Interview with Edward C. Rosenow, Jr.

July 27, 1993

Edward C. Rosenow, Jr. - ER
Charles A. Donnell - CD

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CD:Now, Esther was your first wife, and you met her there in China?

ER:In Peking.

CD:And what was her role in China?

ER:She was an Oberlin representative. Now, Oberlin ran a whole school, not a missionary school. They had [a] mission with it, but Oberlin itself ran the school. It was really owned by Oberlin College. Oberlin had always had a very distinguished career in missionary fields. They had a Divinity School in Oberlin, also the music school, and then they got this thing started before Carleton did. I think they’d been going for several years. But my wife went to Oberlin, and she was the first woman representative. One of her classmates was Addie Hemingway, who was Dr. Hemingway, the missionary in Taiku, China, that’s about fifty miles apart [from Fenchow]. So Esther and Addie went as a pair, and they had a couple other people. They always had about five or six representatives different places, and they’d go up in India and Kuala Lumpur, different places. They’d been doing this for a long time.

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Anyhow, let me go back to meeting in Peking. Esther, this is my wife-to-be, I met her in Peking at a missionary’s doctor’s home. I can’t think of the name, but anyhow, he was a wonderful guy. He was a missionary during the Boxer Rebellion, and any time people came visiting he’d have tea for them or something. We went over, and there were about five of us that had just arrived in China. One was from Grinnell, two from Oberlin, and two from Carleton. During the lunch, he recognized my father’s name and apparently they’d met through the years, and he says, “Rosenow, have you done it yet?” I says, “Done what?” “How long have you been here?” “You mean in Peking?” “Well, yeah, Peking, China.” “Well, I got to China two days ago, and I’ve been in Peking here since last night.” “And you haven’t even started it?” I says, “What am I supposed to start?” He says, “I made the same mistake you did. If you don’t write the book within the first two weeks, you will never know enough about China to write a book.” [laughter] And he says, “I never wrote a book on China,” and he says, “and I see people come over here for two weeks, and they go home and get bestsellers.”
Anyhow, that was the start. So we took rickshaws and went out to the Empress Dowager’s Summer Palace and we rented rowboats to go around and see the lakes, and I generously offered to row. Sandburg, the guy from Carleton with me, I didn’t like him very much already, and I was going to have to be with him two years, and I thought . . . He quit after one year. He didn’t like it. So I rowed the boat, and he kept telling me how to row it. I finally stood up in the boat, out in the middle of the lake, and I says, “Sandburg, if you know so darn well how to row this boat, you come up and row it, and I’ll sit back there and tell you what to do.” Esther was in the boat with us. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t actually have any contact with her until the following summer, almost. I had always thought for fifteen years that this was the start of a wonderful courtship and that she finally forgave me for this.
Well, after she died, her best girlhood friend in Shugren Falls, Ohio, sent me xeroxed copies of all the letters that Esther had written to her from China, 1928. Well, I looked through those letters one night, sitting on that couch, and not one word about me. She did mention another guy from Yale. She liked him, but she says, “He writes wonderful letters, but when I’m with him nothing much happens.” When I finally finished, “My God! I never saw her!” I was living over in Fenchow and she was in Taiku and we were busy hunting and doing other things, and it wasn’t till the second summer, where she went and stayed with the Duttons, they always up into the mountains, it was a cool place, sort of in an old mill, and I went with the Currans. And we saw a lot of each other, fell in love, knew we were going to get married. The second year was wonderful, but the first year, nothing at all.

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CD:As a Westerner, were you an oddity there?

ER:Well, you know, sure. Yeah, sure. If you ever stopped the car anywhere and got out . . . Bakken, the guy that came the second year, he was a big guy, about my same height, but he had a big booming voice like this, and the kids would all just come around. If you’d stop a car to get anything, there’d be a hundred people around in no time at all. And they were very interested. They’d do things like, “Ah, so, how old are you? Have you eaten?” “No.” “Hasn’t eaten yet,” then they’d pass the word, “he’s not married, he’s just by himself.” This was what really drove Sandburg nuts. He couldn’t stand having people that close to him. I thought it was wonderful. You could have fun, and the Chinese have a very playful part of them. They’re sort of . . . when we know them, they’re pretty hard to communicate with, but once you get to know them, they like to do play on words, and they like to kind of do those things.
For example, one day I noticed--and I took Chinese lessons all the time I was teaching--but this morning all my students would come up, and they’d say, “Gentin homan, Ronata.” My Chinese name was Rotana, but they called it “Ronata,” and I couldn’t figure that out. And then they’d laugh. I asked my teacher, “What does Ronata mean?” He says, “Meathead.” [laughter] So the next day, I says, “What’s the worst thing you can tell a student? Meathead’s pretty good, but what’s the worst?” “Muta.” “What’s that?” “Woodhead, blockhead.” So next day when the little kid says, “Ah, gentin homan, Ronata,” I says, “Oh, ho, Muta.” They were like this. They never did the joke again. So they have a lot of this sort of fun they have. You have to play around a little bit, but that’s kind of good.

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There’s another very interesting thing about teaching in China. Everything goes through the middleman. Now I had a very mischievous little boy in one of my classes. I couldn’t get him to do anything right, he was always playing around. So one of the older teachers tells me what to do about this. Get the smartest boy in the class, the one that’s very popular and a very good guy, and you say, “I’d like to have you come over to my house for tea this afternoon. Could you do that?” Oh, yes. He’d be glad to. He’d come over and you’d have tea and you show him your things around, and he thinks that’s all fun, and just about the time he’s ready to take the door and go home, you say, “By the way, I notice that Inow, he doesn’t pay much attention to what I’m doing. Sometimes he’s sort of a bad boy.” Oh, yes, that’s bad. He shouldn’t do those things, that’s terrible. That’s awful. Then you say, “Well, it’s nice to have seen you.” That’s all. No more. That guy doesn’t . . . what he does then is goes to that kid and he says, “You know, I didn’t talk to him about this, but I have an idea that he thinks that just you’re not doing it very right and you’d better do it right.” So it’s always done through a . . . there’s no loss of face that way. That’s a very interesting thing. You get to do that.
And you bargain for things, always. Not now so much, they’ve fixed prices pretty much, but when we ever wanted something, you’d always say Jug-a do-sha cheng, “how much is this thing?” And they’d say san pei, susher. “Oh, you mean twenty dollars? Too much.” So you’d bargain on everything, and finally you establish a price, and then you say, “How may I pay you?” “Oh, pay me at the New Year.” And that’s credit. And at the New Year, it’s not . . . you’re the merchant. It’s not your duty to come after me for my payment. It’s up to me to find you and give you the money, because I would lose an awful lot of face if I didn’t pay my bill. And they’ll carry you for a second year. And if you don’t do it then, you’d better just disappear. Cut your head off, or something, they just don’t want you any more. But that credit system is something hard to figure out.

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