The Nation (American magazine)/Volume 123/3194/The Emotional Nature of the Chinese

by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck

The Emotional Nature of the Chinese

By Pearl S. Buck

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 the anxiety. I have seen a boy sicken and die of love for a girl he had seen but once and whose name he never knew; I have known boys and girls to commit suicide because of despair over some matrimonial arrangement. They commit suicide with the most horrifying ease.

One may see this terrifying capacity for feeling in the Chinese love poetry, a feeling which has with it too often an edge of despair. The emphasis is all the more marked in that it is put into delicate, restrained words almost devoid of physical allusions, yet breathing a power as final as death itself.

The Chinese have until now been a people possessed by quietism. An imposed fatalistic turn of mind, inevitable from their religions and philosophy, has rendered them seemingly impassive, and even indifferent. Now, with the breakdown of the old forms of Buddhism and the reassertion of nationalism, always latent, fatalism is fast disappearing and they are beginning to form a determination to wrest their fate from the hands of heaven and mold it nearer to their heart's desire. It is, undoubtedly, true that the present situation aggravates their high emotional state. This crisis of fever and madness must wear away to some extent.

But there will remain a person new to many of us, a person who will be exceedingly easily hurt (as he has always been in reality), a person whose sword will now fly from its scabbard at the slightest breath of insult where before it remained sheathed, not in cowardice or from insensitivity but from the restraint of dignity. It will take a good many years of sincere friendliness and honest, disinterested treatment on the part of other nations to convince him that the world is not waiting to devour him.

At such a time as this, then, when the pent-up emotionalism of centuries has been released, it is absurd that we should demand an ability to judge any situation impartially. It is not in the power of the Chinese, certainly not of the young Chinese—and he is in the ascendancy in China just now—to see any side but his own. It is inevitable and a wholly natural result of his state of mind. Judicial investigations only increase his indignation. He is profoundly skeptical of conferences. Any appeals or demands to reform himself first and talk about foreign aggression afterward simply infuriate him further.

Many younger Chinese apparently believe that if China were a sovereign nation with all her rights restored, she would automatically become strong, quiet, and prosperous. The source of all evils, from foot-binding and concubines to cigarette-smoking and the movies, is to be found in the unequal treaties. Nothing will change this conviction short of giving up the unequal treaties and letting the truth show itself.

And in the long run it will be worth it to everyone. Aside from the moral question involved, which makes it the only honorable thing for the Western nations to return to China what has been all too often unlawfully seized, the fact remains that it is really the only solution to the situation now in China. Until China has no excuse to turn her attention to anyone except herself, until she has no one except herself to blame for her condition, this emotionalism now rampant will not cease to express itself in chauvinism and in an actual willingness to shed blood. Once the immediate cause of irritation can be removed, there is hope that this intensity of nature, common to the Chinese people, may turn upon itself and really force some sort of order out of chaos.