"A few years later, reduced family circumstances made it necessary for me to get a job, so I returned to China. I got a false queue—it only cost two dollars in those days as soon as I landed at Shanghai, and went home wearing it. My mother did not say anything, but others studied it suspiciously and grunted when they found it to be false, citing decapitation as my proper punishment. One of my kinsmen considered informing against me, but was deterred by the thought that the treasonable revolutionaries might succeed after all.
"Then deciding that a false queue was not as open and honest as a real shaven head, I discarded it and walked out on the street in a foreign suit.
"Laughter and taunts followed me wherever I went. 'The reckless fool!' 'The fake foreign devil.'
"I discarded my foreign clothes and put on my long robe. But the laughter and taunts grew worse. At the end of my resources, I armed myself with a walking stick and used it vigorously a few times. The taunts ceased gradually, except when I ventured into strange territory where my stick had not yet been brought into play.
"But this expedient depressed me, and even now I recall it with shame. When I was studying in Japan I once read a newspaper item about a certain Dr. Honda who had traveled in China and the Malay States. Now, when this doctor, who spoke neither Chinese nor Malay, was asked how he got along without a knowledge of the native languages, he raised his walking stick and said that that was a language they all understood. I could not get over the feeling of anger and humiliation caused by this for many days. Who'd think that I would resort to it myself? The more ironic that these people did understand the language of the stick!
"In the first year of Hsüan T'ung [1909] I was proctor at
