My Several Worlds (25 page)

I left him and returned at noon to find a meager effort the result of his morning’s work. Nevertheless I gave him the coins for his noodles and bade him come back when he had eaten.

He did not come back. I never saw him again until about six months later, when I happened to meet him in another street on the opposite side of the town where I seldom went. He put out his hand to beg, and when he saw who I was horror spread over his brown face. Without one word he darted away and after this time I truly never saw him again.

One Christmas Eve I heard a childish voice at our back door, and opening it, I found there on the doorstep a little boy of perhaps eight, thin and starved, and clad only in a cotton shirt. He was a pretty boy, unusually so, and he looked at me with huge dark eyes.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“They told me it was your feast day and I thought you might have some scraps for me to eat,” he said plaintively.

“Where are you parents?” I asked.

“I have none,” he said.

“You must have a family,” I remonstrated.

“I have no one,” he said in his pathetic voice. “My father and mother and I were walking south to escape the northern famine and they fell ill and died and so I am alone.” It was true that there was a famine in the North that year and the boy looked honest. At any rate, my heart was soft with Christmas sentiment, and so I brought him in and bathed him and put warm clothes on him and fed him. Then I made up a cot in the small study and put him to bed. Nothing was hidden in our life, and of course the two servants we employed soon spread the news about the orphan and the next morning my first visitor was Madame Chang. She heard the story and then she inspected the small boy. He looked back at her in apparent innocence, answering her questions while she stared at him thoughtfully. After a while she sent him to the kitchen and she cogitated and then spoke.

“I distrust this child,” she said. “I think someone is taking advantage of Christmas and your good heart. What do you plan to do with him?”

“I haven’t thought,” I confessed. “I suppose I’ll just keep him here, send him to school and so on.”

She shook her head. “Keep him but not here,” she advised. “Let him go and live with the mission farmer.”

Outside the city there was a small farm where the man in the house was experimenting with seed selection and a farmer lived there in our employ. I respected Madame Chang too much not to obey her, and we took our orphan to the farm, giving directions about his care, that he was to be sent each day to the village school and that he could learn to help about the place. Alas, after three months or so of this life, although he grew fat and cheerful, our pretty orphan ran away and we never saw him again either. The farmer was cheerfully philosophical about it. “That small one could never work,” he remarked. “Eat and sleep and play he could do very well, but ask him to take the broom and sweep the threshold and he runs away.”

The farmer was a kind man and his wife was a motherly woman who had taken the orphan as one of her own brood and she mourned over him, but he was gone, I suppose to join the band of beggars or thieves who had sent him to me in the first place.

Those were the years, too, when I travelled far and wide over the back country where sedan chairs were the only way for a woman to go. I went of course with the man in the house who was restless, I think, about studying Chinese and liked to escape his books. At any rate we travelled, he on bicycle and I in the usual sedan chair. It was enclosed and down the front hung a curtain of heavy blue cotton cloth. I rode with the curtain up while we went along open roads, but as we neared villages and towns I let it fall in order to escape the curiosity of crowds who had never seen a white man or woman. Even so, I did not count on some one who might pass me, walking or donkeyback, and who, reaching a town ahead of us, would cry out on the streets or in a teashop that a strange sight was soon to arrive. More than once when we reached the gates of a walled village or town a crowd would be there waiting, and in such an intense state of curiosity that they could not keep from pulling the curtain aside to stare at me. At first, trying to be like a Chinese lady, I fastened the curtain. Then reflecting that I was not Chinese, and that I had better satisfy their curiosity since it was friendly enough, I put the curtain aside and let them stare. Staring and pressing about me they would follow me to the inn and only an irate innkeeper could make them leave.

“What are you gaping at?” he would bawl at them. “Is it anything but a man and a woman with eyes and arms and legs? Are not all around the four seas one family under Heaven?”

He would make a great ado of pushing them out, but actually he was as curious as they, and soon they were all back again. When I went to my room and shut the wooden door, they would bend down to the ground where for six inches or so there was no door and stare at me upside down. If the windows were papered, they licked their fingers wet and melted holes in the soft rice paper and applied an eye to watch me. Only once was I frightened and that was when our baggage did not arrive and the man went back to find it and left me alone. As soon as they saw he was gone the crowd began to batter at the barred door, and I was uneasy because I had noticed a number of rough young men among them. I drew a heavy wooden chair against the door and sat down in it with my feet drawn up so that they could not see me, and waited until the baggage arrived.

Out of these travels still other friends were found, and as time went on and I became familiar with new places, I used to visit in families where no white person had even been, proud old families who had lived in remote walled towns and in the same houses for many hundreds of years, and sitting with the womenfolk, young and old, I listened to them talk and learned about their lives. One such house I remember especially in a fine old city, small and totally untouched by modern times. The family was surnamed Li, and I became friends with the wife of the youngest son, a woman about my own age.

She was intensely curious about me and about the life I lived, and yet she never spoke a word in the presence of her husband’s mother and her elder sisters-in-law. I always noticed her sweet and gentle face, however, and always smiled at her. One day she came to my room alone and begged me to go to the part of the vast compound where she lived. We went through small lanes and hidden ways, for obviously she did not want anybody to know that she was monopolizing me, and at last we reached the little courtyard and the rooms where she and her husband lived. No one was there and she seized my hand and led me into her bedroom and barred the door. It was an old-fashioned Chinese bedroom, such as I had seen many times, the enormous bed, hung with embroidered curtains of red satin, filling one entire end of the room, tables and chairs placed against the wall, and the usual pigskin chests, varnished red and locked with huge brass locks.

“Sit on the bed so we can talk,” she begged.

She stepped up on the footstool, for the bed was high, and patted the red satin mattress, and I sat down beside her. Immediately she took my right hand in both hers with friendly affection, and then she began her questions.

“Tell me,” she said earnestly, “is it true your husband speaks to you in the presence of other people?”

“Quite true,” I said.

“Not shameful?” she persisted.

“We do not consider it so,” I assured her.

“Ah,” she sighed enviously. “I dare not speak to mine except at night here. If I am with the family and he comes in then I must leave the room, otherwise it would be shameful. How many years do you think I have been married?”

“Not many,” I said, smiling. “You look so young.”

“Two,” she said, holding up two slender fingers. “I have been here two years, yet I have never once spoken to my father-in-law. I bow to him if we meet and then I must leave the room. He does not notice me.

“I have never met my father-in-law nor my mother-in-law,” I told her. “They live across the sea in America.”

She looked astonished. “Then how was your marriage arranged?”

We talked a long time then about the differences between our peoples, and she showed a lively intelligence. Without the slightest help she had thought a great deal, although apparently her young husband was fond of her and sometimes answered her questions. She adored him, I could see, and she was only sorrowful because they could be together so little, for when he came home at night from the family business, duty compelled him to spend hours with his parents and it was always late when he came to bed, and she was afraid to ask him for too much talk. And yet there was no one else, except the bondsmaids and servants who were more ignorant than she, for custom forbade her to speak to the elder women unless she was spoken to. This rigorousness of family decorum was of course not to be found except in the oldest and richest and most conservative families. Among the poorer people and certainly among those who were more modern there was much freedom. Eventually even my friend would have more freedom, for when her mother-in-law died and her elder sister-in-law became the head of the inner family, her own position would improve until someday she herself might be the head, with daughters-in-law of her own. I am sure it was hard to wait, and she listened enchanted to what I told her about American women.

The longer I lived in our northern city, however, the more deeply impressed I was, not by the rich folk but by the farmers and their families, who lived in the villages outside the city wall. They were the ones who bore the brunt of life, who made the least money and did the most work. They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and to weeping. To visit the farm families became my own search for reality, and among them I found the human being as he most nearly is. They were not all good, by any means, nor honest, and it was inevitable that the very reality of their lives made them sometimes cruel. A farm woman could strangle her own newborn girl baby if she were desperate enough at the thought of another mouth added to the family, but she wept while she did it and the weeping was raw sorrow, not simply at what she did, but far deeper, over the necessity she felt to do it.

“Better to kill the child,” this was what she thought.

Once in a small gathering of friends, and not all of them poor or farm folk, we fell to talking of killing girl babies. There were eleven women present and all except two confessed that at least one girl child had been killed in each home. They still wept when they spoke of it, and most of them had not done the deed themselves, and indeed they declared that they could not have done it, but that their husbands or mothers-in-law had ordered the midwife to do it because there were too many girls in the family already. The excuse was that a girl when she marries becomes part of another family, and poor families could not afford to rear too many children who brought nothing to the family and indeed took from it to go to another family when they married. Yet daughters when they lived were tenderly loved and death had to be done at birth or it was not done at all. A few hours, a first glimpse at a little newborn face, could move the hardest woman to realize that she could not destroy her child. Orders were given before the birth, so that the instant a midwife perceived the sex of the child, were it a girl, she could put her thumb to its throat.

I have heard proud young Chinese abroad declare that such things never happened in their country, and when I hear such talk, I hold my peace. They did happen, for I saw it and heard of it, but these young modern Chinese do not know why it happened, and if they cannot understand the life of their own people and some of the tragedy behind it then let them say what they will. In the same way I have heard them deny that Chinese women have had bound feet in recent decades. Perhaps, living only in the foreign cities of Shanghai or Tientsin or under the Manchu influence of Peking they really have not seen bound feet. But I, living only a few hours from Peking in a town on the railroad, within my adult life have seen girl children with bound feet and most of the women, in both city and country, had bound feet. Our Madame Chang had bound feet, and though they were not small, being six inches long instead of the traditional three, yet she had suffered enough and when she walked it was as though she went on pegs. Madame Wu had always to lean on two bondsmaids when she came to see me, and her feet were only three inches long and she wore beautiful little satin shoes. Yet the granddaughters of Madame Chang and Madame Wu were not having their feet bound because they were going to school. Madame Chang put it in practical terms when she said one day, “I am glad for every girl who does not have her feet bound, for I spent my nights in weeping when I was a girl before my feet grew numb. Yet if she is not bound-footed she must be educated, otherwise she will not get a husband. A small-footed girl can get an old-fashioned husband and a big-footed girl, if educated, can get a new-fashioned husband, but small feet or schooling she must have, one or the other.”

It is true that in certain areas of China there never were bound feet. I remember once travelling in the province of Fukien in South China and discovering there that the countrywomen went freely about with natural feet. They were beautiful strong women, and it was the wise local custom to marry sons to countrywomen so as to bring clean new blood into the family. These daughters-in-law were not ladies of leisure. Instead they did all the work of the family, very much as though they were maids, and the whole family depended upon them and they were always stronger than their husbands. I remember visiting in the family of a friend who lived in Amoy and although it was a scholar family we were waited upon at dinner by a handsome country girl with bare brown feet thrust into cotton shoes. She smiled when her mother-in-law introduced her to us as her daughter-in-law, and she busied herself, managing everything well, joining in the conversation and yet never sitting down with us.

And among the people in my childhood region in mid-China the farm women seldom had bound feet. It was only the city families who bound their daughters’ feet. But there we were on the main road of new China, and few of my generation were binding the feet of their girl children. One hears many stories of how this custom grew up in China, all of them mostly myth. It was in my time merely a matter of custom and beauty, exactly as the young Chinese are fond of saying, as westerners used to bind the waists of their women in corsets or as young Western women today preposterously exaggerate their breasts. People do strange things for what they consider beauty.