CHAPTER XX
CHINESE SHOES
The Chinese women have enormous feet. They are reputed “small footed,” but our reputations often wrong us. No Chinese woman has a small foot. But even a Chinese woman’s huge great toe looks small when in its solitary deformity it masquerades as an entire foot.
There is nothing so characteristic of the Chinese as thoroughness. The Chinese are the least beautiful of all civilised peoples; but when they undertake to be beautiful—even in the mere matter of their women’s feet—they do it thoroughly. They don’t put a heel in the middle of a shoe to make a foot look small, nor do they point absurdly an empty satin toe. No! They bend four of the human toes back and leave the one big toe to do apparent duty as a lovely, diminutive foot.
To us the small-footed women of China appear twofold martyrs. We think them martyrs because they suffer when the foot deformity is inflicted upon them. We think them martyrs because their deformed feet are useless, and disable them from taking exercise.
We regard exercise as a blessed privilege. The Chinese regard exercise as a dire necessity.
We, in the West, do most things because we like; they, in the East, do most things because they must.
That makes the great racial difference. It is not often justly appreciated. Ignoring it causes us to do the people of Asia innumerable injustices.
Chinese women know as little of tennis, of golf, of riding to hounds—even of dancing in its fast and furious Western sense—as we know of fish-eye soup and of birds’-nest stew. And they care less.
The majority of Chinese women whose feet are bound endure temporary pain, but they suffer no permanent deprivation. To take voluntary and unnecessary exercise—to take it as a pleasure—could never occur to a well-balanced Chinese mind. The Nirvâna of which the Brahmins dream is the idleness which the most favoured-by-fortune of the Chinese women realise.
Milton might have written of the small-footed women of China (had he known them—had he felt an interest in them), ‘They also serve who only sit and wait.’ They serve indeed a great racial purpose of repose as they sit and wait for an Occidental enlightenment for which they have no desire.
The Chinese are the hardest working, the most indefatigable race on earth. Consequently the grandes dames of old Cathay do even less material work than the leisured women of any other country.
Nature is the great giver of recompense; Nature saves us from universal insanity; Nature whispers in the ear of the tired, overworked Chinaman, “Rest is the superlative form of happiness. To be idle is to be in paradise.”
The Chinese bind the feet of their women not out of cruelty; they do it partly out of a deformed, over-civilised, national vanity, but still more out of a tender kindness. The woman whose feet are “small” can perform no great physical labour; she cannot trudge beneath the burning sun to tend the young rice plants; nor can she pole the heavy sampans up and down the crowded Chinese rivers.
The Chinese do not incapacitate their chosen women from enjoyment but from hardship. It is often said and printed in the West that the feet of the women of the Chinese nobility are bound, and that the feet of the peasant women are left unbound. It has been said that you can learn a Chinese woman’s rank from her feet. I have even seen it recorded in good, honest-looking type that the feet of all the Chinese women are bound.
Excepting only the descendants of Confucius there is no Chinese nobility, save the momentary nobility of personal merit. A mandarin who is “noble” because he is able is most probably rich; being rich he can afford to bind the feet of his daughter. There is no necessity for her to work. He can go further; he can secure her in perpetual idleness. Her feet are bound, and her bowl of rice is placed before her; she need never earn it by the sweat of her pretty little yellow brow.
How the preposterous notion that the feet of all Chinese women are bound ever entered the most stupid Occidental head is inconceivable. I suppose that it occurred on the same intellectual principle that impelled a San Francisco friend to say to me, “You need not tell me there’s any good in any of the Chinese, for I just know there ain’t. I know two Johns; they do my washing. They’re both thieves, they both lie, and they both gamble.”
In the poorer class (we can scarcely use the word peasant of a people by all of whom the highest nobility is attainable)—in the poorer class there is apt to be one small-footed girl in each family. If they can see their combined way to support her, the feet of the prettiest girl are bound. Don’t fancy that she resents it. She is delighted. She does only light work after that. She brings a better price in the vast Mongolian marriage market. Haply, she will, in future, be able to aid and recompense her devoted family. At the worst, they have the satisfaction of feeling that they have rescued one of their own flesh and blood from the seething, sweating struggle for Chinese existence.
Chinese shoemakers are supreme. They are an economy and a delight to every European woman who lives in Asia. Their work is swift, deft, and faultless! Their bills are charmingly little. In spite of the hard times I am beautifully shod to-day, thanks to a little yellow man who lives on Bentick Street in Calcutta. I forget his name, but I send him a very hearty chin-chin. Difficulties may arise with my landlord and my coal-merchant; but I am strong on my feet. I have a box full of lovely shoes and slippers; the most expensive pair cost me six rupees. As a rule I furnished the satin and paid my cobbler one rupee. I was with a friend yesterday, when she bought herself a pair of French boots. I saw her purse bleed gold, and my heart was full with kind thoughts of my Chinese shoemaker.
In nothing are the Chinese more thorough than in their stoicism. I only saw, well, one Chinese hospital; I never had the courage to go into another. In Hong-Kong a friend who was attached to the English Hospital took me through it and through the Tung Wah Hospital.
The English Hospital was a great cool place of succour, of comfort, and of alleviation. The Chinese Hospital was a house of horror. There was system, but I saw no comfort. The Chinese gentleman who accompanied me told me that the beds were bare boards because the patients were used to nothing else and would like nothing else. Why the insane ward was as it was he did not explain. Indeed I went into the insane “ward” alone; my two escorts waited at the door. There were several good and sufficient reasons for this.
In the pharmacy all seemed excellently ordered. We might, I believe, learn from the Chinese much of great medical value; their drugs, their instruments, and their therapeutics all deserve trained and competent study.
The Chinaman dreads the knife as he dreads nothing else; and yet of recent years China has made great strides in surgery. The Chinese pharmacopœia is, I fancy, exceptionally rich, and includes many potent, efficacious herbs of which we know nothing.
I ought, in justice, to say that the Tung Wah Hospital was clean. It was very clean,—but it was beyond words dreary. It was a cruel place. The sick and the sick-unto-death lay, I thought, absolutely without sympathy, certainly without creature comforts. But there, it is so easy for ignorance to be critical, so impossible for it to criticise justly. Possibly those poor creatures would have resented the sympathy and have refused the comforts. So, at least, I was told. I tried to be fair. But I went out of the handsome carving-decked waiting-room very troubled about the Tung Wah Hospital, and very sure that its insane ward was a disgrace to an island over which the English flag floated.
From the Tung Wah Hospital we went on and up, until we passed through the pretty lodge of the English Hospital. It was a huge house of mercy. And the pretty brown-eyed Sister who smiled me welcome to the first ward had English roses at her belt.
CHINESE MUSICIANS. Page 184.
The Chinese are heroically thorough in their struggle for existence. China has an enormous water population. I forget how many thousands or tens of thousands live in the sampans of Hong-Kong and Canton; but the number is gigantic. I made friends in Hong-Kong with a woman who was born on a sampan, who was married from a sampan to a sampan man, and who had, in the short sanctity of her husband’s sampan, been seven times a mother. She had never spent five consecutive hours out of a sampan. Her loves and hates, her distastes and her appetites, her fears and her ambitions, were all bounded by the primitive walls of a Hong-Kong sampan.
When you think of partly English Hong-Kong in all its regal beauty, when you think of wholly Mongolian Canton in all its super-Asiatic density, think of them with an outer scum—a scum of poverty, a scum of sampans. China, the prolific, has overflowed into the yellow Chinese sea, and it is greatly to the credit of the Chinese overflow that it has found life both palatable and practicable. I saw in China nothing more wonderful than the modus vivendi of the sampan people. They do all that men must do on board their crude, diminutive barks. Nevertheless, they keep the boats scrupulously clean and very much at the service of any European who will exchange a few sen for a long, soft float on the swelling Chinese sea.
Nature herself is thorough in China. When it rains on Hong-Kong, the island is drenched with a wet splendour that dwarfs into a mere mist all the rains that ever fell on Europe. The last time that we were in Hong-Kong it rained incessantly. Between the steamer and the hotel our boxes were thoroughly drenched. I was very cross when my poor trunks were opened, and my maid wept, probably because she foresaw damp, additional labour. We secured an extra room, and every effort was made to remove the stain of Anne Nevill’s black velvet from Pauline Deschappelle’s white bridal satin. But alas, the trailing stain of the Chinese rains was over them all, and I am still the chagrined possessor of sundry costly gowns that are not the colour they were, because they have been soaked by the unexaggeratable torrents of the Chinese storms. The rain came down, the rain came across, the rain seemed to come up from the seething earth.
My thickening manuscript cries to me, “Halt.” I have left unsaid almost all that I ought to have said of China, had my information and my capacity been less meagre. And in the sheerest gratitude I should have chronicled more that one feast on the Peak, and recorded how sweetly the Argyll and Sutherlanders played Annie Laurie, and how potent their uniforms looked against the vivid background of the green Chinese flora.
There are sentences, or rather might be sentences, I long to write—sentences unique with Slavic words and Tartar phraseology—sentences descriptive of the Russian seamen who ’rickshawed through Hong-Kong while the Tsarevitz was peeping at Canton.
The Russian men-of-war were too bulky to slip up the narrow Canton rivers. The Tsarevitz accepted the locomotion of a smaller boat, and the Russian sailors held in Hong-Kong high holiday.
From Hong-Kong we sent back to Australia about half of our artistic corps. We were, as we thought, soon going home to England. My husband wished our departing fellows God-speed and a glad return to their Antipodean homes. I tried to wring Jimmie MacAllister’s huge hand; and I wiped my eyes as the big ship carried him back to the land of the Southern Cross—carried him away from the green hills of Hong-Kong, where the red flowers of China flashed upon the gray walls of the English Barracks.
Of the amateurs who filled up our depleted ranks, I will say nothing, because nothing that I could say would be enough.
I believe that I am a wiser woman for having lived in China. Certainly I am a happier.
There is, I think, if I may say it again, no other civilised country that we misunderstand and misjudge as we do China. There is, I emphatically believe, no other nation so worthy, as are the Chinese, of our sympathy and respect.