There must have been well over thirty guests invited for the evening, among them an American woman, Mrs. Grover Clark, whose husband was on the faculty of the University. Some of the students had been to her between the lecture and dinner time and given her the transcribed notes which they had taken down in shorthand. Would she correct them? They wanted to get the information published. When they came to the Chancellor’s home to call for them so that they could deliver them to the press, I could see at a glance that this was not at all what I desired to leave behind me; my spoken words never sound adequate or complete in print. Therefore, I sent a boy to the hotel for a copy of the old stand-by, Family Limitation. The students set to work at once to translate it. Mrs. Clark offered to pay the expenses, and the next afternoon five thousand copies were ready for circulation.
This little incident was significant of Young China; an idea to them was useless if only in the head. Their motto was to put it into concrete reality.
Symptomatic also of new China was the abandonment of bound feet, although women of advanced years still were to be seen leaning on each other for support as they tottered by. Amahs were carrying nurselings about when they themselves seemed scarcely able to stand up. However, I was glad to see only a few of the small children had these lily feet. Fathers realized their daughters could not earn a living if thus deformed. At the Peking Union Medical College, combining the modern equipment of the Occident with the artistry and traditions of the Orient, no girl was accepted for training unless her feet were normal.
One day Dr. Hu-Shih asked me to lunch in an old Manchu restaurant where his friends were accustomed to gather and ponder. Many were business or professional men, but all, with their little beards and intellectual faces, had the appearance of professors. It was an unusual combination of Wall Street and university. In our private dining room were seven English-speaking Chinese with families of from four to nine children. Each said the later ones had not been wanted; nevertheless they had come.
The conversation took a scientific turn. Since man had through breeding brought about such changes in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, why could he not produce a class of human beings unable to procreate? Was there any reason why the particular biological factors that made the mule sterile could not be applied further? They discussed the interesting possibility of creating a neuter gender such as the workers in a beehive or ant hill.
The implications of this colloquy formed a fascinating climax to our sojourn in Peking. Our train was the last one south for several days. Soldiers cluttered the landscape—not alert or even military-looking, but men or boys put into uniform and told how to act. The Tuchuns were all trying to “unite” China, each in his own way. We read in the papers about the war clouds hanging over the country, but nobody seemed to be excited. We were not worried; being foreigners, we were assured, meant protection.
The valley of the Yangtze Kiang was green and luxuriant; every inch of ground was being utilized. Even space which should have been employed for roads was given over to food production, and thousands of people were born, lived, and died in boats on the river. Some water buffalo waded in the mud of the rice fields, some horses worked the water treadmills, but human labor predominated. Overpopulation and destitution went hand in hand. In this land which Marco Polo once described as “a pleasant haven of silks, spices, and fine manners,” all the hypothetical Malthusian bogeys had come true.
Foreigners at the International and French Settlements of Shanghai enjoyed much the same life as at home. Their hotels were the same, they met the same sort of people, dressed in the same clothes, ate the same meals; in fact, it was difficult to get Chinese food unless you knew exactly where to go. They came in droves, herded together, most of them bored to death. You could see they had appropriated the best of everything—the houses with gardens and walls, the clean rickshas, the well-fed boys, the prosperity. The Chinese, in their own country, lived on what was left, which was practically nothing. They huddled wistfully on the fringes—horrible, abject, dirty.
It amazed me to see that Americans, French, and English could be so near and yet close their eyes to the wretched, degrading conditions of devastating squalor in the native quarters. Once while a missionary was guiding me through the Chinese City, we noted a crowd, children included, gathered in curiosity around a leper woman. She was on the ground, sighing and breathing heavily. Nobody offered to help her. “Maybe she’s dying,” said my companion. Just then the woman gave a fearful groan and took a baby from under her rags. She knew what to do, manipulated her thighs and abdomen, got the afterbirth, bit the cord with her teeth, put the baby aside, turned over, and rested. No trace of emotion showed on the faces of the watchers.
In their respective countries Europeans would have made an effort to improve such conditions. But here they seemed to have lost many of their former standards and qualities of character and conscience. It was said that China, psychologically speaking, swallowed up the morals of all those who came to reside there.