The floors of all the rooms are of rough boards, with great cracks between them, sometimes covered with a rug but more often bare. The walls are composed of the same wide boards, with here and there an embroidered hanging or a scroll bearing the words of some honoured sage. The furniture of the reception-room consists of small tables alternating with straight-backed chairs, arranged with mathematical precision around the three sides of the room. Opposite the doorway is the seat of honour, or an opium-couch. Often the furniture is elaborately carved or inlaid with mother-of-pearl, but it looks formal and precise. The chairs, with their red embroidered cushions, are very uncomfortable for the Westerner, because of their straight, low backs and high, narrow seats, that make one long for a footstool. There are no buffets nor sideboards in the dining-rooms, and stools are used in place of chairs. The tables are square, seating eight, and neither tablecloths nor napkins are considered necessary adjuncts to dining.
The bedrooms are small, and filled wellnigh to overflowing by an enormous carved bed, with red embroidered curtains hanging from the heavy canopy and long silken tassels draping the four posts. The Chinese do not indulge in mattresses nor springs, sheets, nor pillow-cases. The pillows are small bolsters, and the bedclothing consists of a series of wadded “comfortables” made of silk or cotton. Their dislike of springs is very intense. A hospital for the Chinese was opened in one of the interior towns, and the doctors, wishing to do the very best they could to make their patients comfortable, bought, at great expense, foreign beds with springs. They found, to their disgust, that the patients, as soon as the nurse turned her back, insisted on placing the bedclothing upon the floor and lying there, instead of in the nice comfortable beds that had been provided for them. They claimed that the springs made them “seasick.” When Chinese ladies are calling upon a foreign woman, one of the chief ways to amuse them is to take them over the house and permit them to see the furnishings of the homes of the people from over the sea. They are always intensely interested in the beds and look at the springs from all sides, sitting on them and pressing them down with their hands, finally shaking their heads, as much as to say, “It is past all belief what these strange people will have in their houses.”
CHINESE WOMEN WARMING HANDS AND FEET WITH BRAZIERS.
To face p. [214].
The chief article of furniture in the kitchen is the stove, a huge affair made of brick. This stove has generally three holes, in which are set the iron cooking-pots, shaped like large washbowls and made of very thin metal, in order that the ingredients may cook with the smallest amount of heat necessary, as the question of fuel is a serious one in China. In the country around Shanghai, rice-straw and faggots are the main fuel, while on every hillside in the country one sees women and children cutting the dried grass and gathering every available thing that may be burned. Because of the lack of body in the fuel it keeps one person busy feeding the fire while another attends to the cooking.
The food served at a feast, and which the average foreigner sees, is quite different from that eaten every day. At a feast there are often twenty or thirty courses. Swallow’s-nest soup, shark-fins, pigeon eggs cooked with nuts, ducks prepared in many ways, fowl, fish, and innumerable sweets. Rice is served as the last course, while at the ordinary dinner it is the principal dish. It is to the Chinese what bread is to the European or potatoes to the Irish. The food is cooked in vegetable oil, made from beans or cabbages, or, for the richer class, from peanuts. The chief meat is pork, which is cut into little bits and cooked with a vegetable. Beef is not used by the average Chinese. The cow is a beast of burden, and none of her products are eaten. I have seen a great official, on being told that the ice-cream he was eating was made of milk, deposit upon his plate the contents of his mouth with more haste than grace. One receives the impression from pictures that the Chinese politely picks up a few grains of rice with his chopsticks and carries them slowly to his mouth. This is a picture of Occidental imagination rather than Oriental reality. He takes with his chopsticks some vegetables from the dishes in the centre of the table, to which all have access, and, after depositing the chosen morsel on the top of his rice, he lifts the bowl to his face and uses his chopsticks to shovel as much of the rice into the opening as its capacity will permit. The Chinese are supposed to be a slow and phlegmatic race, but if one were to judge by the rapidity with which a bowl of rice will disappear, one would easily give them a place among the most rapid and progressive races of the world.
Food used by the Chinese is very cheap. The Viceroy at Nanking, a man of unlimited wealth and power, told me that the food for himself did not cost more than twenty cents a day. The servants in the American Consulate had their food bought by the second cook, paying him five shillings each per month, which sum included food, cooking, and service. On board a foreign houseboat the captain is paid four shillings per day for the hire of six men, and they are fed by him out of this sum. It is made possible by the cheapness of the vegetables. I have seen him buy three bushels of a curly-leaved vegetable resembling spinach for twopence.
The lady of China takes no part in her husband’s business or social life. Much of the business in China among the official and rich class is transacted socially, and the dinners are generally given at a tea-house or restaurant, or on the pleasure-boats kept for that purpose. Even the very finest of these entertainment-places are very shabby affairs, from a Western standpoint. They are also extremely dirty. The floors are made of unmatched boards that have never seen the scrubbing-brush, and the guests throw their fish-bones, cigarette-ends, etc., under the table.
The Chinese understand the art of dining, and we who simply go to eat cannot appreciate the social side of this form of entertainment as does the Eastern man. He eats a few courses, sheds a jacket, loosens a belt, talks to a singing girl, smokes, then eats a few more courses, gambles a while, and really enjoys himself for four or five hours. When he enters the room for the feast he is given a slip of paper, on which he writes the name of his favourite singing girl and her place of residence. When all the guests arrive the slips are taken by a servant to the different places, and at intervals during the dinner the girls arrive. These girls are owned by men or women who bought them when they were very young, and have trained them for singing girls or professional amusers. They sway in on their tiny bound feet, beautifully dressed, painted and powdered, and take their place behind the man who sent for them. They sit on a narrow stool, chat with the man, have a few puffs from a water pipe, eat melon-seeds (they never eat or drink anything from the table); then their maid brings them their musical instrument, and they sing, in a high falsetto voice, a song or two. If the song and the singer are admired, the guests show their approval by loud “Hah, hah’s.” After her song the girl arises, says good-bye to her patron, and leaves for her next engagement. The girl’s owner receives from four to sixteen shillings, according to the fame of the girl; she receives nothing, unless a present is given her by some admirer. Many of them have beautiful bracelets and hair ornaments of pearls and jade, and many own gold water pipes that are very costly. They all carry little makeup boxes, and powder their noses whenever the desire seizes them. To Western eyes they are not pretty, with their red and white faces. They paint their forehead, nose, and around their mouth white, the cheeks and under-lip bright red, and to obtain the proper willow-leaf pattern for the eyebrows their own are shaved and others more slanting are painted in their place. It is hard to see any charm in these little women. They sing through their noses, talk very little, and that the most inane gossip, powder themselves, then bow and go away. They seem to have neither ideas, expression, nor figure.
