- main site -- links --mailing list -- guestbook -- admin
life and times
A book excerpt, giving some idea of the kind of people a Japanese boy in Chinese territory had to deal with. Not easy. Just imagine how many languages he had to at least be familiar with!
http://www.talesofoldchina.com/shanghai/places/t-buil01.htm
"Two Wongs and a White" Excerpts from Sin City, by Ralph Shaw, a British journalist in Shanghai from 1937 to 1949:
"Percy Finch, who was a staunch supporter of the Shanghai Club, often used to tell me that two Wongs never made a White. My predilection for oriental females had alarmed him and though he was no racial bigot he made it plain that lasting - and legal alliances with Chinese or Eurrasian women could only result in a rapid descent down Shanghai's social ladder.
'If you fancy a bit of oriental tail, Ralph,' he would say, 'then follow the old empire-builder's dictum: "Screw 'em and leave em'.
When I arrived on the Shanghai scene it was clear that the white-supremacy lobby had lost the battle against the lure of oriental women who had much to commend them.
Shanghai's Eurasian community embraced people of many nationalities - British subjects, born of legal liaisons with the natives; Chinese subjects not similarly blessed; Portuguese passport-holders, 98 per cent Chinese and tracing ancestry back to Macao, the oldest of the colonies; French citizens; Germans; Dane; Norwegians; Swedes and many more.
One thing was certain: their antecedents precluded elbow-bending with the exalted tipplers fined up sometimes three-deep at the Shanghai Club bar. The club was exclusively white. So it was that a former sergeant of artillery, successful in the textile trade but almost illiterate, a school-leaver at fourteen, as blunt of speech as any raucous drill-square martinet but born of pure white parents in some terraced hovel in Keighley, could pay his monthly dues and enter the sanctum sanctorum. Not so the product of Haileybury and Oxford, possessor of an M.A. degree, partner in a highly profitable import-export enterprise - but born, unfortunately, in a large mansion in Avenue Haig of a union between the descendants of a pukka sahib and a Chinese female, nice and all that, but certainly not pukka.
There were those who still referred to the Eurasians as chee-chees, a derogatory term from India. They were said to have a touch of the 'tar-brush' which, so far as China was concerned, was untrue in that I never could see the 'yellow' in the 'yellow race' nor, for that matter, the 'white' in the ruddy hues of the Europeans.
To the Chinese it was also obvious that whites were not white but red. Thus they were known as 'red-skinned devils', 'red-haired devils', 'long-nosed devils', 'foreign devils', or just 'devils'. They were also known as 'long-nosed barbarians', 'outer barbarians', 'cow-smelling barbarians'.
Even today in Hong Kong and other places where there are sizable Chinese communities we are still the 'hung moh gwai' red-haired devils' - or just 'gwai loh' ('foreign devils'). The terms, invented by supercilious Mandarins, have lost their acid content and are now accepted colloquialisms for the white races.
Certainly 'devils' we were in Shanghai.
As the British were the most important element in Shanghai and the other concessions elsewhere and wielded the greatest influence on patterns of behaviour, it had to be admitted that the affliction of indignity on the cultured Chinese race - and others not of pure European stock - was, largely, a British crime.
Strangely enough the French, whose policy at times in China was as harsh as that of Japan, inflexible on maintenance of treaty rights, were on remarkably good terms with the Chinese.
The Portuguese, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Spaniards and the Scandinavians treated the Chinese on an equal footing and the Americans, whose record on race relations at home was a deplorable one, accorded the Chinese much more dignity than most Britons.
The American Club in Foochow Road was open to Chinese who had studied in the United States or to those with close American connections. Nevertheless, I never saw a black man there and there were many black Americans in Shanghai.
Few Britons ever thought of trying to learn Chinese. If the natives did not speak English then it was their tragedy. There was no job in a British firm for any Chinese who could not let the pidgin flow. English was the language of Shanghai and, by God, the Chinese would learn it or starve."
"Though the Chinese formed the bulk of the city's population the foreigners,
which included the armed services, lived in a cocoon of privilege as if they did
not exist. We treated them as inferiors, worthy only of high-handed, often
brutal, subjection to our territorial strength, established by force of arms in
the previous century.
We insulted a courteous, hospitable people by barring them from front entrances, by insisting on their exclusion from the centre sports arena of the Racecourse, by rigidly insisting on a Whites-only Policy at the Shanghai Club and other social centres.
It was a common sight in the foreign areas to see drunken soldiers knocking Chinese pedestrians to the ground because they had had the temerity to be on the same pavement. Similarly, white civilians often attacked Chinese on the streets, hitting them with walking-sticks or bundling them off pavements the road. I have seen Chinese pushed off buses by Europeans who simply wanted more standing room. I once witnessed a scene on a French tram in which an irate European forced an elderly, scholarly-looking Chinese to stand up and give him the seat he occupied. Everywhere - even in the missions - the Chinese suffered degradation at the hands of the whites."