The Chinese Girl Barred From the Y.W.C.A. Pool

Prejudice reigns even under the roof of Christianity, which teaches us, among other things, to love our enemy. In some of the Y.M.C.A.s Orientals are carefully and painstakingly segregated from the whites, and the segregation, as I was told, is suggested, if not demanded, by the taxpayers who have in one way or another contributed to the maintenance of such organizations and who do not like to have their worthy sons mix with the unworthy Orientals. A Chinese girl whose father has always made very liberal donations to churches was once denied admittance to a Y.W.C.A. swimming pool. With such an attitude toward the Chinese, can Americans ever understand China and the Chinese?

Prejudice arises from dissimilarity—social, physical, or psychological. In every respect the Chinese are very different from the Americans. Americans are noisier, more restless, and exaggerating. The United States is a country of superlatives: Americans consider everything the very best in the world or the most wonderful one can ever see. And when there comes something really good and wonderful, they run out of adequate adjectives. The Chinese people are more quiet, reserved, modest, and humble, much due to the teaching of Confucius. But those differences play only a minor part; the thing that creates prejudice is physical dissimilarity. Black hair, yellow skin, eyes with a peculiar slant, noses without a prominent bridge—these create prejudice.

Has anyone ever heard that the Humane Society launches an investigation about a fish being mistreated? But the Humane Society never hesitates to charge you with mistreating animals when you do the same thing to a dog or a cat. Why is it? A dog resembles a human being more than a fish can ever hope to. A dog can bark, swim, lick your hands, and do tricks. But a fish is dumb. So not only in our human relations do we find prejudice; even our attitude toward animals is often prejudiced.

It is very hard for Americans to understand China because they seldom have the chance to know the real China. They depend on their newspapers, their lecturers, their professors, and various publications either on travel in China or on Oriental affairs. But they see only a distorted picture. China is much like a kaleidoscope which, if given just a little shaking, would present an entirely different view. Journalists, for some reason best known to themselves, are often reluctant to write about a true fact; they twist it so as to suit their biased views, to suit their readers whose minds have, since childhood, long been poisoned.

Missionaries have gone to China but few understand her. Those tin-chapel spellbinders with hell-fire in one hand and a commercial handbook in the other have become a menace to the Chinese people. Without questioning their motives, which are often doubtful, one finds in their method much room for adverse criticism. They try either to impose something on, or hand something down to, the Chinese; their footsteps are often followed by unequal treaties, demands, claims. In the spirit of goodwill in whose name they are commissioned, they have failed. And, after all, what Americans call Christianity is but a conglomerate of various and irreconcilable elements, running all the way from Holy Rollers to Unitarian Brahmins, from Aimee McPherson to Bishop Manning. If China needs salvation, perhaps this country, with her Leopold and Loeb case, her Hickman case, her Bassett case, and a dozen of other crimes which are almost of daily occurrence, needs it worse.