Shadow Woman

The following excerpt is from Shadow Woman: The Extraordinary Career of Pauline Benton, by Grant Hayter-Menzies.

At least throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, walled Beijing was, as David Strand points out, one of the few Chinese cities that “looked so traditional and Chinese and at the same time harbored the essentials of modern and Western urban life.” It was a city at once a precise tool of feng shui design, meant to align the unseen energies of the earth to benefit the emperor and his subjects, and a place of disruption, fear, political and military jockeying for power, assassination, and greed.

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“The streets are marvelous,” stated Ellen LaMotte, another American admirer. “Those in the Legation Quarter are well paved, European, and stupid; but those in the Chinese and Tartar cities are full of excitement. A few are wide, but the majority are narrow, winding alleys, and all alike are packed and crowded with people and animals and vehicles of all kinds. Walking is a matter of shoving oneself through the throng, dodging under camels’ noses, avoiding wheelbarrows [used for human, animal and produce transport], bumping against donkeys, standing aside to let officials’ carriages go by.”

The Tartar Gate in Beijing. Camels carrying coal from the north were still a daily sight in the 1930s.

This was the Beijing that greeted Pauline in 1923, its chaos and colour as “interesting to hear as well as to see,” she wrote, “for its music is a strange, rhythmic intermingling of sounds.”

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Into one of her most popular shadow plays (adapted from Li Tuochen), which years later she performed at the White House, Pauline packed as many of her street experiences as a shadow stage could hold. “Across the screen in turn come the figures you would see and hear on the old Peking street,” she wrote when describing it in a 1944 article:

The flower vendor calling “Mei hua’rh, lai, mei hua’rh!” (Buy flowers, come, buy flowers!); the candy seller with his shop on his back; the scissors grinder who toots his slender horn, and the shopkeeper with his short-handled broom sweeping the street in front of his door. You see the barber, too, his equipment swinging from the ends of a long shoulder pole. He twangs a large iron, two pronged instrument by means of an iron stick to call his customers. You hear, then see, the two men carrying goods, who trot along to their tuneful “Hi! Hi!” And perhaps there will come one of those decorative two-wheeled carts pulled by a Mongolian pony and still used by some farmers; or a vendor selling pork dumplings or other hot foods from his wheelbarrow equipped with a little stove; or a lady in a rickshaw.

The sometimes comic altercations between rickshaws and pedestrians, camels and automobiles, the jugglers and fire eaters and other entertainers to be found on street corners, the salesmen of everything from candies to immortality elixirs, toys to dim sum, and the vast human drama occurring in the streets and alleys by day and by night impressed Pauline deeply. Compared to the chaos of the warlords and, later, the madness of the civil war that ravaged the entire fabric of China, this moving circus of “old Peking” was something to celebrate and remember. Through shadow theatre, this China was for Pauline “a beauty and romance of promise, courage, amazing achievement.”

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