When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

Opposite the joss house sat a Chinese fortune-teller. His table stood in front of a big rock, about which graceful trees hung. Over the table was a cabalistic cloth, and the Mongolian wizard foretold your fate, using bamboo slips character-inscribed, and he was quite as infallible as any Occidental fortune-teller whom I ever patronised.

I often used to manufacture an excuse to go into and to linger in the courtyard of a Chinese carpenter who interested me greatly. He was one of the few accessible Chinamen I have ever known. It is very difficult to write positively of China, even after some residence there. The Chinese will tell you nothing, and, with a few exceptions, the Europeans who have spent half their lives there know nothing. But my friend, the carpenter, did give me a few peeps into China. He was almost always sawing, and his brother was almost always smoking a slender pipe that was nearly as long as himself. Two “sew sew” women often sat upon a low bench mending the tattered garments of the carpenter and his confrères.

“Sew sew amahs” are one of the institutions of China. A London paper has recently advocated, as an occupation for deftly needled but impecunious gentlewomen, the going from mansion to mansion and the mending of dilapidated garments. In China, that has been, for hundreds of years, an acknowledged profession for women. The “sew sew amahs” are really very useful. They sit outside your door or in a secluded corner of your garden, and stitch, stitch, stitch, for two sen a day, until you are whole again and clothed in your right garments. The Chinese women do not sew as well as do the Chinese men. It is only in the Orient and in Paris that man realises what a superior, noble occupation dressmaking is. But the women of the East mend very adequately; and I for one congratulate them that, among all their other miseries, they are not expected to devote their lives to the designing and first sewing of loom-woven fig leaves.

Has it ever occurred to the champions of the women of the East, that the Oriental man has not only crushed the Oriental woman beneath his cruel heel, but that he has robbed her of her most effeminate privilege, since he has usurped her sharp sceptre—her needle?

Happy Valley is a lovely spot, circled by gray-green hills and feathered bamboo. It is the race-course of Hong-Kong. Here ponies are run and frocks from home are worn, sandwiches are eaten and cool wines are drunk, and, take it all in all, it is quite like a toy Derby. It is a magnification of the “Ascot” that you may buy in the Lowther Arcade for a few pounds. No, it is not. No toy maker, though he were as tenderly sympathetic as sweet Caleb Plummer, much less a maker of toys in Germany, could manufacture such a toy as nature and Anglo-residents have made Happy Valley.

Separated from the race-course by a narrow bamboo-edged road is the Happy Valley Cemetery—an acre of beauty sacred to the eternal sleep of dead Europeans. I know of no other cemetery so beautiful in all our world. I know of no place commemorative of the dead that compares in loveliness with the Happy Valley Cemetery, save only the Taj Mahal. One is the triumph of nature; one is the supreme art triumph of man: but over both Death is triumphant, and the Indian Princess and the English wanderers are at rest—asleep and oblivious.

Only an even more presumptuous pen than mine would attempt to describe the Hong-Kong Public Gardens. They are matchless. Their flora is both mighty and lace-like; and from their detailed beauty you look away to the panoramaed beauty of Hong-Kong.

As I write on from page to page, the little story of our Eastern wanderings, I grow a bit frightened at my own temerity. I do so want to describe the wonderland through which we wandered, and I am so unable to describe it. China baffles me most. The country is so intricate with a thousand beauties, the people so unapproachable, their customs so puzzling, so almost inexplicable. But my excuse for trying to do what I am not fit to do, must be the old excuse, the great excuse, the excuse of love. I love the Orient; I prattle about it like a child perhaps; but if I could inspire one tired European to go East for a little to rest his eyes, his feet, and his heart, in the great, kind Oriental wonderland, then I should be, for once at least, a benefactor.

My boy and I spent many a happy half-day, being carried up and down the Hong-Kong hills—he in one chair, I in another. It was in Hong-Kong that he was promoted from dresses to trousers, and he used to sit in his high-swung chair, quite fearlessly, and chatter to his bearers. I was a little frightened at first lest they should drop him, but I soon learned how foot-sure they were and how careful of their light little burden. They never encouraged my advances towards good-fellowship; but they were ready enough to teach him the name of a flower or a bird, to run or to walk, as he wished. And often and often they spared one of their scanty coins to buy him a sweetmeat.

The heat in Hong-Kong was not excessive when we were first there, but it was warm enough to make the Peak a luxury. And it was a charming change to go to a friend’s bungalow not far from the Bowen Road and drink afternoon tea. And what dinners we used to have in some of those cool, white bungalows; and how we sang softly as we went home through the starlight.