Remembering Eunice Tietjens #4 – The Sikh Policeman

Written during Tietjens’ (who was an American) visit to Shanghai sometime before 1917…the Shanghai Municipal Police’s Sikh Branch was established in 1884. Sikh policemen wore red turbans.

The Sikh Policeman: A British Subject

Of what, I wonder, are you thinking?

It is something beyond my world I know, something I cannot guess.

Yet I wonder.

Of nothing Chinese can you be thinking, for you hate them with an automatic hatred – the hatred of the wel-fed for the starved, of the warlike for the weak.

When they cross you, you kick them, viciously, with the drawing back of your silken beard, from your white teeth.

With a snarl you kick them, sputtering curses in short gutturals.

You do not even speak their tongue, so it cannot be of them you are thinking.

Yet neither do you speak the tongue of the master whom you serve.

No more do you know of us the “Masters” than you know of them the “dogs”.

We are above you, they below.

And between us you stand, guarding the street, erect and splendid, lithe and male.

Your scarlet turban frames your neat black head,

And you are thinking.

Or are you?

Perhaps we are only stung with thought.

I wonder.

Shanghai

Remembering Eunice Tietjens #3 – The Altar of Heaven

written sometime before 1917 during a visit to Peking….

The Altar of Heaven

Beneath the leaning, rain-washed sky this great white circle – beautiful!

In three white terraces the circle lies, piled one on one towards Haven. And on each terrace the white balustrade climbs in aspiring marble, etched in cloud.

And Heaven is very near.

For this is worship native as the air, wide as the wind, and poignant as the rain,

Pure aspiration, the eternal dream.

Beneath the leaning sky this great white circle!

Peking

Remembering Eunice Tietjens #2 – The Beggar

Written sometime before 1917 in Hwai-yuen (Huaiyuan), Anhui where Eunice visited, probably with the well-established Presbyterian Mission in the town….Tietjins (who had not been in China long at this point) was obviously quite shocked by the poor state of the beggar, refers to him/her only as “it” and suggests (as was believed of most beggars at the time, and was true of some) that the beggar had been professionally maimed to increase their income opportunities….

The Beggar

Christ! What is that-that-Thing?

Only a beggar, professionally maimed, I think.

Across the Narrow street it lies, the street where the children are.

It is rocking back and forth, back and forth, ingratiatingly, in the noisome filth.

Beside the body are stretched two naked stumps of flesh, on one the remnant of a foot. The wounds are not new wounds, but they are open and they fester. There are flies on them.

The Thing is whining, shrilly, hideously.

Professionally maimed, I think.

Christ!

(Hwai Yuen)

Remembering Eunice Tietjens #1 – The Story Teller

The Story Teller

In a corner of the market-place he sits, his face the target for many eyes.

The sombre crowd about him is motionless.

Behind their faces no lamps burn; only their eyes glow faintly with a reflected light.

For their eyes are on his face.

It alone is alive, is vibrant, moving bronze under a sun of bronze.

The taut skin, like polished metal, shines along his cheek and jaw. His eyes cut upward from a slender nose, and his quick mouth moves sharply out and in.

Artful are the gestures of his mouth, elaborate and full of guile. When he draws back the bow of his lips his face is like a mask of lacquer, set with teeth of pearl, fantastic, terrible…

What strange tale lives in the gestures of his mouth?

Does a fox-maiden, bewitching, tiny-footed, lure a scholar to his doom? Is an unfilial son tortured of devils? Or does a decadent queen sport with her eunuchs?

I cannot tell.

The faces of the people are wooden; only their eyes burn dully with a reflected light.

I shall never know.

I am an alien…alien.

(Nanking)

2018 – Poetry and Photography – Remembering Eunice Tietjens

I thought I’d kick off 2018 on China Rhyming with some poetry…specifically from Eunice Tietjens and her largely forgotten and hard to find 1917 collection, Profiles from China, Sketches in Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior….the poems, which appeared in a variety of journals and magazines including (Harriet Monroe’s always keen on Chinese-related work) Poetry, The Seven Arts, The Chicago Evening Post, The Graphic, and The Little Review. Tietjens wrote of Chinese scenes and people as well the treaty port of Shanghai and colony of Hong Kong. I’ll try to pair the works with relevant photographs from the period as we progress…

Tietjens, born in 1844, was an American poet and journalist. She was a correspondent in France during WW1 for the Chicago Daily News while her poetry began to appear around the same time championed by Monroe’s Poetry journal. She was a great traveller and visited Japan and Taiwan (and elsewhere) as well as China.

I’ll dive in for a couple of weeks sampling her poems with some images and we’ll see if we can’t restore her reputation from obscurity a bit….

Chinese Lanterns and the Limehouse Golem

I haven’t posted for a while about references to Chinese lanterns in books (I went through a spate of these a while back – use the search box if you’re remotely interested). Anyway, Boxing Day brought all gathered around the TV to watch The Limehouse Golem – OK, so not the best piece of Victoriana ever, but, right there in the music hall scenes…Chinese lanterns!!

Remembering Shanghai Express on Marlene’s Birthday

Marlene Dietrich was born this day in 1901….enough of an excuse to remember her in Shanghai Express….

A Christmas Day Tale from Old China….Vanya Oakes Explaines the Nativity & Santa Claus to her Shanghainese Tailor in 1933

There’s a bit of a tradition on China Rhyming of providing an old China Christmas tale every Christmas Day. In the past we’ve had a 1930s Christmas with Carl Crow sharing Christmas dinner with some vegetarian Buddhist monks that did however involve some ancient eggs and sharksfin soup. We have also had the story of the Christmas Errol Flynn spent in Shanghai. And, finally, Anthony Abbott’s 1930s tale of spending Christmas with the “Christian General” warlord.

Well this year’s tale is from the American “lady reporter” Vanya Oakes and comes from her 1943 memoir White Man’s Folly. It’s the early 1930s, Oakes is recently arrived in Shanghai from America. She has just set up home in a nice flat and has invited over her tailor to measure her for a Christmas gown…

“I came in one day and found the tailor engaged in scrutinizing one of my Christmas cards. It was a picture of the manger, and Mary and the Infant Jesus, and the Three Wise Men. ‘Missy, what thing this?’ said the tailor, unabashed at rummaging about in my things. ‘Before have plenty time to see in other misses’ house, tree, and Santa Claus and white rain. But this fashion – no see.’

With zeal worthy a more promising venture I launched into an interpretation of the Nativity. At the conclusion the tailor shook his head cheerfully and said: ‘No savvy, I savvy these Master will bring present, all same Chinese New Year. I savvy this lady belong mother small baby. But Missy, this no belong proper house – this for horse.’

I explained that the lady was very poor, so poor that she had no house.

‘But Missy,’ he objected, ‘where father? No have got job?’

Swallowing hastily, I stammered there was no father.

The tailor stared at me with a kind of contemptuous horror. Of course he had always known that foreigners were stupid. But this was beyond everything. How could even a foreigner suppose there could be a baby without a father?

Some red in the face I tried to explain further. I got wound up in the Immaculate Conception. The tailor’s eyes widened, bugged out. Too bad. Crazy Missy, talking about making baby without father.

Slowly, with severity, he laid the Christmas card down on he table. ‘I no savvy how fashion this small baby so good – only beggar baby,’ he said disdainfully. ‘So poor no can catch proper house.’ I grew flustered, trying hurriedly to make out a respectable case for Christianity. He kept murmuring ‘Small baby in a horse house,’ accusingly. In desperation I gave up. It meant laving him to think ill – very ill indeed – of Christianity. I couldn’t seem to help it.

We did better on Santa Claus. There are several Chinese myths in which gods ride through space on clouds or waves, so it did not strike him as peculiar that Santa Claus should gallop through the ether behind his ‘horse with horns’. We pranced along splendidly therefore until we came to the chimney. But as I began coming down the chimney to put all the nice toys on the tree, the tailor’s shocked gaze pulled me up short.

‘Missy’, he said, with terrifying logic, ‘no can do this fashion – his stomach too fat – get inside, no can get out.’

Wildly I stated that Santa’s stomach was an illusion; where it appeared large and round and solid it was, actually, a balloon which telescoped when convenient.

‘But Missy,’ said the tailor, eyeing me dubiously, ‘he get very dirty. Inside all fire dirt.’

It was unfair – and hopeless. I conceded that Santa Claus would get a little dirty, but that it was part of the trade – just as the tailor occasionally pricked his finger with a needle. Anyhow, Santa Claus would only get a very little dirty, because he was, on the whole, a very clever man.

‘No,’ said the tailor wearily, ‘I think he get plenty dirty.”