I. ON LYING IN BED
IT seems I am destined to become a market philosopher, but it can't be helped.
Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to
understand, but I can conceive of a philosophy which is the science of making difficult
things simple. In spite of names like "materialism", "humanism", "transcendentalism",
"pluralism", and all the other longwinded "isms", I contend that these systems are
no deeper than my own philosophy. Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping,
of meeting and saying good-by to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears
and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and
watching one's neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions
concerning these simple phenomena of life in a kind of academic jargon is nothing
but a trick to conceal either an extreme paucity or an extreme vagueness of ideas
on the part of the university professors. Philosophy therefore has become a science
by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves.
What the philosophers have succeeded in is this: the more they talk about it, the
more confused we become.
It is amazing how few people are conscious of the importance of the art of lying in
bed, although actually in my opinion nine-tenths of the world's most important
discoveries, both scientific and philosophical, are come upon when the scientist or
philosopher is curled up in bed at two or five o'clock in the morning.
Some people lie in the daytime and others lie at night. Now by "lying" I mean at the
same time physical and moral lying, for the two happen to coincide. I find that those
people who agree with me in believing in lying in bed as one of the greatest pleasures
of life are the honest men, while those who do not believe in lying in bed are liars
and actually lie a lot in the daytime, morally and physically. Those who lie in the
daytime are the moral uplifters, kindergarten teachers and readers of Aesop's Fables,
while those who frankly admit with me that a man ought to consciously cultivate the
art of lying in bed are the honest men who prefer to read stories without a moral
like Alice in Wonderland .
Now what is the significance of lying in bed, physically and spiritually ? Physically,
it means a retreat to oneself, shut up from the outside world, when one assumes the
physical posture most conducive to rest and peace and contemplation. There is a
certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of
life, "never lay straight" in bed "like a corpse, " but always curled up on one side.
  I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed.
The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree
of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat
on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees
with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head. In this posture
any poet can write immortal poetry, any philosopher can revolutionize human thought,
and any scientist can make epoch-making discoveries.
It is amazing how few people are aware of the value of solitude and contemplation.
The art of lying in bed means more than physical rest for you, after you have gone
through a strenuous day, and complete relaxation, after all the people you have met
and interviewed, all the friends who have tried to crack silly jokes, and all your
brothers and sisters who have tried to rectify your behavior and sponsor you into
heaven have thoroughly got on your nerves. It is all that, I admit. But it is something
more. If properly cultivated, it should mean a mental house-cleaning. Actually, many
business men who pride themselves on rushing about in the morning and afternoon and
keeping three desk telephones busy all the time on their desk, never realize that
they could make twice the amount of money, if they would give themselves one hour's
solitude awake in bed, at one o'clock in the morning or even at seven. What does it
matter even if one stays in bed at eight o'clock? A thousand times belter that he
should provide himself with a good tin of cigarettes on his bedside table and lake
plenty of time to get up from bed and solve all his problems of the day before he
brushes his teeth. There, comfortably stretched or curled up in his pyjamas, free
from the irksome woolen underwear or the irritating belt or suspenders and suffocating
collars and heavy leather boots, when his toes are emancipated and have recovered
the freedom which they inevitably lose in the daytime, (he real business head can
think, for only when one's toes are free is his head free, and only when one's head
is free is real thinking possible. Thus in that comfortable position, he can ponder
over his achievements and mistakes of yesterday and single out the important from
the trivial in the dav s program ahead of him. Better that he arrived at ten o'clock
in his office master of himself, than that he should come punctually at nine or even
a quarter before to watch over his subordinates like a slave driver and then "hustle
about nothing, " as the Chinese say.
But for the thinker, the inventor and the man of ideas, lying quietly for an hour
in bed accomplishes even more. A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his
novel in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and
afternoon. For there, free from telephone calls and well-meaning visitors and the
common trivialities of everyday life, he sees life through a glass or a beaded screen,
as it were, and a halo of poetic fancy is cast around the world of realities and informs
it with a magic beauty. There he sees life not in its rawness, but suddenly transformed
into a picture more real than life itself, like the great paintings of Ni Yunlin or
Mi Fei.
Now what actually happens in bed is this. When one is in bed the muscles are at rest,
the circulation becomes smoother and more regular, respiration becomes steadier, and
all the optical, auditory and vaso-motor nerves are more or less complelly at rest,
bringing aboul a more or less complete physical quietude, and therefore making mental
concentration ; whether on ideas or on sensations, more absolute . Even in respect
to sensations, those of smell or hearing for example, our senses are the keenest in
that moment. All good music should be listened to in the lying condition. Li Liweng
said in his essay on " Willows" that one should learn to listen to the birds at dawn
when lying in bed. What a world of beauty is waiting for us, if we learn to wake up
at dawn and listen to the heavenly concert of the birds ! Actually there is a profusion
of bird music in most towns, although I am sure many residents are not aware of it.
For instance, this was what I recorded of the sounds I heard in Shanghai one morning:
This morning I woke up at five after a very sound sleep and listened to a most gorgeous
feast of sounds. What woke me up were the factory whistles of a great variety of pitch
and force. After a while, I heard a distant clatter of horse's hoofs; it must have
been cavalry passing down Yuyuen Road; and in that quiet dawn it gave me more aesthetic
delight than a Brahms symphony. Then came a few early chirps from some kind of birds.
I am sorry I am not proficient in birdlore, but I enjoyed them all the same.
There were other sounds of course some foreigner's "boy, " presumably after a night
of dissipation outside, appeared at about half past five and began to knock at
someone's back door. A scavenger was then heard sweeping a neighboring alleyway with
the swish-swash of his bamboo broom. All of a sudden, a wild duck, I suppose, would
sail by in the sky, leaving echoes of his kung-tung in the air. At twenty-five past
six, I heard the distant rumble of the engine of the Shanghai-Hangchow train arriving
at the Jessfield Station. There were one or two sounds coming from the children in
their sleep in the next room. Life then began to stir and a distant hum of human
activities in the near and distant neighborhood gradually increased in volume and
intensity. Downstairs in the house itself, the servants had got up, too. Windows were
being opened. A hook was being placed in position. A slight cough. A soft tread of
footsteps. A clanging of cups and saucers. And suddenly the baby cried, "Mamma! "
This was the natural concert I heard thai morning in Shanghai.
Throughout the whole spring that year my greatest delight was to listen to a kind
of bird probably called a quail or partridge in English. Its lovecall consists of
four notes (do. mi: re : . //, ) the rv lasting two or three beats and ending in the
middle of a beat, followed by an abrupt, staccato ti in the lower octave. It is the
song I used to hear in the mountains in the south. The most beautiful part of it was
that a male bird would starl the call on top of a tree about twenty yards from my
place early at dawn, and a female bird would counterpoint it at a distance of about
a hundred yards. Then once in a while there would be a slight variation, a quickening
as it were of tempo and of the bird's heart, and the last staccato note would he left
out. This bird-song stands out preeminently among those of others, of which there
is a great profusion. 1 am at a loss to describe these songs except by resort to musical
notation, but I know they include the songs of orioles and magpies and woodpeckers,
and the cooing of pigeons. The sparrows seem to wake up later, and the reason, 1 suppose,
must be as our great epicure-poet Li Liweng gave it. The other birds have to sing
early because they are continually afraid of men's guns and children's stones during
the day. These birds, therefore, can sing at ease only before this insufferable human
species wake up from their sleep. As soon as men wake up, the birds can never finish
their song at ease. But the sparrows can, because they are not afraid, and therefore
they can sleep longer.

II. ON SrniNt; IN CIIAIKS
I want to write about the philosophy of sitting in chairs because I have a reputation
for lolling. Now there are many lollers among my friends and acquaintances, but
somehow I have acquired a special reputation for lolling, at least in the Chinese
literary world. I contend that I am not the only loller in this modern world and that
my reputation has been greatly exaggerated. It happened like this. I started a
magazine called the Analects Fortnightly, in which I consistently tried to disprove
the myth of the harmfulness of smoking. In spite of the fact that we did not have
cigarette advertisements in our magazine, I wrote and publi shed essay after essay
praising the virtues of Lady Nicotine. Somehow, therefore, a legend developed that
I was a man doing nothing the whole day but lolling idly on a sofa smoking a cigar,
and in spite of my disclaimers and my protests that I am one of the hardest working
men in China, the legend had got about and was constantly used as an evidence of my
belonging to the hateful leisure-class intelligentsia. Two years after, the situation
was aggravated by the fact that I started another magazine devoted to the familiar
essay. Bored stiff by the dilatory, hypocritical and pompous style of Chinese
editorials, which is the result of the method of teaching school composition a
generation ago, making young boys of twelve or thirteen write essays on "The Salvation
of the Country" and "The Virtue of Persistence, " I saw that the introduction of a
more familiar style of writing was the means of emancipating Chinese prose from the
straitjacket of Confucian platitudes. It happened, however, that I translated the
phrase "familiar style" by a Chinese phrase meaning "leisurely style."... And now
I have the indisputable reputation of being the most leisurely of all leisurely
writers in China and therefore the most unforgivable, " while we are living in this
period of national humiliation. "
I admit that I do loll about in my friends' drawing-rooms, but so do the others. What
are armchairs for anyway, except for people to loll in ? If gentlemen and ladies of
the twentieth century were supposed to sit upright all the time with absolute dignity,
there should be no armchairs at all in the modern drawing-room, but we should all
be sitting on stiff redwood furniture, with most ladies' feet dangling about a foot
from the ground.
In other words, there is a philosophy about lolling in chairs. The mention of the
word "dignify" explains exactly the origin of the difference in the styles of sitting
between the ancient and the modern people. The ancient people sat in order to look
dignified, while modern people sit in order to be comfortable. There is a philosophic
conflict between the two, for, according to ancient notions only half a century ago,
comfort was a sin, and to be comfortable was to be disrespectful. Aldous Huxley has
made this sufficiently plain in his essay on "Comfort." The feudalistic society which
made the rise of the armchair impossible until modern days, as described by Huxley,
was exactly the same as that which existed in C^hina up to a generation ago. Today
any man who calls himself another's friend must not be afraid to put his legs on top
of a desk in his friend's room, and we take that as a sign of familiarity instead
of disrespect, although to put one's legs on top of a desk in the presence of a member
of the older generation would be a different matter.
There is a closer relationship between morals and architecture and interior
decoration than we suspect. Huxley has pointed out that Western ladies did not take
frequent baths because they were afraid to see their own naked bodies, and this moral
concept delayed the rise of the modern white-enameled bathtub for centuries. One can
understand why in the design of old Chinese furniture there was so little
consideration for human comfort only when we realize the Confucian atmosphere in which
people moved about. Chinese redwood furniture was designed for people to sit upright
in, because that was the only posture approved by society. Even Chinese emperors had
to sit on a throne on which I would not think of remaining for more than five minutes,
and for that matter the English kings were just as badly off. Cleopatra went about
inclining on a couch carried by servants, because apparently she had never heard of
Confucius. If Confucius should have seen her doing that, he would certainly have
"struck her shin with a stick, " as he did to one of his old disciples. Yuan Jang,
when the latter was found sitting in an incorrect posture. In the Confucian society
in which we lived, gentlemen and ladies had to hold themselves perfectly erect, at
least on formal occasions, and any sign of putting one's leg up would be at once
construed as a sign of vulgarity and lack of culture. In fact, to show extra respect,
as when seeing official superiors, one had to sit gingerly on the edge of a chair
at an oblique angle, which was a sign of respect and of the height of culture . There
is also a close connection between the Confucian tradition and the discomforts of
Chinese architecture, but we will not go into that now.
Thanks to the romantic movement in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth
centuries, this tradition of classical decorum has broken down, and to be comfortable
is no longer a sin. On the other hand, a more truthful attitude towards life has taken
its place, due as much to the romantic movement as to a better understanding of human
psychology. The same change of attitude which has ceased to regard theatrical
amusements as immoral and Shakespeare as a "barbarian, " has also made possible the
evolution of ladies' bathing costumes, clean bathtubs and comfortable armchairs and
divans, and of a more truthful and at the same time intimate style of living and writing.
In this sense, there is a true connection between my habit of lolling on a sofa and
my attempt to introduce a more intimate and free and easy writing into modern Chinese
journalism.
If we admit that comfort is not a sin, then we must also admit that the more comfortably
a man arranges himself in an armchair in a friend's drawing-room, the greater respect
he is showing to his host. After all, to make oneself at home and look restful is
only to help one's host or hostess succeed in the difficult art of hospitality. How
many hostesses have feared and trembled for an evening party in which the guests are
not willing to loosen up and just be themselves. I have always helped my hosts and
hostesses by putting a leg up on top of a tea table or whatever happened to be the
nearest object, and in that way forced everybody else to throw away the cloak of false
dignity.
Now I have discovered a formula regarding the comparative comfort of furniture. This
formula may be stated in very simple terms:
the lower a chair is, the more comfortable it becomes. Many people have sat down on
a certain chair in a friend's home and wondered why it is so cozy. Before the discovery
of this formula, I used to think that students of interior decoration probably had
a mathematical formula for the proportion between height and width and angle of
inclination of chairs which conduced to the maximum comfort of sitters. Since the
discovery of this formula, I have found that it is simpler than that. Take any Chinese
redwood furniture and saw off its legs a few inches, and it immediately becomes more
comfortable;and if you saw off another few inches, then it becomes still more
comfortable. The logical conclusion of this is, of course, that one is most
comfortable when one is lying perfectly flat on a bed. The matter is as simple as
that.
From this fundamental principle, we may derive the corollary that when we find
ourselves sitting in a chair that is too high and can t saw its legs off, all we have
to do is seek some object in the foreground on which we can rest our legs and therefore
theoretically decrease the difference between the levels of our hips and our feet.
One of the commonest devices that I use is to pull out a drawer in my desk and put
my feel on it. But the intelligent application of this corollary I can leave to
everybody's common sense.
To correct any misunderstanding that I am lolling all the time for sixteen waking
hours of the day, I must hasten to explain that I am capable of sitting doggedly at
a desk or in front of a typewriter for three hours. Just because I wish to make it
clear that relaxation of our muscles is not necessarily a crime, I do not mean that
we should keep our muscles relaxed all the time, or that this is the most hygienic
posture to be assumed all the time. That is far from my intention. After all human
life goes in cycles of work and play, of tension and relaxation. The male brain energy
and capacity for work goes in monthly cycles just like women's bodies. William James
said that when the chains of a bicycle are kept too tight, they are not conducive
to the easiest running, and so with the human mind. Everything, after all, is a matter
of habit. There is an infinite capacity in the human body for adjustments. Japanese
who have the habit of silting with crossed legs on the floor are liable to get cramps,
I suspect, when they are made to sit on chairs. Only by alternating between the
absolutely erect working posture of office hours and the posture of stretching
ourselves on a sofa after a hard day's work can we achieve that highest wisdom of
living.
A word to the ladies: when there is nothing in the immediate foreground on which you
can rest your feet, you can always curl up your legs on a sofa. You never look more
charming than when you are in that attitude.

Ill. ON CONVERSATION
Talking with you for one night is better than studying books for ten years, " this
was the comment of an old Chinese scholar after he had had a conversation with another
friend. There is much truth in that statement, and today the phrase "a night's talk"
has become a current expression for a happy conversation with a friend at night, either
past or anticipated. There are two or three books which resemble an English "week-end
omnibus," bearing the title A Night's Talk, or A Night's Talk in the Mountains. Such
a supreme pleasure as a perfect conversation with a friend at night is necessarily
rare, for as Li Liweng has pointed out, those who are wise seldom know how to talk,
and those who talk are seldom wise. The discovery of a man up in a mountain temple,
who really understands life and at the same time understands the art of conversation,
must therefore be one of the keenest pleasures, like the discovery of a new planet
by an astronomer or of a new variety of plant by a botanist.
People today are complaining that the art of conversation around a fireplace or on
cracker barrels is becoming lost, owing to the tempo of business life today. I am
quite sure that this tempo has something to do with it, but believe also that the
distortion of the home into an a-partment without a log fire began the destruction
of the art of conversation, and the influence of the motor car completed it. The tempo
is entirely wrong, for conversation exists only in a society of men imbued in the
spirit of leisure, with its ease, its humor, and its appreciation of light nuances.
For there is an evident distinction between mere talking and conversation as such.
This distinction is made in the Chinese language between shuohua (speaking) and
t'anhua (conversation) , which implies the discourse is more chatty and leisurely
and the topics of conversation are more trivial and less business-like. A similar
difference may be noted between business correspondence and the letters of literary
friends. We can speak or discuss business with almost any person, but there are very
few people with whom we can truly hold a night's conversation. Hence, when we do find
a true conversationalist, the pleasure is equal to, if not above, that of reading
a delightful author, with the additional pleasure of hearing his voice and seeing
his gestures. Sometimes we find it at the happy reunion of old friends, or among
acquaintances indulging in reminiscences, sometimes in the smoking room of a night
train, and sometimes at an inn on a distant journey. There will be chats about ghosts
and fox-spirits, mixed with amusing tales or impassioned comments on dictators and
traitors, and sometimes before we know it, light is shown by a wise observer and
conversationalist on things taking place in a certain country which are a premonition
of the impending collapse or change in a regime. Such conversations remain among the
memories that we cherish for life.
Of course, night is the best time for conversation, because there is a certain lack
of glamour in conversations during the daytime. The place of conversation seems to
me entirely unimportant. One can enjoy a good conversation on literature and
philosophy in an eighteenth-century salon, or sitting on barrels at a plantation of
an afternoon. Or it may be on a windy or rainy night when we are traveling in a river
boat and the lantern lights from boats anchoring on the opposite bank of the river
cast their reflections into the water and we hear the boatmen tell us stories about
the girlhood of the Queen. In fact, the charm of conversation lies in the fact that
the circumstances in which it takes place, the place, the time and the persons engaged
in it, vary from occasion to occasion. Sometimes we remember it in connection with
a breezy moonlight night, when the cassia flowers are in bloom,and sometimes we
associate it in memory with a dark and stormy night when a log fire is glowing on
the hearth, and sometimes we remember we were sitting on top of a pavilion watching
boats coming down the river, and perhaps a boat was overturned by the swift current,
or again, we were sitting in the waiting room of a railroad station in the small hours
of the morning. These pictures associate themselves indelibly with our memory of those
particular conversations. There were perhaps two or three persons in the room, or
perhaps five or six; maybe old Chen was slightly drunk that night, or old Chin had
a cold in the nose and spoke with a slight twang, adding to the particular flavor
of that evening. Such is human life that "the moon cannot always be round, the flowers
cannot always look so fine and good friends cannot always meet together, " and I do
not think the gods will be jealous of us when we engage in such simple pastimes.
As a rule, a good conversation is always like a good familiar essay. Both its style
and its contents are similar to that of the essay. Such topics as fox-spirits, flies,
the strange ways of Englishmen, the difference between Oriental and Occidental
culture, the bookstalls along the Seine, a nymphomaniac apprentice in a tailor shop,
anecdotes of our rulers, statesmen and generals, the method of preserving "Buddha's
Fingers" (a variety of citron)  these are all good and legitimate topics of
conversation. The point it has most in common with the essay is its leisurely style.
However weighty and important the topic may be, involving reflections on the sad
change or state of chaos of one's own country, or the sinking of civilization itself
under a current of mad political ideas, depriving man of liberty, human dignity and
even the goal of human happiness, or even involving moving questions of truth and
justice, still such ideas are expressed in a casual, leisurely and intimate manner.
For in civilization, however a man chafes and is angry at the robbers of our liberty,
we are allowed only to express our sentiments by a light smile around our lips or
at the tip of our pen. Our really impassioned tirades, in which we give full reins
to our sentiments, may be heard only by a few of our most intimate friends. Hence
the requisite condition of a true conversation is that we are able to air our views
at leisure in the intimacy of a room with a few good friends and with no people around
whom we hate to look at.
It is easy to see this contrast between the true genre of conversation and other kinds
of polite exchange of opinion by referring to the similar contrast between a good
familiar essay and the statements of politicians. Although there are a good deal more
noble sentiments expressed in politicians' statements, sentiments of democracy,
desire for service, interest in the welfare of the poor, devotion to the country,
lofty idealism, love of peace and assurances of unfailing international friendship,
and absolutely no suggestions of greed for power or money or fame, yet there is a
smell about it which puts one off at a distance, like an over-dressed and over-painted
lady. On the other hand, when we hear a true conversation or read a good familiar
essay, we feel that we have seen a plainly dressed country maiden washing clothes
by the riverbank, with perhaps her hair a little disheveled and one button loose,
but withal charming and intimate and likable. That is the familiar charm and studied
negligence aimed at in a Western woman's negligee. Some of this familiar charm of
intimacy must be a part of all good conversations and all good essays.
The proper style of conversation is, therefore, a style of intimacy and nonchalance,
in which the parties engaged have lost their self-consciousness and are entirely
oblivious of how they dress, how they speak, how they sneeze, and where they put their
hands, and are e-qually indifferent as to which way the conversation is drifting.
We can engage in a true conversation only when we meet our intimate friends and are
prepared to unburden our hearts to each other. One of them has put his feet on a
neighboring table, another is sitting on a window sill, and still another is sitting
on the floor, upholstered by a cushion which he has snatched from the sofa, thus
leaving one-third of the sofa seat uncovered. For it is only when your hands and feet
are relaxed and the position of your body is at ease that your heart can be at ease
also. It is then that:
Before my face are friends who know my heart, And at my side are none who hurt my
eyes.
This is the absolutely necessary condition of all conversation worthy of the name
of an art. And since we dp not care what we are talking about, the conversation will
drift further and further, without order and without method, and the company break-
up, happy of heart.
Such is the connection between leisure and conversation and the connection between
conversation and the rise of prose that I believe the truly cultured prose of a nation
was born at a time when conversation had already developed as a fine art. This we
see most clearly in the development of Chinese and Greek prose. I cannot otherwise
imagine an explanation for the vitality of Chinese thought in the centuries following
Confucius, giving birth to the so-called " Nine Schools of Thought," than the
development of a cultured background, in which there was a class of scholars whose
business was only to talk. For confirmation of my theory, we find there were five
great rich noblemen, noted for their generosity, chivalry and fondness for guests.
All of them had thousands of scholarly guests at their homes, as for instance
Mengch'ang of Ch'i Kingdom who was reputed to have three thousand scholars, or
"guests" wearing "pearled shoes, " being "fed' at his home. One can imagine the
conversational hubbub that was going on in those houses. The content of the
conversation of scholars of those days is today reflected in the books of Liehtse ,
Huainantse, Chankuots'eh and Lilian. It is noteworthy that with respect to the last
one, which was a book admittedly written by Lu's guests but published in his name
(in a sense similar to the " patrons" of English sixteenth-century and
seventeenth-century authors), there was already developed the idea of the art of
living well, in the formula that it would be better to live well or not at all. There
was besides a class of brilliant sophists or professional talkers, who were engaged
by the different warring states and sent out as diplomats to avert a crisis or persuade
a hostile army to retreat from the walls of a besieged city, or to bring about an
alliance, as so many did. Such professional sophists were always distinguished by
their wit, their clever parables and their general persuasive power. The
conversations or clever arguments of such sophists are preserved for us in the book
Chankuots'eh. From such an atmosphere of free and playful discussion arose some of
the greatest names in philosophy, Yang Chu, noted for his cynicism, Hanfeitse, noted
for his realism (similar to Machiaevelli's, but more tempered), and the great diplomat
Yentse, noted for his wit.
An example of the cultured social life existing in the third century B. C., toward
the end of this period, may be seen in the record of how a certain scholar by the
name of Li Yuan succeeded in presenting his accomplished sister to the court of a
rich patron in the Kingdom of Ch'u. The patron in turn secured the favor of the King
for this girl, which was eventually responsible for the destruction of the Kingdom
of Ch'u by the conquering army of the First Emperor of Ch'in, who united the Chinese
Empire.
Formerly there was Li Yuan, serving as a subordinate of Prince Ch'unshen, the Prime
Minister of the King of Ch'u. Li had a sister by the name of Nuhuan who spoke to him
one day,I hear that the King is without an heir. If you will present me to the Prime
Minister, through him I will be able to see the King. ""But the Prime Minister is
a high official", replied her brother. "How dare I mention it to him?" "You just go
and see him", said his sister, "and then tell him that you have to come home because
a noble guest has arrived. He will then ask you who is the noble guest and you can
reply that you have a sister, that the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Lu has heard
of her reputation and has sent a delegate to ask for her from you, and that a messenger
from home has just brought the news. He will then ask, what can your sister do ? And
you will reply that I can play on the ch'in, can read and write, and have mastered
one of the classics. He is certain to send for me that way."
Li then promised to do as she said, and the next morning, after seeing the Prime
Minister, he said, " A messenger from home told me that there is a guest from a distant
country, and I must return to receive him." The Prime Minister Ch'unshen then actually
asked him, "Who is this noble guest from a distant country ?" And Li replied, "I have
a sister, and the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Lu has heard of her reputation
and has sent a delegate to ask for her." "May I see her ?" asked the Prime Minister.
" Ask her to come and meet me at the Li Pavilion."" Yes sir, " replied Li, and he
returned and told his sister that the Prime Minister expected to see her the next
evening at the Li Pavilion. "You must go there yourself first in order to be there
when I arrive, " said the girl.
The Prime Minister then arrived at the time and asked to see Niihuan. She was presented
and they drank a great deal. Niihuan played on the ch 'in, and before her song was
finished, the Prime Minister was greatly pleased and asked her to stay there for the
night. . . .
This then, was the social background of cultivated ladies and leisurely scholars,
which produced for us the first important development of prose in China. There were
ladies who could talk and read and write and play on a musical instrument, making
for that peculiarly light mixture of social, artistic and literary motives that was
always found in a society where men and women mixed together. It  was undoubtedly
aristocratic in character and atmosphere, for the Prime Minister Ch'unshen was
difficult to see, but when he heard of a lady who could play on a musical instrument
and had mastered one of the classics, he insisted on seeing her. This was then the
life of leisure which the early Chinese sophists and philosophers lived. The books
of these early Chinese philosophers were nothing but the results of leisurely
conversation among these scholars.
It is clear that only in a society with leisure can the art of conversation be produced,
and it is equally clear also that only when there is an art of conversation can there
be good familiar essays. In general, both the art of conversation and the art of
writing good prose came comparatively late in the history of human civilization,
because the human mind had to develop a certain subtlety and lightness of touch, and
this was possible only in a life of leisure. (...) The enjoyment of leisure cannot
be a sin, but on the other hand the progress of culture itself depends on an intelligent
use of leisure, of which conversation is only one form. Business men who are busy
the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely
to contribute anything to culture.
Sometimes this "leisure' is enforced upon one and does not come of one's own seeking.
All the same, many good works of literature have been produced in an atmosphere of
enforced leisure. When we see a literary genius with great promise, dispersing his
energy in futile social parties or writing essays on current politics, the best and
kindest thing we can do to him is to shut him up in jail. For we must remember that
it was in prison that the King Wen wrote his Book of Changes, a classic of philosophy
on the changes of human life, and Ssema Ch'ien wrote his masterpiece, Shihchi
(conventionally spelled Shiki), the best history ever written in the Chinese language.
Sometimes the authors were defeated in their ambitions for a political career, or
the political situation was too discouraging, and great works of literature or of
art were produced. That is the reason why we had such great Yuan painters and Yuan
dramatists during the Mongol regime and such great painters as Shih T'ao and Pata
Shanjen . . . Shih T'ao is undoubtedly one of the very greatest painters China has
ever produced, and the fact that he is not generally known in the West is due to an
accident and to the fact that the Manchu emperors were not willing to give credit
to these artists not in sympathy with their rule. Other great writers who had failed
in the Imperial examination, began to sublimate their energy and turn to creation,
as in the case of Shih Naian who gave us All Men Are Brothers and P'u Liuhsien who
gave us Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio .
We have in the preface to All Men Are Brothers, attributed to Shih, one of the most
delightful descriptions of the pleasure of conversation among friends:
When all my friends come together to my house, there are sixteen persons in all, but
it is seldom that they all come. But except for rainy or stormy days, it is also seldom
that none of them comes. Most of the days, we have six or seven persons in the house,
and when they come, they do not immediately begin to think; they would take a sip
when they feel like it and stop when they feel like it, for they regard the pleasure
as consisting in the conversation, and not in the wine. We do not talk about court
politics, not only because it lies outside our proper occupation, but also because
at such a distance most of the news is based upon hearsay; hearsay news is mere rumour,
and to discuss rumours would be a waste of our saliva. We also do not talk about
people's faults, for people have no faults, and we should not malign them. We do not
say things to shock people and no one is shocked; on the other hand, we do wish people
to understand what we say, but people still don't understand what we say. For such
things as we talk about lie in the depths of the human heart, and the people of the
world are too busy to hear them.
It was in this kind of style and with this kind of sentiment that Shih's great work
was produced, and this was possible because they enjoyed leisure.
The rise of Greek prose took place clearly in the same kind of a leisurely social
background. The lucidity of Greek thought and clearness of the Greek prose style
clearly owe their existence to the art of leisurely conversation, as, is so clearly
revealed in the title of Plato's Dialogues . In the "Banquet" we see a group of Greek
scholars inclining on the ground and chatting merrily along in an atmosphere of wine
and fruit and beautiful boys. It was because these people had cultivated the art of
talking that their thought was so lucid and their style so clear, providing a
refreshing contrast to the pomposity and pedantry of modern academic writers. These
Greeks evidently had learned to handle the topic of philosophy lightly. The charming
conversational atmosphere of the Greek philosophers, their desire for talking, the
value they placed upon hearing a good talk and the choice of surroundings for
conversations were beautifully described in the introduction to "Phaedrus. " This
gives us an insight into the rise of Greek prose.
Plato's "Republic" itself does not begin, as some of the modern writers would have
it, with some such sentence as, "Human civilization, as seen through its successive
stages of development, is a dynamic movement from heterogeneity to homogeneity, "
or some other equally incomprehensible rot. It begins rather with the genial sentence:
"I went down yesterday to the Piraeus, with Glauco, the son of Aristo, to pay my
devotion to the goddess; and desirous, at the same time, to observe in what manner
they would celebrate the festival, as they were now to do it for the first time. "
The same atmosphere that we find among the early Chinese philosophers when thinking
was most active and virile, we find in the picture of Greek men, gathered to discuss
the topic whether a great writer of tragedies should or should not be also a great
writer of comedies, as described in "The Banquet." There was an atmosphere of mixed
seriousness and gaiety and friendly repartee. People were making fun of Socrates'
drinking capacity, but there he sat, drinking or stopping as he liked, pouring a cup
for himself when he felt like it, without bothering about others. And thus he talked
the whole night out until everybody in the company fell asleep except Aristophanes
and Agathon. When he had thus talked everybody to sleep and was thus the only one
awake, he left the banquet and went to Lyceum to have a morning bath, and passed the
day as fresh as ever. It was in this atmosphere of friendly discourse that Greek
philosophy was born.
There is no question but we need the presence of women in a cultured conversation,
to give it the necessary frivolity which is the soul of conversation. Without
frivolity and gaiety, conversation soon becomes heavy and philosophy itself becomes
foolish and a stranger to life. It has been found in all countries and in all ages
that, whenever there was a culture interested in the understanding of the art of living,
there always developed a fashion of welcoming women in society. This was the case
of Athens in the time of Pericles, and it was so in the eighteenth-century French
salons. Even in China, where mixed company was tabooed, Chinese men scholars still
demanded the presence of women who could join in their conversation. In the three
dynasties, Chin, Sung and Ming, when the art of conversation was cultivated and became
a fashion, there always appeared accomplished ladies, like Hsieh Taoytin, Ch'oayiin,
Liu Jushih and others. For although Chinese men demanded that their wives be virtuous
and abstain from seeing men, they did not on that account cease to desire the company
of talented women themselves. Chinese literary history after all was very much mixed
up with the lives of professional courtesans .; The demand for a touch of feminine
charm in a company during conversation is a universal demand. I have met German ladies
who can talk from five o'clock in the afternoon till eleven at night, and I have come
across English and American ladies who frighten me by their familiarity with economics,
a subject that I despair of ever having the courage to study. But it seems to me,
even if there are no ladies around who can debate with me on Karl Marx and Engels,
conversation is always pleasantly stimulated when there are a few ladies who know
how to listen and look sweetly pensive. I always find it more delightful than talking
to stupid-looking men.

IV. ON TEA AND FRIENDSHIP
I do not think that, considered from the point of view of human culture and happiness,
there have been more significant inventions in the history of mankind, more vitally
important and more directly contributing to our enjoyment of leisure, friendship,
sociability and conversation, than the inventions of smoking, drinking and tea. All
three have several characteristics in common: first of all, that they contribute
toward our sociability; secondly, that. they do not fill our stomach as food does,
and therefore can he enjoyed between meals;and thirdly, thai they are all to be enjoyed
through the nostrils by acting on our sense of smell. So great an' their influences
upon culture that we have smoking cars besides dining cars, and we have wine
restaurants or taverns and tea houses. In China and England at least, drinking tea
has become a social institution.
The proper enjoyment of tobacco, drink and tea can only be developed in an atmosphere
of leisure, friendship and sociability. For it is only with men gifted with the sense
of comradeship, extremely select in the matter of forming friends and endowed with
a natural love of the leisurely life, that the full enjoyment of tobacco and drink
and tea becomes possible. Take away the element of sociability, and these things have
no meaning. The enjoyment of these things, like the enjoyment of the moon, the snow
and the flowers, must take place in proper company, for this I regard as the thing
that the Chinese artists of life most frequently insist upon: that certain kinds of
flowers must be enjoyed with certain types of persons, certain kinds of scenery must
be associated with certain kinds of ladies, that the sound of raindrops must be enjoyed,
if it is to be enjoyed fully, when lying on a bamboo bed in a temple deep in the
mountains on a summer day; that, in short, the mood is the thing, that there is a
proper mood for everything, and that wrong company may spoil the mood entirely. Hence
the beginning of any artist of life is that he or anyone who wishes to learn to enjoy
life must, as the absolutely necessary condition, find friends of the same type of
temperament, and take as much trouble to gain and keep their friendship as wives take
to keep their husbands, or as a good chess player takes a journey of a thousand miles
to meet a fellow chess player.
The atmosphere, therefore, is the thing. One must begin with the proper conception
of the scholar's studio and the general environment in which life is going to be
enjoyed. First of all, there are the friends with whom we are going to share this
enjoyment. Different types of friends must be selected for different types of
enjoyment. It would be as great a mistake to go horseback riding with a studious and
pensive friend, as it would be to go to a concert with a person who doesn't understand
music. Hence as a Chinese writer expresses it:
For enjoying flowers, one must secure big-hearted friends. For going to sing-song
houses to have a look at sing-song girls, one must secure temperate friends. For going
up a high mountain, one must secure romantic friends. For boating, one must secure
friends with an expansive nature. For facing the moon, one must secure friends with
a cool philosophy. For anticipating snow, one must secure beautiful friends. For a
wine party, one must secure friends with flavor and charm.
Having selected and formed friends for the proper enjoyment of different occasions,
one then looks for the proper surroundings. It is not so important that one's house
be richly decorated as that it should be situated in beautiful country, with the
possibility of walking about on the rice fields, or lying down under shady trees on
a river bank. The requirements for the house itself are simple enough. One can "have
a house with several rooms, grain fields of several mow, a pool made from a basin
and windows made from broken jars, with the walls coming up to the shoulders and a
room the size of a rice bushel, and in the leisure time after enjoying the warmth
of cotton beddings and a meal of vegetable soup, one can become so great that his
spirit expands and fills the entire universe. For such a quiet studio, one should
have wut'ung trees in front and some green bamboos behind. On the south of the house,
the eaves will stretch boldly forward, while on the north side, there will be small
windows, which can be closed in spring and winter to shelter one from rain and wind,
and opened in summer and autumn for ventilation. The beauty of the  wut'ung tree is
that all its leaves fall off in spring and winter, thus admitting us to the full
enjoyment of the sun's warmth, while in summer and autumn its shade protects us from
the scorching heat. " Or as another writer expressed it, one should "build a house
of several beams, grow a hedge of chin trees and cover a pavilion with a hay-thatch.
Three mow of land will be devoted to planting bamboos and flowers and fruit trees,
while two mow will be devoted to planting vegetables. The four walls of a room are
bare and the room is empty, with the exception of two or three rough beds placed in
the pavilion. A peasant boy will be kept to water the vegetables and clear the weeds.
So then one may arm one's self with books and a sword a-gainst solitude, and provide
a ch 'in (a stringed instrument) and chess to anticipate the coming of good friends.
"
An atmosphere of familiarity will then invest the place. "In my studio, all
formalities will be abolished, and only the most intimate friends will be admitted.
They will be treated with rich or poor fare such as I eat, and we will chat and laugh
and forget our own existence. We will not discuss the right and wrong of other people
and will be totally indifferent to worldly glory and wealth. In our leisure we will
discuss the ancients and the moderns, and in our quiet, we will play with the mountains
and rivers. Then we will have thin, clear tea and good wine to fit into the atmosphere
of delightful seclusion. That is my conception of the pleasure of friendship. "
In such a congenial atmosphere, we are then ready to gratify our senses, the senses
of color and smell and sound. It is then (hat one should smoke and one should drink.
We then transform our bodies into a sensory apparatus for perceiving the wonderful
symphony of colors and sounds and smells and tastes provided by Nature and by culture.
We feel like good violins about to be played on by master violinists. And thus "we
burn incense on a moonlight night and play three stanzas of music from an ancient
instrument, and immediately the myriad worries of our breast are banished and all
our foolish ambitions or desires are forgotten. We will then inquire, what is the
fra-gance of this incense, what is the color of the smoke, what is that shadow that
comes through the white papered windows, what is this sound that arises from below
my fingertips, what is this enjoyment which makes us so quietly happy and so forgetful
of everything else, and what is the condition of the infinite universe ?"
Thus chastened in spirit, quiet in mind and surrounded by proper company, one is fit
to enjoy tea. For tea is invented for quiet company as wine is invented for a noisy
party. There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet
contemplation of life. It would be as disastrous to drink tea with babies crying around,
or with loud-voiced women or politics-talking men, as to pick tea on a rainy or a
cloudy day. Picked at early dawn on a clear day, when the morning air on mountain
top was clear and thin, and the fragrance of dews was still upon the leaves, tea is
still associated with the fragrance and refinement of the magic dew in its enjoyment.
With the Taoist insistence upon return to nature, and with its conception that the
universe is kept alive by the interplay of the male and female forces, the dew actually
stands for the "juice of heaven and earth" when the two principles are united at night,
and the idea is current that the dew is a magic food, fine and clear and ethereal,
and any man or beast who drinks enough of it stands a good chance of being immortal.
De Quincey says quite correctly that tea "will always be the favorite beverage of
the intellectual, " but the Chinese seem to go further and associate it with the
high-minded recluse.
Tea is then symbolic of earthly purity, requiring the most fastidious cleanliness
in its preparation, from picking, frying and preserving to its final infusion and
drinking, easily upset or spoiled by the slightest contamination of oily hands or
oily cups. Consequently, its enjoyment is appropriate in an atmosphere where all
ostentation or suggestion of luxury is banished from one's eyes and one's thoughts.
After all, one enjoys sing-song girls with wine and not with tea, and when sing-
song girls are fit to drink tea with, they are already in the class that Chinese poets
and scholars favor. Su Tungp'o once compared tea to a sweet maiden, but a later
critically qualified it by adding that tea could be compared, if it must be compared
to women at all, only to the Fairy Maku, and that, "as for beauties with peach-colored
faces and willow waists, they should be shut up in curtained beds, and not be allowed
to contaminate the rocks and springs. " POT the same author says, "One drinks tea
to forget the world's noise; it is not for those who eat rich food and dress in silk
pyjamas. "
It must be remembered that, according to Ch'alu, "the essence of the enjoyment of
tea lies in appreciation of its color, fragrance and flavor, and the principles of
preparation are refinement, dryness and cleanliness. " An element of quiet is
therefore necessary for the appreciation of these qualities, an appreciation that
comes from a man who can "look at a hot world with a cool head. " Since the Sung Dynasty,
connoisseurs have generally regarded a cup of pale tea as the best, and the delicate
flavor of pale tea can easily pass unperceived by one occupied with busy thoughts,
or when the neighborhood is noisy, or servants are quarreling, or when served by ugly
maids. The company, too, must be small. For, "it is important in drinking tea that
the guests be few. Many guests would make it noisy, and noisiness takes away from
its cultured charm. To drink alone is called secluded; to drink between two is called
comfortable; to drink with three or four is called chai'fning, to drink with five
or six is called common ; and to drink with seven or eight is called [contemptuously]
philanthropic . " As the author of ch 'asu said, "to pour tea around a-gain and again
from a big pot, and drink it up at a gulp, or to warm it up again after a while, or
to ask for extremely strong taste would be like farmers or artisans who drink tea
to fill their belly after hard work; it would then be impossible to speak of the
distinction and appreciation of flavors. "
For this reason, and out of consideration for the utmost rightness and cleanliness
in preparation, Chinese writers on tea have always insisted on personal attention
in boiling tea, or since that is necessarily inconvenient, that two boy servants be
specially trained to do the job. Tea is usually boiled on a separate small stove in
the room or directly outside, away from the kitchen. The servant boys must be trained
to make tea in the presence of their master and to observe a routine of cleanliness,
washing the cups every morning (never wiping them with a towel), washing their hands
often and keeping their fingernails clean. "When there are three guests, one stove
will be e-nough, but when there are five or six persons, two separate stoves and
kettles will be required, one boy attending to each stove, for if one is required
to attend to both, there may be delays or mix-ups. " True connoisseurs, however, regard
the personal preparation of tea as a special pleasure. Without developing into a rigid
system as in Japan, the preparation and drinking of tea is always a performance of
loving pleasure, importance and distinction. In fact, the preparation is half the
fun of the drinking, as cracking melon-seeds between one's teeth is half the pleasure
of eating them.
Usually a stove is set before a window, with good hard charcoal burning. A certain
sense of importance invests the host, who fans the stove and watches the vapor coming
out from the kettle. Methodically he arranges a small pot and four tiny cups, usually
smaller than small coffee cups, in a tray. He sees that they are in order, moves the
pewter-foil pot of tea leaves near the tray and keeps it in readiness, chatting along
with his guests, but not so much that he forgets his duties. He turns round to look
at the stove, and from the time the kettle begins to sing, he never leaves it, but
continues to fan the fire harder than before. Perhaps he stops to take the lid off
and look at the tiny bubbles, technically called "fish eyes" or "crab froth, "
appearing on the bottom of the kettle, and puts the lid on a-gain. This is the " first
boil." He listens carefully as the gentle singing increases in volume to that of a
"gurgle, " with small bubbles coming up the sides of the kettle, technically called
the "second boil." It is then that he watches most carefully the vapor emitted from
the kettle spout, and just shortly before the "third boil" is reached, when the water
is brought up to a full boil, "like billowing waves, " he takes the kettle from the
fire and scalds the pot inside and out with the boiling water, immediately adds the
proper quantity of leaves and makes the infusion. Tea of this kind, like the famous
"Iron Goddess of Mercy, " drunk in Fukien, is made very thick. The small pot is barely
enough to hold four demi-tasses and is filled one-third with leaves. As the quantity
of leaves is large, the tea is immediately poured into the cups and immediately drunk.
This finishes the pot, and the kettle, filled with fresh water, is put on the fire
again, getting ready for the second pot. Strictly speaking, the second pot is regarded
as the best; the first pot being compared to a girl of thirteen, the second compared
to a girl of sweet sixteen, and the third regarded as a woman. Theoretically, the
third infusion from the same leaves is disallowed by connoisseurs, but actually one
does try to live on with the "woman. "
The above is a strict description of preparing a special kind of tea as I have seen
it in my native province, an art generally unknown in North China. In China generally,
tea pots used are much larger, and the ideal color of tea is a clear, pale, golden
yellow, never dark red like English tea.
Of course, we are speaking of tea as drunk by connoisseurs and not as generally served
among shopkeepers. No such nicety can be expected of general mankind or when tea is
consumed by the gallon by all comers. That is why the author of Ch'asu, Hsti Ts'eshu,
says, "When there is a big party, with visitors coming and coming, one can only
exchange with them cups of wine, and among strangers who have just met or among common
friends, one should serve only tea of the ordinary quality. Only when our intimate
friends of the same temperament have arrived, and we are all happy, all brilliant
in conversation and all able to lay aside the formalities, then may we ask the boy
servant to build a fire and draw water, and decide the number of stoves and cups to
be used in accordance with the company present. " It is of this state of things that
the author of Ch'uchieh says, "We are sitting at night in a mountain lodge, and are
boiling tea with water from a mountain spring. When the fire attacks the water, we
begin to hear a sound similar to the singing of the wind among pine trees. We pour
the tea into a cup, and the gentle glow of its light plays around the place. The
pleasure of such a moment cannot be shared with vulgar people. "
In a true tea lover, the pleasure of handling all the paraphernalia is such that it
is enjoyed for its own sake, as in the case of Ts'ai Hsiang, who in his old age was
not able to drink, but kept on enjoying the preparation of tea as a daily habit. There
was also another scholar, by the name of Chou Wenfu, who prepared and drank tea six
times daily at definite hours from dawn to evening, and who loved his pot so much
that he had it buried with him when he died.
The art and technique of tea enjoyment, then, consists of the following: first, tea,
being most susceptible to contamination of flavors, must be handled throughout with
the utmost cleanliness and kept apart from wine, incense, and other smelly substances
and people handling such substances. Second, it must be kept in a cool, dry place,
and during moist seasons, a reasonable quantity for use must be kept in special small
pots, best made of pewterfoil, while the reserve in the big pots is not opened except
when necessary, and if a collection gets moldy, it should be submitted to a gentle
roasting over a slow fire, uncovered and constantly fanned, so as to prevent the leaves
from turning yellow or becoming discolored. Third, half of the art of making tea lies
in getting good water with a keen edge; mountain spring water comes first, river water
second, and well water third; water from the tap, if coming from dams, being
essentially mountain water and satisfactory. Fourth, for the appreciation of rare
cups, one must have quiet friends and not too many of them at one time. Fifth, the
proper color of tea in general is a pale golden yellow, and all dark red tea must
be taken with milk or lemon or peppermint, or anything to cover up its awful sharp
taste. Sixth, the best tea has a "return flavor" (hueiwei), which is felt about half
a minute after drinking and after its chemical elements have had time to act on the
salivary glands. Seven, tea must be freshly made and drunk immediately, and if good
tea is expected, it should not be allowed to stand in the pot for too long, when the
infusion has gone too far. Eight, it must be made with water just brought up to a
boil. Nine, all adulterants are taboo, although individual differences may be allowed
for people who prefer a slight mixture of some foreign flavor (e.g., jasmine, or
cassia). Eleven, the flavor expected of the best tea is the delicate flavor of "baby's
flesh. "
In accordance with the Chinese practice of prescribing the proper moment and
surrounding for enjoying a thing, Ch'asu, an excellent treatise on tea, reads thus:
Proper moments for drinking tea:
When one's heart and hands are idle.
Tired after reading poetry.
When one's thoughts are disturbed.
Listening to songs and ditties.
When a song is completed.
Shut up at one's home on a holiday.
Playing the ch'in and looking over paintings.
Engaged in conversation deep at night.
Before a bright window and a clean desk.
With charming friends and slender concubines.
Returning from a visit with friends.
When the day is clear and the breeze is mild.
On a day of light showers.
In a painted boat near a small wooden bridge.
In a forest with tall bamboos.
In a pavilion overlooking lotus flowers on a summer day.
Having lighted incense in a small studio.
After a feast is over and the guests are gone.
When children are at school.
In a quiet, secluded temple.
Near famous springs and quaint rocks.
Moments when one should stop drinking tea:
At work.
Watching a play. Opening letters. During big rain and snow. At a long wine feast with
a big party. Going through documents. On busy days.
Generally conditions contrary to those enumerated in the above section.
Things to be avoided:
Bad water.
Bad utensils.
Brass spoons.
Brass kettles.
Wooden pails (for water) .
Wood for fuel ( on account of smoke).
Soft charcoal.
Coarse servant.
Bad-tempered maid.
Unclean towels.
All varieties of incense and medicine.
Things and places to be kept away from :
Damp rooms. Kitchens. Noisy streets. Crying infants. Hotheaded persons.
Quarreling servants. Hot rooms.

V. ON SMOKE AND INCENSE
The world today is divided into smokers and non-smokers. It is true that the smokers
cause some nuisance to the non-smokers, but this nuisance is physical, while the
nuisance that the nonsmokers cause the smokers is spiritual. There are, of course,
a lot of non-smokers who don't try to interfere with the smokers, and wives can be
trained even to tolerate their husbands' smoking in bed. That is the surest sign of
a happy and successful marriage. It is sometimes assumed, however, that the non-
smokers are morally superior, and that they have something to be proud of, not
realizing that they have missed one of the greatest pleasures of mankind- I am willing
to allow that smoking is a moral weakness, but on the other hand, we must beware of
the man without weaknesses. He is not to be trusted. He is apt to be always sober
and he cannot make a single mistake. His habits are likely to be regular, his existence
more mechanical and his head always maintains its supremacy over his heart. Much as
I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings. For that reason, I am
always scared and ill at ease when I enter a house in which there are no ash trays.
The room is apt to be too clean and orderly, the cushions are apt to be in their right
places, and the people are apt to be correct and unemotional. And immediately I am
put on my best behavior, which means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.
Now the moral and spiritual benefits of smoking have never been appreciated by these
correct and righteous and unemotional and unpo-etic souls. But since we smokers are
usually attacked from the moral, and not the artistic side, I must begin by defending
the smoker's morality, which is on the whole higher than that of the non-smokers.
The man with a pipe in his mouth is the man after my heart. He is more genial, more
sociable, has more intimate indiscretions to reveal, and sometimes he is quite
brilliant in conversation, and in any case, I have a feeling that he likes me as much
as I like him. I agree entirely with Thackeray, who wrote: "The pipe draws wisdom
from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouths of the foolish; it generates
a style of conversation contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected."
A smoker may have dirtier finger-nails, but that is no matter when his heart is warm,
and in any case a style of conversation contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and
unaffected is such a rare thing that one is willing to pay a high price to enjoy it.
And most important of all, a man with a pipe in his mouth is always happy, and after
all, happiness is the greatest of all moral virtues. W. Maggin says that "no cigar
smoker ever committed suicide, " and it is still truer that no pipe smoker ever
quarrels with his wife. The reason is perfectly plain: one cannot hold a pipe between
one's teeth and at the same time shout at the top of one's voice. No one has ever
been seen doing that. For one naturally talks in a low voice when smoking a pipe.
What happens when a husband who is a smoker gets angry, is that he immediately lights
a cigarette, or a pipe, and looks glum. But that will not be for long. For his emotion
has already found an outlet, and although he may want to continue to look angry in
order to justify his indignation or sense of being insulted, still he cannot keep
it up, for the gentle fumes of the pipe are altogether too agreeable and soothing,
and as he puffs the smoke out, he also seems to let out, breath by breath, his stored-up
anger. That is why when a wise wife sees her husband about to fly into a fit of rage,
she should gently stick a pipe in his mouth and say, "There! forget about it! " This
formula always works. A wife may fail, but a pipe never.
The artistic and literary value of smoking can best be appreciated only when we imagine
what a smoker misses when he stops smoking for a short period. Every smoker has, in
some foolish moment, attempted to abjure his allegiance to Lady Nicotine, and then
after some wrestling with his imaginary conscience, come back to his senses again.
I was foolish enough once to stop smoking for three weeks, but at the end of that
period, my conscience irresistibly urged me onto the right road again. I swore I would
never relapse, but would keep on being a devotee and a worshiper at her shrine until
my second childhood, when I might conceivably fall prey to some Temperance Society
wives. When that unhappy old age arrives, one is of course not responsible for one's
actions. But so long as I have a modicum of will-power and moral sense left, I shall
not attempt it again. As if I had not seen the folly of it all the utter immorality
of trying to deny oneself the spiritual force and sense of moral well-being provided
by this useful invention. For according to Haldane, the great English bio-chemist,
smoking counts as one of the four human inventions in the history of mankind that
have left a deep biologic influence on human culture.
The story of those three weeks, when I played the coward to my own better self and
willfully denied myself something that I knew to be of great soul-uplifting force,
was indeed a disgraceful one. Now that I can look back upon it in a matter-of-fact
and rational way, I can hardly understand at all how that fit of moral irresponsibility
lasted so long. If I were to detail my spiritual Odyssey by day and by night during
those three weeks in the Joycean manner, I am sure it would fill three thousand good
Homeric lines in verse, or a hundred and fifty closely printed pages in prose. Of
course, the object, to begin with, was ridiculous. Why, in the name of the human race
and the universe, should one not smoke ? I cannot answer now. But such unreasonable
moods do come to a man sometimes, when one, I suppose, wishes to do something against
the grain just for the pleasure of overcoming resistance and in this way use up his
momentary excess of moral energy. Beyond this, I cannot account for my sudden and
unholy resolution to cut out smoking. In other words, I was giving myself a moral
test much in the same manner as people indulge in Swedish gymnastics movement for
the sake of movement, without actually accomplishing any work useful to society. It
was apparently this kind of moral luxury that I was giving myself, and that was all.
Of course, in the first three days, I felt a queer sinking sensation somewhere along
the alimentary canal, especially in the upper part of it. To relieve that queer
sensation, I took Double-Mint chewing gum, good Fukien tea, and Montesserat
Lime-Fruit Pastilles. I conquered and killed that sensation in exactly three days.
This was the physical, and therefore the easiest and, to my mind, the most contemptible
part of the battle. People who think that herein lies the whole of the unholy struggle
against smoking have no idea of what they are talking about. They forget that smoking
is a spiritual act, and those who have no idea of the spiritual significance of smoking
ought never to meddle with the affair. After three days, I encountered the second
stage, when the real spiritual battle began. Scales fell from my eyes and I saw that
there were two races of smokers, one of which never deserved the name at all. For
these people, the second stage never existed. I began to understand why we hear of
the "easy conversions" of many smokers who seem to have given up their smoking without
any struggle at all. The fact that they could stop such a habit as easily as they
could throw away an old toothbrush shows that they have never really learned to smoke
at all. People credit them with a " strong will-power, " whereas the fact is these
people are never true smokers and have never been so in their lives. For them, smoking
is a physical act, like the washing of their faces and brushing of their teeth every
morning a mere physical, animal habit without any soul-satisfying qualities. I doubt
whether this race of matter-of-fact people would ever be capable of tuning up their
souls in ecstatic response to Shelley's "Skylark" or Chopin's "Nocturne. These people
miss nothing by giving up their smoke. They are probably happier reading Aesop's
Fables with their Temperance wives.
For us true smokers, however, a problem existed, of which neither the Temperance wives
nor their Aesop-reading husbands have even an inkling. For us, the injustice to
oneself and the senselessness of it all soon became apparent. Good sense and reason
soon began to revolt against it and ask: for what reason, social, political, moral,
physiological or financial, should one consciously use one's will-power to prevent
oneself from attaining that complete spiritual well-being, that condition of keen,
imaginative perception, and full, vibrant creative energy a condition necessary to
our perfect enjoyment of a friend's conversation by the fireside, or to the creating
of real warmth in the reading of an ancient book, or to that bringing forth of a perfect
cadence of words and thought from the mind that we know as authorship? At such moments,
one instinctively feels that reaching out for a cigarette is the only morally right
thing to do, and that sticking a piece of chewing gum in the mouth instead would be
criminally wicked. Of such moments, I can tell only a few here.
My friend B had arrived from Peiping and called on me. We had not seen each other
for three years. At Peiping, then called Peking, we used to chat and smoke the evenings
out, discussing politics and philosophy and modern art. And now he had come, and we
were engaged in the fascinating task of rambling reminiscences. We discussed the whole
bunch of professors, poets and cranks we used to know in Peiping. At every pointed
remark, I was mentally reaching out for a cigar, but instead inhibited myself and
only rose up and sat down a-gain. My friend, on the other hand, was rattling along
amidst his cigar fumes in perfect contentment. I had told him that I had given up
smoking, and I had enough self-respect not to break down right in his presence. But
down in my heart, I knew I was not at my best, and was only unjustly making myself
look coldly rational, when I wished to partake of the full communion of the two souls
with a complete surrender of the emotions. The conversation went on, somewhat
onesidedly, with half of myself there, and then my friend left. I had stuck it all
out somewhat grimly. By that fiction of "willpower, " I had "won," but I knew only
that I was unhappy. A few days later, my friend wrote me on his voyage that he had
found me not the old, vibrant, ecstatic self, and suggested that perhaps living in
Shanghai had something to do with it. To this day, I have not forgiven myself for
failing to smoke that night.
After this, my conscience began to gnaw upon my soul. For, I said to myself, what
was thought without imagination, and how could imagination soar on the clipped wings
of a drab, non-smoking soul? Then one afternoon, I visited a lady. I was mentally
prepared for the re-conversion. Nobody else was in the room, and we were apparently
going to have a real tete-d-tete. The young lady was smoking with one arm resting
on her crossed knee, slightly inclined forward, and looking wistful and in her best
style. I felt the moment had arrived. She offered the tin, and I took one firmly and
slowly from it, knowing that by that act I had recovered from my temporary fit of
moral degradation.
I came back, and at once sent my boy to buy a tin of Capstan Minum. On the right side
of my desk, there was a regular mark, burnt in by my habitually placing burning
cigarette ends there. I had calculated that it would take somewhere between seven
and eight years to burn through the two-inch desk top, and had regretted to observe
that, after my last disgraceful resolution, it was going to remain at about half a
centimeter. It was with great delight, therefore, that I had the pleasure of placing
my burning cigarette on that old mark again, where it is happily at work now, trying
to resume its long journey ahead.
In contrast with wine, there is comparatively little praise of tobacco in Chinese
literature, because smoking as a habit was introduced by Portuguese sailors as late
as the sixteenth century. I have ransacked the entire Chinese literature after that
period, but have found only a few scattered insignificant lines, quite unworthy of
the fragrant weed. An ode in praise of tobacco evidently has to come from some
undergraduate of Oxford. The Chinese people, however, always had a very high sense
of smell, as is evident in their appreciation of tea and wine and food. In the absence
of tobacco, they had developed the art of burning incense, which in Chinese literature
was always classified in the same category and mentioned in the same breath, with
tea and wine. From the earliest time, as far back as the Han Dynasty when the Chinese
Empire extended its rule to Indo-Chi-na, incense brought as tribute from the South
began to be used at court and in rich men's homes. In books on the art of living,
sections have always been devoted to a discussion of the varieties and quality
and preparation of incense. In the chapter on incense in the book K'aop'an Yitshih,
written by T'u Lung, we have the following description of the enjoyment of incense:
The benefits of the use of incense are manifold. High-minded recluse scholars, engaged
in their discussion of truth and religion, feel that it clears their mind and pleases
their spirit when they burn a stick of incense. At the fourth watch of the night,
when the solitary moon is hanging in the sky, and one feels cool and detached toward
life, it emancipates his heart and enables him to whistle leisurely. When one is
examining old rubbings of calligraphy before a bright window, or leisurely singing
some poetry with a fly-whip in his hand, or when one is reading at night in the lamp
light, it helps to drive away the Demon of Sleepiness. You may therefore call it "the
ancient companion of the moon. " When a lady in red pyjamas is standing by your side,
and you are holding her hand around the incense burner and whispering secrets to each
other, it warms your heart and intensifies your love. You may therefore call it "the
ancient stimulant of passion." Or when one has waked up from his afternoon nap and
is sitting before a closed window on a rainy day and practising calligraphy and tasting
the mild flavor of tea, the burner is just getting warm and its subtle fragrance floats
about and encircles our bodies. Even better still is it when one wakes up from a
drinking party and a full moon is shining upon the clear night, and he moves his fingers
across the strings or makes a whistle in an empty tower, with the green hills in the
distance in full sight, and the half-visible smoke from the remaining embers floats
about the door screen. It is also useful for warding off evil smells and the malicious
atmosphere of a swamp, useful anywhere and everywhere one goes. The best in quality
is chianan, but this is difficult to obtain, not accessible to a man living in the
mountains. The next best is aloeswood or eaglewood, which is of three grades. The
highest grade has too strong a smell, tending to be sharp and pungent; the lowest
grade is too dry and also too full of smoke; the middle grade, costing about six or
seven cents an ounce, is most soothing and fragrant and can be regarded as exquisite.
After one has boiled a pot of tea, he can make use of the burning charcoals and put
them in the incense container and let the fire heat it up slowly. In such a satisfying
moment, one feels like being transported to the heavenly abode in the company of the
immortals, entirely oblivious of human existence. Ah, indeed great is the pleasure!
People nowadays lack the appreciation of true fragrance and go in for strange and
exotic names, trying to outdo one another by having a mixture of different kinds,
not realizing that the fragrance of aloeswood is entirely natural, and that the best
of its kind has an indescribable subtlety and mildness.
Mao Pichiang in his Reminiscences of My Concubine, describing the art of life of this
rich poet and his accomplished and understanding mistress, gives various descriptions
of their enjoyment of incense, of which the following is one:
My concubine often sat quietly with me in her fragrant bedchamber to sample or judge
famous incense. The so-called "palace incense" is seductive in quality, while the
popular way of preparing aloeswood is vulgar. The ordinary people often set aloeswood
right on the fire and its fragrant fume is soon put out by the burning resin. Thus
not only has its fragrance failed to be brought out, but it also leaves a smoky, choking
odor behind around one's body. The hard quality with horizontal grains called
hengkoch'en, has a superb fragrance, being one of the four kinds of aloeswood, but
distinguished by having horizontal fibers. There is another variety of this wood,
known as p'englaihsiang, which is the size of a mushroom and conically shaped, being
not yet fully grown. We kept all these varieties, and she burned them on top of fine
sand over a slow fire so that no actual smoke was visible. Its subtle perfume permeated
the chamber like the smell of chiunan wood wafted by a breeze, or like that of
dew-bedecked roses, or of a piece of amber rubbed hot by friction, or of fragrant
liquor being poured into a horn cup. When bedding is perfumed by this method, its
fragrance blends with that of the woman's flesh, sweet and intoxicating even in one's
dreams.

VI. ON DRINK AND WINE GAMES
I am no drinker and am therefore totally unqualified to talk of wines and liquors.
My capacity is three cups of shaohsing rice wine, and I am even capable of getting
tipsy on a mere glass of beer. This is evidently a matter of natural gift, and the
gifts of drinking tea and wine and smoking do not seem to go together. I have found
among my friends great drinkers who get sick before they go through half a cigar,
while I smoke every waking hour of the day without any appreciable effect, but am
not very good with liquors. Anyway, Li Li-weng has put down on record his sworn opinion
that great drinkers of tea are not fond of wine, and vice versa. Li himself was a
great tea connoisseur, but confessed that he had no pretentions to being a drinker
of wine at all. It is therefore my special delight and comfort to discover so many
distinguished Chinese authors that I like who had really but a small capacity for
wine, and who said so. It has taken me some time to collect these confessions from
their letters or other writings. Li was one, Yuan Tsets'ai, Wang Yiiyang, and Yuan
Chunglang were others. All of them, however, were people who had "the sentiment for
wine" without having an actual capacity for it.
In spite of my disqualification, I still cannot ignore this topic, because more than
anything else, it has made an important contribution to literature, and in the same
measure as smoking, wherever the custom of smoking was known, it has greatly helped
man's creative power, with considerable lasting results. The pleasure of wine
drinking, especially in what the Chinese call " a little drink, " so constantly met
with in Chinese literature, had always seemed a mystery to me, until a beautiful
Shanghai lady, when half-drunk herself dilated upon its virtues with such convincing
power that I finally thought the condition described must be real. "One just babbles
along and babbles along in the state of halfdrunkenness, which is the best and happiest
state, " she said. There seems to be a sense of elation, of confidence in one's power
to overcome all obstacles and a heightened sensibility, and man's power of creative
thinking, which seems to lie in the borderland of fact and fancy, is brought up to
a higher pitch than at normal times. There seems to be a force of self-confidence
and emancipation, which is so necessary at the creative moment. The importance of
this sense of confidence and emancipation from mere rules and technique will be made
quite clear when we come to the section on art.
There is a wise thought in the suggestion that the modern dictators of Europe are
so dangerous to humanity because they don't drink. In my reading of current literature
of the past year, I have come across no better and wiser and wittier writing than
an article by Charles W. Ferguson on "Dictators Don't Drink" in Harper's for June,
1937. The thought is worth pursuing, and the writing is so good throughout that I
feel tempted to quote it in full but have to refrain from doing so. ... The question
is what do these facts signify for us ? "Do they indicate that we are today in the
grip of a coterie of men essentially smug, disastrously self-righteous grimly aware
of their tremendous rectitude, and hence so^ dangerous that the world at large would
be better off if it could entice them on a roaring drunk?". . . "No man could be a
dangerous dictator with a hang-over. His sense of God-almighty-ness would be wrecked.
He would feel himself to have been gross and humiliated in the presence of his subjects.
He would have become one of the masses   one of the lowest of them   and the experience
would have done something to his insufferable conceit. "The writer thinks that should
there be an international cocktail party, attended only by these chosen leaders, in
which "the main object would merely be to fry the dignitaries as smoothly and as
quickly as possible", the next morning, "Far from being the irreproachable su-
permen of today, the world's best would have become ordinary fellows, afflicted like
their meanest followers, and perhaps in a frame of mind to grapple with matters as
men and not as demigods. "
The reason I don't like dictators is that they are inhuman, and anything which is
inhuman is bad. An inhuman religion is no religion, inhuman politics is foolish
politics, inhuman art is just bad art, and the inhuman way of life is the beast's
-way of life. This test of humanness is universal and can be applied to all walks
of life and all systems of thought. The greatest ideal that man can aspire to is not
to be a show-case of virtue, but just to be a genial, likable and reasonable human
being.
While the Chinese can teach the Westerners about tea, Westerners can teach the Chinese
about wine. A Chinese is easily dazzled by the variety of bottles and labels when
he enters an American wine-shop for wherever he goes, in his own country, he sees
shaohsing, again shaohsing, and nothing but shaohsing . There are six or seven other
varieties, and there are distilled liquors from millet, the kaoliang, besides the
class of medicinal wines, but the list is soon exhausted. The Chinese have not
developed the nicety of serving different drinks with different courses of food. On
the other hand, the popularity of shaohsing is such at the place giving its name to
this wine, that there as soon as a girl is born, her parents make a jar of wine, so
that by the time she marries, she is sure to have at least a jar of wine about twenty
years old as part of her trousseau. Hence the name huatiao, the proper name for this
wine, which means " florally decorated, " from the jar decoration.
This lack in the variety of wine they make up for by greater insistence on the proper
moment and surrounding for drinking. The feeling for wine is essentially correct.
The contrast between wine and tea is expressed in the form that "tea resembles the
recluse, and wine resembles the cavalier; wine is for good comradeship, and tea is
for the man of quiet virtue. " Specifying the proper moods and places for drink, a
Chinese writer says, "Formal drinking should be slow and leisurely, unrestrained
drinking should be elegant and romantic; a sick person should drink a small quantity,
and a sad person should drink to get drunk. Drinking in the spring should take place
in a courtyard, in summer in the outskirts of a city, in autumn on a boat and in winter
in the house, and at night it should be enjoyed in the presence of the moon. "
Another writer says, "There is a proper time and place for getting drunk. One should
get drunk before flowers in the daytime, in order to assimilate their light and color;
and one should get drunk in snow in the night-time, in order to clear his thoughts.
A man getting drunk when happy at success should sing, in order to harmonize his spirit;
and a man getting drunk at a farewell party should strike a musical tone, in order
to strengthen his spirit. A drunk scholar should be careful in his conduct, in order
to avoid humiliations; and a drunk military man should order gallons and put up more
flags, in order to increase his military splendor. Drinking in a tower should take
place in summer, in order to profit from the cool atmosphere; and drinking on the
water should take place in autumn, in order to increase the sense of elated freedom.
These are proper ways of drinking in respect of mood and scenery, and to violate these
rules is to miss the pleasure of drinking. "
The Chinese attitude toward wine and behavior during a wine feast is partly
incomprehensible or reprehensible to me, and partly commendable. The reprehensible
part is the custom of getting pleasure out of forcing a man to drink beyond his capacity.
I am not aware that such a practice exists or is common in Western society. It is
usual among drinkers to place a mystic value upon the mere quantity of drinking,
whether by oneself, or by those in the company. No doubt there is a certain hilarity
connected with it and such urging is done in a playful or friendly spirit, resulting
generally in a lot of noise and hubbub and confusion, which adds to the fun of the
occasion. It is beautiful to look at when the company reach a state when they all
forget themselves and the guests shout for more wine or leave or exchange their seats,
and nobody remembers who is the host and who are the guests. It usually degenerates
into a drinking match, played with great pride and subtlety and finesse and always
with the desire to see the other fellow under the table. One has to be on the lookout
for foul play, and guard against the other party's underhanded tactics. Probably the
fun lies there, in the spirit of contest.
The commendable side of Chinese drinking lies in the noise. Eating at a Chinese
restaurant sometimes makes one imagine one is attending a football match. How is the
volume of noise produced and whence come those noises with beautiful rhythm resembling
cheers and yells at a football match ? The answer lies in the custom of "guessing
fingers" , in which each party puts up a number of fingers simultaneously with his
opponent and shouts the number of the total sum of fingers that he guesses will be
put out by both parties. The numbers,one, two, three, four", and so on, are given
in poetic, polysyllabic phrases like "seven stars" (Ch'ich'iao, the constellation
"Dipper"), or "eight horses" or "eight immortals crossing the sea. " The necessity
for perfectly timed and simultaneous action in putting out the fingers forces the
phrases into definite musical beats or bars, into which the varying syllables have
to be compressed, and these are accompanied during the interval by a set introductory
phrase occupying another musical bar, and the song is carried on without interruption
rhythmically until one party makes a correct conjecture and the other party has to
drink a full cup, large or small, or two or three, as previously agreed. Guessing
at the total is not mere blind conjecture, but is based on observation of the
opponent's habit of sequence or alternation of numbers and demands some quick thinking.
The fun and swing of the game depends entirely upon the speed and uninterrupted rhythm
of the players.
We have come to the real point about the conception of a wine party, for this alone
gives a satisfactory explanation of the length of a Chinese feast, its number of
courses and its method of service. One does not sit down at a feast to eat, but to
have a good time, provided by telling of stories and jokes and all kinds of literary
puzzles and poetic games between the serving of different dishes. The party looks
more like a time for oral games, punctuated every five or seven or ten minutes with
the appearance of a dish on the table and a bite or two by the company. This produces
two effects: first, the vociferousness of oral games undoubtedly helps to let the
spirituous liquors evaporate from the system, and secondly, by the time one comes
to the end of a feast lasting over an hour, some of the food is already digested,
so that the more one eats, the more hungry he becomes. Silence after all is a vice
during eating; it is immoral because it is unhygienic. Any foreigner in China who
has lasting doubts about the Chinese being a gay and happy people with a touch of
Latin gaiety, who still clings to the preconceived notion that the Chinese people
are silent, sedate and unemotional, should watch them while eating, for then the
Chinaman is in his natural element and his moral perfections are complete. If the
Chinaman does not have a good time when he is eating, when does he have a good time ?
Famous as the Chinese are for their puzzles, their wine games are less well-known.
With wine as forfeit, a great variety of games have been invented as excuses for
drinking. All Chinese novels dutifully record the names of dishes served at a dinner,
and equally dutifully describe the contests of poetry which have no difficulty in
filling an entire chapter. The feminist novel Chinghuayuan describes so many games
among the literary girls (including games in phonetics), as to seem to make these
the main theme of the story.
The simplest game is shehfu, in which a syllable forming the beginning of one word
and the end of another is concealed by joining the other syllables into a word and
the player has to guess at the missing syllable. Thus "drum" being the syllable common
to "humdrum" and " drum stick, " the puzzle is given in the combination "hum-stick"
and the other party is to supply the missing syllable. Or given "a-starch, " the other
person is to find the missing middle syllable "corn" in "acorn-corns tarch." Properly
played the person who has guessed at the middle syllable is not to declare it, but
to form a counter-puzzle with the syllable "corn" and simply answer "pop-er"
("pop-corn-corner"), or "pop-muffin," from which the original maker of the puzzle
is able to tell whether he has got the correct answer, while it remains a mystery
to the rest of those present. Sometimes an answer not originally intended, but even
better than the one the maker has in mind, has to be accepted. Both parties can set
syllable-puzzles for each other to solve at the same time. Some puzzles are simple
and some are carefully concealed, as "a-ounce" for the missing syllable "pron, " while
"cam-ephant" can be easily detected to contain "el" in "cameZ-ci'ephant. " Rare and
difficult words might be used, and in the practice of scholars, rare historical names
might be used, taxing one's scholarship: e.g. , names from one of Shakespeare's plays
or Balzac's novels.
Variations of literary games are infinite. One popular among scholars is for each
person in turn to say a doggerel line of seven words for the other person to follow
up with another rhymed line, the poem as a whole degenerating into pure nonsense at
the end. Lines usually begin with some comment on some object or person in view, or
the scenery. Every person is to say two lines, the first one completing a couplet
begun by the preceding person, and the second leading off a new couplet for the
successor to finish. The first line sets the rhyme, and the third, fifth, seventh
(and so on) lines must keep to it. In the milieu of scholars, by whom every name and
sentence from the Four Books or the Book of Poetry has been memorized by heart, demands
may be made by the toastmaster for apt quotations illustrating a topic, (e.g., "Girl
shy", "Girl happy", "Girl cries") . Names of popular ditties, and lines from T'ang
poems are often included. Or the party may be required to give names of medicines
or flowers that answer to the description in a given title of a popular tune, or,
to make the matter appear simpler in English, to give names of medicines or flowers
that refer to an article pertaining to women; e. g., Queen An ne's lace, fox-glove,
etc. Possibility of such combinations depends on the beauty of names given to flowers,
medicines, trees, etc. in a language. English family names might, for instance, be
given to call up names of popular songs, ( as an instance, "Rockefeller" may suggest
" Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat, " and "Whitehead" may suggest "Silver Threads
Among the Gold"). The aptness of such juxtapositions depends on one's ingenuity, and
the fun of such games lies in spontaneity and fanciful, but not necessarily learned,
associations. Names like "Tug-well, " "Sitwell" and "Frankfurter" can easily be made
to serve any humorous purpose (for the last I suggest "Non-cold Not-Pig"). College
students can have a good time making wine games out of their professors' names.
More elaborate games require specially designed chips. In the novel An Orchid's Dream,
one finds, for instance, a description of the following game. Three sets of chips
(which may be made of paper) contain the following combination of six persons doing
six things in six places:Dandy goes horse-riding thoroughfare Abbot says prayers
abbot's room Lady embroiders Lady's chamber Butcher fights  streets Courtesan
flirts  red-light district Beggar sleeps cemetery Chips drawn from the three sets
by a person may form the weirdest combinations: thus, "Abbot flirts in a lady's room",
"Courtesan says prayers in a cemetery", "Beggar sleeps in the red-light district",
Butcher embroiders in a thoroughfare", "Lady fights in an Abbot's room", etc., all
of which would make good newspaper headlines. With some such situation as the main
theme, each person is to give a five-word line from a poem, followed by the name of
a song, and concluded by a line from the Book of Poetry, the whole to make an apt
description of the situation.
It is no wonder therefore that a wine feast easily lasts two hours. The object of
a dinner is not to eat and drink, but to join in merrymaking and to make a lot of
noise. For that reason, he who drinks half drinks best. Like the poet T'ao Yuanming
playing upon a string-less instrument, for the drinker the sentiment is the thing.
And one may enjoy the sentiment for wine without the capacity to drink it. "There
are people who cannot read a single word, but have the sentiment for poetry; people
who cannot repeat a single prayer but have the sentiment for religion; people who
cannot touch a drop but have the sentiment for wine; and people who do not understand
a thing about rocks, but have the sentiment for painting." It is such people who are
fit company for poets, saints, drinkers and painters.

VII. ON FOOD AND MEDICINE
A broader view of food should regard it essentially as including all things that go
to nourish us, just as a broader view of house should include everything pertaining
to living conditions. As we are all animals, it is but common sense to say that we
are what we eat. Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.
Hence every Chinese gentleman tries to befriend his cook, because so much of the
enjoyment of life lies within his power to give or to take away as he sees fit. Chinese,
and I suppose Western, parents always try to befriend the wet-nurse and treat her
royally, because they realize that the health of their baby depends on the temper
and happiness and general living conditions of the wet-nurse. Pari passu, we should
give our cooks who feed us the same royal treatment, if we care as much for our own
health as we care for that of our babies. If a man will be sensible and one fine morning,
when he is lying in bed, count at the tips of his fingers how many things in this
life truly give him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one. Therefore
it is the invariable test of a wise man whether he has good food at home or not.
The tempo of modern city life is such that we are giving less and less time and thought
to the matter of cooking and feeding. A housewife who is at the same time a brilliant
journalist can hardly be blamed for serving her husband with canned soup and beans.
Nevertheless, it is a pretty crazy life when one eats in order to work and does not
work in order to eat. We need a certain kindness and generosity to ourselves before
we learn kindness and generosity to others. What good does it do a woman to do some
muckraking for the city and improve general social conditions, if she herself has
to cook on a two-burner range and allow ten minutes for eating her meal? Confu-
cius undoubtedly would divorce her, as he divorced his wife for failure in good
cooking.
The story is not exactly clear as to whether Confucius divorced her or she just had
to run away in order to flee from the demands of this fastidious artist of life. For
him "rice could never be white enough and mince meat could never be chopped fine enough.
" He refused to eat "when meat was not served with its proper sauce, " "when it was
not cut square, " "when its color was not right" and "when its flavor was not right.
" I am quite sure that even then his wife could have stood it, but when one day, unable
to find fresh food, she sent her son Li to buy wine and cold meat from some delicatessen
and be through with it, and he announced that he "would not drink wine that was not
homemade, nor taste meat that was bought from the shops, " what else could she do
except pack up and run away? This insight into the psychology of Confucius' wife is
mine, but the severe conditions that he imposed upon his poor wife stands there today
in the Confucian classics.
Taking then the broader view of food as nourishment, the Chinese do not draw any
distinction between food and medicine. What is good for the body is medicine and at
the same time food. Modern science has only in the last century come to realize the
importance of diet in curing diseases, and happily today all modern hospitals are
well equipped with trained dietitians. If modern doctors would carry it a step further,
and send these dietitians to be trained in China, they might have less use for their
glass bottles. An early medical writer, Sun Ssemiao (sixth century, A. D. ), says:
"A true doctor first finds out the cause of the disease, and having found that out,
he tries to cure it first by food. When food fails, then he prescribes medicine."
Thus we find the earliest existing Chinese book on food, written by an Imperial
physician at the Mongol Court in 1330, regards food essentially as a matter of regimen
for health, and makes the introductory remarks: "He who would take good care of his
health should be(D Analects, Ch.x.sparing in his tastes, banish his worries, temper
his desires, restrain his emotions, take good care of his vital force, spare his words,
regard lightly success and failure, ignore sorrows and difficulties, drive away
foolish ambitions, avoid great likes and dislikes, calm his vision and his hearing,
and be faithful in his internal regimen. How can one have sickness if he does not
tire his spirits and worry his soul ? Therefore he who would nourish his nature should
eat only when he is hungry and not fill himself with food, and he should drink only
when he is thirsty and not fill himself with too much drink. He should eat little
and between long intervals, and not too much and too constantly. He should aim at
being a little hungry when well-filled and being a little well-filled when hungry.
Being well-filled hurts the lungs and being hungry hurts the flow of vital energy."
This cook book, like all Chinese cook books, therefore reads like a pharmacopoeia .
Walking down Honan Road in Shanghai and passing through the shops selling Chinese
medicine, one might find it hard to decide whether they sell more medicine than food
or more food than medicine. For there one finds cinnamon bark standing side by side
with ham, tiger's tendons and beaver kidneys along with sea slugs, and horns of young
deer along with mushrooms and Peiping dates. All of them are good for the body and
all of them nourish us. The distinction between food and medicine is positively
impossible in the case of a bottle of "tiger-tendon and quince wine. " Happily a
Chinese tonic does not consist of three grams of hypophosphate and .02 grains of
arsenic. It consists of a bowl of black-skinned chicken soup, cooked with rehmannia
lutea. This is due entirely to the practice of Chinese medicine, for while Western
medicines are taken in pills or tablets, Chinese medicines are served as stews and
literally called "soups. " And Chinese medicine is conceived and prepared in the same
manner as ordinary soup, with proper regard for mixing of the flavors and ingredients.
There are anywhere from seven or eight to twenty ingredients in a Chinese stew, so
designed as to nourish and strengthen the body as a whole, and not to attack the disease
solely. For Chinese medicine essentially agrees with the most up-to-date Western
medicine in thinking that, when a man's liver is sick, it is not his liver alone but
the entire body that is sick. After all, all that medicine can do comes down to the
essential principle of strengthening our vital energy, through acting on this most
highly complicated system of organs and fluids and hormones called the human body,
and letting the body cure itself. Instead of giving patients aspirin tablets, Chinese
doctors would therefore ask them to take large bowls of medicinal tea to produce
perspiration. And instead of taking quinine tablets, the patients of the future world
might conceivably be required to drink a bowl of rich turtle soup with mushrooms,
cooked with pieces of cinchona bark. The dietetics department of a modem hospital
will have to be enlarged, and the future hospital itself will very nearly resemble
a sanatorium-restaurant. Eventually we have to come to a conception of health and
disease by which the two merge into each other, when men eat in order to prevent disease
instead of taking medicine in order to cure it. This point is not stressed enough
in the West, for the Westerners go to see a doctor only when they are sick, and do
not see him when they are well. Before that time comes, the distinction between
medicine which nourishes the body and medicine which cures disease will have to be
abolished.
We have, therefore, to congratulate the Chinese people on their happy confusion of
medicine and food. This makes their medicine less of a medicine, but makes their food
more of a food. There seems to be a symbolic significance in the fact that the God
of Gluttony appeared even in our semi-historical period, the God T'aot'ieh being found
today as a favorite motif among our earliest bronze and stone sculptures. The spirit
of T'aot'ieh is in us. It makes our pharmacopoeias resemble our cook books and our
cook books resemble a pharmacopoeia, and it makes the rise of botany and zoology as
branches of the natural science impossible, for the Chinese scientists are thinking
all the time of how a snake, a monkey, or a crocidile's flesh or a camel's hump would
taste. True scientific curiosity in China is a gastronomic curiosity.
With the confusion of medicine and magic, found in all savage tribes, and with the
Chinese Taoists making the " nourishment of life" and the search after immortality
or long life their central object, we find that food and medicine often lie in their
hands. In the Imperial Cook Book of the Mongol Dynasty referred to above, Yinshan
Chengyao, there are chapters devoted to preserving long life and warding off disease.
With the Taoist passionate devotion to Nature, the tendency is always to emphasize
fruits and food of a vegetarian nature. There is a sort of combination of poetry and
Taoist detachment from life, regarding the eating of fresh lotus seeds with their
delicate flavor born of the dew as the height of a scholar's refined pleasure. He
would drink the dew itself, if he could. In this class belong the seeds of pine trees,
arrowroot and Chinaroot which are all regarded as tending toward long life, because
they clarify one's heart and purify one's soul. One is not supposed to have mortal
desires, like the desire for women, when eating a lotus seed. More like medicine and
constantly taken as part of one's food and highly valued for prolonging life are
asparagus lucidus, rehmannia Luteu, lycium chinense, atratylis ovata, polygonatum
giganteum , and particularly ginseng and astragalus htiantely .
The Chinese pharmacopoeia offers an immense field waiting for Western scientific
research. Western medicine has only within the past decade discovered the blood-
building value of liver, while Chinese have all along regarded it as an important
tonic for old people. I have a suspicion that when a Western butcher kills a pig,
he throws away all the parts that have the greatest nourishing food value   kidneys,
stomachs, intestines (which must be full of gastric juice), blood, bone marrow and
brains. It is beginning to be discovered that the bone is the place where the red
corpuscles of one's blood are manufactured, and I cannot help thinking the throwing
away of mutton bones and pig's bones and cow's bones without stewing them into a fine
soup is a terrific waste of food value.
There are many Western foods that I like, and first of all I must mention the honeydew
melon, because its suggestion of dew is so Chinese. Also, if an ancient Chinese Taoist
were given a grapefruit, he might imagine that he had discovered the elixir of
immortality, for it was the exotic flavor of strange and unknown fruits that the
Taoists were looking for. Tomato juice must be ranked as one of the greatest Western
discoveries in the twentieth century, for the Chinese, like the Westerners of a
century ago, used to consider tomatoes not fit for eating. Next comes the eating of
raw celery, which comes nearest to the Chinese idea of eating food for texture, as
with bamboo shoots. Asparagus is fine, when it is not green, but it is not unknown
in China. Finally I must confess to a great liking for English roast beef, and for
all roasts. Every food is good when cooked and tasted in its own country and in its
proper season. I have always liked American food when it is served in American homes,
but have never yet tasted food that impressed me as good in the best hotels of New
York. The fault is not due to hotels or restaurants, for even in Chinese restaurants,
it is impossible to get good food unless with long notice and unless it is prepared
with individual care.
On the other hand, there are glaring deficiencies in American and European cuisine.
Far ahead in bakery and the making of sweets and desserts. Western cuisine strikes
one as being pretty dull and insipid and extremely limited in variety. After eating
in any hotel or boarding house or steamship for three weeks, and after one has had
chicken d la king, prime ribs of beef and lamb chops and filet for the thirteenth
time, the food begins to pall on one's palate. The most undeveloped branch of Western
cooking is that of preparing vegetables. In the first place, vegetables are extremely
limited in variety; in the second place, they are merely boiled in water; and in the
third place, they are always over-cooked until they lose their color and look mushy.
Spinach, the calamity of all children, is never cooked properly ; it is cooked until
it becomes mushy, whereas if it is fried on a very hot pan with oil and salt and taken
away before it loses its crispness, it is one of the most palatable of foods. Lettuce
prepared in the same manner is also delightful, the only consideration being not to
allow? it to stand in the pan for too long. Chicken liver is considered a delicacy
in the West, and even grilled lamb kidneys, but there is a large number of foods of
the same class which have not even been experimented upon. This explains the lack
of variety in Western food. Fried chicken gizzard, along with fried chicken liver,
dipped in salt, is among the commonest dishes in China. Carp's head, with its delicate
flesh around the cheeks and jowl, is served as a special dish of great delicacy. Pig's
tripe is my favorite food, and for that matter, certain parts of the ox's tripe. It
makes a delicious soup with noodles, or it may be thrown into boiling soup over an
extremely hot fire and immediately taken out, so that it has a crispness almost like
that of raw celery. Large snails (meaning only the thick covering at their mouth)
are a delicacy much sought after in France, and they are also a delicacy in China.
In taste and texture and resistance to the teeth, they are practically the same as
abalones and scallops.
The lack of variety of soups is due to two causes. First, the lack of experiment on
mixtures of vegetables with meat. By combinations and permutations, five or six
ingredients, like dried shrimp, mushroom, bamboo-shoot, melon, pork, etc. , can give
a hundred varieties of different soups. Melon soup is unknown in the West, and yet,
made with different varieties and prepared with a dash of dried shrimp, it is one
of the most delicious dishes in summer. Secondly, the lack of variety in soup is due
to failure to make full use of sea food. Scallops are always fried in the West, but
dried scallops are one of the most important elements for making good soup, and so
is a-balone. As for clam chowder, I never smell the clam in it, and one, of course,
never sees turtle flesh in turtle soup. A real turtle soup, cooked until it is sticky
on the lips, is one of the favorite Cantonese dishes, sometimes being prepared with
the webbed feet of ducks or geese. The Shaohsing people of Chekiang have a favorite
dish called
the big corners, " consisting of the wings and legs of chicken, because there is a
happy combination of skin and tendon and meat in chicken wings and feet. The best
soup I have tasted, however, is the soup of bastard carp and small softshell clams
combined. The test of soup generally made from shell food is that it should not be
oily.
As an instance of Chinese feeling about food, I may quote here from Li Liweng's essay
on "Crabs" in the section on food in his Art of Living.
There is nothing in food and drink whose flavor I cannot describe with the utmost
understanding and imagination. But as for crabs, my heart likes them, my mouth
relishes them, and I can never forget them for a year and a day, but find it impossible
to describe in words why I like them, relish them, and can never forget them. Ah,
this thing has indeed become for me a weakness in food, and is in itself a strange
phenomenon of the universe. All my days I have been extremely fond of it. Every year
before the crab season comes, I set a-side some money for the purpose and because
my family say that "crab is my life" I call this money "my life ransom. " From the
day it appears on the market to the end of the season, I have never missed it for
a night. My friends who know this weakness of mine always invite me to dinner at this
season, and I therefore call October and November "crab autumn. "... I used to have
a maid quite devoted to attending to the care and preparation of crabs and I called
her "my crab maid." Now she is gone! 0 crab! my life shall begin and end with thee!
The reason that Li finally gave for his appreciation of crab was that it was perfect
in the three requisites of food   color, fragrance and flavor. Li's feeling about
crabs is quite generally shared by Chinese of all classes today, the kind eaten being
from freshwater lakes.
For me, the philosophy of food seems to boil down to three things:
freshness, flavor and texture. The best cook in the world cannot make a savory dish
unless he has fresh things to cook with, and any good cook can tell you that half
the art of cooking lies in buying. Yuan Tsets'ai, the great epicure and poet of the
seventeenth century, wrote beautifully about his cook as a man carrying himself with
great dignity who absolutely refused to cook a dish ordered unless the thing was in
its best season. The cook had a bad temper, but confessed that he continued to serve
the poet because the latter understood flavor . Today there is a cook over sixty years
old in Szechuen who must be courteously invited to prepare a dinner for some special
occasion, and who must be given a week's notice to collect and buy things and must
be left entirely free to be the sole lord and judge of the menu to be served.
For the common people who cannot afford expensive cooks, there is comfort in the
knowledge that anything tastes good in its season, and that it is always better to
depend upon nature than upon culture to furnish us with the greatest epicurean
delights. For this reason, people who have their own garden or who live in the country
may be quite sure that they have the best food, although they may not have the best
cook. For the same reason, food ought to be tasted in its place of origin, before
any judgment can be pronounced upon it. But for a wife who does not know how to buy
fresh food or a man who is willing to put up with cold storage foods, any discussion
of epicurean values is futile.
The texture of food, as regards tenderness, elasticity, crispness and softness, is
largely a matter of timing and adjusting the heat of the fire. Chinese restaurants
can produce dishes not possible in the home because they are equipped with a fine
oven. As for flavor, there are clearly two classes of food, those that are best served
in their own juice, without adulteration except salt or soya-bean sauce, and those
that taste best when they are combined with the flavor of another food. Thus, in the
case of fish, fresh mandarin fish or trout should be prepared in its natural juice
to get its full flavor, while more fatty fish like the shad tastes best with Chinese
pickled beans. The American succotash is an example of the perfect combination of
tastes. There are certain flavors in nature which seem to be made for each other and
reach their highest degree of delectability only in combination with each other.
Bamboo shoot and pork seem to make a perfect pair, each borrowing its fragrance from
the other and lending it in return its own. Ham somehow combines well with the sweet
flavor, and one of the proudest dishes of my cook in Shanghai is ham with rich Peking
golden dates, steamed together in a casserole. So does black tree fungus combine
perfectly with duck's egg in soup, and New York lobster combine with Chinese pickled
bean-curd sauce ( nanju) . In fact, there is a large class of eatables whose chief
func-tron seems to be to lend their flavor to others   mushroom, bamboo shoots,
Szechuen tsats'ai, etc. And there is a large class of food, most valued by the Chinese,
which have no flavor of their own, and depend entirely on borrowing from others.
The three necessary characteristics of the most expensive Chinese delicacies are that
they must be colorless, odorless, and flavorless. These articles are shark-fin,
bird's nest and the "silver fungus. " All of them are gelatinous in quality and all
have no color, taste or smell. The reason why they taste so wonderful is because they
are always prepared in the most expensive soup possible.

VIII. SOME CURIOUS WESTERN CUSTOMS
One great difference between Oriental and Occidental civilizations is that the
Westerners shake each other's hands, while we shake our own. Of all the ridiculous
Western customs, I think that of shaking hands is one of the worst. I may be very
progressive and able to appreciate Western art, literature, American silk stockings,
Parisian perfumes and even British battleships, but I cannot see how the progressive
Europeans could allow this barbarous custom of shaking hands to persist to the present
day. I know there are private groups of individuals in the West who protest against
this custom, as there are people who protest against the equally ridiculous custom
of wearing hats or collars. But these people don't seem to be making any headway,
being apparently taken for men who make mountains of molehills and waste their energy
on trivialities. I am one of these men who are always interested in trivialities.
As a Chinese, I am bound to feel more strongly against this Western custom than the
Europeans, and prefer always to shake my own hands when meeting or parting from people,
according to the time-honored etiquette of the Celestial Empire.
Of course, everyone knows this custom is the survival of the barbaric days of Europe,
like the other custom of taking off one's hat.
These customs originated with the medieval robber barons and chevaliers, who had to
lift their visors or take off their steel gauntlets to show that they were friendly
or peacefully disposed toward the other fellow. Of course it is ridiculous in modern
days to repeat the same gestures when we are no longer wearing helmets or gauntlets,
but survivals of barbaric customs will always persist, as witness, for instance, the
persistence of duels down to the present day.
I object to this custom for hygienic and many other reasons. Shaking hands is a form
of human contact subject to the finest variations and distinctions. An original
American graduate student could very well write a doctorate dissertation on a
"Time-and-motion Study of the Varieties of Hand-Shaking, " reviewing it, in the
approved fashion, as regards pressure, duration of time, humidity, emotional response,
and so forth, and further studying it under all its possible variations as regards
sex, the height of the person concerned (giving us undoubtedly many "types of marginal
differences"), the condition of the skin as affected by professional work and social
classes, etc. With a few charts and tables of percentages, I am sure a candidate would
have no difficulty in getting a Ph.D. , provided he made the whole thing sufficiently
abstruse and tiresome.
Now consider the hygienic objections. The foreigners in Shanghai, who describe our
copper coins as regular reservoirs of bacteria and will not touch them, apparently
think nothing of shaking hands with any Tom, Dick or Harry in the street. This is
really highly illogical, for how are you to know that Tom, Dick or Harry has not touched
those coppers which you shun like poison? What is worse is, sometimes you may see
a consumptive-looking man who hygienically covers his mouth with his hands while
coughing and in the next moment stretches his hand to give you a friendly shake. In
this respect, our celestial customs are really more scientific, for in China, each
of us shakes his own hand. I don't know what was the origin of this Chinese custom,
but its advantage from a medical or hygienic point of view cannot be denied.
Then there are aesthetic and romantic objections to handshaking.
When you put out your hand, you are at the mercy of the other person, who is at liberty
to shake it as hard as he likes and hold it as long as he likes. As the hand is one
of the finest and most responsive organs in our body, every possible variety of
pressure is possible. First, you may have the Y. M. C. A. type of handshaking; the
man pats you on the shoulder with one hand and gives you a violent shake with the
other until all your joints are ready to burst within you. In the case of a Y. M.
C. A. secretary who is at the same time a baseball player with a powerful grip, and
the two often go together, his victim often does not know whether to scream or to
laugh. Coupled with his straightforward self-assertive .manner, this type of
handshaking practically seems to say, "Look here, you are now in my power. You must
buy a ticket for the next meeting or promise to take back with you a pamphlet by
Sherwood Eddy before I'll let your hand go." Under such circumstances I am always
very prompt with my pocketbook.
Coming down the scale, we find different varieties of pressure, from the indifferent
handshake which has utterly lost all meaning, to that kind of furtive, tremulous,
retiring handshake which indicates that the owner is afraid of you, and finally to
the elegant society lady who condescends to offer you the very tip of her fingers
in a manner that almost suggests that you look at her red-painted fingernails. All
kinds of human relationships, therefore, are reflected in this form of physical
contact between two persons. Some novelists profess that you can tell a man's
character from his type of handshake, distinguishing between the assertive, the
retiring, the dishonest and the weak and clammy hands which instinctively repel one.
I wish to be spared the trouble of analyzing a person's moral character every time
I have to meet him, or reading from the degree of his pressure the increase or decrease
of his affection towards me.
More senseless still is the custom of taking off one's hat. Here we find all kinds
of nonsensical rules of etiquette. Thus a lady should keep her hat on during church
service or during afternoon tea indoors. Whether this custom of wearing hats in church
has anything to do with the customs of Asia Minor in the first century A. D. or not,
I do not profess to know, but I suspect it comes from a senseless following of St.
Paul's injunction that women should have their heads covered in church while men
should not, being based thus on an Asiatic philosophy of sexual inequality which the
Westerners have so long repudiated. For the men, there is that ridiculous custom of
taking off one's hat in an elevator when there are ladies in it. There can be absolutely
no defense for this meaningless custom. In the first place, the elevator is but a
continuation of the corridor, and if men are not required to take off their hats in
a corridor, why should they be made to do so in a lift? Any one would see the utter
senselessness of it all, if he happens to pass from one floor to another in the same
building with a hat on. In the second place, the elevator cannot by any logical
analysis be distinguished from other types of conveyance, the motor car, for instance.
If a man can, with a free conscience, keep his hat on while driving in a motor car
in the company of ladies, why should he be forbidden from doing the same in a lift ?
All in all, this is a very crazy world of ours. But I am not surprised. After all,
we see human stupidity around us everywhere, from the stupidity of modern
international relations to that of the modern educational system. Mankind may be
intelligent enough to invent the radio and wireless telephones, but mankind is simply
nol intelligent enough to stop wars, nor will ever be. So I am willing to let stupidity
in the more trivial things go by, and content merely to be amused.

IX. THE INHUMANITY OF WESTERN DRESS
In spite of the popularity of Western dress among the modern Turks, Egyptians, Hindus,
Japanese and Chinese, and in spite of its universality as the official diplomatic
costume in the entire world, I still cling to the old Chinese dress. Many of my best
friends have asked me why I wear Chinese instead of foreign dress. And those people
call themselves my friends! They might just as well ask me why I stand on two legs.
The two happen to be related, as I shall try to show. Why must I give a reason for
wearing the only "human" dress in the world ? Need anyone who in his native garb
practically goes about the house and outside in his pyjamas and slippers give reasons
why he does not like to be encased in a system of suffocating collars, vests, belts,
braces and garters? The prestige of the foreign dress rests on no more secure basis
than the fact that it is associated with superior gunboats and Diesel engines. It
cannot be defended on esthetic, moral, hygienic or economic grounds. Its superiority
is simply and purely political.
Is my attitude merely a pose, or symptomatic of my progress in knowledge of Chinese
philosophy ? I hardly think so. In taking this attitude, I am supported by all the
thinking persons of my generation in China. The Chinese dress is worn by all Chinese
gentlemen. Furthermore, all the scholars, thinkers, bankers and people who made good
in China either have never worn foreign dress, or have swiftly come back to their
native dress the moment they have "arrived" politically, financially or socially.
They have swiftly come back because they are sure of themselves and no longer feel
the need for a coat of foreign appearance to hide their bad English or their inferior
mental outfit. No Shanghai kidnaper would think of kidnaping a Chinese in foreign
clothes, for the simple reason that he is not worth the candle. Who are the people
wearing foreign clothes today in China ? The college students, the clerks earning
a hundred a month, the political busybodies who are always on the point of landing
a job, the tang-/>M young men, the nouveaux riches, the nincompoops, the
feebleminded. . . . And then, of course, last but not least, we have Henry P'uyi,
who has the incomparably bad taste to adopt a foreign name, foreign dress, and a pair
of dark spectacles. That outfit of his alone will kill all his chances of coming back
to the Dragon Throne, even if he has all the bayonets of the Mikado behind him. For
you may tell any lies to the Chinese people, but you cannot convince them that the
fellow who wears a foreign dress and dark spectacles is their  Kuomintang Party
office."emperor. " So long as he wears that foreign dress and so long as he calls
himself Henry, Henry will be perfectly at home in the dockyards of Liverpool, but
not on a Dragon Throne.
Now the philosophy behind Chinese and Western dress is that the latter tries to reveal
the human form, while the former tries to conceal it. But as the human body is
essentially like the monkeys', usually the less of it revealed the better. Think of
Gandhi in his loincloth! Only in a world of people blind in sense of beauty is the
foreign dress tolerable. It is a platitude that the perfect human figure rarely exists.
Let any one who doubts this go to Coney Island and see how beautiful