“At dawn next morning, my father came out for something, and was astonished to find that I was still alive. He had expected that the fall on the hard stone slabs that paved the courtyard and the long exposure would have killed me. He was a very superstitious man, and so he believed that my escape from death had been due to the intervention of Heaven, and that it was designed by it that my life should be preserved. Impressed with this idea, he picked me up and carried me to my mother, who took me to her heart and decided that I should not be destroyed. In memory of that eventful night, and my father’s rescue of me next morning, I was called, ‘Picked up.’”
There is no doubt but that countless baby girls have thus disappeared within the first two or three hours of their birth, when the unnatural passion of the parents has been excited by anger and disappointment. If they are spared long enough to let that cool down, and the child still lives, the voice of nature begins to be heard, and the mother will ask for the little one to be given her, and from that moment there will be no more talk of putting it to death.
Under the most favourable circumstances, and where it has been decided to rear the child, no congratulations are ever uttered by any one on her birth. To do so would be considered so grim a joke that it would be looked upon as an insult so marked and so offensive that a perpetual feud would be engendered that would never be dissolved as long as life lasted.
The neighbours who have been on the alert with their congratulations all ready to offer to the happy parents in the event of a son being born, are placed in the most awkward position, and they get out of it as deftly as they can by the use of polite phrases and airy nothings of which the Chinese language has such an abundance. In these attempts no one would ever dream of using the common word “Girl.” That would grate harshly on the ears of those whose sensitive feelings are only too ready to think that some reflection is intended by a reference to their daughter. A polite phrase is used instead, which means “A thousand pieces of gold,” a title which by a subtle species of legerdemain lifts the poor forlorn little mite, who has barely escaped drowning or suffocating, into the region of an heiress with a large fortune with which to begin her life.
The early years of a child seem on the whole to be happy ones. In the swarms of children that one sees almost anywhere, one gets the impression that on the whole they thoroughly enjoy themselves. They run about and romp and dance and gambol very much as a similar number of English children would do on the village green, or in the streets and lanes of a home city.
The Chinese are far from being a gloomy race of people. Their hearts are full of fun and vigorous life, and this is seen in the sturdy urchins that race about with each other and that fill the air with their merry sounds of childish laughter.
STUDIES OF CHINESE BOYS.
To face p. 51.