JOHN CHINAMAN
By G. F. McCLEARY
FROM the shaded deck of the liner I watched John Chinaman at work. It was a sight to provoke thought. Under the fierce tropical sun he ran along a gangway carrying a heavy basket of coal, which he emptied into a chasm yawning in the liner's side. He ran back, refilled and emptied his basket, and then da capo. All the morning he had done this, but he did not seem weary. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He looked as if he liked working. At midday he took a short rest. He sluiced his head, neck and chest from a hydrant and sat on the ground to eat. Then he lit a cigarette and strolled about the wharf. He was an upstanding young man, lithe, lean, and tough as whipcord. At times he would look up at the liner and its passengers. What was going on behind that impassive face and the long eyes that swept us with an inscrutable glance ? Curiosity perhaps ; or was it contempt ? Certainly nothing from which we might infer that he regarded us as in any way superior to him. John has no inferiority complex.
In the streets of Hong Kong we could see through the open doors and windows John and his wife and children in large numbers, all busily Occupied—cooking, sewing, mending, all kinds of occupations. Intent, deft, purposeful, they were all hard at it. You see the same thing everywhere in China, I am told. John and his family work like ants. In the stores are some of the things John makes ; exquisite silks, for instance, with wonderful colours, and lines as firm and delicate as the tracery of a Mozart quartet. John does not practise the kind of salesmanship that leads you into buying what you don't want. With a courteous dignity he displays his wares and leaves you tutmolested to decide the question of purchase. You find, however, that his methods are effective. John is a good salesman.
As the liner ploughs through the Pacific I meet John as a table steward. He is a grave, efficient young man, and from his manners you might think he was a prince travelling incog. If you consult him about the menu he gives you candid advice with an air of general detach- ment from the ship's administration. He does not recommend the fish for luncheon today ; it is not fresh ; he suggests an omelette. It is not easy to draw him into talk, but one morning he becomes communicative. He means to give up his job. He wants to be a soldier ; to fight for his country, which has just been having a scrap near Shanghai with a neighbour.
In San Francisco I make a pilgrimage to Bush Street where once lived an attenuated Scotsman suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. I walk up Telegraph Hill to gaze, as he often did, on the resplendent spectacle of the Golden Gate and the Bay. I descend to Portsmouth -Square, where there is a monument to the aforesaid -Scotsman. It is a plain rectangular slab of granite surmounted by a bronze galleon. On the slab is an inscription :
• " To-remember Robert Louis Stevenson.
To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and spend a little less : to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence : to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered : to keep a few friends but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.'"
There are friends in England who would welcome a picture postcard of this monument ; but none can be had. I try three stores with the same result. Entering a fourth as a forlorn hope I meet John again. He is about thirty years old, wears spectacles, and is interested in my quest. No, unfortunately there are no postcards, but if I will excuse him for a moment he will show me a photograph of the monument that he himself has taken. He goes to an upper room, and returns with an excel- lent photograph, which he asks me to accept. For ten minutes we talk Stevenson, then I depart with the precious photograph. "To remember Robert Louis Stevenson." I am making discoveries about John China- man. He remembers R. L. S. El Paso, San Antonio, Houston. We are covering a lot of ground. There are 3,026,789 square miles in the United States and the population at the 1930 census was 122,775,046. John's country is rather more than half the size, and he and his family number some 400 millions—about one-fifth of all the people in the world. He lives in a poverty that often reaches starvation-point, yet he works hard to produce the means to enable him to live. "Produce, Produce. Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name." Carlyle's message was not needed by John, who certainly does produce. Among his products are babies, of whom every year he produces several millions. "Sen- timent, hallowed by immemorial tradition, makes it a duty to leave sons, and the communism of the patriarchal family dissociates the production of children from re- sponsibility for their maintenance." So says Professor Tawney, who has stndied John in his own country. Like other producers, John wants to export his pro- duce, but he finds it difficult to export his offspring. All sorts of arrangements have been made to prevent that.
New Orleans, Montgomery, and now Atlanta, where first appeared that most beautiful and efficient of all move- ments of the human body, the swing of Bobby Jones. Still onward through North Carolina and Virginia. Since we left San Francisco we have passed through many miles of coun- try with no sign of human habitation. It is not an over- crowded land. A distinguished American statistician, Dr. Louis Dublin, has calculated that the population of the United States will probably reach a maximum of about 148 millions in 1970, and will then decline to 140 millions by the year 2000, to 109 millions by 2050, and to 76 millions by 2100. These estimates, it is stated, "are based on the assumption of no increase through immigration." What would happen if John came to live here ?
On the Atlantic liner I meet an Australian friend. Somehow our talk turns on John Chinaman, whom my friend has known on: his native heath.
" Yes,' he says, 'John has many good points. He serves you faithfully and well, and you can do business with him ; he is a man of his word. In politics it is different, but he doesn't take politics seriously ; it is the ordinary day by day relation of man to man that he thinks important. But we can't have him in Australia. We have built up a real democracy with a high standard of living for the unskilled as well as the skilled workers, and we mean to keep it. It is not merely a question of material comfort. Our standard of civilisation includes the full equality—political, social and economic—of men and women; and it has given us many good things, for instance, the second lowest infant mortality in the world. If John were to mine in . with his enormous birth-rate, his ant-like industry, and his willingness to work for wages on which none of us could live, how long would our standard last ? How long could we remain a democracy? Would your Labour people in • England, for all their talk of internationalism, like to see Chinese workmen come in there ? You know what happened in 1906 to your Government that sanctioned Chinese labour in the South African gold mines. No; there is no place for John in Australia. Didn't you find that folks talked like this in America ' " • Three thousand years ago, when my ancestors were more or less savages,. John's were members of a high civilisation, producing works that still rank among the wonders of the world. . There was a good deal of land and water between his ancestors and mine and it kept them from contact. Under what conditions his descendants and mine will be living, say, a hundred years hence, I don't know. But I wish I could feel more comfortable about it. •
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