DR. MARY STONE
I
WITH UNBOUND FEET
On the "first day of the third moon" of the year 1873, a young Chinese father knelt by the side of his wife and, with her, reverently consecrated to the service of the Divine Father the little daughter who had that day been given them. They named her "Maiyü,"—"Beautiful Gem"—and together agreed that this perfect gift should never be marred by the binding of the little feet. It was unheard of! Even the servant women of Kiukiang would have been ashamed to venture outside the door with unbound feet, and the very beggar women hobbled about on stumps of three and four inches in length. No little girl who was not a slave had ever been known to grow up with natural feet before, in all Central or West China. That the descendant of one of the proudest and most aristocratic families of China, whose genealogical records run back without a break for a period of two thousand years, little Shih Maiyü, should be the first to thus violate the century-old customs of her ancestors, was almost unbelievable.
Even the missionaries could not credit it, not even Miss Howe, whose interest in the family was peculiarly keen, since Maiyü's mother was the first fruits of her work for Chinese women, and had ever since been working with her. To be sure Mrs. Shih had said to her, "If the Lord gives me a little daughter I shall not bind her feet." But Miss Howe had made so many efforts to induce the women and girls with whom she had worked to take off the crippling bandages, without having been successful in a single instance, that she did not build her hopes on this. One day, when calling in the home and seeing little Maiyü, then five years old, playing about the room, she remarked, "My dear Mrs. Shih, you will not make a good job of it unless you begin at once to bind little Maiyü's feet." But Mrs. Shih never faltered in the purpose which she and her husband had formed at the little girl's birth, and promptly answered, "Did I not tell you I should not bind her feet?"
The first years of Maiyü's life were unusually happy ones. Her father was a pastor in the Methodist church, and had charge of the "Converting to Holiness" chapel in Kiukiang; her mother was successfully conducting a day school for girls. From her mother Maiyü received much of her earliest instruction and before she was eight years old she had studied several of the Chinese classics and memorized the Gospel of Matthew and the catechism in Chinese so thoroughly that she has never forgotten them.
But as she approached the age when custom required that her feet should be bound, the little girl discovered that the way of the pioneer is not an easy one. The unbound feet were a constant source of comment and ridicule, not only by older people, but by other children as well. She was stopped on her way to school one day by an older girl, who taunted her with her "big feet" and refused to let her pass unless she would kneel down and render obeisance to her own bandaged stumps. The small descendant of the proud house of Shih absolutely refused to submit to such humiliation; but it was only after her mother's assistance had been invoked that she was allowed to proceed on her way.
Relatives and friends protested vigorously against such apparent indifference to their daughter's future on the part of her parents. "You will never be able to get a mother-in-law for her," they declared. Mr. and Mrs. Shih felt, no doubt, that this was true; for who could have then prophesied that the time would so soon come in conservative old China when young men would not only be willing to marry girls with natural feet, but would decidedly prefer them! Maiyü's father and mother never reconsidered their decision that their daughter should grow to womanhood with natural feet; but they did try to devise some plan by which her life might be a useful and happy one, even though she might never enjoy the blessing of a mother-in-law. They were very much impressed with the service which Dr. Kate Bushnell was rendering the suffering women and children of Kiukiang, and when Maiyü was eight years old her father took her to Dr. Bushnell and announced, "Here is my little girl. I want you to make a doctor of her."