A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

Steeper and steeper grew the hills, more and more toilsome the way, and the people, when we stopped, looked more and more wonderingly at the stranger. At one place, where I had tiffin, I shared the room and the k'ang, the sun was so hot and there was no shade, so I could not stay outside, with six women of all ages, two had babies that had never been washed, two had hideous goitres, and all had their hair gathered into long curved horns at the back. There was also on the floor, a promising litter of little pigs, and three industrious hens. The women's blue coats were old, torn, patched, soiled, and yet——oh the pity of it, these women, who had to work hard for their living, work in the fields probably, had their feet bound. One had not, but all the rest were maimed. Two of them had their throats all bruised, and I wondered if they had been trying to hang themselves as a means of getting away from a life that had no joy in it, but I afterwards found that with two coins, or anything else that will serve the purpose, coins are probably rather scarce, they pinch up the flesh and produce these bruises as a counter-irritant, and, ugly as it looks, it is often very effective.

These should have been country people, if ever any people belonged to the country, and then, as I looked at them, the truth dawned on me. There are no country people in the China I have seen, as I from Australia know country people, the men of the bush. They—yes—here in the mountains, are a people of mean streets, a slum people, decadent, the very sediment of an age-long civilisation. I said this to a man who had lived long in China and spoke the language well, and he looked at me in surprise.

“Why,” he said, “they all seem to me country people. The ordinary people of the towns are just country yokels.”

But we meant exactly the same thing. I looked at the country people I had known all my life, the capable, resourceful pioneers, facing new conditions, breaking new ground, ready for any emergency, the men who, if they could not found a new nation, must perish; he was looking at the men from sleepy little country villages in the old land, men who had been left behind in the race. And so we meant exactly the same thing, though we expressed it in apparently opposing terms. These people are serfs, struggling from dawn to dark for enough to fill their stomachs, toiling along a well-worn road, without originality, bound to the past, with all the go and initiative crushed out of them. As their fathers went so must they go, the evils that their fathers suffered must they suffer, and the struggle for a bare existence is so cruelly hard, that they have no hope of improving themselves.

It was all interesting, wonderful, but I do not think ever in the world have I felt so lonely. I longed with an intense longing to see someone of my own colour, to speak with someone in my own tongue.

I don't know that I was exactly afraid, and yet sometimes when I saw things that I did not understand, I wondered what I should do if anything did happen. Considering the way some people had talked in Peking, it would have been a little surprising if I had not. Once we came upon a place where the side of the road was marked with crosses in whitewash and I wondered. I remembered the stories I had heard of the last anti-Christian outbreak, and I wondered if those crosses had anything to do with another. It all sounds very foolish now, but I remember as cross after cross came into view I was afraid, and at last I called Tuan and asked him what they meant.

“Some man,” said he, “give monies mend road, puttee white so can see where mend it.” And that was all! But what that road was like before it was mended I cannot imagine!

At last, after a wearying day's journey of one hundred and twenty li, or forty miles, over the roughest roads in the world, we came in the evening sunlight upon a long line of grunting, ragged camels just outside a great square gate enclosed in heavy masonry, and we were at Pa Kou, as it is spelt by the wisdom of those who have spelled Chinese, but it is pronounced Ba Go. It is a city or rather a long street, twenty li or nearly seven miles long, and the houses were packed as closely together in that street as they are in London itself. The worst of the journey, Tuan told me, was over. There was another range of mountains to cross, we had been going north, now we were to go west, it would take us two days and we would be in Jehol.

And here, for the first time, the authorities took notice of me. The first inn we stopped at was dirty, and Tuan went on a tour of inspection to see if he could not find one more to his Missie's liking, and I sat in my cart and watched the crowded throng, and thought that never in my life had I been so tired—I ached in every limb. If the finding of an inn had depended on me I should simply have gone to sleep where I was. At last it was decided there was none better, and into the crowded and dirty yard we went, and I, as soon as my bed was put up, had my bath and got into it, as the only clean place there was, besides I was too tired to eat, and I thought I might as well rest.

But I had been seen sitting in the street, and the Tutuh of the town, the Chief Magistrate, sent his secretary to call upon the “distinguished traveller” and to ask if she, Tuan, who never could manage the pronouns, reported it as “he,” had a passport. The “distinguished traveller” apologised for being in bed and unable to see the great man's secretary, and sent her servant—I noticed he put on his best clothes, so I suppose he posed as an interpreter—to show she had a passport all in order. He came back looking very grave and very important.