made the young nation so rich and powerful, Chinese commentators explained, were the work ethic and the people's energy, both of which contributed to speed and efficiency. Americans work hard; there is little sign of idleness in offices and factories. Americans seem to know how to renew their energies through rest and relaxation. Americans become independent at a young age and support themselves by working their way through college. Americans know how to plan ahead and how to save time. One Chinese traveler, Tang Hualong, praised the apparent conundrum of Americans' having taken three generations to build the Brooklyn Bridge so that people could save a few minutes going to and from Manhattan (see Chapter III).

As the twentieth century advanced, the United States became the most popular foreign destination for Chinese. More and more Chinese came, no longer as immigrant workers or official representatives, but as individual travelers on much longer stays and as students at American universities. After World War II and the Communist victory in China, many chose to stay and become permanent residents or citizens. In recent years, those coming from Taiwan have reached record numbers. Their extensive experience has bred a familiarity with American society, and the massive volume of their writings on America draw not only on personal experience but on American writings as well, as translations into Chinese have multiplied. At the same time, the ability to read and speak English have become routine skills for many educated Chinese in Taiwan.

Most of these postwar works focus on details of a more social and personal nature. While Chinese have continued to find much to praise, particularly the independence, competence, and self-assertiveness of American women (indeed, since the 1870s, many Chinese have been favorably impressed with American women), they also began to see the negative consequences of the qualities they had initially admired. Some voice serious doubts about aspects of American behavior and about personal relations between the sexes and within the family. Even down to the present day, many are uneasy when confronted with public kissing, provocative clothing, or erotically charged advertisements,15 to

For an example, see Zhang Qijun, L Mei manhua (Sketches of travel in America) (Taipei: Shangwu, 1967), 8994.

say nothing of American pornography and the rate of divorce. American friendships have also sometimes seemed weak to Chinese observers. The shallowness of emotional ties with other people, suggests a recent article in the People's Daily , may explain why so much attention is lavished on petsanother American peculiarity.16

The isolation and loneliness of American life is another theme prominent in Chinese descriptions but not in the European travel literature. In this land without ghosts, as Fei Xiaotong suggested, in a nation without strong traditions or bonds with the past, people lack a sense of continuity with their ancestors and their heritage. Other visitors have seen the ubiquitous automobile as a cell that isolates individuals, separating them from their neighbors and communities. Conceivably Chinese visitors, so many of them students, are more attuned to loneliness because of the isolation they themselves feel, particularly on Sundays and holidays when Americans withdraw to the privacy of their homes.17 But to the Chinese, the value Americans place on independence and individualism robs them of a supreme satisfaction: a sense of connectedness with others. Furthermore, to the more conservativeminded, independence and individualism have an immoral aspect: the self-indulgent pursuit of pleasure, sexual or otherwise, blinds some Americans to their moral obligations toward others. Coupled with a legal system that is perceived as overprotective of the rights of criminals, this excessive libertarianism has seemed to some Chinese to bear the threat of social anarchy. Visitors from the People's Republic of China in the late 1970s and early 1980s expressed horror at the rates of crime and unemployment, at the instability of prices and the cost of medical care. To members of socialist Chinese society, which provides lifetime job tenure and considerable economic and other security, the price of American individualism seems unacceptably high: an anxious personal insecurity underlies the nation's affluence and political stability.

Of the social themes, perhaps the one discussed most frequently by Chinese observers is the American family system. To some, the nuclear family seems admirably cohesive, while others view it as fragile and almost unethical in its neglect of the aged. In the ideal Chinese family, older and younger generations live under one roof; if this is impossible,

Renmin ribao , April 20, 1981, 7. As an anonymous Chinese informant put it, "The Chinese say you have to be either an American or a lunatic to talk to dogs or play with dogs" (Margaret Mead and Rhoda Mtaux, eds., The Study of Culture at a Distance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], 118). For a recent caricature of an American woman gushing about her five-hundred-dollar dog at a cocktail party, see Ding Ling sanwen jinzuo xuan (Selected recent essays of Ding Ling) (Kunming: Yunnan renmin, 1983), 21722.

Fei Xiaotong wrote of feeling lonely on Sunday, in Meiguoren de xingge , 1819.

proper reverence and care for parents and grandparents are a paramount moral obligation. Thus Chinese visitors have been shocked to see elderly Americans living apart from adult children and beloved grandchildren and accorded little respect or financial support. Expressions of horror at such cold and even cruel treatment are common in Chinese writings about America, and the literature contains countless sad vignettes of lonely, abandoned, pathetic elderly Americans yearning for some word from their distant children. Even within households, family members have their own rooms and live apart, behind closed doors. A recent description of American family life at Christmas time by a student baby-sitter from Taiwan tells of a pattern of constant activity, of TV watching and people coming and going, but little real human contact (see chapter V). The American family seemed like the wooden horses on a carouselalways in motion but never coming together.

To offer Americans a chance to see themselves from this Chinese perspective, we have compiled and translated the present volume of selections from a large body of Chinese literature since the mid-nineteenth century. In choosing the selections, we looked to works that were either representative or of special interest. Almost all the selections were written by people who actually visited the United States, and our survey samples a variety of topics and types of writers. We have given preference to works widely read and influential in China, and many of our selections are by leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, such as Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Zou Taofen, and Fei Xiaotong, whose ideas about China's future were in some cases affected by their views of America. Beyond that, our guiding criterion has been to find excerpts that we thought would be interesting to American readers. What unconscious biases and preconceptions came into play in making these subjective judgments we cannot say.

We would like to thank the following people for reading earlier versions of this book and offering useful comments and suggestions: John Fairbank, Charles Hayford, Michael Hunt, Linda Kerber, Andrew Nathan, and Shelton Stromquist. Wenxi Liu, an energetic research assistant, carefully checked some of the translations and helped in other ways. The initial impetus for this book came out of the Luce Seminar on American-East Asian Cultural Relations organized by Akira Iriye at the University of Chicago. Research for one semester was supported by a University of Iowa faculty developmental assignment. Above all, we are grateful to Susan Nelson, who gave the manuscript an especially thorough reading, most of it more than once over the course of several years, and improved it in countless places.

Note on the Texts

The titles and section headings of the translations are in many cases our own, and occasionally we have rearranged the order of excerpts from long works. The date after the author's name in each heading is usually that of the visit being described and not necessarily the date of composition or publication.

Square brackets indicate our interpolations, and guillemets ( ) indicate words that appear in English in the Chinese text (though we have silently corrected some misprints in this English). We have often guessed at the spelling of Western names; in the Chinese texts they are written with phonetic approximations that are not always readily identifiable. We have occasionally reproduced such phonetic approximations and rendered literally some expressions (for instance, "firewheeled vehicle" for "train") in order to suggest the newness of such terms to Chinese readers. Similarly, we have sometimes left dates in Chinese style as a reminder that Chinese who visited America before 1912 were dealing with a totally alien system of reckoning time. "Miles" in these texts is presumed to mean Chinese miles (li ), three of which are about equal to an English mile; a Chinese acre (mu ) is about one sixth of an English acre.

Chinese words are romanized according to the pinyin system, and the pronunciation more or less follows English with the following notable exceptions:

x - is like 'sh'
q - "    "  'ch'
zh -"    "    'j'
c -  "    "   'ts'
z-   "   "   'dz'

-i is more or less silent in the syllables zi, ci, si, zhi, chi, shi, and ri ; elsewhere it is pronounced 'ee' as in 'machine'.

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520084241
• ISBN 13: 9780520084247
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Arkush R. David, Lee Leo O.