The position of the Chinese woman, taken by the white man, who is mean enough to do it, as a common law wife, and of their Eurasian children, who are often not acknowledged, or are deserted, is a pathetic one in Hongkong, Shanghai and many treaty ports. It was more common in the old days than it is now, and men of high position often fell, when the Oriental ports were designated over an ill-informed world as the “white man’s grave,” to which no white woman would come. There are Eurasian schools and orphanages in Hongkong, Shanghai, Macao, etc., and the colonies of deserted Eurasians have a population of thousands. They are far from unintelligent. The best billiard player in Hongkong was of this mixed race. They have dark eyes and hair and dress in both foreign and Chinese style. They are taller and have larger heads than the pure Chinese. In the second and third generations the hair turns fairer. Naturally they partake of the characteristics of each race. A Eurasian is more sprightly than the Chinese, and he is inclined to the sporting and spendthrift proclivities of the foreigner. They are the clerks and second men of the ports. Few rise high, though many now attend colleges. They are the best penmen and linguists of the Far Fast, though not earnest enough to become scholars, or persistent enough to become the successful merchants which the men of their mother’s race are. Feeling sometimes acutely the opprobrium which is visited upon them by both races, they often claim a dark foreign nationality, generally Portuguese of Macao colony.
I want to relate the remarkable history of one Eurasian and his mother. I shall say no more of his father than that in blood and ability he was one of the noblest names that came for a long sojourn in the Far East. His position was such that the father could not own the son, especially as in time the former married a white woman. The boy, who from the beginning bore a Chinese name, was the picture of his father, and his dressing in Chinese clothes and wearing a queue shocked all of us who knew the history, for the boy was taller than the Chinese and had the face of a foreigner. Some laughed, for the youth seemed to be a foreigner on perpetual masquerade. He came into our hong as clerk, was easily the best penman and figurer in the office. His manners were those of fashionable West End, London, or genteel Upper Fifth Avenue; you felt when you heard him speak that you were talking to your superior. He often had business dealings with his father, yet he did not seem conscious of the relationship. The son, being even the abler man, the painful dramatic situation was pitiful. The tall Eurasian youth married a Chinese woman in time, and reverted to his mother’s race, and his deserted Chinese mother returned to her blood, married a Chinese, had many pure blood children, and publicly disowned her Eurasian boy. Privately, however, the boy and mother sometimes met, and the scene matched in dramatic pathos the meetings with the father. The youth seemed to be cheerful despite all these trials. I never saw him reveal pride or resentment; only in this way, when in later years for a time, he came into a position of power in a Chinese company which entered into international trade, he was merciless when the white competitor withstood him. I have often felt his mighty blows and been outwitted by his commercial strategy. He smiled in a complacent way as though to say: “Why might I not circumvent you; you know something, perhaps, about one race, but nothing about the other. I, being a Eurasian, know much about the two races.” He deserved all his conquests. He had something to avenge, and he did right in casting his life with China and not Europe. The remarkably dramatic setting of this boy’s, his mother’s and father’s life would have given Shakespeare material for a tragedy, and the foreigner concerned would have paid the price of his heartless audacity, despite the romantic poetry which Pierre Loti wove around such relationships in his book Madame Chrysanthème.
Perhaps the most significant sign of China’s reform is the new status of women. Never before have Chinese women traveled with their merchant husbands. In a few isolated instances Chinese ministers have taken their wives abroad, but there have never been mixed parties of men and women until the revolution. On November, 1911, a touring party of prominent members of Chinese trading guilds of several of the provinces met at Shanghai for a business tour of Japan. They were accompanied by their wives. The New China has its Mrs. Pankhurst in Miss Yik Yung Ying, of Canton, who is foreign trained and has admission to the Nanking Assembly as representing the women of her province of Kwangtung. She has obtained from the Nanking Assembly a promise of equal suffrage on equal property and educational conditions. Some of her suffragettes attacked the assembly police and broke windows in true Pankhurst style, the patient Chinese wits only remarking: “This froth will blow off the glass and leave the clear liquid!”
Many girls of the mission schools of Canton, Fuchau and the Yangtze cities of the rebellion could not be restrained from serving at the front in the republican revolution. Some of them tried to form bomb-throwing corps. Where they insisted on service the missionaries of Wuchang, Hankau, Shanghai and Nanking organized them in several uniformed Red Cross Corps, which performed effective and brave work. The large clans, or family villages, are sending to the missions for graduate teachers to take charge of their girls. The head man (hsiang lao) sets apart a bedroom, a schoolroom and a courtyard for the school, and the whole family clan contributes. The mothers of course continue their instruction in the Chinese classics, folk lore, religion and their inimitable needlework. Elsewhere I have spoken of the St. Hilda’s school at Wuchang, under American Episcopal auspices, which aims to become the Women’s College of Central China. A daughter of the original reformer, Kang Yu Wei, has studied in America. Miss Li Yu, the granddaughter of Li Hung Chang, took the course at Wells Female College, at Aurora, New York, where she was a prize scholar.
Cornell in particular, Hartford High, Leland Stanford, Columbia, University of Washington State, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, University of Michigan, and all the women’s and co-ed colleges in America have enrolled more Chinese women than all the other women’s colleges of the world, but not so many as they might and will, now that the new régime has opened with rainbow promise. Forty young Chinese women are studying medicine in America through the work of China’s first woman doctor, Miss Ya Mi Kin, who is in charge of the Tientsin Woman’s Hospital and nurses’ school.
A remarkable Chinese woman doctor, going by the name of Doctor Mary Stone (educated at University of Michigan), manages the American hospital at Kiukiang, and Doctor Tsang Cho Kin, a Cantonese lady, is prominent in modern medical work at Canton, Fuchau and Shanghai. The American Presbyterian women (to instance only one denomination here) have seventeen girls’ schools open at Canton alone, and in addition the following exemplary development: a school for blind girls, in charge of Doctor Mary Niles; a boarding school for children of lepers; a hospital school for girls in charge of Mrs. Kerr; a training school for women teachers; the Hackett Medical College for women; and the Turner Nurses’ School, under the charge of the noted Doctor Mary Fulton. At Ningpo there is a girls’ school and a women’s industrial school. At Shanghai there is the well-known girls’ school at the south gate; and at Hangchow and Nanking there are girls’ boarding schools. At Nanking the wives of Chinese taotais (officials such as mayors) are encouraged to preside over mothers’ meetings. At Peking there is the Bridgman College for Women, a women’s medical college and nurses’ school, a girls’ day and industrial school. At Paoting, in Pechili, there is the Union School for Girls; at Tengchow, in Shangtung, a girls’ high school and industrial school; and at Tsinan a girls’ school. At many of these girls’ schools, presided over by foreign women, the Chinese pay much of the expense; and they are copying the schools to the best of their ability all over the land for their girls and women, and calling upon the mission women’s schools for graduates whom they may use as teachers. There is no greater proof that the New China has begun its march toward the sun than that its womanhood has at last been thus recognized in modern education and opportunity.
Womanhood over the world responds to the same chord of sympathy. One of the contributions to the Woman’s Titanic Memorial came from a Chinese girl, Ying Low, with this message: “I send this for Captain Smith’s soul.” The word for woman in Chinese is “nu,” and the probability now is that she will be new indeed, and the foundation stone of the New China for her sons.
The first modern style Chinese marriage among those not Christian was solemnized in April, 1912, in the well-known Chang Su Ho Gardens, Shanghai. The families concerned were wealthy and the marriage was a civil one. A ring, music, flowers, witnesses, a public ceremony and certificate contract all came into use. There was nothing picturesquely old-style or secret, as the middleman, the closed chair, the ceremony at the groom’s house, the joined teacups, the contests between teams of both families, the worshiping of sticks and house coffins, the discordant orchestra, the chairs of food, the goose present and heckling of the bride by practical jokers.