The slaves in a rich family fare very well. Each child is given one or two personal servants, and when the children grow up and marry they follow them to the new home. Often a pretty, attractive slave-girl becomes the secondary wife of her master, and if she should be so fortunate as to bear him sons, she ranks with her mistress in the honour given her within the household.
There is a home in Shanghai for the rescue of little girls whose mistresses are more than ordinarily cruel. There is also a branch of the Florence Crittenden work for the rescue of girls sold to tea-houses. It is very hard for the people who are engaged in this good work to obtain the girls unless they are so badly treated that it comes to the notice of the magistrate, who may send the girl to the home for a given period.
I saw a pitiful case at a hospital at Soochow. We were sitting in the clinic when a very pretty woman came in and threw herself on her knees before the doctor and began to cry. She said between her sobs: “Oh, foreign doctor, help me to get away, help me, help me!” She was a respectable girl from Ningpo who had been sold by her husband to a place in Soochow for four years. She loathed the life, and when for the first time she had eluded the old woman who always goes out with these unfortunates to see that they do not get away, she had appealed to the only hope she knew. Yet that appeal was useless, as nothing could be done for her. She was nothing but a chattel of her husband, according to Chinese law, and he had a perfect right to sell her if he wished. I saw another pretty girl of sixteen who had been sold for eighty dollars to the same place. She came to the hospital to have her back treated, as she had been severely beaten with a brick because she would not make herself sufficiently pleasing to a guest.
But the average Chinese girl goes to her husband’s home quite likely within a short distance of her girlhood village, and passes a most uneventful life, one day being exactly like another unless broken by the ceremonies attending the births, weddings, and deaths of her husband’s people. Every village is surrounded by trees and is exactly like its neighbour, with its one-story, thatched-roof houses, or, perhaps, if the owner is especially prosperous, the pointed roofs may be formed of blue-grey tiling. Part of the front yard is beaten and made smooth to be used for threshing the rice, the front room of the house is used for the storing of the farming implements, and the other rooms are given to the different members of the family according to their needs. There is no light and little ventilation in these rude village homes. Windows are expensive and cold, as the houses are not heated in the winter. The mothers may be seen sitting in their doorways, holding in their hands brass hand-warmers, in which are a few burning coals of charcoal, and under their feet are the braziers which provide the only heat for these poor people during the cold months of the year.
RAIN-COATS OF CHINESE WORKMEN.
To face p. [246].
The life lived by these village people is life reduced to its simplest form. The main food is rice and a little cabbage. Meat is an unknown quantity unless on special feast days. Beef is not used, as the cow is a beast of burden, and the Chinese have the same feeling in regard to its flesh that we have for the flesh of horses. Ducks, chicken, eggs, fish, crabs, snails, and clams are the poor man’s luxuries. No hole is too muddy nor water too filthy for a fish-net to be drawn across it, or for the little crowd of boys who catch the crabs to help fill the family pot.
The question of clothes is a simple one and easily solved. The father wears a pair of blue cotton trousers in the summer, while the mother wears the same style garment with the addition of an apron effect which covers the bust. An amulet and a string are sufficient clothing for the children during the warm days, but when winter comes the wadded clothing must be brought forth, often from the pawnshop, where it goes in the spring to obtain money to buy the seed for planting.
The great prayer which rises from the heart of all Chinese women, rich and poor, peasant and princess, is to Kwan-yin for the inestimable blessing of sons. “Sons, give me sons!” is heard in every temple. A woman is not honoured until she has sons to worship at the tablets of her husband’s ancestors. One of the chief reasons for divorce in China is the lack of sons, and if the first wife has no male children, and the secondary wife has borne sons to her lord, the lot of the first wife is very bitter. In one of the foreign hospitals in Shanghai for Chinese women, the wife of an official in Tientsin gave birth, much to her sorrow, to a girl. She was inconsolable, and would not allow the dreadful news to be sent to her home, and the doctors feared that she would take her life. But through a servant the unhappy woman saw a way to regain the love and respect of her family. At the same time that the daughter was born to her a beggar-woman in the charity department gave birth to a boy. She bought the boy and telegraphed her husband, “Thou art the father of twins.”
One of the upper servants in a consulate, growing rich on the foreign spoils, took to himself a second wife, giving as his excuse that he had four daughters and no sons. At the birth of a son to the new wife the first wife tried to starve herself to death, and failing that, took opium and gained her wish. She could not survive the ignominy of being only the mother of girls.