Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

That the history of the races of the Far East has been a history of man apart from any help of woman, I cannot understand Mr. Lowell’s saying. He is evidently a man of very wide education, and he has lived in the Far East. Undoubtedly he has read the history of the Far East, and I cannot imagine the author of “Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm,” reading anything unintelligently. “That woman counts for nothing in the life of the race at the present time, as she has counted as nothing in it from the beginning!” Ah! yes, Mr. Lowell. She counts for a great deal. The tally of her influence may not be kept in the market-place, nor her power blazoned on the house-tops, but influence and power are there. She counts for a hundred things, and will count in every part of the globe, civilized or uncivilized, until Nature adopts a very different modus operandi from her present one. And in Korea, in China and Japan, woman counts above all for motherhood, and for the perpetuation of the race. And that she so counts must give her really great power among any race of men whose one eradicable religion is the worship of their ancestors, whose universal and insatiable ambition is to beget sons who may in turn worship them, and secure them a prosperous and a happy eternity.

There is much, very much that I deplore in the condition of woman in Korea. But once in a while woman gets the whip hand, and once in a very great while she has the wit to use it—and the nerve—even in Korea.

If it must be a canon of European literary good form to say very little, and to say it gingerly about Oriental polygamy, it has been a more than general custom among European writers to say nothing, nothing at least of any significance about the large class of Oriental women who stand outside the pale even of polygamy. There are some things that I think ought to be said about them; said now, when we are so very earnestly trying to understand the East, and, I hope, honestly striving to help the East. These things would come with more convention I know from the pen of a man, but I think they would come more appropriately from the pen of a woman, and I take upon myself the saying of them, in so far as I am able. I feel impelled to explain, as well as I can, the exact social position, and the exact personally mental attitude of the yoshiwara women of Japan, the flower girls of China, and the geisha girls of Korea. These three are sisters. They are cousins, more or less close of kin, to the nautch girls of India, and the posture girls of Burmah and of Siam. But these three were born of one father, and of one mother, and are the result of one bringing up. What shall I call them? I have no wish to use a harsh word that would offend select European ears, nor will I use a harsh word that would wrong and mis-describe them. I might almost call them the understudies of the happier women of the East; for in Asia’s social life they take the parts which ought, perhaps, to be played by the harem-hidden wives and mothers of the Orient. Those women, whose profession is publicity, are an important part of the social structure of every Asiatic race I have known, except only the Parsi race. To ignore their existence, when travelling through Asia in person, or with pen, is stupid. To slink by the strong position that they hold in the East, the big significance of their firm placement in the East, and the several lessons they will not fail to teach us, if we do not fear to learn, is prudish. To pass them by with a cry of horror, and to condemn them as being what they are not, is un-Christian and unjust.

For the men that mocked His agony and spat upon Him, Jesus claimed forgiveness, because “they knew not what they did.” And certainly the professionally unfortunate women of the East have as little consciousness of degradation and of sin as they have of shame. There are many reasons why this is so, and I will try to state them. I am only less sorry for the homeless, nameless women of Asia, than I am for the homeless, nameless women of Europe. Perhaps this is the best place for me to say that I am making no plea for the profession of which I am writing. For the women who through folly, through ignorance, or who beneath the lash of that hardest of all task-masters, circumstance, follow this nameless profession, I could easily find it in my heart to plead, and to plead, and to plead; but not now nor here. What I wish to do now is to write frankly, freely, and truthfully of the women who make the seclusion and the sanctity of gentlewomen possible in the Far East.

After all’s said and done, the social scales must balance or break, weight them as you will. And as the women of the Korean gentry are more secluded than those of any other Oriental gentry, so are the geisha girls of Chosön more interesting, more fascinating even than the yoshiwara women of Japan, and infinitely more so than the flower girls of China. Men living in the Far East, superior as they find the society of men to the society of men and women, tire of the perpetual society of men, and long to let down its intellectual average a bit by the introduction into it of women. Now the men of the East cannot possibly, from their point of view, bring their wives and daughters out from the safe shelter of home seclusion. But still they long for the mental, not to speak of the moral relaxation of woman’s companionship, and so in the East a class of women has sprung up which is only very slightly analogous to the class of Western women from whom respectable Western women draw their skirts aside as they pass them in the Western streets.

Women seem to be an indispensable element of society after all. Social enjoyment without them is more or less a failure, at least in any very prolonged form. And in those countries where wives and mothers must veil their faces, a class has sprung into existence—a class whose exact social position is almost, if not quite, outside the pale of modern European comprehension.

The geisha of Korea, like the yoshiwara women of Japan, are sweetly pretty, soft-voiced, and charmingly mannered. And, like their sisters of Japan, they seem almost happy and quite dignified. Perhaps indeed, they feel that they fulfil a national want—perform a national duty.

Companionship is the first and the chief thing required by an Oriental man from the women he pays to share some of the hours that he spends away from home. If the Hindoo, or Chinaman, or the Japanese, or the Korean man be poor, he has no leisure hours, and certainly cannot afford the illicit companionship which comes dear, and becomes dearer in the long run, all the world over. If he be well-to-do, the chances are that he has a bungalow or yamun running over with wives. Therefore, it is not for a common bestial satisfaction, but altogether for natural human companionship, that the men of the Far East so largely employ and so generously pay those Eastern women who have broken through the closed curtains and out of the sure safety of Oriental home-life, into the turmoil and the promiscuousness of society. Here, I must emphatically say, and it should be most emphatically remembered by anyone who is trying to understand the East: the nameless women of the East sin, but sin is neither their sole nor their chief occupation. To please, to amuse, to understand, and to companion men, mentally and socially, is their chief duty, their chief occupation, and their most earnest study. Sin follows, as sin has the grievous habit of following wherever people are human. But sin is neither the beginning nor the end, and I who can see no difference between a Korean wife and a Korean concubine, can see little or none between a Korean concubine and a Korean geisha. I am speaking of their morals, of course. The geisha girl is, as a rule, rather better educated than the concubine, better educated, quite possibly, than the wife; for the geisha must make her way, and hold any position she gains, solely by personal talent, personal attractiveness, and personal attainments. Not for her to lay at the man’s feet a son who may worship him into the most desirable corner of the Korean heaven; only for her to please him while she is with him, to touch for him odd instruments and sing to them soft, weird songs, to shake the soft perfume of her hair across his cheek and the perfume of the flowers she wears upon the bowl of food, or of fish, or fruit she humbly places before him; only for her to laugh at his humour, flat howsoever it may be; only for her to applaud his ambitions, urge on his hopes, charm away his fears; only for her to please; never for her, save by accident, to be pleased. And that is the state of their sad fate in Europe, in Asia, in America, or in Africa: the women who give an everlasting all for a momentary nothing. Feminine unchastity is less degrading in the East than in the West, and the unfortunate women of the East are far less degraded than the unfortunate women of the West. There are three reasons why this is so. In the Orient no woman is born to immorality. In the Orient professional unchastity is not considered altogether immoral. And immorality is not the only accomplishment necessary for the professional success of an Asiatic unfortunate.

In the Orient no woman is born to immorality. The ranks of the immoral profession are recruited from homes and from family circles that are quite up to the Asiatic average, and an immoral method of life is usually adopted by an Eastern girl not from impulse, not from caprice, but from a conviction that it is the surest and the most sensible way for her to earn her living, and assist in earning the living of her family. Her parents, in all probability, share this conviction with her, and nine times out of ten she makes her début in the profession of sin after the elders of her family have consulted earnestly together, and sifted, as best they can, the probabilities and the possibilities of her future. So she starts into her sad pilgrimage from a clean home, from clean associations, and her instincts and herself are clean and normal. She adopts sin gravely and as a business; nor does it ever occur to her to regard it as a self-indulgence; rather is it a penance, or an act of filial self-sacrifice.

In the East the life of a young girl is seldom wrecked by the misfortune which overtakes so many of our own girls. The social arrangements in the East prevent that, prevent it very effectually. When an Eastern girl takes upon herself a long martyrdom of public service she is at least of normal mind and whole of heart. Her nature, mental and moral, however it may be debased by her future life, is as yet unvitiated by any accumulation of ancestral wrong-doing. She may adopt sin for reasons that seem good and sufficient to herself and her parents, but she has no appetite for sin, no appetite inherited from her mother at least, so she has a fairer start than have the majority of unfortunate women in the Occident.