The Good Old Days in Shanghai

...The Chinese, hampered by an ingrown civilization, fearful of anything different either in mankind or customs, handicapped by their own love of caste, made a half-hearted attempt to dispute the white man's claim...

...Bank clerks and stenographers, shop-girls and bookkeepers heard it, and the more adventurous went...

...It was a rule of the mess, and he grew to like the feeling that a dinner coat gave him...

...Great marble buildings, broad, paved, tree-lined boulevards, and a skyline that makes an imposing waterfront have taken shape under the guiding hand of the white man, while the native city huddles in its centuriesold buildings, stagnates in its filth-laden streets and looks at the magic municipality with sometimes apathetic, sometimes covetous eyes...

...For Jin Ling Loo will be playing tennis himself, and probably with Tom's employer...

...A valet...

...Its rent was an insignificant sum in Shanghai, but the appointments were comparable to those of the most exclusive New York club...

...Foreign industries have given work to many thousands, and foreign factories and firms have paid better wages than native concerns...

...For many years the Europeans and Americans lived in China under the most ideal conditions...

...There were no grinding and petty economies to tarnish the romance or bring one back from Elysian fields...

...The good old days when every white man was a king—when a pale skin was the open sesame to social and commercial prestige, and even the most cultured Chinese gentleman had to bow his head before a foreigner, regardless of how stupid, illiterate or rude that foreigner might be...

...They found a new life—the kind of life they would have struggled for years in the United States to obtain— and in many cases would have been too old to enjoy when they got it...

...It, like everything else, had ceased to be a problem, economically speaking...

...Tom was a little giddy when shown into the enormous room, richly furnished, but he was completely overwhelmed when a Chinese walked in and announced, "Please, Master, I b'long your boy...

...He had not been in Shanghai very long until he was invited to homes he would never have dreamed of entering in the United States...

...Epidermis has, for the Chinese at least, ceased to be the basis upon which man's superiority is determined...

...The regatta found Tom at an oar, and he was an outstanding figure in the paper hunts which take the place of fox hunts...

...Tom had always envied the officials of his bank in New York because they belonged to clubs and had time for golf and racing...

...Even when the children came, there were competent, devoted Chinese women to care for them...

...When the first white men went there the Chinese had refused them permission to live in the native city, and now the foreign settlements stand as indisputable evidence of the initiative, progress and industry of the Occidental...

...There was always tomorrow for any extra work that might have made today unpleasant...

...And yet the sum was the same as that which had maintained him so miserably in a hall bedroom...

...The white man won, but the encounter left a deep impression on those who had witnessed it...

...Where he could afford but one suit in New York, he could have six in Shanghai, made of the best imported English materials, by native tailors who insisted on extending unlimited credit...

...He was Somebody...

...You mustn't do that...

...The day was bitterly cold and the coolie was shivering in rags...

...But the Oriental had lived in peace too long...

...Their real complaint against the foreigner isn't economical or political—any intelligent and honest Chinese will say so unhesitatingly...

...I want a pair of mittens for my rickshaw coolie," said the girl to the British clerk...

...And Tom Gray soon learned he needed many more suits than when he had lived in Fourteenth Street...

...He bought a pony for a few dollars and raced it in the spring and fall meets, riding the horse himself, as nearly all the foreigners do...

...He was housed in a beautiful private residence, leased by the bank for the foreign clerks...

...He was important...

...But the next day all had changed...

...And like all the amazing changes of the past few years, it has come about since the world war...

...In a world given over to a mad scramble for a living, China offered the poor man a haven and the lazy man an Eden...

...What...

...Jin Ling Loo, who sits in the cashier's cage on the right, will have as much social prestige as Tom Gray...

...When the ports of Asia were opened to the world and the Occidentals immigrated there to establish permanent colonies, they began their association with the Chinese with the understanding that the color of a man's skin determined his right to rule...

...An American girl who had just arrived in Shanghai, went into a large foreign department store to buy a pair of mittens for her rickshaw coolie...

...Because the foreigners loved Shanghai and wanted to live out their lives there, they built a beautiful city outside the walls of the native settlement...

...This has been responsible for raising the standard of living in the treaty ports, and while the Chinese have cried out against exploitation, they have at the same time admitted receiving definite benefits under it...

...It wasn't long until the news of the pleasant life in the Orient trickled back to San Francisco, New York and London, and hundreds heard the "call of the East...

...exclaimed the Englishman, disapproval spreading over his face...

...Instead of being jammed into a subway, he found a bright, shiny, rubber-tired rickshaw waiting for him, and a fawning runner to do his bidding...

...He was no longer just a clerk, he was a boss...

...There were private tennis courts, a golf course a short distance away, and a beautiful garden...

...He was not adept at the game of fighting and the old theory that "might makes right" was proven to the utmost satisfaction of the white settlers in the Far East...

...Truly, China offered a rare combination of economic ease and delightful social existence not to be found in any other part of the world...

...Racing in China is still a gentleman's sport, and nearly all the entries are ridden by their owners...

...cried one returned student in an impassioned speech to a mob in the native city, and the coolies cheered enthusiastically...

...There were no efficiency experts or time clocks...

...They do not want to be treated as inferiors, or children, or slaves, and heretofore the foreigners have unfailingly placed them in one of these categories...

...Tom Gray's case is typical of hundreds of young men and women who went to China to work...

...For the girls there was, invariably, marriage—and the kind of marriage that every girl dreams of...

...It came suddenly—overnight, almost...

...A coolie suddenly turned and pushed back, and the beginning of a new era was marked on that morning when a well-dressed white man and a ragged, filthy coolie struggled with each other to see who would stay on the sidewalk...

...If the white man is to continue his pleasant existence in the Far East he can do so at the price of his superiority, but the good old days will be gone...

...But there were still a few more surprises for Tom...

...The first step in breaking away from the domination of the white man had been made...

...There, for the minimum of effort, a white man could maintain himself in the surroundings of an English country gentleman or a retired American banker...

...I think," said the American girl quietly, "that the English were the first to organize a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals—you would not fail to put a blanket on a horse on a day as cold as this, would you...

...He played golf and did well at tennis and with it all worked to the satisfaction of his employers, because he had clever and eager Chinese assistants...

...China's great problem is to find employment for her millions...

...Sweating yellow figures, stripped to the waist, salaamed before him, groveled for his pennies and lugged his baggage for a tenth of a cent...

...Many sons of Han went to foreign universities and returned to their own people with the assurance that though the foreigners were smart and aggressive, they were as a race no better than the Chinese...

...He was a different person as soon as he put his foot on the Bund...

...One day a white man walked down Nanking Road in Shanghai, pushing coolies off the sidewalk, as had been his custom for years past...

...You'll spoil him...

...He dressed every night for dinner...

...So over-supplied with labor is the country that whenever a famine or a flood or an epidemic comes along and takes off a few hundred thousand the remainder of the populace sigh with gratitude...

...There was nothing gradual about the transition...

...Racial equality—or nothing...

...Like many other human beings of many other races, the coolie will accept the most brutal kind of punishment from one of his countrymen without protest, but even the lightest correction from a foreigner arouses his indignation...

...But while the white man was building and expanding, while he was developing and opening up new lines of commercial activities, the discontent of the Chinese at being treated as an inferior and conquered race spread with alarming thoroughness...

...Tom Gray, who just six weeks before had been washing his own socks to save a few cents, was now living as any wealthy young man of New York might live...

...His quarters were even more surprising...

...To them it meant that the Indian Sikh policemen in the foreign settlements wouldn't dare to use their clubs so promiscuously, or the white men administer a beating whenever some error aroused their tempers...

...In Shanghai it was almost impossible for a young fellow not to become a manabouttown, particularly if he was genial, so it was not long before Tom was a well-known figure in the best clubs, and a valuable member of several athletic organizations...

...The white man's theory that the less consideration there is given the native's personal comforts, the easier he is to discipline, has been handed down religiously in China...

...and because Tom is white, Jin Ling Loo won't feel it compulsory to finish Tom's work so that Tom can get away to his tennis game...

...It is social...

...Tom Gray, who washed his socks and handkerchiefs on Sunday morning in a hall bedroom in West Fourteenth Street, heard the call and shipped to Shanghai...

...But he was white and in China—that, coupled with good manners and a pleasing exterior, was one's passport to society...

...Oh no," replied the English clerk, "but that's different...

...One of them was clothing...

...determined his superiority in every department of life...