Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

This legend has become part of the national faith and is firmly believed in by every one. Of course it is absurd, and one that originated in an after age, but with the innate love of the Chinese for the mysterious and the supernatural, it is transmitted age after age as though it were part of authentic history.[1]

Foot-binding is a lifelong misery even after the first few years during which the feet are being tortured into such a hideous mass of deformity that no women will willingly show them to any one. Nature never becomes reconciled to the cruel caricature they present. She continues to make a vigorous protest by pains and suffering that more or less last as long as life itself. The bandages may never be loosed even for a single day, for nature, as if on the eternal watch, would at once begin to revert to the original size and shape with which she was born, and the feet would gradually return to their original shape, though with marks of the cruel treatment to which they have been exposed, and which can never be entirely effaced, no matter how long the owner may live.

The girls are employed in household duties, in learning to embroider, to weave cotton cloth, to make their own shoes, and to learn all kinds of sewing. The years pass on, and when they reach the age of sixteen their childhood begins to vanish, and womanhood, with its responsibilities and its stern demand that the girls shall leave their own clan and become members of others, looms up before them. The transition stage may be delayed for a year or two, but when a girl gets to be eighteen it is considered ample time for her to open her wings and to fly for ever from the parent home.

We have thus taken a very rough and bird’s-eye view of Child Life in China. There are countless details that might have been gone into, but they would have required an entire book for themselves. The main outline that has been given will suffice to convey a very general idea of the kind of life that the black-eyed children of the Empire have to go through.

There is one thing about which there can be no manner of doubt, and that is that the children never forget the home in which they were reared. The home is to the Chinese what the country is to the most devoted patriot of other nationalities. The home is larger and dearer than the nation. It is the one thought that is always enshrined in his inmost heart, and which never dies out. A Chinaman went abroad and lived for a quarter of a century in Australia. He married an Irish woman, had several almond-eyed daughters, who had caught the brogue of their mother and might have been emigrants from Cork or Kerry. He had a thriving money-making business, he possessed a vote, and he was a man of substance in the community.

One day the home hunger came upon him. He handed over his business to his wife and daughters, took his balance out of the bank and returned to his home in China. This was situated by the edge of the sea on a sand dune, the most forlorn and mouldy-looking place one could possibly imagine. He regained his spirits as soon as his feet touched the desolate spot that lay within a few yards of the home where his childhood was spent, and nothing could induce him ever to think of returning to the far-off land where the family he had left behind him were living.

A strong and vigorous coolie showed symptoms of being far from well. Physically there seemed nothing the matter with him. Gradually he lost his appetite and his spirits. He occasionally acted as though his mind was affected. One day he said to his master, “I must go home. I feel very ill, but I am convinced that no medicine that I can take will cure me. Let me go home.” The mal du pays of the Switzer was upon him, and when permission was given him, his eye brightened and his step became elastic, and by the time he reached the old homestead every trace of disease had entirely vanished.

A man becomes a mandarin and is sent to another part of the Empire. He is gradually advanced in rank until he becomes a Viceroy of two Provinces, and rules over thirty millions of people. He marries, and has sons and daughters, and he amasses property in the place where his greatest honours have come to him.

He never has time to get away to his ancestral home, which is more than a thousand miles distant, but it is never out of his thoughts, and when he dies full of honours and wealth, his coffin is carried to his far-off village where he was born, and he is laid to his final rest almost in sight of the house in which his boyhood was passed.

The Americans are greatly distressed because when the Chinese come to their country they do not bring their wives and families with them. The fact is to do so would be opposed to the spirit and genius of their race. It would tend to alienate them from their home, which they intend to revisit as soon as ever they can, and to finally lay their bones amongst their kindred there. Every merchant and scholar, every coolie that lands with but the clothes he has on his back, every spendthrift and opium-smoker and gambler, and every millionaire of the Yellow race in the United States has one dream that never dies out of his brain, and that is the picture of his home, which either in life or in death it is his unalterable purpose to visit. To move their families and become denizens of their adopted country would be to run counter to one of the strongest instincts of their race.