Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

FAMILY LIFE

Chinese character studied in the home—How marriages are arranged in China—Love of husband and wife must be concealed—Daughters go out of clan, sons remain—Story of a famous community in former days—Solidarity of family—Story of general accused of treason—Disposal of sons—Occupation of women in homes—Wife-beating—Suicides of wives—Women treated as inferior—Filial piety, views on—The famous book describing the twenty filial sons—Filial piety not extensively carried out by the Chinese.

If one desires to understand the Chinese, he must study the family life, for there we find the secret for much that is amusing and perplexing in their character. In all the long years of Chinese history, the ideal of the family has been an exalted one. Ancient sages have dealt with much eloquence upon it, and it has been made the model upon which the State has been built up. It is declared in books written on China that the Chinese Government is a patriarchal one, the meaning of which, put into simpler language, is that the system by which this vast and ancient Empire is ruled has been borrowed from any one of the countless homes that exist throughout the land. It has been plainly stated by Confucius, more than two thousand years ago, that a man that did not know how to rule his home was quite unfit to govern a kingdom.

That the family ideal is held in the highest honour by every class of society is evident from the fact that every one that can by any possibility scrape together the amount required to be paid to the parents of the young girl, gets married; whilst for every woman, without any regard for her personal appearance or even for her infirmities, when the marriageable age comes round, a marriage is arranged, and she is carried to her husband’s home with as much ceremony as though she were the most beautiful woman in the land. If a woman does not get married it is her own fault or that of her family, who for selfish or other reasons fail to make the necessary arrangements for her, and never because her features are uncomely or her complexion bad, or because she has some bodily infirmity that in England would condemn her to a spinster’s life, though she lived to the age of Methuselah.

Let us now take the case of a family, such as one may see anywhere, and look at the peculiar way in which it is built up and developed in accordance with the antique methods that seem dear to the Yellow brain in this land. A young man is going to be married. The parents have decided that question for him, and they have called in a middle-woman, who does all the selecting and all the courting that is possible in China, and by her intrigues and falsehoods, the girl that is to be his bride is settled for him absolutely, without any power of appeal from the sons or the parents should they discover by and by that the young lady would be an undesirable acquisition when she came into their home.

With us it is an accepted axiom that to secure the happiness of the married couple, there must be love and there must be a thorough acquaintance with each other. The Chinese hold that all that is Platonic nonsense, and is the reasoning of a barbaric mind that has never come under the benign influence of the sages and teachers of the Celestial Empire. They declare that neither of those two things are requisite, and they point to China, where marriage is the rule in social life, and where a Divorce Court does not exist in all the length and breadth of the land, as a convincing evidence that love at least is not at all a requisite for marriage. The young man and his wife then begin their married life without any knowledge of each other. They have never seen each other, and they have never dared to inquire from their parents what their future partners were like. To have done so would have filled the hearts of their fathers and mothers with a shame so intense as to be absolutely unspeakable.

Their first look into the faces of each other, after the bride has been carried with noise of music and firing of crackers in the crimson chair into the home of her husband, must be one in which is concentrated the agony and passion of two hearts, trying to read their fate for the years that are to come, from what a bashful glance at each other’s faces can tell them. If either of them is disappointed, the wave of despair that flashes through the heart is hidden behind those sphinx-like faces, and no quivering of the lips and no glance of the coal-black eyes betrays the secret that has sprung up within them.

They are both conscious that their marriage is a settled fact and that there is no possibility of its ever being annulled, and so with the heroic patience that the Chinese often show in ordinary life, they both determine to make the best of things, knowing that in time love will grow, and tender affection for each other will ripen amid the trials and disciplines of life through which they will have to pass together.

The years go by, and without daring to show by word or look to the rest of the world that they love each other, the deepest and the purest affection has sprung up in their hearts. The Chinese language is full of tender epithets and phrases full of poetry to express the emotions of love, but the husband and wife may never use any of these excepting behind closed doors where none can hear them but themselves.

In the course of time the family grows in numbers, and three sons and as many daughters are born. There was indeed another girl, but as it was considered that there were enough of them in the family, she was put to death immediately after her birth, so she was never counted. As the years rolled by, the children grew up and the boys were sent to school, whilst the sisters were taught household work, such as cooking, mending and embroidery. At last, when these latter arrived at the age of eighteen, the services of middle-women were called into requisition, and they were severally carried into other clans, for no person may marry a member of his own, even though these may be counted by the thousands.