{"id":413,"date":"2012-06-12T08:48:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T08:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/?p=413"},"modified":"2012-06-12T09:00:07","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T09:00:07","slug":"canton-1836","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/2012\/06\/canton-1836\/","title":{"rendered":"Canton, 1836"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar<\/em><\/p>\n

John Dewey, arriving in Canton after a long stay in North China, noted with some surprise the cultural contrast and a temperamental similarity to the Latin peoples.<\/em>
\n\u2014 Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement<\/em><\/p>\n

The esplanade is the most exotic region
\nin the city. You can find there strange peoples:
\nDutch, English, French, black Indiamen, Manilamen,
\neven Italians . . . though of course they are all just fan kuei<\/em>.
\nSome Cantonese come here just to watch the foreigners.<\/p>\n

It looks as if all the trees in Guangdong
\nwere hacked down to make these ramshackle stands
\nfrom which small, singularly ambitious men
\nhawk silks, and soy, and sweet cakes, soup and meat
\nand offers, dark and splendid, constantly circulating
\nin their yells, but only at the white men, in their pidgin<\/em>.
\nNobody from Canton<\/em> would want to bring
\na nonsensical dead<\/em> chicken home to eat.<\/p>\n

Pidgin<\/em>: business. Pidginess<\/em>. This city is full
\nof pidgin: war-pidgin<\/em>, lof-pidgin<\/em> (of countless girls),
\njoss-pidgin<\/em> (for joss<\/em> is deus, their foreign God);
\nchin-chin<\/em> when you gather in ten and talk,
\nand everyone wants to be your numba one<\/em>
\n olo flen<\/em>, when the goodee chop<\/em> come.<\/p>\n

Fortunes! Prophecies? They cost you only silver,
\nif you go on that way, yes, just down this aisle.
\nPast the Taoist quacks and the Buddhist priests,
\nand a proud catcher of rats, his victims strung
\nto bamboo poles, dangling massive vermin,
\nwarrior crickets, smiling maids with bright silks
\ntying their hair back \u2014 Portugese-styled working girls \u2014
\ntinkers meddling with the delicate guts of locks,
\ncages of birds, for admiration or the table,
\nand drab old wrinkly hens \u2014 widows \u2014 with needles
\nready to darn your every little tear.<\/p>\n

Everything in Canton seems to be for sale.<\/p>\n

In some of the shops, you can find things
\nthat even smell like another country:
\nstrange pictures sketched too full, too colorful,
\nnot the twig-and-branch-lined work of local artists,
\nframed in wood. Battle scenes filled with white men’s
\nblood, surprisingly crimson as any Han\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The foreigners puzzle, marvel constantly
\nat quotidian things, ceaselessly amazing:
\na dead baby girl abandoned in the street —
\nnearby two rag-clothed girls hand in hand,
\nclutching wooden begging bowls, giggle together,
\nwalk with white-hazed, sightless eyes that defy
\nthe city to harm them, their laughter itself a ward;
\nin the undergrowth of their filthy scalps, hidden
\nlice engage in secret, gentle crucial maneuvers,
\nas if it were they who were the city\u2019s linguists,
\nbridging the gap between locals and the outsiders,
\ndelivering secret their messages quietly,
\nlike opium-smugglers moving through the night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar John Dewey, arriving in Canton after a long stay in North China, noted with some surprise the cultural contrast and a temperamental similarity to the Latin peoples. \u2014 Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement The esplanade is the most exotic region in the city. You can find there strange peoples: Dutch, English, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems-from-taiping"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xIep-6F","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":419,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}