All Chinese may be said to have strongly developed an attachment to the family in which they were born, and most of them have also strong family affections running in specific and limited channels, and by no means evenly distributed. They share with the rest of the race a desire to make their families perpetual, and when they fail, as they so frequently do, their failure is the more conspicuous by reason of their inalienable attachment to their natal soil. In order more deeply to explore some of the causes of their want of success, it will be necessary to go farther below the surface of the Chinese family.
XXVI
INSTABILITY FROM FAMILY DISUNITY
To give a correct diagnosis of the inner causes of the disunity of Chinese social and family life without at the same time grossly misrepresenting both the Chinese character and society, is a hopeless undertaking. Merely to note even the most authentic and typical facts is to convey an impression which is incorrect because it is not proportional. Every family contains within itself the seeds of disunity, and if they do not in all cases produce their appropriate harvest, it is because they are mercifully blighted or counteracted in their development.
Of each Chinese family a full half has had or will have interests largely at variance with those of the other half. Every Chinese wife came by no choice of her own from some other family, being suddenly and irrevocably grafted as a wild stock upon the family tree of her husband. As we have already seen, she is not received with enthusiasm, much less with affection (the very idea of which in such a connection never enters any Chinese mind) but at best with mild toleration, and not infrequently with aggressive criticism. She forms a link with another set of interests from which by disruption she has indeed been dissevered, but where her attachments are centred. The affection of most Chinese children for their mothers is very real and lasting. The death of the mother is for a daughter especially the greatest of earthly calamities. Filial piety in its cruder and more practical aspects constantly leads the married daughter to wish to transfer some of the property of the husband’s family to that of her mother. The temptation to do so is often irresistible, and sometimes continues through life, albeit with many dramatic checks. The Chinese speak of this habit in metaphorical phrase as “a leak at the bottom” which is proverbially hard to stop. It is a current saying that of ten married daughters, nine pilfer more or less. It is not uncommon to hear this practice assigned as one of the means by which a family is reduced to the verge of poverty. The writer once had occasion to acquaint a Chinese friend with the fact that a connection by marriage had recently died. He replied thoughtfully: “It is well she is dead; she was gluttonous, she was lazy; and beside she stole things for her mother!”
Visits to the mother’s family constitute by far the most substantial joys in the life of a young Chinese married woman. It is her constant effort to make them as numerous as possible, and it is the desire of her husband’s family to restrict them, since her services are thus partially lost to them. To prevent them from being wholly so, she is frequently loaded down with twice as much sewing as she could do in the time allowed, and sent off with a troop of accompanying children, if she has reached so advanced a stage as to be a mother of a flock. An invasion of this kind is often regarded with open dissatisfaction by her father and brothers, and what could be more natural than her desire to appease them by the spoils which she may have wrested from the Philistines?
After the death of her mother the situation has materially altered. The sisters-in-law have now no restraint on their criticisms upon her appearance with her hungry brood, and her whole stay may not improbably be a struggle to maintain what she regards as her rights. It is one of the many pathetic sights with which Chinese society abounds to witness the effort to seem to keep alive a spark of fire in coals which have visibly gone out. Not to have any “mother’s family” to which to go is regarded as the depth of misery for a married woman, since it is a proclamation that she no longer has any one to stand up for her in case she should be abused. To discontinue altogether the visits thither is to some extent a loss of face, which every Chinese feels keenly. We have known an old woman left absolutely alone in the world, obliged at the age of ninety-four to gather her own fuel and do whatever she wanted done for herself, except draw water, which was furnished her by a distant relative as an act of special grace. Her poverty was so abject that she was driven to mix fine earth with the little meal that sufficed for her scanty food, that it might last the longer. Yet this poor creature would sometimes be missed from her place, when it was reported that she had gone on a visit to her “mother’s family” consisting of the great-grandchildren of those whom she had known in youth!
By the time a married woman had reached middle life her interest in her original home may have greatly weakened. There are now young marriageable girls of her own growing up, each of whom in turn repeats the experience of her mother. To their fathers and also to their brothers these girls are at once a problem and a menace. Could the birth-rate of girls be determined by ballot of all the males of full age, it is probable that in a few generations the Chinese race would become extinct. The expression “commodity-on-which-money-has-been-lost,” is a common periphrasis for a girl. They no sooner learn a little sewing, cooking, etc., than they are exported, and it is proverbial that water spilled on the ground is a synonym for a daughter. “Darnel will not do for the grain-tax, and daughters will never support their mothers.” These modes of speech represent modes of thought, and the prevailing thought, although happily not the only thought of the Chinese people.