A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

And the people I saw in the hills were the kindliest I had yet met in China. I had little enough to do with them, I could not communicate with them, and yet this was borne in on me. Whenever we met, dirty brown faces smiled upon me, kindly voices with a burr in them gave me greeting, I was regularly offered the baby of the farm-house at my gates, much to that young gentleman's discomfiture, and whenever there was anything to see, they evidently invited me to stay and share the sight. Once a bridal procession passed with much beating of gongs, the bride shut up in the red sedan chair, and all the people about stood looking on, and I stayed too. Another time they were killing a pig, an unwieldy, gruesome beast, that made me forswear pork, and I was invited to attend the great event. The poor pig was very sorry for himself, and was squealing loudly, but much as I wished to show I appreciated kindliness, I could not accept that invitation.

And here in the Western Hills I sat in judgment upon the people I had known of all my life and been amongst for the last ten months. Of course, I have no right to sit in judgment but after all, I should be a fool to live among people for some time and yet have no opinion about them. And it seemed to me that I was looking with modern eyes upon the survival of one of the great powers of the ancient world, Babylon come down to modern times, Babylon cumbrously adapting herself to the pressure of the nations who have raced ahead of the civilisation that was hers when they were barbarian hordes.

All along the Pacific Coast, on the west of America, and the east of Australia, they fear the Chinaman, and—I used to say his virtues. I put it the wrong way. What the white races fear—and rightly fear—is that the Chinaman will come in such hordes, he will lower the standard of living, he will bring such great pressure to bear, he will reduce the people of the land in which he elects to live, the people of the working classes, to his own condition—the hopeless condition of the toiling slaves of Babylon. It has been well said that the East, China, is the exact opposite of the West in every thought and feeling. In the West we honour individualism. This is true of almost every nation. A man is taught from his earliest youth to depend to a great degree upon himself, that he alone is responsible for his own actions. Even the women of the more advanced nations—it marks their advancement, whatever people may think—are clamouring for a position of their own, to be judged on their merits, not to be one of a class bound by iron custom to go one way and one way only. In the East this is reversed. No man has a right to judge for himself, he is hide-bound by custom, he dare not step out one pace from the beaten path his fathers trod. The filial piety of the Chinese has been lauded to the skies. In truth it is a virtue that has become a curse. To his elders the Chinaman must give implicit, unquestioning obedience. His work, his marriage, the upbringing of his children, the whole ordering of his life is not his business but the business of those in authority over him. If he stepped out and failed, his failure would affect the whole community. Whatever he does affects not only himself, but the farthest ramifications of his numerous family. This interdependence makes for a certain excellence, an excellence that was reached by the Chinese nation some thousands of years ago, and then—it is stifling.

This patriarchal system, this continual keeping of the eyes upon the past, has done away in the nation with all self-reliance. A man must be not only a genius, but possessed of an extraordinarily strong will-power if he manage to shake off the trammels and go his own way unaided, if he exercise the sturdy self-reliance that sent the nations of the West ahead by leaps and bounds, though the Chinese had worked their way to civilisation ages before them. Pages might be written on the subservience and ignorance of the women.

“Oh but a woman has influence,” say the men who know China most intimately. And of course she has influence, but in China it must often be the worst form of power, the influence of the favourite, favoured slave. The woman's influence is the influence of a degraded, ignorant, and servile class, a class that every man treats openly with a certain contempt, a class that is crippled, mentally and bodily. The Chinese, be it counted to them for grace, have always held in high esteem a well-educated man, educated on their archaic lines; but not, I think, till this century, has it ever occurred to them that a woman would be better educated. A cruel drag upon the nation must be the appalling ignorance of its women, the intense ignorance of half the population. Things are changing, they say, but, of necessity, they change most slowly. Knowledge of any kind takes long, long to permeate an inert mass.

We praise the Chinaman for his industry. But, in truth, we praise without due cause. We of the West have long since learned of the dignity of labour and if we do not always live up to our ideals, at least we appreciate them, and judged by this standard the Chinaman is found wanting. He does not appreciate the dignity of labour. The long nails on the fingers of the man upon whom fortune has smiled proclaim to all that he has no need to use his hands; his fat, flabby, soft body declares him rich and well-fed, and that there is no need to exert himself. He is a man to be envied by the greater part of the nation. The forceful, strenuous life of the West, the life that has made the nations has no charms for, excites no admiration in his breast. Manual labour and strife is for the man who cannot help himself. And, man for man, his manual labour will by no means compare with that accomplished by the man of the West. Nominally he works from dawn to dark, really he wastes two-thirds of the time, sometimes in useless, misdirected effort, sometimes in mere idle loitering. He is a slave in all but name. His life is dull, dull and colourless; he can look forward to no recreation when his work is over, therefore he spins it out the livelong day. Home life, in the best sense of the term, he has none, he may just as well stay at his work, exchanging ideas and arguing with his fellows.

Something to hope for, to live for, to work for, seems to me the great desideratum of the majority of the Chinese nation, something a little beyond the colourless round of life. The greater part of the nation is poor, so poor that industry is thrust upon it, unless it worked it would of necessity die; the struggle for life absorbs all its energies, gives it no time for thought sufficient to raise it an inch above the dull routine that makes up the daily round, but the country is by no means poor, had it been there would have been no such civilisation so early and so lasting in the world's history, no such fostering of a race that now, in spite of most evil sanitary conditions, raises four generations to the three of the man of the West.