China Watcher

By Eugene William Levich Ph. D.

China Watcher

The Dragon has awakened!

Read this scholarly insiders look at China . . . its customs, history, politics, cuisine, love life, literature and art, philosophy, and much more. Witty and informative, this unique book explains aspects of Chinese culture and history often confusing to natives and foreigners alike. All the characters described in this work are real and all the events true. Each chapter offers a vignette of Chinese life and these chapters form, in toto, a kaleidoscope of Chinas past and present. The author includes his translations of some of Chinas greatest poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Aug 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781490775074

Eugene William Levich Ph. D.

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Copyright 2016 Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-7505-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-7506-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-7507-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911118

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Photographs

Dedication

Note On The Use Of Chinese Names And Characters Used In This Book

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 Mr. Tang

Chapter 2 Banquet

Chapter 3 The Plight Of An Alluring Woman

Chapter 4 Equity And Justice

Chapter 5 Buying

Chapter 6 Darton’s Harem

Chapter 7 Professional Courtesy

Chapter 8 The View From Gouzikou

Chapter 9 Eating

Chapter 10 Family And Marriage

Chapter 11 Filial Piety

Chapter 12 GUANXI

Chapter 13 How To Establish Guanxi

Chapter 14 The Policeman’s Story

Chapter 15 Taibei Street Scenes

Chapter 16 Corruption

Chapter 17 Chinese Medicine

Chapter 18 Speaking Chinese

Chapter 19 Reading Chinese

Chapter 20 The Japanese

Chapter 21 The Russians

Chapter 22 The Americans

Chapter 23 Quemoy And Sergeant Campbell

Chapter 24 The Dirty Dozen

Chapter 25 On Sin And Baboons

Chapter 26 In The Mountains

Chapter 27 The Manchu Commando

Chapter 28 A Trial, Sun Yat-Sen, And A Massacre

Chapter 29 Cultural Differences

Chapter 30 Taizhong Experiences

Chapter 31 The Three Tortures Of Mr. Chen: A Modern Chinese Tale Of Woe

Chapter 32 Boat People

Chapter 33 Under Threat

Chapter 34 Mao And Chiang

Chapter 35 Glimpses Into China’s Past And Future

Appendix

Selected Bibliography

List of Photographs

(ALL ARE BY THE AUTHOR EXCEPT FOR THOSE STARRED.)

Twenty Yards Downstream from the Pool with the Gui

A Typical Taiwanese Extended-Family Home

The Former Policeman (seated right) and the Dentist (standing)

A Local Celebration (bai bai) in Gouzikou, across the Street from the Author’s Lodging

Ah Hua (center rear) and Pals

The National Taiwan University Campus Looking towards the Main Gate

The Chinese Sign at the top of this building reads: Macao Chen Clan Fellowship Association. The Portuguese sign below reads: Fraternal Association of the Chen Surname.

A Typical Family Shrine to the Ancestral Spirits

Raohe Street Market, Taipei

Dr. Li at Calligraphy

A Seal Carver

A Foreign Devil With A Camera Is Very Funny!

The Buddhist Nun

Père Paul Coquoz with Some of His Flock

The Author’s Mountain Pass

Our Guide Celebrates the Successful Three-Day Climb of Jade Mountain

The Trail across Taiwan

The Manchu Emperor K’ang-hsi the Great

Xiu Xiu

A Charming Couple, My Landlord and His Wife (both in white shirts)

The View from Victoria Peak

The Author on His Victoria Peak Veranda

The Author Learning a New Trade in Hong Kong

A Hong Kong Junk Under Construction

Life aboard a Hong Kong Sampan

Boat People in Macao

A Small Two-Mast Coastal Junk Photographed from the Macao Governor’s Palace

A Three-Mast Ocean-going Junk Photographed from Kowloon

DEDICATION

This book is written in honored memory of the author’s first two professors of Chinese studies

Chang Hsin-hai (Zhang Xinhai)

張辛亥

And

Paul M. A. Linebarger

林 博 樂

Scholars, Revered Teachers, Patriots of their Respective Countries, and True Gentlemen

君子

JUNZI

GENTLEMEN

LITERALLY:

THE SONS OF PRINCES

NOTE ON THE USE OF CHINESE NAMES AND CHARACTERS USED IN THIS BOOK

Chinese words and names are generally transliterated using the pinyin system developed in the People’s Republic. The exceptions in this work are names of people and places commonly known in the West by different renderings, such as that of SunYat-sen, whose given name is in the Cantonese dialect. (In Mandarin, using pinyin, his name would be written Sun Yixian.) I similarly use the term Cantonese rather than the clumsy-sounding and unfamiliar term Guangzhou-ese In a few rare cases, as pinyin often does not give an accurate rendering of a Chinese word’s sound in English, I have created my own romanized form in order to clarify a particular situation. I have, for example, used shr for the number ten, rather than the shi used in pinyin, as the latter excludes the final r sound.

Except in the chapter where I compare simplified Chinese characters to their traditional forms, I eschew their use, as I consider traditional characters more artistic and more representative of China’s magnificent age-old civilization.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the support, editing skill, specialized information, and advice from many dear friends this book could never have been completed. Some of these friends may be named, others—for political reasons— may not. To all these friends, named or not, I owe the deepest and most heartfelt thanks:

  Dr. Roman and Mrs. Nadine Brackman

          Mrs. Betty Brownell

                    Professor Emeritus Norman and Mrs. Deborah Fedder

                              Mrs. Marilyn Vasko Laufer

                                        Mr. Edwin and Mrs. Jane McNulty

                                                  Mrs. Phyllis Riegler-Levich

                                                            Mrs. Dorothy Rosenberg

                                                                      Dr. David Tsai

INTRODUCTION

As you read about some of the spectacularly unusual people I describe in this book you may conclude it is a work of fiction, as those people have led lives quite divorced from what most people today experience or are likely even to imagine. All of the people I describe are real, although I have disguised some of their names. Each event I describe is true.

This book constitutes a portrayal of life in China as illustrated primarily by the individuals and incidents I encountered there beginning in the 1970s. Being married into an extended Chinese family for twenty years expanded enormously my understanding of China’s society. Many of this book’s chapters depict an aspect of Chinese culture generally unknown to or misunderstood by foreigners. A secondary objective of this book is to provide to general readers glimpses into recent Chinese history, as well as into the lives of both China’s people and Western and Japanese Old China Hands—glimpses unlikely to be familiar even to specialists in the field. I have attempted also to give my readers a feel for what it is like for a Western graduate student to study in China and to live in a village where, to my knowledge, for most of my time there, no one else spoke English. I wished, in writing this book, not merely to amuse, but to inform and enlighten as well. Finally, I felt compelled in several chapters of this book, particularly towards its end, to comment regarding China’s recent history, her current political situation, and her future possibilities—and to do so through the perspective of Chinese civilization rather than through its Western equivalent.

When I first arrived in China, I already had completed two masters’ degrees in Chinese studies, one at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the other in the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, and had completed most of the course work towards a doctorate in that field at the latter institution; and yet, living in China, I found all this education had not prepared me to understand many confusing aspects of its culture. China proved full of surprises for me. These I have attempted to illustrate and explain, primarily for a Western audience.

If a Chinese were to live in America and afterwards write about life there, his impressions and descriptions would differ markedly depending on his location. The life styles and attitudes of his neighbors and acquaintances would be quite different in Boston than they would be in the Texas Panhandle or in countless other locations. Even within states or cities, the atmosphere often differs radically from locale to locale. Compare, for example, life in lower Manhattan to that in the Bronx or Brooklyn, both areas parts of New York City, or life and attitudes in Miami, Florida to those in Jacksonville, a major city in the same state. My specialty is writing micro-history, the examination of a small region within China in order to determine whether or not what happened there conforms to what scholars assume occurred in the country in general. My doctoral dissertation, for example, dealt with a critical ten-year period in the 1930s, in the southwestern Model Chinese province of Guangxi (Kwangsi, Kuangsi, or Kuang-hsi) as its leaders prepared its population for war against Japan.¹

The Chinese micro-region most familiar to me is Taiwan, which in certain respects is an ideal place to live for a researcher writing about Chinese culture.² One reason is that, during the Communist conquest of the Mainland in 1949, tens of thousands of refugees from all parts of China fled there. It contains, consequently, one of the most diverse Chinese populations of any region of that country. Another reason why Taiwan presented a good place to live for a student of Chinese culture is it never fell under Communist rule. More of its culture remained traditionally Chinese, rather than having been superseded by a Soviet-influenced Maoist utopian philosophy and structure, much of which is currently in the process of being deconstructed. When that is gone on the Mainland, who can say how much of China’s traditions will remain extant? I am happy that I once experienced what still existed of the Old China before it perhaps disappears forever.

I did not personally select Taiwan as a place to live. One day, my University of Chicago graduate adviser informed me that the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations would no longer grant doctoral degrees to students who had not spent time in the field. He informed me, further, that the Stanford Language Center³ in Taibei (Taipei) would accept a number of UChicago graduate students for a year or two of study, and that the Department was prepared to offer me scholarship assistance to cover tuition, travel, and living expenses. I readily accepted this offer, not knowing anything about what Taiwan was like or what to expect there.

A psychologist once informed me that normality really does not exist in human behavior. Perhaps she was correct, but it is my experience that foreigners who study China professionally tend to be somewhat less normal than most of humanity. Consider, for example, Arthur Waley (1889-1966), who mastered both classical Chinese and classical Japanese, on his own, an incredibly difficult achievement, and then went on to become probably the greatest English-language translator of East Asian literature of all time, as well as one of the greatest expositors of Chinese and Japanese philosophy and culture.⁴ Waley retired from Cambridge University after receiving many honors, including being created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and receiving the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. His friends in the Bloomsbury Group pointed out to him that he had never been to Asia and suggested a trip there for someone who had devoted his entire working life to the study of its civilization would be a fitting cap to his career. Waley voyaged on a ship whose itinerary included a stop in Hawaii. He debarked there … and booked passage right back to England. His astonished friends asked him why he had not completed his trip. He replied, I was so afraid of being disappointed!⁵ Waley, I feel certain, erred. I believe he would have become even more enthralled by East Asian civilization had he completed his voyage of discovery.

CHAPTER 1

Mr. Tang

The Master said, How admirable Hui is! Living in a mean dwelling on a bowlful of rice and a ladleful of water is a hardship most men would find insupportable, but Hui does not allow this to affect his joy. How admirable Hui is!

Confucius, Analects, Book VI, 11. D. C. Lau, trans.

I completed my own East Asian voyage of discovery and never suffered disappointment—except perhaps during my first two or three days in Taibei. After having spent a week walking around Tokyo, a fascinating city, I found Taibei in early September, somnolent under the peak of the dry season, to be dusty, provincial, and drab. The city lies in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, and acrid exhaust fumes from low quality gasoline seemed to hover over me like an evil cloud. But I soon discovered a Taibei fascinating in its own right and a rural Taiwan that seemed wild and beautiful almost beyond imagination. Enormous mist-covered jade-colored mountains rise right out of the sea. Vast fields of wild orchids, waterfalls, hot springs, rare and gorgeous butterflies, and tribes of monkeys swinging from tree to tree amazed me as I hiked along mountain trails that sometimes hovered narrowly and precipitously over ravines hundreds of feet deep.⁶ Sometimes old Japanese army bridges crossed those ravines, the wooden planking long-ago rotted away, the hiker forced to jump precariously from cable to cable. In places one could pick up pieces of jade right along the trail. A favorite hot spring at just the right temperature for soaking aching muscles formed a pool in a small cave, and just outside ran a pure stream for cold plunges. From the crest of Yushan (Jade Mountain, also known as Mount Morrison)—the highest mountain in East Asia—one could see both the Pacific Ocean to the West and the Taiwan Strait to the East just by turning one’s head, and one might even receive waves from the pilots of jet fighters flying at one’s own altitude just a few yards distant.⁷ The peak is above the clouds and climbers awaken early in the morning to view the sun break through a seemingly endless mother-of-pearl sea of clouds—a truly unforgettable experience. The first Portuguese sailors to land in Taiwan did not name it Ilha Formosa [beautiful island] for nothing.

I lived for a week at the Taibei International Students’ House. Two of the three other UChicago grad students and I decided to find an apartment together, the third being married and having his wife and son with him. We contacted the office at the Stanford Center and they suggested that we see a realtor, Mr. Tang, who turned out to be a personable and energetic fellow in his mid-fifties.

Mr. Tang found for us an attractive four-bedroom apartment on Wenzhou Street, a popular living area for senior Guomindong (Kuomintang) officials, within easy walking distance of the university. We, at first, were very happy with the apartment. One day, however, my Chinese neighbor invited me in to see his apartment, one identical to ours. In China, it is considered perfectly polite to ask complete strangers how much things cost. My neighbor thus asked me how much we were paying for rent. I answered that we paid monthly N[ew]T[aiwan]$3,500, or US$100. He laughed when I told him, and said that his rent was less than half of ours. I was very angry with Mr. Tang, feeling that he had taken advantage of us—but after getting to know him better, I developed a great admiration and affection for him.

Mr. Tang, a teenager at the beginning of China’s long War of Resistance against Japan, enlisted in the army, rose to the rank of major, and ended up commanding an infantry battalion. At the end of the war he had the opportunity to learn English (and some French), as his battalion had been ordered to Vietnam to accept the surrender of Japanese troops there in liaison with American forces. During the subsequent civil war, Mr. Tang’s unit ended up in Taiwan. He expected that it would remain on the island only a short while and then be redirected to the battle on the Mainland, but that never happened. Mr. Tang, tragically, like so many Nationalist soldiers, never saw or heard from anyone in his family again, normal contacts between the Mainland and Taiwan being completely severed for decades. One must remember the extraordinary importance of family in Chinese society to fully appreciate the severity of Mr. Tang’s loss.

He served in the army through World War Two and the subsequent civil war and then was retired, receiving a small lump sum as his total military severance pay, the equivalent of about US$125. He lived in a cheap hotel for two weeks, ate in cheap restaurants, drank a few bottles of beer, and then realized all his money was gone. After serving his country for twenty years, he had not a cent in the world, no pension, no family and, apparently, no future. No governmental unemployment insurance or welfare system existed on Taiwan.

But Mr. Tang did speak English. He first went to work as a house boy and gardener at the home of an American army officer in Tien-mu, the little rich colony of American military advisors and their families. He then found odd jobs washing cars for American personnel at the U. S. Military Assistance and Advisory Group’s base in Taibei; a former commander of hundreds of Chinese soldiers, he now performed menial labor for American NCOs. He cleaned their homes, did their laundry, and shopped for their food. He discovered that the Americans needed things in Taiwan that their inability to speak Chinese and their unfamiliarity with the Chinese market made it difficult for them to acquire. He could find them anything they wanted: an auto mechanic, furniture, antiques, train tickets, apartments, girlfriends, anything. Anywhere there were Americans there was money to be made for an enterprising, intelligent, English-speaking Chinese former battalion commander. He managed to get himself appointed as the realtor of choice to the foreign students and staff at the Stanford Center.

He woke at five every day, washed by pouring buckets of cold water over himself in his courtyard (having no hot water in his flat), and was on the move all day, every day, hustling to earn a living. As was typical for Chinese people, he took no days off during the year except for the Chinese New Year. He worked seven days a week. Some weekday evenings, for pleasure, he studied French literature at one of the local universities, working towards a Bachelor of Arts degree. He told me he had saved enough money and was going to marry, at age fifty, for the first time. One has to respect a man like that.

Because no system of welfare or unemployment insurance existed in Taiwan, if you had no family to help you, and if you didn’t work, then you didn’t eat. I never saw a beggar in Taiwan during the entire time that I spent there, though I traveled to almost every obscure part of the island. The Chinese do not in general believe that life (or the government) owes them a living, or that they enjoy a right to happiness. In this, I think, they differ in outlook from most Americans—including, probably, myself. The Japanese, I have read, view life as a beautiful cherry blossom, and if that blossom is sullied in any way, then life no longer is worth living—hence the traditional importance of suicide in samurai culture. But Japan over centuries suffered few wars and almost no invasion attempts by foreigners. To the Chinese, with their age-old famines, civil wars, floods, droughts, and foreign invasions, life is something to be treasured, no matter how sullied it has become. The objective of a poor man is to live one more day. Mr. Tang’s struggle to survive illustrates this view.

CHAPTER 2

Banquet

WHILE JOURNEYING

The delicious wine of Lan-ling is of golden hue and flavorous.

Come fill my precious glass, and let it glow in amber!

If you can only make me drunk, mine host, it is enough;

No longer shall I know the sorrow of a strange land.

Li Bo … Shigeyoshi Obata, trans.

I have attended many banquets in my life, yet one stands out above all others in my memory. The Stanford Center provided it in honor of that year’s newly arrived faculty and students, of which I was one. The Stanford Center occupied a building on the campus of Tai Da, National Taiwan University, the Republic of China’s most prestigious educational institution. The banquet took place at a catering establishment adjacent to the campus, just off Roosevelt Road (Luosefu lu). I assume that this establishment provided such a marvelous banquet because they had newly opened and were in the process of establishing their reputation.

Following the custom at Chinese banquets, the guests sat twelve to a table around a lazy susan. The dining room held about ten to twelve tables. The director of the Stanford Center that year, an American professor of Asian Studies from a Midwestern state university, served as master of ceremonies. He sat on an inflated round tube because he suffered from a persistent boil on his rear end.⁸ For a reason that will become clear to you shortly, I cannot remember most of the dishes served at this banquet. I do remember the shark’s fin and the bird’s nest soups⁹, the sauté of fish lips, the Peking¹⁰ duck prepared three different ways, and the only dish that I didn’t like, sautéed sea slugs. The number of dishes seemed endless. Each was exotic and (except for the slugs) extraordinarily delicious.¹¹

Bottles of huang jiu [yellow alcohol] distilled from rice, sat on each table, and our Chinese teachers invited us to play one of the several Chinese drinking games: paper, scissors, and stone. You know the game: two people put out their hands at the same time. Paper is indicated by a flat hand with fingers held together, scissors by extending the separated first and middle fingers, and stone by a fist. Scissors cut paper, paper covers stone, stone breaks scissors. Losers must empty their glasses, the objective being to make one’s adversary become drunk and thereby lose face. It is impolite to raise one’s glass alone at Chinese dinners: one must always drink in mutually exchanged toasts with someone else, lifting the glass with one hand and placing the other, palm upward, fingers touching the base of the glass. At first, the amounts of alcohol poured into our water tumblers were small; but, as the evening progressed, they increased until, towards the end of the evening, they were filled to the brim. We chug-a-lugged after each toast. The Chinese toast is gan bei [dry glass]!

I can’t remember what new dishes we were consuming by that time, only that they were superb. Waiters would place new delights on the lazy susan and the guests would turn the wheel to partake of whichever one caught their fancy. As the dinner and the drinking game progressed, people began to collapse or to wave away further doses of alcohol. Those people still drinking congregated at fewer and fewer tables, with everyone else crowding around to see who would give up and lose face next. Suddenly, I looked around and discovered I was one of only two people still left in the game. The other contender was Teacher Wang. In the weeks following our contest, I learned his fellow teachers regarded him as a laoyoutiao, literally an old oil stick, i.e., a slippery fellow who knew his way around. During the school year following the banquet, I grew to like and respect him very much and we became good friends. I will describe in a later chapter the comically disastrous results of my invitation to him to join me for his very first Western-style meal.

But that evening, the first time I had ever seen him, he walked over and sat at my table, and challenged me to out-drink him. We toasted and chug-a-lugged water glasses filled to