concept
"Manzy" -- period term for Chinese laborers
manzy
also: манзы, манз, манзу, Chinamen
Renders the Russian "манзы" (manzy), a period ethnic term used in the Russian Far East for Chinese (and sometimes broader East Asian) migrant laborers, current in the colonial military vocabulary of the 1880s and carrying dismissive, othering force even where not the crudest available slur. Gusev uses it without any sense of wrongdoing both in his flat account of beating four such laborers who had come into his yard ("I got bored, so I gave it to them") and in his later statement that he would not risk his life to save a drowning "German or manzu," only a baptized Russian. Preserved in translation as "manzy"/"Chinamen" per Hermitsh Press policy: the term and the casual violence and prejudice it accompanies are Chekhov's unflinching representation of a semi-literate soldier's period attitudes, not the narrator's endorsement of them, and softening either would falsify the story's clear-eyed realism.
Reading notes
- Gusev §38 Four Chinamen came into our yard
Gusev recounts, without any sense of wrongdoing, beating four "манзы" (manzy) -- a period Russian Far Eastern term for Chinese migrant laborers -- because he "got bored." Chekhov gives no indication that Gusev is an unreliable or exceptional narrator here: the casual violence and the ethnic framing are presented flatly, as unremarkable facts of Gusev's service, which is the story's own quietly damning point about what such service has made ordinary to him. Preserved in translation as "manzy"/"Chinamen" per Hermitsh Press policy rather than softened; see for the term's fuller history in this corpus.
- Gusev §41 the four Chinamen
Pavel Ivanych's one direct follow-up question about the beating ("And why did you beat them?") receives only Gusev's flat, unelaborated answer, "Just so. They came into the yard, and I beat them" -- the exchange ends there, without further judgment from either character or the narrator.
- Gusev §56 it must be a Chinaman singing
The first of several glimpses of Chinese people around the ship's anchorage (see also loc 66, 68-69), here heard rather than seen; Gusev's incurious, faintly contemptuous reaction to the fat Chinaman eating rice at loc 69 ("could use a smack on the neck") echoes, in miniature, the same casual hostility as his account of the beating at loc 38.
- Gusev §118 if, say, a baptized man fell into the water now -- I'd jump in after him too. I wouldn't save a German or a Chinaman, but for a baptized man I'd go in
The story's clearest single statement of Gusev's inherited, unexamined hierarchy of who counts as worth risking his own life for: not a matter of personal grievance (he shows no animus toward any German or Chinese person by name) but of an unreflective sorting by nationality and Orthodox baptism, delivered in the same flat, matter-of-fact register as his account of beating the four manzy at loc 38. Chekhov gives Gusev no self-awareness about the statement and the narration offers no comment on it either way -- the discomfort is left entirely to the reader, in keeping with the story's undecorated realism. Preserved in translation as written per Hermitsh Press policy.