isa-normaladvance-1914-00143

Description:	THE NORMAL ADVANCE143sides, the chances are that he is getting two or three times the value of the article anyway.The American is the joke of every Chinaman. He will pay two or three prices without a mur¬ mur, and so he is always welcome.Shall we go out for another trip? Let us take a sedan chair this time. These are merely chairs which are carried on mens shoulders by means of long poles. Two men carry the more common ones, while a third runs along in front calling to the crowd to clear the way. This will cost about eighteen cents of our money per hour. Or you can get nicer chairs with silken cushions and sunshades carried by four, or even eight, uniformed carriers for but little more. Every¬ one who lives in Hong Kong has his own pri¬ vate ricksha or sedan chair, and some of them are beautiful. But why not have them? One can employ three or four Chinamen for less than he can feed a single horse.As I said before, there are no horses in Hong Kong. Look at that heavy ice wagon coming. There are in it probably two tons of the finest ice that can be manufactured, yet this wagon is drawn by fourteen men. Here comes a mod¬ ern street sprinkler made in South Bend, Ind., drawn by sixteen men there goes a heavy truck piled high with lumber, drawn by a sweating mass of humanity.Notice the skyscraper being built yonder. Not a single piece of machinery is used in construc¬ tion.When you ate lunch, you were kept cool by a series of long fans that swung back and forth. A boy was the motive power for those fans. O, yes, the women work. You havent seen them yet, thats all. The woman may break rock for the road, carry heavy loads on her back, and do such work, but as a beast of burden she is not popular.Hong Kong is built on the side of a mountain called the Peak. All the wealthy Englishmen have their homes built high up over the city, and some of these homes are grand. The sand used to build these homes is carried up the Peakin baskets by women. To ascend the hill, they take a winding road which is miles long. The woman carries two baskets suspended from a pole which she carries on her shoulders. There is perhaps a half-bushel of sand in each bas¬ ket. With this load she staggers as far as she is able, and then while she rests she walks back to the starting place and gets two more. In this way she gets eight or ten baskets of sand to the destination by sundown, and receives probably the equivalent of eight or ten cents of our money.Then notice that—four men are carrying an upright piano through the streets. On their shoulders are great calloused lumps which have formed by years of carrying heavy loads. Everyone, including father, works in China, or starves. You wonder how they can live on their pay. They dont. They just exist.Go to the Chinese market with me and see what they purchase. They will buy a tenth of a cents worth of fish, a half carrot, a piece of spoiled meat, or some scraps from the tables of the European hotels. If they buy a piece of fish, the} beg the merchant to throw in the head, and if they haggle about it long enough, the merchant will probably cut it into three or four pieces and throw a piece grudgingly into the basket. Nothing is wrapped and everything is handled dozens of times, by all sorts of dirty hands, before it is finally sold.Notice here is a merchant who sells potato peelings, and there is one whose sole stock in trade is dirty rice that was swept up from the floor of a warehouse. And so when people will and do live on such fare, one can readily see how a man can keep a family on ten cents a day.But it is a great day when a tourist ship comes into port, for then there is money for everyone. Tourists have money and they al¬ ways pay more than the regular fare or rate. When a ship comes in, the landings are always crowded with rickshas, fruit and flower ped¬ dlers, sedan chairs, money changers and beg¬ gars—a regular mob of them welcome you.
Source:	http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/32599
Collection:	Indiana State University Archives

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