Returning from Manila we stopped once more at "The City of Mist,"
Hongkong, and were entertained all over again. While some of the Chamber
of Commerce party were motoring to a dance given in honor of the San
Francisco delegates, a coolie was hit and nearly run over. Our host told
the coolie to get out of the way, while assuring us that it would not
have caused much trouble had he been severely injured. He said, "Labor
is so cheap here, some coolies try to get hit to get something out of
you, and if I had really run over him, I would have given him fifty
cents, or so. You know there is a law that if a Chinese accepts any
amount of money after being injured, he has no redress." He went on to
tell a story about using Chinese women to retrieve instead of dogs in
snipe shooting. If these coolie women happen to stand up and get a stray
shot, a few cents is given them, and it is called "square." One of the
husbands of these women retrievers needed money, so his wife stood up in
order to get a lot of shots. She got seven shots and went away with her
husband rejoicing upon receipt of five dollars.
It was like meeting someone from home when Mrs. H. W. Thomas and Mrs.
Cudahy joined our party again.
Many of our party looked for the American flag at our consulate, and H.
L. Judell said he could not buy one in all of British Hongkong.
The feeling against the Germans in Hongkong, many of our party decided,
must be very strong, as we saw cartoons showing a fierce-looking person
killing everyone, and the same person in another pose, dressed as a
traveling salesman, together with the warning, "Remember they are one
and the same." We also noted sentiment against the Japanese in China,
for instance, a Chinese gentleman told a group of our party that he and
many of his countrymen taught their children that someday they would
fight the Japanese. We were told that if a Chinese child is given a
piece of candy and then told that the candy was made in Japan, the child
refuses to eat it. This just typifies the attitude we found in China
towards the Japanese. But as Dr. Kasper Pischel said at one of our
evening meetings, "The spirit of China is not dead but is very much
alive in Canton. Where the guidebooks discussed the narrow streets, to
small even for rickshaws, I found twenty miles of broad streets. Where I
anticipated hovels, a twelve-story skyscraper was seen, and it is my
belief that unscrupulous outsiders are trying to keep the old political
power in Peking."
Canton
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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