SPEAKING
FREELY Young America and China's
dream By Barbara Rendall
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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contributing.
Everyone should read
history, of course - who wants to be doomed to
repeat all that? But such books tend to be thick
ones, stuffed with names and dates and battles.
I've discovered a livelier alternative: reading
diaries, letters, biographies, and a bit of
cultural history, a mixture that can give one a
quick and intimate acquaintance with another age.
What have I learned from my reading this
past winter, while the bitter northwest wind was
icing up my windows in Beijing? A lot, in the
delightfully random way that happens when you pick up
unrelated books and they
suddenly come together to tell you something
important.
From reading the published
diary of a young woman (I'll keep her mysterious
for now), I've learned that history does repeat
itself, in the strangest ways. I identified with
the writer because at the time she kept her diary
she was an expatriate, feeling homesick and out of
place. Worse, the people among whom she lived
delighted in criticizing and making fun of her
native land, a less developed country. To add to
her woes, during her stay in this foreign place a
popular book came out chronicling its author's
adventures as an unsympathetic traveler in the
young woman's country. This made social gatherings
a trial for her because she was constantly called
on to explain and defend her home.
What
sort of criticism was leveled at her country? The
female traveler complained about a whole range of
behavior that she found objectionable: the
personal habits and manners of the young woman's
compatriots, the unsanitary environment, the
mangling of the English language, and the natives'
relentless fixation on making money.
Does
the young woman's plight begin to sound familiar?
Are you thinking she might be a young Chinese
marooned in some graduate school in Middle America
(or Hong Kong, for that matter), troubled by the
China-bashing she hears all around her? That would
be a good guess, but the truth is more surprising.
The young woman was actually Harriet Low, an
American from Salem, Massachusetts, living in the
English enclave of the British East India Company
in Macao in the early 19th century (The Diary
of Harriet Low, ed Nan P Hodges and Arthur W
Hummel, 2002). Although she was physically in
China, from a practical, everyday standpoint she
might as well have been in London. The people she
mainly spoke to, aside from the American uncle and
aunt with whom she was living, were all British.
The year was 1832 and the United States
was still a young country, an upstart former
British colony that was just beginning to claim
its place among nations. Harriet's British
neighbors didn't think the "rising" country
deserved much of a place. They considered
Americans to be rather rough-hewn and uncouth, and
they took pleasure in belittling the former
colonists' pretensions to civilization.
Just at this sensitive time in
British-American relations, the British writer
Frances Trollope (mother of future author Anthony
Trollope) undertook an extensive tour of the US to
see the young country for herself, and she
chronicled her impressions - few of which were
good - as she went (Domestic Manners of the
Americans,1832). The British all over the
world read it with relish, much to Harriet's
discomfort. And it's still around; I read it on
the Internet.
Interestingly, the thing
that bothered Trollope more than anything else
about America was ... the spitting. Chewing
tobacco was universally popular among American men
and the by-product was deposited everywhere,
without a second thought. Declared the lady
traveler, "I hardly know any annoyance so deeply
repugnant to English feelings as the incessant,
remorseless spitting." It was a major battle, she
complained, for ladies in America to protect their
dresses from the "contamination".
Only
slightly less distasteful were the table manners
she witnessed. She was appalled by "the total want
of all the usual courtesies of the table, the
voracious rapidity with which the viands were
seized and devoured," as well as "the frightful
manner of feeding with their knives ... and the
still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth
afterward with a pocket knife." The environmental
pollution she had to deal with in the city of
Cincinnati, where she lived for part of a year,
was also a trial. To her shock, her household help
were directed by the local authorities to throw
all refuse into the street, where the wandering
pigs would efficiently dispose of it.
The
English spoken by the Americans was also found
wanting in refinement. Trollope's ears were
offended by "the strange uncouth phrases and
pronunciation". She claimed that "I very seldom
during my whole stay in the country heard a
sentence elegantly turned, and correctly
pronounced from the lips of an American."
Trollope did admit that Americans were
hard-working and ambitious, and that they were to
be congratulated for bringing about the rapid
growth and development that she saw all around
her. But their relentless fixation on the pursuit
of the dollar was, in her judgment, rather
unseemly: "Nothing stops them if a profitable
result can be fairly hoped for."
Harriet
Low, an intelligent and reasonable young woman,
forced herself to read Trollope's criticisms so
that she could rise to the defense of "Poor
America" at social gatherings. "Before we left I
had to defend my country from some of Mrs
Trollope's imputations, and endeavored to
represent correctly what she has so grossly
misrepresented. She tells some truths I grant and
many the reverse." As I read this, I couldn't help
but be struck by the similarity between Harriet
Low and many young Chinese today as they respond
in blogs and tweets to the various contemporary
"imputations" that abound concerning China.
Another book I read this winter, Bill
Bryson's At Home, coincidentally takes up
the story of young America a few decades later and
adds several more interesting points to the
parallel with modern China. Bryson's book is a
sort of history of the development of our modern
comforts, and he has a very interesting
description of the 1851 Great Exhibition in
London, the world's first "Expo." All the
countries of the world were invited to put their
accomplishments on display but, Bryson writes, the
organizers had rather low expectations of the
American contribution to the show. Funds were
scarce in the US and their setting-up in London
was done haphazardly, all of which reinforced "the
more or less universal conviction that Americans
were little more than amiable backwoodsmen not yet
ready for unsupervised outings on the world
stage."
However, when the Crystal Palace
opened its doors, visitors were amazed by what
America could do: there were sewing machines,
machines that could stamp out nails, cut stone,
mold candles, farm machinery that could do the
work of 40 men, and many other wonderful displays.
"For many Europeans," Bryson says, "this was the
first unsettling hint that those tobacco-chewing
rustics across the water were creating the next
industrial colossus." Harriet Low, a woman of 40
at this time and back home in the United States,
must have been proud.
The following
decades brought the US its prosperous, perhaps
overly-prosperous, "Gilded Age." During this
period the Europeans had to make some rapid
adjustments to their attitude toward the former
colony. As Bryson observes, "Europeans viewed
American's industrial ambitions with amusement,
then consternation, and finally alarm." He tells
how books began to appear with titles like The
American Invaders and The American
Commercial Invasion of Europe. Does this
fretting sound strangely familiar?
Europe
finally made its peace with Yankee "ambitions" and
eventually accepted the developing country as a
vital ally. Now, years later, perhaps it's the
turn of the United States to take the senior
statesman's role. Wouldn't it behoove that country
to take a thoughtful look at history and make its
peace with "rising" China? They just might do good
things together.
Barbara Rendall
is a Canadian writer living in Beijing.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
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