Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling, and Diplomacy on the South China Coast

8: Five American Women’s Perceptions of China 1829–1941

Chapter 8 Five American Women’s Perceptions of China 1829–1941 “A Yard-stick of Our Own Construction” Susan E. Schopp We are inclined to measure this people by a yard-stick of our own construction, the model of which is formed in ourselves. They are right or wrong, wise or unwise, according as they copy or depart from the fashion which we have arbitrarily set up, the ideals formed within the essentially narrow limits of our personal surroundings.1 It has been observed that an individual’s perceptions of another culture are profoundly influenced by the cultural values they bring with them. The greater the differences between the two cultures, the more susceptible the observer is to misinterpretation and/or pejorative assessment. This study explores five American women’s perceptions of China as revealed in their diaries, correspondence, and other writings, and how their perceptions influenced the outcome of their experiences living in China. The five represent a range of eras, backgrounds , and responses to cultural differences. Twenty-year-old Harriett Low arrived in Macao in 1829, confident in the values instilled by her close family and her upbringing in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. Her four years in Macao exposed her to a wealthy colonial lifestyle but brought about little change in her ethnocentric outlook. She left Macao permanently in 1833. Rebecca Chase Kinsman came to Macao a decade later, in 1843. While espousing many of the ethnocentric views prevalent among Americans of the era, she displayed both a greater curiosity about China and a greater open-mindedness toward cultural differences than did Harriett Low. Her perceptions broadened over the course of her four years in Macao but her experience was overshadowed by the deaths during that same period of her daughter and her husband. Sarah Pike Conger arrived in Beijing in 1898 as the wife of the United States’ Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to 126 Susan E. Schopp China. The values and beliefs she brought with her from her birth culture were tempered by previous experience overseas, and she consciously sought to broaden her cultural horizons. Her husband’s position enabled her to meet Chinese of all social levels, including the imperial family and members of the court. The sole woman in this study to grow up in China, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck considered herself simultaneously an insider and outsider in both Chinese and American cultures. She held strong views regarding Western ignorance of, and apathy toward, China, and consciously retained the influence of her Chinese upbringing throughout her life. Ruth V. Hemenway, M.D., arrived in China in 1924 as a medical missionary with the goal of providing services in regions lacking medical care. Her ambivalence toward Christianity and the activities of religious missionaries did not extend to Western medicine; she was unwavering in her conviction of its superiority to traditional Chinese remedies. She embraced the acquisition of cultural knowledge of China as an aid to better serving her patients. Harriett Low (1809–1877) Harriett Low2 was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1809, twentyfive years after the United States entered the China trade. She was the second eldest child in a staunch Unitarian family and was accustomed to shouldering considerable responsibility within the home. In 1829, at the age of twenty, she sailed to Macao at the invitation of her uncle, William Henry Low (1795–1834), who hoped to make his fortune with the American firm of Russell & Company. He invited Harriett as a companion to his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Abigail Knapp Low (1800–?), who would remain in Macao while he resided at the American factory in Canton. For Ms. Low, this was a rare opportunity to live in a community that was vastly different from Salem, and of which she had been hearing since childhood; by the year of her departure for Asia, merchants of Salem had been trading at Canton for more than four decades. Much of the value of Harriett’s diary, which provides a chatty and lively view of the voyage to China as well as of life in the Englishspeaking community of Macao, lies in the candid nature of its entries, which were intended solely for the eyes of her older sister. The entries show a frankness in thought of which the author herself was well Five American Women’s Perceptions of China 1829–1941 127 aware: “I often dread what I may have written myself, for...