Children of China

by C. Campbell Brown

“Not Wanted is her name,” said the woman quickly, before the foreigner could finish the sentence.

It would be sad indeed to know one was not wanted, but it would be harder still to be reminded of it every time one was called by one’s own name. How would an English girl like to be so treated? “Not Wanted, come and have your hair brushed.” “Not Wanted, where are you?” “Not Wanted, come and play with your little brother,” and so forth. When a baby girl’s fortune, as told by the fortune-tellers, is not a lucky one, she may perhaps be handed over to Buddhist nuns, who will give her rice, potatoes and vegetables, but no fish or meat or eggs. The little one, if she lives to grow up, will serve in the nunnery and help with the worship offered to the idols. When old enough to become a nun she will have her head shaved, till it looks as round as a bullet, and wear tight black trousers, a short blue coat and a close-fitting cap of black cloth; and she will learn to do the fine embroideries, most of which are the work of Buddhist nuns.

Sometimes, when the fortune-teller says a little girl will bring bad luck to her own family, she is given to another household, where she will be brought up to be the wife of one of the sons, when he is old enough to marry. This often happens, but it is not a good plan and leads to unhappiness, as you will hear later on.

The everyday dress of Chinese girls is simple enough. When they first begin to walk they are odd little bundles of clothes, topped by a little jacket and a cloth cap, which covers their head and ears and neck, leaving the face open. When they grow older they wear jackets of cotton,—blue stamped with white flowers is a favourite pattern,—loose coloured trousers and tiny embroidered shoes. They wear ear-rings, silver bangles on their ankles, and sometimes a ring on one finger. When they are engaged to be married, they wear a bangle on one arm. Their hair, which has been worn in a plait behind, is, when they are old enough to be married, put up in a neat coil at the back of the head, and pretty pins and flowers are stuck into it. It is a great day in a girl’s life when her hair is done up in this way.

The first great trial which a Chinese girl has to meet is when she has her feet bound. Her toes are pulled towards the heel, by winding a strip of cotton cloth round them and drawing it tight. Tiny girls of six or seven sometimes have to bear the pain of having their poor little feet pinched together in this way, though eight or nine is the more common age to begin. It must be extremely painful to have the bones twisted and the flesh crushed, until it decays and dries; but when the pain is over, and a girl has ‘golden lilies,’ only two or three inches long, she is very proud of them, and people praise the child’s mother for all the trouble she has taken to make her daughter look so beautiful! So strong is the desire to be admired, that often girls beg to have their feet bound, in spite of all the pain they will have to bear.

Foot-binding, being foreign to Manchu customs, is not allowed in the Palace. Some years ago, the Empress Dowager herself issued an edict to the people saying: “Not to bind is better.” Children brought up in God-fearing homes seldom or never have to suffer the torture of being thus lamed for life. And now, in many parts of China, fathers and mothers, who do not wish their little girls to be crippled, have joined themselves into what is called ‘The Natural Foot Society.’ Let us hope that before long there will be no more foot-binding in China.

Girls brought up in wealthy homes are seldom seen out of doors, but poorer children, at a very early age, have to do something to help to earn their living. They gather firing; they nurse the baby; they cook and sew; they learn to scrape the soot from the bottom of the family rice pot with a hoe; and, in some places, they very early begin to carry loads, slung from a pole on their shoulders. Some sit beside their mothers and help to make paper money to be offered to idols. Some paste rags on a board, one on the top of the other, to be afterwards made into soles for shoes; or they weave coloured tape, or twist fibre into rough string. In some parts of China they make embroidery, working beautiful birds and flowers with their clever fingers. All Chinese girls learn to embroider and make up their own shoes and the embroidered bands which they wear round their distorted ankles. Sometimes they feed silk-worms with mulberry leaves, and afterwards wind the threads off the cocoons which the worms have spun. When a little older some girls may be seen making silver ornaments for women’s hair-pins, but this is work usually done by men and boys; sometimes poor girls, while they are quite young, sell cakes and sweets in the streets, to help their parents; often they spin cotton and weave it into cloth, to make clothes for all the family.

With the exception of a very few daughters of scholars, who were taught to read and write by their fathers, girls used never to be troubled with learning. In spite of this, there are books giving the names of wise and learned women, some of whom, especially in the time of the T’ang Dynasty, wrote famous poems. This shows that ages ago women in China were educated, but as a rule in later days they were left untaught, to learn by slow degrees the ‘three dependencies of woman,’ “who,” as the Chinese say, “depends upon her father when she is young, on her husband when she is older, and upon her son when she is very old.” The story is told of a girl, who used to sing as she toiled at her daily tasks: “Oh, the tea-cup, the tea-cup, the beautiful, beautiful tea-cup”—that was all the song she knew! When Christianity comes, it brings new hope and new songs, and teaches girls and boys alike to know of God and Heaven and a life away beyond the narrow courts of the houses in which the earthly lives of so many Chinese girls are shut up.

As we have seen already, a change has come over China. At the beginning of 1909 there were said to be thirty-seven girls’ schools in Canton alone, one of which had over three hundred pupils, and every year adds to the number of such schools, all over the land. Christian girls teach in these schools. Not long ago a girl refused to become teacher in a Government school because she would not be allowed to read the Bible with the scholars there. Twice she said she would not go, although offered more money each time. At last the authorities said: “We must have you in our school; you may do what you like; you may teach the Bible—only you must come.” Some Christian girls, after leaving school, study in the women’s hospitals and become nurses and doctors. At first they help the missionary lady doctors, and afterwards, in some cases, they earn their living by going out to care for sick women and children. Thus Christianity has opened up a new way by which women may support themselves in China.

When they are tiny little children girls are often engaged to be married and go to live in their future husbands’ homes. They are married, too, when very young. Sometimes a little girl is told only a short time before that she is to be sent away in a great red chair and become somebody’s wife in another home. Poor little thing, she is often very frightened and unwilling to go.