The Emotional Nature of the Chinese
One of the most difficult adjustments the people of the Western nations have ever had to face is the adjustment to the new Chinese. He is freed at last from his inherited inhibitions and is showing himself for the emotional being he is, with, of course, a certain temporary addition of war psychology.
The citizens of the West have for a long time taken the Chinese as a matter of course. To most of them in imagination he is still the impassive, unemotional, yellow Oriental, with a stealthy step, an impenetrable face, and a swinging queue. The queue has long been obsolete. The impassivity is now gone. So is the unemotionalism. We shall have to throw away this old picture; relegate it to the attics of history. Certainly it has no reality in the present.
Of course, to the person really acquainted with the Chinese, old and new, this unemotionalism has always been a myth. They are and have always been one of the most emotional races in the world. That is why now, when the old repressive bonds of their civilization, welded by Confucius thousands of years ago, are breaking apart, we see this natural capacity for emotion exhibiting itself, and it is frightening in its intensity.
The present attitude of the young Chinese toward their country, for instance, is often emotion amounting to frenzy. There is in it the hysteria and religious devotion of a self-martyr. They are capable, many of these young persons, of letting their own blood as a wild sacrifice to the only god they worship—love of country. Patriotism, so-called, has laid hold of the imaginations and emotions of some of the younger students to such an extent that they are wholly unable to use their reasoning powers. What constitutes patriotism, in what way their country can best be served in reality, these things are impossible to dwell upon now in China. Youth demands an instant outlet for its exaltation. Suffering is welcomed, even courted; the weight of emotional energy must be discharged.
I do not intend to discuss the proper and natural reaction of the Chinese to the treatment they have received from the West. Personally, I am wholly on their side. They have the right of it, in the main, beyond discussion. What I am interested in is the emergence of the real Chinese, at last, out of the trappings which their civilization has placed upon them for so long; the real Chinese, whom so few have ever seen. Yet they have been there all these centuries, sensitive, restrained, ardent, and romantic beyond the imagination of the prosaic Westerner.
For the men and women of the West have certainly an exceedingly cold emotional life in comparison to these men and women in China. The Western people are colder by nature, and with the passing of youth the brief bright moment is gone. In the Chinese emotion is potent their whole life long. Moreover, for centuries the Western peoples, and by these I mean primarily those of the white race, have had normal outlets for their emotions; there has been no system of ethics, no book of manners, detailed, rigid, and inflexible, bearing down against the individual, forbidding all original expression. This has tended to allow any surplus of emotionalism to be carried off naturally.
But in the history of China we have had a condition wholly contrary; we have a people far more emotional than the Westerner by nature, a people naturally richer in appreciation of the emotional aspects of life, a people of high intensity to whom all or nearly all possibility of emotional expression has been denied for centuries. They have been dammed up, and now the dam is broken and the flood is alarming. It may take centuries for this to subside to anything like normal.
I am well aware that in maintaining such a thesis as this I am contradicting to their faces many "old Chinese hands," who contemptuously expect to see the present excitement quiet down again and impassivity and apparent apathy return. One may as well expect to see the queues come back. For the barriers, builded by ages as they were, were nevertheless artificial. What the West has to make up its mind to is that this Chinese we have now is the real Chinese, and he is the Chinese the world is going to have in the future.
One might, of course, give any amount of evidence that the Chinese is by nature an emotional person. Take for instance, the ancient and not infrequent custom of killing oneself after an insult, preferably on the doorstep of the individual by whom one has been insulted. Several explanations of this have been made; among others, the superstition that the ghost would haunt the enemy, that the Chinese do not value human life and die easily, that there is little sense of individualism, and so on. There is, undoubtedly, some truth in all of these. But the essence of the thing is that when one is a Chinese gentleman and has been insulted tradition denies the possibility of revenge by laying hold of the offender, and so, like a child rending its own clothes and biting its own flesh in futile anger, emotion turns upon the man himself.
And anger in the Chinese has a wildness of which the people of the West know little. I have seen an angry American; I have seen him curse and snort and swear. I have never seen him capable of the pitiless, inhuman madness of the Chinese, whose anger seizes him and makes him as helpless as a branch tossed in the wind—unless he is a gentleman, and then you may see it all in his eyes for one terrible moment; then his lids are dropped and his hands shake a little, his voice comes with controlled softness and he bows. He bides his time and he never forgets.
Only, it is becoming the fashion not to drop lids over angry eyes, not to restrain clenched hands, and not to bow where friendship is not meant. All the years of enforced restraint are behind that anger now.
I have heard an angry woman on a Chinese street scream out her fury from dawn till dark, until her face is the face of an insane person and her voice is utterly gone. They have an affection of the throat, a constriction of the muscles, which they call "the anger disease," and it comes from nothing but unbridled rage. True, it is nearly always found in the lower classes. Until now, the upper classes have restrained themselves according to custom.
For many years I have taught young men and women in China. I have seen young people in other countries; I have seen them in love and they have it badly enough, some of them. But I watch my Chinese boys and girls with twice
