A Chinese gentleman is superlatively polite. This may not be generally known, because the upper classes in China are so reluctant to know us or to let us know them. But it is true. We know one Chinese family of rank rather well; we have eaten with the men of the family and with the women. Truth compels me to mention that the gentleman of the house had two wives. Whether they ordinarily ate with him I do not know. I fancy that their doing so when we were there was an act of consideration for me; yet I am not sure, for they were easy and self-possessed. And this I do know, that the men of the house were most unfailingly courteous to them. I believe that, on the whole, Mongolian married life is very fairly satisfactory to the Mongolians. If they are satisfied, why, in the name of reasonableness, should they be disturbed? If the women of the upper classes are not always, or even often, supreme in their home lives, they are at least secure of deferential and courteous treatment. One of the chief proverbs of China—and I thought it a delightful one—is, “You must listen to your wife, but not believe her.”
CHAPTER XX
CHINESE SHOES
The Chinese women have enormous feet. They are reputed “small footed,” but our reputations often wrong us. No Chinese woman has a small foot. But even a Chinese woman’s huge great toe looks small when in its solitary deformity it masquerades as an entire foot.
There is nothing so characteristic of the Chinese as thoroughness. The Chinese are the least beautiful of all civilised peoples; but when they undertake to be beautiful—even in the mere matter of their women’s feet—they do it thoroughly. They don’t put a heel in the middle of a shoe to make a foot look small, nor do they point absurdly an empty satin toe. No! They bend four of the human toes back and leave the one big toe to do apparent duty as a lovely, diminutive foot.
To us the small-footed women of China appear twofold martyrs. We think them martyrs because they suffer when the foot deformity is inflicted upon them. We think them martyrs because their deformed feet are useless, and disable them from taking exercise.
We regard exercise as a blessed privilege. The Chinese regard exercise as a dire necessity.
We, in the West, do most things because we like; they, in the East, do most things because they must.
That makes the great racial difference. It is not often justly appreciated. Ignoring it causes us to do the people of Asia innumerable injustices.
Chinese women know as little of tennis, of golf, of riding to hounds—even of dancing in its fast and furious Western sense—as we know of fish-eye soup and of birds’-nest stew. And they care less.