The Chinese Boy and Girl

Part 1

Produced by Charles Keller. HTML version by Al Haines.

THE CHINESE BOY AND GIRL

ISAAC TAYLOR HEADLAND

OF PEKING UNIVERSITY

Author of Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes

PREFACE

No thorough study of Chinese child life can be made until the wall of Chinese exclusiveness is broken down and the homes of the East are thrown open to the people of the West. Glimpses of that life however, are available, sufficient in number and character to give a fairly good idea of what it must be. The playground is by no means always hidden, least of all when it is the street. The Chinese nurse brings her Chinese rhymes, stories and games into the foreigner's home for the amusement of its little ones.

Chinese kindergarten methods and appliances have no superior in their ingenuity and their ability to interest, as well as instruct. In the matter of travelling shows and jugglers also, no country is better supplied, and these are chiefly for the entertainment of the little ones.

To the careful observer of these different phases it becomes apparent that the Chinese child is well supplied with methods of exercise and amusement, also that he has much in common with the children of other lands. A large collection of toys shows many duplicates of those common in the West, and from the nursery rhymes of at least two out of the eighteen provinces it appears that the Chinese nursery is rich in Mother Goose. As a companion to the "Chinese Mother Goose," this book seeks to show that the same sunlight fills the homes of both East and West. If it also leads their far-away mates to look upon the Chinese Boy and Girl as real little folk, human like themselves, and thus think more kindly of them, its mission will have been accomplished.

CONTENTS

THE NURSERY AND ITS RHYMES CHILDREN AND CHILD-LIFE GAMES PLAYED BY BOYS GAMES PLAYED BY GIRLS THE TOYS CHILDREN PLAY WITH BLOCK GAMES--KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN'S SHOWS AND ENTERTAINMENTS JUVENILE JUGGLING STORIES TOLD TO CHILDREN

THE NURSERY AND ITS RHYMES

It is a mistake to suppose that any one nation or people has exclusive right to Mother Goose. She is an omnipresent old lady. She is Asiatic as well as European or American. Wherever there are mothers, grandmothers, and nurses there are Mother Gooses,--or; shall we say, Mother Geese--for I am at a loss as to how to pluralize this old dame. She is in India, whence I have rhymes from her, of which the following is a sample:

Heh, my baby! Ho, my baby! See the wild, ripe plum, And if you'd like to eat a few, I'll buy my baby some.

She is in Japan. She has taught the children there to put their fingers together as we do for "This is the church, this is the steeple," when she says:

A bamboo road, With a floor-mat siding, Children are quarrelling, And parents chiding,

the "children" being represented by the fingers and the "parents" by the thumbs. She is in China. I have more than 600 rhymes from her Chinese collection. Let me tell you how I got them.

One hot day during my summer vacation, while sitting on the veranda of a house among the hills, fifteen miles west of Peking, my friend, Mrs. C. H. Fenn, said to me:

"Have you noticed those rhymes, Mr. Headland?"

"What rhymes?" I inquired.

"The rhymes Mrs. Yin is repeating to Henry."

"No, I have not noticed them. Ask her to repeat that one again."

Mrs. Fenn did so, and the old nurse repeated the following rhyme, very much in the tone of, "The goblins 'll git you if you don't look out."

He climbed up the candlestick, The little mousey brown, To steal and eat tallow, And he couldn't get down. He called for his grandma, But his grandma was in town, So he doubled up into a wheel, And rolled himself down.

I asked the nurse to repeat it again, more slowly, and I wrote it down together with the translation.

Now, I think it must be admitted that there is more in this rhyme to commend it to the public than there is in "Jack and Jill." If when that remarkable young couple went for the pail of water, Master Jack had carried it himself, he would have been entitled to some credit for gallantry, or if in cracking his crown he had fallen so as to prevent Miss Jill from "tumbling," or even in such a way as to break her fall and make it easier for her, there would have been some reason for the popularity of such a record. As it is, there is no way to account for it except the fact that it is simple and rhythmic and children like it. This rhyme, however, in the original, is equal to "Jack and Jill" in rhythm and rhyme, has as good a story, exhibits a more scientific tumble, with a less tragic result, and contains as good a moral as that found in "Jack Sprat."

It is as popular all over North China as "Jack and Jill" is throughout Great Britain and America. Ask any Chinese child if he knows the "Little Mouse," and he reels it off to you as readily as an English-speaking child does "Jack and Jill." Does he like it? It is a part of his life. Repeat it to him, giving one word incorrectly, and he will resent it as strenuously as your little boy or girl would if you said,

Jack and Jill Went DOWN the hill

Part 2

Suppose you repeat some familiar rhyme to a child differently from the way he learned it and see what the result will be.

Having obtained this rhyme, I asked Mrs. Yin if she knew any more. She smiled and said she knew "lots of them." I induced her to tell them to me, promising her five hundred cash (about three cents) for every rhyme she could give me, good, bad, or indifferent, for I wanted to secure all kinds. And I did. Before I was through I had rhymes which ranged from the two extremes of the keenest parental affection to those of unrefined filthiness. The latter class however came not from the nurses but from the children themselves.

When I had finished with her I had a dozen or more. I soon learned these so that I could repeat them in the original, which gave me an entering wedge to the heart of every man, woman or child I met.

One day, as I rode through a broom-corn field on the back of a little donkey, my feet almost dragging on the ground, I was repeating some of these rhymes, when the driver running at my side said:

"Ha, you know those children's songs, do you?"

"Yes do you know any?"

"Lots of them," he answered.

"Lots of them" is a favorite expression with the Chinese.

"Tell me some."

"Did you ever hear this one?"

"Fire-fly, fire-fly, Come from the hill, Your father and mother Are waiting here still. They've brought you some sugar, Some candy, and meat, For baby to eat."

I at once dismounted and wrote it down, and promised him five hundred cash apiece for every new one he could give me. In this way, going to and from the city, in conversation with old nurses or servants, personal friends, teachers, parents or children, or foreign children who had been born in China and had learned rhymes from their nurses, I continued to gather them during the entire vacation, and when autumn came I had more than fifty of the most common and consequently the best rhymes known in and about Peking.

A few months after I returned to the city a circular was sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal--not metrical--translation and had issued them in book form without expurgation.

Others learned of my collection, and rhymes began to come to me from all parts of the empire. Dr. Arthur H. Smith, the well-known author of "Chinese Characteristics" gave me a collection of more than three hundred made in Shantung, among which were rhymes similar to those we had found in Peking. Still later I received other versions of these same rhymes from my little friend, Miss Chalfant, collected in a different part of Shantung from that occupied by Dr. Smith. I then had no fewer than five versions of

"This little pig went to market,"

each having some local coloring not found in the other, proving that the fingers and toes furnish children with the same entertainment in the Orient as in the Occident, and that the rhyme is widely known throughout China.

These nursery rhymes have never been printed in the Chinese language, but like our own Mother Goose before the year 1719, if we may credit the Boston story, they are carried in the minds and hearts of the children. Here arose the first difficulty we experienced in collecting rhymes--the matter of getting them complete. Few are able to repeat the whole of the

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