China and the West

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Shanghai, May 2. [2.5.1919].
We have been taken in hand by a reception committee of several Chinese gentlemen, mostly returned American students. The 'returned student' is a definite category here, and if and when China gets on its feet, the American university will have a fair share of the glory to its credit. They took us to see a Chinese cotton spinning and weaving factory. There is not even the pretense at labor laws here that there is in Japan. Children six years of age are employed, not many though, and the wages of the operatives in the spinning department, mainly women, is thirty cents a day, at the highest thirty-two cents Mex. In the weaving department they have piece work and get up to forty cents.
I will tell you something of what we had to eat in one small afternoon. First, lunch of all courses here at the hotel. Then we went to the newspaper where we had tea and cake at about four. From there to the house of the daughter of a leading statesman of the Manchus, she being a lady of small feet and ten children, who has offered a prize for the best essay on the ways to stop concubinage, which they call the whole system of plural marriage. They say it is quite unchanged among the rich. There we were given a tea of a rare sort, unknown in our experience. Two kinds of meat pies which are made in the form of little cakes and quite peculiar in taste, delicious; also cake. Then after we went to the restaurant where we were to have dinner. First we got into the wrong hotel and there, while we were waiting, they gave us tea. We were struck by the fact that they asked for nothing when we left, and thanked us for coming to the wrong place. Then we went to the right hotel across the street from the first. They called it the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, and it is that. There is a big roof garden besides the hotels, and they are both run by the Department stores which have their places underneath. It may be a sad commentary on the human character that one can eat more than one can remember, but that is what we did last night. First of all we went into the room which was all Chinese furniture; very small round table in the middle and the rows of stools along one side for the singing girls, who do not dance here. Those stools were not used, as all the young Chinese are ashamed of that institution and want to get rid of it. On a side table were almonds shelled, nice little ones, different from ours and very sweet. Beside them were dried watermelon seeds which were hard to crack and so I did not taste them. All the Chinese nibbled them with relish. Two ladies came, both of them had been in New York to study. All these people speak and understand English in earnest. On the table were little pieces of sliced ham, the famous preserved eggs which taste like hard-boiled eggs and look like dark-colored jelly, and little dishes of sweets, shrimps, etc. To these we helped ourselves with the chop sticks, though they insisted on giving us little plates on which they spooned out some of each. Then followed such a feast as we had never experienced, the boys taking off one dish after another and replacing them with others in the center of the table, to which we helped ourselves. There was no special attempt at display of fine dishes such as you might have expected with such cooking and such expense, and such as would have happened in Japan. We had chicken and duck and pigeon and veal and pigeon eggs and soup and fish and little oysters that grow in the ground (very delicious and delicate) and nice little vegetables and bamboo sprouts mixed in with the others, and we had shrimps cooked, and shark's fin and bird's nest (this has no taste at all and is a sort of very delicate soup, but costs a fortune and that is its real reason for being). It is gelatine which almost all dissolves in the cooking. We had many more things than these, and the boy in a dirty white coat and an old cap on his head passing round the hot perfumed wet towels every few courses, and for dessert we had little cakes made of bean paste filled up with almond paste and other sweets, all very elaborately made, and works of art to look at, but with too little taste to appeal much to us; then we had fruits, bananas and apples and pears, cut up in pieces, each with a toothpick in it so it can be eaten easily. Then we had a soup made of fish’s stomach, or air sac. Then we had a pudding of the most delicious sort imaginable, made of a mold of rice filled in with eight different symbolic things that I don't know anything about, but they don't cut much part in the taste. In serving this dish we were first given a little bowl half full of a sauce thickened and looking like a milk sauce. It was really made of powdered almonds. Into this you put the pudding, and it is so good that I regretted all that had gone before, and I am going to learn how to make it.