Chinese Tenacity

Bill Brown ... Xiamen University
Westerners have long admired Chinese' tenacity and fixedness of purpose, as MacGowan wrote in Sidelights on Chinese Life (1907, pp. 112-114):

CHAPTER VI THE ADAPTABILITY AND TENACITY OF PURPOSE OF
THE CHINESE

THE strength of the Chinaman lies in his power to adapt himself to the circumstances in which he may be situated. Place him in a northern climate where the sun's rays have lost their fire, and where the snow falls thickly and the ice lays its wintry hand upon the forces of nature, and he will thrive as though he had descended from an ancestry that had always lived in a frozen region. Transport him to the torrid zone, where the sun is a great ball of molten flame, where the air is as hot as though it had crossed a volcano, and where the one thought is how to get cool in this intolerable maddening heat, and he will move about with an ease and a comfort just as if a sultry climate was the very thing that his system demanded.

He is so cosmopolitan in his nature that it seems to be a matter of indifference where he may be or what his environment. He will travel along lofty peaks, where the snows of successive winters lie unmelted, or he will sleep in a grass hut where the fever-bearing mosquitoes will feast upon him the livelong night to the sound of their own music, and he will emerge from it next morning with a face that shows that the clouds of anopheles have left him a victor on the field. He will descend into the sultry tin mines of Siam, and at night he will stretch himself on the hard, uneven ground, with a clod for his pillow, and he will rise as refreshed as though he had slept on a bed of down.

You meet the Chinaman everywhere under the most varied circumstances, and he seems natural in every one of them. He walks about in an easy, unsurprised way, a first-class passenger in a crack mail steamer, or he curls himself up in a native river boat, in a space where no human being but himself could live an hour, and he sleeps a dreamless sleep the livelong night in a fetid atmosphere that would give an Occidental typhoid, from which he would perhaps never recover. Whatever the social condition of the Chinaman may be, whether merchant, or coolie, or artisan, one becomes conscious that behind those harsh and unaesthetic features there is a strength of physique and a latent power of endurance that seems to make him independent of climate, and impervious to microbes, germs, bacteria, and all the other scientific scourges that seem to exist for the destruction of all human life excepting the Chinese.

One advantage the Celestial has over the Occidental is what may be called his absence of nerves. The rush and race and competition of the West have never yet touched the East. The Orient is sober and measured, and never in a hurry. An Englishman, were all other signs wanting, could easily be distinguished, as he walks along the road, by his rapid stride, the jerky movements of his arms, and the nervous poise of his head, all so different from the unemotional crowd around him, who seem to think that they have an eternity before them in which to finish their walk, and so they need not hurry.

There is no doubt but that this absence of nerves is a very important factor in enabling the Chinaman to adapt himself so readily to the circumstances in which he may be placed. Take the matter of pain. He bears it with the composure of a saint. The heroic never seems to come out so grandly in him, as when he is bearing some awful suffering that only a martyr could endure. I have seen a man come into a hospital with an abscess that must have been giving him torture. His face was drawn, and its yellow hue had turned to a slightly livid colour, but there were no other signs that he was in agony. The surgeon drove his knife deep into the inflamed mass, but only the word "ai Ya," uttered with a prolonged emphasis, and the twisting up of the muscles of one side of his face, showed that he was conscious of any pain. An Occidental of the same class would most probably have howled, and perhaps a couple of assistants would have been required to hold him whilst the doctor was operating.

It is this same absence of nerves that enables the Chinese to bear suffering of any kind with a patience and fortitude that is perfectly Spartan. He will live from one year's end to another on food that seems utterly inadequate for human use; he will slave at the severest toil, with no Sunday to break its wearisome monotony, and no change to give the mind rest ; and he will go on with the duties of life with a sturdy tread and with a meditative mystic look on his face, that reminds one of those images of Buddha that one sees so frequently in the Chinese monasteries or temples.

The staying power of the Chinese seems unlimited. The strong, square frames with which nature has endowed them are models of strength.
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