Chin people

“ I ain’t! I’m white—wottya mean callin’ me a Chink?” And then, seeing signs of contrition on her friend’s face: “Never mind. Chinkie-Toodles is good enough for me. He treats me white, all right, all right!”
Nor was this an overstatement of the actual facts.
Nag Hong Fah was good to her. He was happy in the realization of his fatherhood, advertised every night by lusty cries which reverberated through the narrow, rickety Pell Street house to find an echo across the street in the liquor-store of the Chin Sor Company, where the members of his clan predicted a shining future for father and son. ”

“ Above all, the Chinese seemed to muster strongly—those busy, patient, plodding people, who are ready to squeeze themselves into any vacant hole, round or square, and to make themselves fit therein. Barbers, carriers, purveyors of fruit, washers of clothes, shampooers, tailors, cooks, waiters, domestic servants, always ready, patient and willing, childlike and bland—John Chinaman swarms in Singapore, and can be found there as the meanest workman or artisan, up to the wealthiest merchant or banker, like the late Mr Whampoa, whose gardens were one of the lions of the place. ”

“ In the morning my way is made through the waking city with a painful limp, that gives rise to much unsympathetic giggling among the crowd at my heels. Perhaps they think all Pankwaes thus hobble along; their giggling, however, is doubtless evidence of the well-known pitiless disposition of the Chinese. The sentiments of pity and consideration for the sufferings of others, are a well-nigh invisible quality of John Chinaman's character, and as I limp slowly along, I mentally picture myself with a broken leg or serious illness, alone among these people. A Fankwae with his leg broken! ”

“ Some travellers tell us, that the Chinese are large and fat, their limbs well formed, their faces broad and round, their eyes small, eye-brows [207] large, their eye-lids turned upwards, and their noses short and flat; that upon the chin they have very little beard, and upon each lip not more than seven or eight tufts of hair. Those who inhabit the southern provinces are more brown and tawny than those in the northern; that in colour they resemble the natives of Mauritania, or the more swarthy Spaniards; but those in the middle provinces are as fair as the Germans. ”

“ Even the babies, and the shrill-tongued babbling women, meditate in China.
“Where there is no vision the people perish.”
Though he was dining alone in his own sitting-room, Sên dressed for dinner as scrupulously as if he’d been an English subaltern alone in a remote dâk bungalow about to dine off half-roasted but wholly grown goat and undergrown plantains, washed down by criminal and luke-warm beer. There was not a little of the English gentleman in Sên King-lo, not a few English characteristics, habits and traits that in no way clashed with Chinese—or that were Chinese as well. ”

“ THE CHINESE FEAST OF THE DEAD.
Weird and Ghastly Scene in a Chinese Temple at Midnight.—The Story of Concatenation Bill.—The True History of the Great Indian Fight on the Gila.
What a strange, peculiar people are these Chinese! Dwelling among us, they are not of us; but are born and grow up, and toil and die here in the midst of the boasted civilization of the nineteenth century, just as they have been being born and growing up, and toiling and dying, for ages on ages, in the "Central Flowery Empire" on the other shore of the blue Pacific. ”

“ Mongol women on a joy-ride
409The town where we made our midday halt was denim blue with market-day. There were big, upstanding six-foot men whom America would hardly have recognized as Chinese; and some of them, from back in the hills, though they had heard of white people before, had never seen them. These and their hardy, red-cheeked boys timidly crowded nearer and nearer the knock-kneed table which Chang had somehow found and placed for us in a wind-sheltered, sun-flooded corner of the inn-yard, retreating in a pell-mell mass if we rose to our feet or looked fixedly at them. ”

“ The King merely ordered that his rice be placed upon a baked clay pie. Mandarins who visited the palace were much surprised at what they saw—a King eating from common clay. Nevertheless, their own tables were soon covered with Princess Chin Uor's pies. For the King, of course, set all fashions.
And so, we modern peoples speak of our plates and cups and saucers as "China." China? Is it? Yes, and no. China is merely our way of pronouncing Chin Uor. Our plates are merely thin copies of Princess Chin Uor's pies. ”

“ Ho Chin did not live in one of the small, dark, opium-scented rooms in which the rest of the Chinese children lived, but in the elegant Consulate with its large rooms and marble stairway; but, after all, he was just a boy, and liked the things that boys liked. He attended a very select American school, and dressed in American style. In fact, nothing was too good for Ho Chin—the eldest son of a Consul. But you know, sometimes he almost wished he was a common boy, and could run and play, and have the perfect freedom of the street boy. ”

“ Lately in America we have heard the school system of the Chinese much lauded. And since Minister Wu, at Washington, has so distinguished himself and his race by his striking addresses, many people have jumped at the conclusion that an ignorant Chinaman is the exception. But I am told by those who ought to know, that in China only about one man in a hundred, and one woman in ten thousand, can read. The Japanese alone of Asiatic races are more literary than the Burmese. ”

“ Chin, chin, n. the jutting part of the face below the mouth.—Up to the chin, deeply immersed. [A.S. cin; Ger. kinn, Gr. genys.]
China, chīn′a, n. fine kind of earthenware, originally made in China: porcelain.—ns. Chin′a-bark, a common name of cinchona bark (derived not from the empire of China, but from. Kina or Quina, the Peruvian name of cinchona—see Quinine) ; Chin′a-clay, a fine white clay used in making porcelain; Chin′a-grass (Bœhmeria nivea) , a small shrubby-like plant, allied to the nettle, native to China ”

“ Chin succeeded in taking his master’s degree; and three years afterwards, happening to revisit the Flowery Hill, he beheld a Mr. Chi, one of those very gentlemen who had previously been killed by the tiger. In great alarm he was making off, when Chi seized his bridle and would not let him proceed. So he got down from his horse, and inquired what was the matter; to which Chi replied, “I am now the slave of Miao, and have to endure bitter toil for him. He must kill some one else before I can be set free. ”

“ American: Quichua, dialect of Lima.
Chinese.
(1.) The most important and purest of all monosyllabic languages, vernacular in the empire of China. It has several sub-dialects, and resembles some idioms of Central Asia. The mode of writing is considered to have originated from drawings of actual objects, somewhat analogous to the hieroglyphics of Egypt, or the picture writing of Mexico. The word “chin,” in Chinese, means “man,” “men,” i.e. the inhabitants of that part of Asia. ”

“ Some one has written of “the heart that must beat somewhere beneath the impenetrable Oriental mask.” The mask is not impenetrable. An honest, friendly smile will pierce it. The Oriental is nine-tenths heart. A typical Asiatic can be won by moderate kindness to great loyalty and devotion. Page after page of the history of the Indian mutiny proves it.
And of the Chinese people this is even truer.
Florence Gregory was a kindly, likeable woman, and during her year in Hong Kong she had not thought it necessary to make herself detestable to the Chinese with whom she came in contact. ”

“ The Chinese ladies did not show at all, but they used to send their dirty little brats up on deck to play, and very offensive they contrived to make their small selves. Independently of their dirt, Chinamen are a sorry spectacle on a journey—their heads require shaving (a week’s crop looks even worse on the poll than on the chin) , and their tails get untidy and shaggy from being slept upon. ”

“ Where a Chinaman fossicks about for gold or tin, and only leaves behind him heaps of débris, the colonist may rightly object; but when the Chinaman leaves behind him roads and important public works, when he feeds and clothes the colonist, and does all this at a rate cheaper than the colonist can do it himself, it is difficult to understand where the objection to John arises.
Many people that I met had prejudices against Chinamen without reason. The steamers coming from China have Chinese stewards and a Chinese crew. ”

“ The reports of 1889 were more concerned with the measures carried out for their subjugation than with descriptions of the people and their manners. In the main, what is written in the Burma Gazetteer published in 1908 is true of the Chins of twenty years ago:—
"They are a sturdy, warlike, hospitable people, slow of speech, grave of habit, paying great regard to rank and to the ties of clan, but spoilt by their intemperance, their vindictiveness, their treachery, their greed, their lack of persistence, [64] and their personal uncleanliness." ”

“ They were not the sleek-braided, white-bloused, silk-sashed Chinese of the [Pg 63] house-servant variety. They had wild black hair, rugged, not fat, sleepy faces, and little clothing except the boots,—store boots, in which a Chinaman is queerer than in anything except a store hat. They struggled with the jam of cord-wood as if it were some sort of water-prey they had hunted down, and were now meeting at bay, spearing, thrusting, hooking with their long boat-hooks, skipping from rock to rock in midstream, hoarse with shouting. ”

“ A link that may be looked upon as connecting the Chins with the communities to the east is provided by the Kadus of the Katha District of Upper Burma. The Chin element in the Kadus is very faint. They are for the most part, like the Danus, a Burmese-Shan compound, but they have also an appreciable mixture of Kachin besides the trace of Chin. ”

“ We have grown so accustomed to John Chinaman, with his innocent yellow face, so smooth and hairless,—except when as a grandfather he wears a moustache,—his obliquely-slit eyes, and his flowing pigtail, with plaited ends of cord and tassels, that we have ceased to observe him. ”

“ Owing to various causes the Central Chins have never been systematically studied as a whole and, though ample information has been collected regarding some of them, not only are there others—for the most part in the unadministered tracts—of whom little is known, but also the relation the different tribes bear to one another has never been fully brought out. Roughly speaking, however, there are four main tribes of Central Chins, namely, the Chinboks, the Yindus, the Kara is and the Mros. ”

“ The native is by far the more attractive of the two—clean, kindly, selfish, jolly, childish, well bred, and pleasing to the eye; but the Chinaman possesses the less attractive qualities which make for the survival of a race—the industry, the unselfishness, the capacity to live for an idea—and in the end, if only by force of numbers, he will win. Looking into the future, one can see the Eastern islands populated by Chinese, as our own islands of Hawaii have been peopled with immigrants from Japan. ”

“ Sên King-lo laughed—his eyes even more than his mouth. Chinese gentlepeople have the most beautiful teeth in the world.
“No, no,” he protested. “That was well-bowled. But you have not caught me out, leg before wicket. I have seen pictures of Chinese girls, Miss Gilbert. And I can read Chinese. Stickpins and girdle ornaments dangle in half the pages of Chinese romances. You did remind me of my home—for the moment. Even the fern you were fanning yourself with added to the impression. You fanned yourself a little as we do—with a Chinese turn of your wrist. I am in your debt.” ”

“ They have hardly any beard, but some of them—though not often before they are grandfathers, and more than forty years old—wear a much-admired moustache. Accustomed to black locks and smooth faces, they look curiously on the full beards of the men, and the yellow curls of the children, of our fairer race, or, as they style us, “The Red-Headed Foreigners.”
The Chinese shave the whole head, except a round patch on the crown, about as large as a breakfast saucer. On this they let the hair grow, and it is combed back and down, and tied firmly with a string, at the middle of the bottom of the patch. ”

“ Imagine a short, slouchy figure, with sloping eyes, a yellow complexion, features characterized by a sort of low cunning, a shaved head with a pigtail, clad in a loose cloth blouse, half shirt and half jacket, continuations not exactly pants nor yet a petticoat, and shoes thick-soled and shearing upwards like a Madras surf-boat, and you have John Chinaman as he appears at home. The portrait is universal. One Chinaman is as like another as two peas,—a uniformity often leading to ludicrous mistakes. ”

“ That was certainly a good answer,—calling it Chinese prayer.
Undoubtedly our type of features is repulsive to the average Chinaman, certainly his is very much so to us. One looked in vain among the smooth chins, shaved heads, and almond eyes of the crowd for signs of intelligence and manliness. There are no tokens of humor or cheerfulness to be seen, but in its place there is plenty of cunning, slyness, and deceit, if there is any truth in physiognomy. The men look like women and the women like children, except that their features are so hard and forbidding. ”