Scratches on Our Minds

American Images of China and India

Harold R. Isaacs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317460060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

A presentation of eight contemporary Chinese women writers, representing two generations of women with different backgrounds and experiences. The selections explore esthetic, cultural and ideological problems that continue to challenge Chinese women.

PART TWO

THE CHINESE

LIKE CHINA’S GREAT RIVERS, flooding and receding and shifting their courses to the sea, American images of the Chinese have traveled a long and changing way, from Marco Polo to Pearl Buck, from Genghiz Khan to Mao Tse-tung.

The name of Marco Polo is scratched onto the mind of almost every American school child. Attached to it are powerful images of China’s ancient greatness, civilization, art, hoary wisdom. With it in time comes a heavy cluster of admirable qualities widely attributed to the Chinese as people: high intelligence, persistent industry, filial piety, peaceableness, stoicism. These were attributes identified in our own generation with the people of Pearl Buck’s novels, solid, simple, courageous folk staunchly coping with the blows of fate and adverse circumstances.

Genghiz Khan and his Mongol hordes are the non-Chinese ancestors of quite another set of images also strongly associated with the Chinese: cruelty, barbarism, inhumanity; a faceless, impenetrable, overwhelming mass, irresistible if once loosed. Along this way we discover the devious and difficult heathen, the killers of girl infants, the binders of women’s feet, the torturers of a thousand cuts, the headsmen, the Boxer Rebellion and the Yellow Peril, the nerveless indifference to pain, death, or to human disaster, the whole set of lurid, strange, and fearful images clustered around the notion of the awakening giant and brought vividly to life again by Mao Tse-tung’s “human sea” seen flooding down across the Yalu, massed barbarians now armed not with broadswords but with artillery, tanks, and jet planes.

In the long history of our associations with China, these two sets of images rise and fall, move in and out of the center of people’s minds over time, never wholly displacing each other, always coexisting, each ready to emerge at the fresh call of circumstance, always new, yet instantly garbed in all the words and pictures of a muchwritten literature, made substantial and unique in each historic instance by the reality of recurring experience. This interchange might vary lineally from epoch to epoch according to its particular history, or collaterally from person to person, according to his particular experience or personality. Thus, advancing or receding but somewhere always in view, our concepts of China have included both a sense of almost timeless stability and almost unlimited chaos. Our notions of Chinese traits have included sage wisdom and superstitious ignorance, great strength and contemptible weakness, immovable conservatism and unpredictable extremism, philosophic calm and explosive violence. Our emotions about the Chinese have ranged between sympathy and rejection, parental benevolence and parental exasperation, affection and hostility, love and a fear close to hate.

Today these contending views and emotions jostle each other at close quarters, for we are in the midst of a great passage from one set to the other. The dominant impressions of the 181 Americans interviewed for this study were acquired in the past on which the gates clanged so abruptly in 1949. Direct communication was severed almost at a single blow. Since then, live American contact with China itself has been cut until it is virtually nonexistent, dropping to the presence of a handful of Americans held in Chinese Communist prisons and links on Formosa to survivors of the debacle. What went before has already acquired the patina of nostalgia; the quality of sadly retrieving a receding past was almost palpable in many of the interviews. What has happened since 1949 has quickly acquired all the distortions of the unknown, dimly seen and greatly feared across a great distance.

The images of the Chinese that still so largely govern in the minds of most of these Americans are for the most part the product of the experience of the first four decades of this century. This experience is framed in a characteristic and meaningful paradox. The beginning of this experience included the powerful prejudice and contempt and violent rejection which had marked American attitudes and behavior toward the Chinese who had come to the United States. Out of this came the exclusion laws and all the mythology and synthetic villainy attached in popular folklore to the China-towns and the Chinese laundries right across the country, a pattern which persists in some measure right down to the present time. But these also became the years of the full flowering of the most sympathetic images of the great qualities and great virtues of the Chinese who had sensibly remained in China. Whether directly or vicariously, through event, book, or pervading climate, these images were widely spread and absorbed and became part of the mental baggage of almost everyone who could read or went to church. It was common to find in our interviews that even the scantiest notions about China and the Chinese acquired in this time were likely to be in some way, however slight, favorably disposed, kindly, or admiring of the Chinese, or at least vaguely sympathetic to their needs and travails. The Chinese—on their own ground—were a people Americans had always helped, a nation that somehow evoked a special and unique benevolence and even a sense of obligation, a people of sterling qualities who deservedly held our high regard.

These impressions are not likely to be reproduced in any similar form in the minds of today’s children or to reappear in their thinking when they grow into maturity. Their images of the Chinese are being shaped by the new circumstances and their multitudinous reflections in the classroom, in print and film, picture and cartoon, in the voices carrying the news by radio, in the faces on the television screens.¹ The members of our present panel, on the other hand, are creatures of their longer past. They are caught in the melee of the images of China on which they were raised and the new images of hostility, cruelty, of easily imposed and easily maintained tyranny, and even of mortal danger. If Americans do again go to China in coming years in any numbers, they are much less likely to come back, as they did so often in the past, with warm feelings produced by the good life they could lead there, or with the same impressions of Chinese wisdom, approachability, humor, polite deference, friendly hospitality, pragmatic intelligence.

To be sure, the rapidly fading images retrieved in these pages will not disappear entirely. But whenever and however they re-emerge, they will be different or recur in some new combination of circumstances and emotion. The process of reincarnation is not the same thing as the story of the sleeping beauty. In this sense, the passing of these images and attitudes is really a death and this report is an obituary.

China occupies a special place in a great many American minds. It is remote, strange, dim, little known. But it is also in many ways and for many people oddly familiar, full of sharp images and associations, and uniquely capable of arousing intense emotion. Some kind of American acquaintance with China and the Chinese goes back to the beginning of our national history. In its quality of vague and long-standing familiarity, this historic connection is matched in the lives of many individuals by a smiling memory evoked from earliest childhood: they knew almost as early as they knew anything that if you dug that hole on down right through the earth you would come out the other side in China. This fixed in many a young mind the idea that China was about as far away as you could get without dropping off into space, but at least it firmly situated China on this planet and gave it a certain unique identity.

Whatever little these Americans went on to learn in school about Asia, most of it generally had to do with China, even if it was nothing more than the bare outlines of the Marco Polo story. Whatever reached them about Asia in their years of growing up from moving pictures, newspapers and magazines, books, or other sources, the bulk again ordinarily dealt with something about China or the Chinese.² if the only image of an “Oriental” in their minds was the image of that well-known “inscrutable Oriental,” the chances are that he was dressed and looked like a Chinese. Until the events of only the last fifteen years, which brought so much more of the trans-Pacific world so abruptly into view, China was for many Americans the most identifiable particular associated with Asia as a whole.

Chinese motifs have in fact long been woven into parts of the American fabric. Along with the many other ideas they absorbed from the writers and thinkers of Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, some of America’s first and most important leaders acquired a highly respectful view indeed of the merits of Chinese civilization and even thought it worthy of emulation in their own new world. The tea that was dumped into Boston harbor on the day of that famous party came off a British ship that had just arrived from Amoy, China. The first American clipper ship sailed from New England to the China coast in 1784, the year after the Republic was founded. It was sent out by Robert Morris, the financier of the American Revolution. It bore the name Empress of China, and it opened one of the most romantic and glamorized chapters in American maritime history, celebrated to this day in moving pictures, storybooks, and history primers. Ships with names like Asia and Canton plied this trade for decades. The merchant mariners who sailed in them brought back tea and silk and ideas about China and the Chinese, and even brought back some Chinese as visitors. They added the Chinese touches to the décor of New England homes that are still visible today, they built Chinese pavilions in their suburban gardens and contributed a thin layer of awareness of the Chinese to their countrymen, a blend of romance, excitement, obscurity, beauty, distance, oddity, quaintness, and danger which has continued to exert its influence on American thinking about China down to our time. It was from one of these merchant families, named Delano, that a President of the United States acquired his own active sense of a personal link to knowledge of China.

The merchants were followed quickly to the China coast by some of the first American missionaries. The movement of these missionaries to China, first in twos and threes in the 1830’s, then in tens, eventually in hundreds, and ultimately in thousands, made it the largest single theater of American missionary enterprise. This enterprise and the men and women who took part in it placed a permanent and decisive impress on the emotional underpinning of American thinking about China. The scratches they left on American minds over the generations, through the nineteenth century and into our own time, are often the most clearly marked, the longest-enduring, and the most powerfully influential of all. More than any other single thing, the American missionary effort in China is responsible for the unique place China occupies in the American cosmos, for the special claim it has on the American conscience.

Shortly after these Americans began to go to China as evangelists, Chinese emigrants began, for quite different reasons, to come in large numbers to the United States. Between 1854 and 1882, some 300,000 Chinese laborers entered this country, most of them for the original purpose of working on the building of the western railroads. Those who stayed for more than a short time created the beginnings of a permanent Chinese segment in American life itself. They found a place in the country’s increasingly polyglot population and in its prejudice patterns, becoming the first people to be excluded by law from entering the land of the free. They produced a whole set of figures, stereotypes, and notions now as firmly fixed in American folklore and literature as the residual Chinese-American population itself (120,000 in 1950) is in American society. The experience with Chinese in the United States is second only to the missionary experience as a source of some of the principal images and emotions about the Chinese to be found in contemporary American minds. In addition to the immigrant laborers, some 22,000 other Chinese, usually of a quite different class, also came to this country from China, between 1854 and 1949, to study at American colleges and universities, creating still another major source of image-forming contact and experiences for the Americans, typified by many in our panel, whom they knew as friends, fellow students, and teachers over these several generations.

Other major links have been numerous and long-lasting. American t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the 1980 Edition
• Preface to the 1972 Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. “Asia”
• II. The Chinese
• III. The Indians
• IV. Some Reflections
• Index