CHAPTER X
WIDOWS AND CHILDREN
The remarriage of a widow is, as we have seen, regarded in the best circles with disapproval. The model wife—the wife to whom a commemorative arch is erected on the roadside near her home and whose name is handed down to posterity in the official chronicle of her district as a pattern of virtue—is as scrupulously faithful to her husband after his death as during his life. But very poor families—such as are the majority of the families of Weihaiwei—cannot afford to support widows for the mere joy of contemplating their fidelity and chastity: hence we find that in practice a young widow is often not only induced by her late husband's family to enter into a second marriage and so rid them of the necessity of supporting her, but is practically compelled to get married before the expiration of the period of deep mourning, which lasts twenty-seven months. For a widow to re-marry while in mourning for her husband is by Chinese law a penal offence: though when the offence is committed on account of the straitened circumstances of the widow and her first husband's family it is generally allowed to pass without official notice or censure.
If a young widow has presented her late husband with children it is less likely that his family will insist upon a second marriage than if she is childless: indeed, if the family is well-to-do, it will sometimes take active preventive measures if she herself contemplates such a step. When a widow with children remarries, the children remain with the first husband's family, or at any rate revert to that family after the years of early childhood. It is when a childless young widow, in spite of the solicitations of her husband's family, obstinately refuses to take a second husband that domestic troubles arise which are likely to end in the law-courts. If the widow's father-in-law finds it impossible to remove her aversion to a second marriage he will probably come to the court with a trumped-up charge against her of "unfilial" behaviour. One Chang Yün-shêng brought an action in my court against his deceased son's wife, who was a daughter of the Lin family, for cruelty and want of respect. "She is disobedient," he said; "she refuses to feed me, and she constantly assaults and vilifies my wife and myself. In our old age we find such conduct on the part of our daughter-in-law intolerable, and I implore the court to devise some means of recalling her to a sense of duty and obedience."
The case soon wore a different aspect when the woman's father, Lin Pa, put in an appearance and explained that Chang's sole object in making a series of false and unjust accusations against a blameless young woman was that he might be sure of magisterial sympathy and help in the matter of compelling her to accept a second marriage. This on investigation was found to be the key to the situation. Chang regarded the woman as a family asset which he desired to realise in cash. Her remarriage would have been negotiated purely as a mercantile transaction, the profits of which would have gone into the money-bags of Chang. As the covetous old man was well able to support his son's wife—indeed she was living without expense to him on the property which had come to her husband before his death as a result of fên-chia[170]—the court required him to find substantial security that in no circumstances would he attempt to dispose of the person of his daughter-in-law against her will. The interference of the woman's father in this case affords another proof that a woman's own family does not necessarily abandon her for ever to the caprice of the family into which she has married.
Chinese local histories contain many accounts of the various devices resorted to by devoted widows for the purpose of avoiding the dishonour of a second marriage. De Groot[171] quotes the case of a child-widow—she was only fifteen years of age—who, as a reply to the demands made upon her to enter into a second marriage, took a solemn oath of chastity and confirmed it by cutting off her ears and placing them on a dish. Thereupon, as the historian says, her relatives "gave up their project," perhaps from pity or admiration of the poor child's heroic conduct, perhaps from the belief that no self-respecting man would care for an earless bride. If the annals of Weihaiwei show no cases quite identical with this, they contain accounts of many a young widow who has died to avoid remarriage.