A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

It is not the best way to view a country from a Peking cart, for the tossing from side to side is apt to engender a distaste for life and to encourage a feeling that nothing would really matter if only the cart would come to a standstill for a moment. Add to that the aching head of influenza and that morning I began to pity not only myself but my publisher, for I began to fear he was going to lose money on me. It was Byron, I think, who considered that Providence or somebody else who shall be nameless always took care of publishers, and that is the reason perhaps why I have come to the opinion that a trip in a Peking cart is really the best cure for influenza. Had I gone to bed and had someone kind and nice to wait upon me and bring me the milk and soda and offer the sympathy my soul desired, I should probably have taken a fortnight to get well; as it was, out in the open air from dawn to dark, three days saw the end of my woes, and even at the worst I was able to sit up and take a certain amount of interest in passing events.

Gradually, gradually, as we went on we seemed to forget the great city that absorbed all things, and the surroundings became more truly countrified. The road, when it was not stones, was deep sand with deep, deep ruts worn by the passing of many carts, and it stretched over just as great a portion of the country as the people would allow. Flat it was, flat, and all along the way were little villages and hamlets. There was no temptation to walk, for it was very rough indeed, just the worn road and the edge of the tilled fields, tilled as surely never before in the world were fields tilled, and they stretched away to the far distant blue hills. Occasionally the road sank deep between them, and as it was very narrow the traffic question was sometimes troublesome. On this day we met a country cart, a longer cart than the Peking cart, covered in with matting and drawn by a mule and a couple of donkeys. Manifestly there was not room for the carts to pass and I wondered what would happen for, for either of us, laden as we were, to go backwards would have been difficult. I was requested to get out, which I did reluctantly, my carts were drawn so close against the bank that the right wheels were raised against it, and then they tried to get the other cart past. No good, it would not go. About a dozen men all in dirty, very dirty blue, with pointed hats of grass matting, looking as if they had stepped off old-fashioned tea caddies, came and took an intelligent interest, even as they might have done in Staffordshire, but that didn't make the carts any smaller, and then they decided to drive the country cart up the bank into the field above. They tried and tried, they lashed that unfortunate mule and the donkeys, but with all their pulling it was too heavy, up the bank it would not go. Chinese patience was exemplified. But it was the mule and the donkeys that really displayed the patience. I climbed the bank, sat on a stone and watched them, and did not like to give my valuable advice, because these men must have been driving carts along these roads all their lives, and presumably must know something about it, while never in my life had I handled a team consisting of two donkeys and a mule. At last when they got an extra hard lashing and fell back, conquered once more, poor brutes, by the weight, I rose up and interfered. I did not request—I ordered. They were to take the two foremost mules from my carts and hitch them on to the other cart. My foremost mule protested, he evidently said he had never been associated with donkeys before; but in two minutes they had got that cart to the higher level, and we were free to go on our way. Why they did not do it without my ordering I am sure I do not know, for as a rule I had no authority over the carts, they went their own way—I was merely a passenger.

Once more that day the narrow way was blocked, this time by a funeral. The huge coffin was borne by ten straining men, and there was no parleying with it, the dead have right of way in China, and out of the way we had to get. We backed with difficulty till the bank on one side was a little lower, and then up we went till we were on the cultivated land, drove on till we were ahead of the corpse, and then down again into the roadway once more.

In China, as far as I have been, you never get away from the people, this country was far more thickly populated than the country round London, for I have walked in Surrey lanes and found no one of whom to ask a question, while here there were always people in sight. True, here were no leafy lanes such as we find in Surrey and Kent, but the whole country lay flat and outstretched till it seemed as if nothing were hidden right up to the base of the far away hills. The days were getting hot and the men were working in the fields stripped to the waist, while most of the little boys were stark naked, pretty little lissom things they were, too, if they had only been washed; and the little girls, for all clothing, wore a square blue pocket-handkerchief put on corner-wise in front, slung round the neck and tied round the waist with a bit of string; but farther on, in the mountain villages, I have seen the little girls like the little boys, stark naked. Only the women are clothed to the neck, whatever the state of the thermometer. Always there were houses by the wayside, and many villages and hamlets, and the women sat on the doorsteps sewing, generally it seemed to me at the sole of a shoe, or two of them laboured at the little stone corn mills, that were in every village, grinding the corn, the millet, or the maize, for household use. Sometimes a donkey, and a donkey can be bought for a very small sum, turned the stone, but usually it seemed that it was the women of the household who, on their tiny feet, painfully hobbled round, turning the heavy stone and smoothing out the flour with their hands, so that it might be smoothly and evenly ground.

Poor women! They have a saying in China to the effect that a woman eats bitterness, and she surely does, if the little I have seen of her life is any criterion. As I went through the villages, in the morning and evening, I could hear the crying of children. Chinese children are proverbially naughty, no one ever checks them, and I could not know why these children were crying, some probably from the pure contrariness of human nature, but a missionary woman, and a man who scorned missionaries and all their works both told me that, morning and evening, the little girls cried because the bandages on their feet were being drawn more tightly. Always it is a gnawing pain, and the only relief the little girl can get is by pressing the calf of her leg tightly against the edge of the k'ang. The pressure stops the flow of blood and numbs the feet as long as it is kept up, but it cannot be kept up long, and with the rush of blood comes the increase of pain—a pain that the tightening of the bandages deepens.

“Beat you, beat you,” cries the mother taking a stick to the little suffering thing, “you cry when I bind your feet.” For a Chinese woman must show no emotion, above all she must never complain. This, of course, is a characteristic of the nation. The men will bear much without complaining.

I never grew accustomed to it. The pity and the horror of it never failed to strike me, and if the missionaries do but one good work, they do it in prevailing on the women to unbind their feet, in preventing unlucky little girls from going through years of agony.

There is no mistaking the gait of a woman with bound feet. She walks as if her legs were made of wood, unbending from the hip downwards to the heels. The feet are tiny, shaped like small hoofs about four inches long, encased in embroidered slippers, and to walk at all she must hold out her arms to balance herself. When I was laughed at for my “pathetic note,” and was told I exaggerated the sufferings of the women, I took the trouble to inquire of four doctors, three men and one woman, people who came daily in contact with these women, and they were all of one opinion, the sufferings of the women were very great. The binding in girlhood was not only terribly painful but even after the process was finished the feet were often diseased, often sore and ulcerated, and at the very best the least exertion, as is only natural, makes them ache.

“Try,” said one doctor, “walking with your toes crushed under your sole, the arch of your foot pressed up till the whole foot is barely four inches long, and you can only walk on your heel, and see if you do not suffer—suffer in all parts of your body. They say,” he went on, “that while there are many peaceful, kindly old men among the Chinese, every woman is a shrew. And I can well believe it. What else could you expect? Oh women have a mighty thin time in China. I don't believe there is any place in the world where they have a worse.”

If anyone doubts that this custom presses heavily on the women, let him ask any doctor who has practised much among the Chinese how many legs he has taken off because the neglected sores of ulcerated, bound feet have become gangrenous and a danger to life.