Wednesday, October 15, 2008

A 1900 chinese child description of Westerns

From the book: "Moment in Beijing" authored by Lin Yutang in 19 :
"
Oceanic people did everything upside down. Their writing went from left to right, instead of from right to left, and horizontally in "crab-walk" fashion instead of from top to bottom. They put their personal names before their family names, and strangest of all, in writing addresses they began with the house number, then the street, then the city, then the province, as if purposely to be contrary. They had to begin from the bottom if they wanted to know to which city a letter was going. And their women had large feet, a foot long, and talked in a loud voice, and had curly hair and blue eyes and went about arm in arm with men when walking.
All in all, the foreigners were the strangest imaginable sort of people.
"

No comments: