FOOT SHUTTLECOCK.
Lent by Scotch Presbyterian Mission.
There is one Chinese family that has for many years shown us kindliness. We have assisted at its weddings and its funerals, and its young men have spent long hours of the days, when they had nothing else to do, at our house. One day the ladies announced they were coming. And they came; but, alas! as is usual, in such numbers, and with so many women attendants, it was difficult to find chairs enough for all, much more conversation. How merry they were, as they looked about at all our foreign things, all new to them! But their especial delight was our battledore and shuttlecocks. They had been accustomed to use the heels of their crippled feet for battledores, and were not easily tired of playing in our pleasanter fashion. It was one of these girls who afterwards at a dinner party consented to show me her foot. For a year after that she was busy with preparations for her trousseau, all apparently made at home under her own supervision; and, to my great regret, I have seen nothing of her since her marriage. We were away for a time, and since then she has had a child. A Chinese lady never goes about whilst expecting, nor whilst her child is very young—at least, those I know do not. Curiously enough, for a month after child-birth Chinese coolies object to even carrying a woman in a sedan-chair. There are in China many curious traces of the same idea, that led to the service for the churching of women. There is some objection to women sleeping upstairs in a house frequented by men; and when a woman in our house was put to sleep in a room that happened to be over the entrance, some Chinese considered it very damaging to my husband's business. In China a husband and wife very rarely go out or travel together. On one occasion, as I relate elsewhere, an old-fashioned inn actually refused to receive us on that ground, and we were nearly benighted before arriving at another village, where our servant had the assurance to pass me off as a man.
It must not, however, be assumed from all this that Chinese women take no part in affairs. A Governor's wife is always supposed to be the keeper of his official seal, and is therefore never expected to go out and pay visits. When my husband was obliged to go to Shanghai on business, it was his Chinese employés who immediately suggested that I should keep the keys of the safe, and supervise the accounts in his absence, this being what they said the wife of a Chinese man of business would undertake. Nor is it unusual, my husband says, for a business man to say to him, "I must go home and consult my wife before concluding this bargain." When we first arrived in Chungking, the wife of a formerly very wealthy merchant came at once to see me, begging that some place might be found in my husband's business for her husband, who had unfortunately become impoverished. I promised to mention the matter; but as she proceeded to enter into details, and my knowledge of Chinese was even less then than it is now, I called for our cook to interpret, and to my amusement presently heard him say, "I don't know why you trouble my mistress about all this. Foreign ladies are not like our ladies; they don't understand anything about business, and take no part in their husbands' affairs." This he said in a tone as if explaining that we were ignorant, frivolous creatures; and it must be remembered that, like most Chinese who go into foreign employ, he had been uniformly in service with foreigners since his earliest years.
When a young man in my husband's business was taking to dissipated courses, it was his mother who came off in her sedan-chair into the country to interview my husband. And very definitely she knew what she wanted,—that her son should be given employment at a distance, and thus separated from the many undesirable acquaintances he had formed. She begged my husband also to give him a talking to, and told him exactly what she thought he had better say; then, having laid her point of view very clearly before him, begged that her visit might be kept a secret from her son, and so departed. I must add that, for all her being a lady, she went on her knees to my husband on arrival, and tried to do so again on going. But in conversation with him she was anything but on her knees.
Except among the poorest of the poor, who do field-work or carry water, the women of China do little beyond suckling children and making shoes, except in the treaty ports, where now large numbers of them are employed in the factories lately started. They smoke and gossip, give and go to dinner parties, and one of their great delights is to go on pilgrimages to distant shrines. It is sometimes stipulated before marriage that a woman shall go on so many pilgrimages during the year. Even when nuns invite ladies to come and enjoy themselves with them, it means drinking wine, smoking, and playing cards; and not uncommonly, in the west of China at all events, smoking includes opium-smoking. The ladies who are regular opium-smokers sit up late at night, and do not get up till five or six in the evening. They mostly have bad health, and generally say they have taken to opium-smoking because of it. Whatever effect opium may have upon men, the various ladies I have seen at ladies' dinners generally return from the opium-couch with their eyes very bright, their cheeks very red, and talking a great deal of nonsense very excitedly. But afterwards they look yellow and unhealthy, mostly with sunken cheeks. They seem no more ashamed of it than ladies are of taking wine in England. But those who do not smoke seem to think it a rather disgraceful proceeding. A lady will draw herself up, and say, "None of the members of my family smoke opium—not one." But at a good many dinner parties the opium-couch is prepared with all its elegant accessories. And at the only Chinese country house, at which I have stayed, the ladies' one idea was to ask me into their bedrooms to smoke opium. Naturally, my acquaintance is rather with Szechuan ladies. Cantonese seem altogether different. And I gather that there must be a much more cultured set in some parts of China, judging from the ladies engaged in starting the High School for Girls in Shanghai. Of those I know in the west, only one young girl could read and write. She was talked of with admiration by young men, who asked if I knew her, and if she were not awfully clever.
Foreign men often get the idea that women rule the roost in China, because when they want to buy a house or bit of land the sale is often delayed owing to some old woman of the family not agreeing to it. And the scolding tongue of an old woman has before now proved too much for a British Consul to withstand. But it must be remembered what a dull, mulish obstinacy is that of the Chinese man, and that somehow or other the Chinese woman has to get on with him. At Ichang, in one street at least, the men were said to be constantly beating their wives; and I recollect once seeing a woman, who, after a storm of invective against her husband, threw herself down on the road there and kicked and screamed. She was very red, as if she had been drinking too much wine; and I still remember the sheepish air of the man, as he stood and watched her kicking. He certainly did not attempt to lay a hand upon her whilst we were by. But during all the years I have been in China this is the only case of the kind I have seen. In a Chinese city one does not at night hear the cries of women as one too often does in London. And on the whole it would appear as if husbands and wives got on very well together, if without very much affection. A woman who kills her husband is still condemned to death by the lingering process, namely, to being sliced to death; but though this shows the horror entertained of so dastardly a deed, yet in reality, even for such a crime as this, she is put to death first and cut in pieces afterwards.
Meng Kuang is one of the typical women of China. Contrary to the usual custom, she seems to have chosen her own husband, and went to his house dressed in all the splendour of a Chinese bride. For seven days he did not speak to her, nor answer one of her questions. At last he told her he did not like silks of various colours, nor a painted face, nor blackened eyebrows. At once she transformed herself into a plainly dressed, hard-working wife; she became noted for her virtues; and her name is on the lips of all the people of China, somewhat after the fashion of the patient Griselda of old.