It was in Pao Ting Fu that I met the only woman who made open complaint against the position of women, and she only did it because, poor thing, she was driven to it.
She slipped through the mission compound gate while the gate-keeper was looking the other way, a miserable, unkempt woman with roughened hair and maimed feet. Her coat and trousers of the poorest blue cotton were old and soiled, and the child she carried in her arms was naked save for a little square of blue cotton tied round his body in front. She was simply a woman of the people, deadly poor where all just escape starvation, young and comely where many are unattractive, and she stood under the shade of the trees watching eagerly the mission family and their guest at breakfast on the porch! It was a June morning, the sunshine that would be too fierce later on now at 7 a.m. was golden, and a gentle breeze just whispered softly in the branches that China—even Pao Ting Fu—in the early summer morning was a delightful place.
But eager watching eyes glued to every mouthful are distinctly disquieting, and in China, the land of punctilious etiquette, are rude. Besides, she had no business to be there, and the doctor's wife turned and spoke to her.
“What custom is this?” said she, using the vernacular, “and how did you get in here?”
“I ran past”—ran, save the mark, with those poor broken cramped feet—“when the gate-keeper was not looking. And it's not a day's hunger I have. For weeks when we have had a meal we have not known where the next was coming from.”
“But you have a husband?”
“And he was rich,” assented the woman, “but he has gambled it all away.”
It was quite a likely story. Another woman working on the compound said it was true. She had a bad husband—hi yah! a very bad husband. He beat her, often he beat her. Sometimes perhaps it was her fault, because she was bad-tempered. Who would not be bad-tempered with maimed feet, an empty stomach and two little hungry children? But often he beat her for no reason at all. And everyone knows that a Chinese husband has a perfect right to beat his wife. That he refrains from so doing is an act of grace on his part, but a woman of herself is merely his chattel. She has no rights.
The hospital quilted bed-covers—pel wos, they called them—had to be unripped and washed. The pay was twenty-five t'ung tzus a day and keep yourself. One hundred and thirty t'ung tzus went to the dollar, and 10-35 dollars went to the sovereign at that time, so that the work could not be considered overpaid; but this was China, and the women were apparently rising up out of the ground and clamouring for it. It was evidently looked upon as quite a recreation to sit under the trees on the grass in the mission compound and gossip and unpick quilts. The new recruit joined them and spent a happy day, sure of food for herself and her children for that day at least—not food perhaps such as we would appreciate, but at least a sufficiency of millet porridge.
That day and the next she worked, and then on the third day at midday she went away for her meal and did not come back till after two o'clock in the afternoon. The doctor's wife was reproachful.