Women, Resistance and Revolution (28 page)

For a fortnight Hsi Men remained with Cinnamon Bud in the house of joy. Not once did he show his face at home.

His five wives felt shamefully forsaken and cast aside. All but Gold Lotus could patiently bear this misfortune. Gold Lotus however could not endure the absence of her mate. Each day she carefully curled her hair, and powdered and rouged her face, and polished as a well-cut-gem she stood at the door of the pavilion and longingly watched for his coming.

She sends him a message which Cinnamon Bud snatched, thinking it was from some new love of his.

Whether in the pale twilight,

Or in the sunlit day,

My thoughts are of him.

I feel such anguish

As one hardly feels

At the sight of the beloved lying dead.

I grieve for him,

And am like to die of sorrow.

Lonely is the pillow,

Dimly flickers the lamp.

The moon looks in

Through the half open window.

Alas! how can I, wretched one,

Survive the frosty night?

But Hsi Men tore it into shreds and kicked the boy who brought it angrily and sent him home.

Sadly, Gold Lotus went back to her pavilion. The time passed with intolerable slowness. An hour seemed to her a month. At last she made up her mind. Hsi Men would not come home that night, she was certain. As soon as it was dark she sent her two maids to bed. Then Gold Lotus went into the park, as though she were going to take one of her nightly strolls. But this time she had a definite goal: the cottage of the young gardener, Kin Tung. Quietly she invited him to come to her pavilion. She let him in, carefully bolted the door, and set wine before him. She pressed him to drink until he grew tipsy. Then she loosened her girdle, disrobed, and abandoned herself to him.

Eternal rules she disregards,

Rules that nature herself proclaims:

The high must ever shun the low,

Noble from the base be strictly severed.

Emboldened by her desires,

She fears not her master’s wrath.

Hot with unbridled desire

She obeys only her own voice.

In the park of the hundred flowers

She allows her base impulse to rule her,

Making a brothel of the house

Where chastity should prevail.

Hsi Men learns of what she has been doing. The boy is beaten until he is covered with blood. The hair is torn from his head and he is cast out of the house. He takes a horse whip to Gold Lotus and brings it down on her. She manages to lie convincingly, and her maid supports her story. He spares her and Gold Lotus goes to an old wise woman herbalist for help, who sends her to an astrologer. She gives his spells to her husband.

Two days later Gold Lotus and Hsi Men were on the best of terms and enjoying themselves like little fishes in the water. But, worthy reader, it is not without reason that a married man is warned against letting his wife have secret dealings with … Tao priests and soothsayers, with nurses and matchmakers. A good old proverb runs,

Let not your guests behold your wife,

And secretly lock the postern gate.

Restrict her to courtyard and garden;

So intrigue and misfortune will pass you by.

From Chin P’ing Mei,
The Adventurous History of Hsi Men and his Six Wives.
Written
c.
1650 and published in seventeenth-century China, it was banned in the eighteenth century as immoral. Though the law was not changed until 1912 Chin P’ing Mei was very popular and circulated illegally.

How sad it is to be a woman,

Nothing on earth is held so cheap.

Boys stand leaning at the door

Like Gods fallen out of heavens.

Their hearts brace the Four Oceans,

The wind and dust of a thousand miles.

No one is glad when a girl is born,

By her the family sets no store.

Fu Hsuan

Our husbands regard us as some sort of dogs who keep the house. We even despise ourselves.

Chinese peasant women

These well-groomed heroines carry five-foot rifles,

On this parade ground in the first rays of the sun.

Daughters of China have uncommon aspirations,

Preferring battle tunics to red dresses.

Mao Tse-tung, inscription on a photograph of a women’s militia

WOMAN’S
ASSESSOR
: Was it because you had different opinions that you fought with your wife?

MAN
: No. But because in the past before liberation, I often saw my father beat my mother and I was brought up to think that men should be superior.

JUDGE
: When did your father beat your mother?

MAN
: In the old society.

JUDGE
: And what does the present law say?

MAN
: That men and women are equal. But I still think the wife should obey the husband.

JUDGE
: But don’t you know the law?

MAN
: I don’t think it matters if a man beats his wife – but he mustn’t beat others. In the family it’s all right.

JUDGE
: What law allows the husband to beat the wife?

MAN
: No law.

Felix Greene,
A Divorce Trial in China
, 1960

We apprehended long ago that the women of Asia cannot exact sympathy from the imperialists in their fight to liberate themselves.… You have but to witness how the imperialists treat women in their own countries.

Mme Sun Yat-sen

On 14 November 1919 Miss Chao Wu-chieh of Nanyung Street, Changsha, took out a dagger, and, as she was being raised in the bridal chair, slit her throat. Such an event might never have been elevated into history. The suicide of a woman in China was far from unusual. But Miss Chao’s suicide became the subject of at least nine impassioned articles by Mao Tse-tung. The event symbolized at once the centuries of hopeless female subordination – the extreme act of suicide was the only way Miss Chao could avoid her arranged marriage – and the critical forces which were being brought to bear on traditional Chinese society.

In order to understand the significance of changes brought by the revolution the nature and degree of degradation and domination which previously existed have to be remembered. While a small minority of the upper classes lived as aesthetic ornaments, most of the women worked ceaselessly and could be beaten and even killed with no hope of redress. Bride-price and wife-selling were normal; so too were polygamy and concubinage. Girls were sold or kidnapped into prostitution. Child streetwalkers could frequently be seen in the larger towns. Within the family the older women disciplined the younger, the mother-in-law beating the young wife. The wife had no rights until she had a son. All women were subject to the authority of husbands, brothers, and finally sons. Although this traditional family was related to the agrarian economy, its effects on women were more severe than in western European peasant societies, because in the evolution of Chinese society women could never inherit. There was no possibility of protection coming from her father’s family in opposition to the way in which her husband was treating her, through the property which she owned. In the upper classes she had a trousseau and in the lower classes there was marriage
purchase. True, the wife’s family might apply pressure but if they weren’t powerful wives could be sold as they had been bought and even rented out. Helen Foster Snow, in
Women in Modern China
, says:

the Chinese family resembled nothing so much as a primitive matriarchal clan in which the father had taken the place of the matriarch and spent his whole time trying to hold his usurped position supported by force and strict ‘rules’ of ancestral etiquette. He calls himself the father and mother of the family, a most indicative term.
¹

Thus conflict between husbands and fathers, sons and fathers, children and parents, was severely restricted. Probably the real strength of this family was in the middle strata of Chinese society. Upper-class women developed the arts of diplomacy and romantic intrigue; the lower peasant woman in the south had a certain independence which came from her economic contribution as a farming hand. There were of course some regional differences too.

The impact of imperialism and industrialization weakened the authority of the father and husband but did not provide a solution for the wife and daughter. Opium brought in by British trade could cause the breakdown of the father and force the mother into a more active role, but it also brought a shortage of food and a permanent escape for the man. Economic development undermined the traditional family cell; though the old structure continued, it became increasingly intolerable to the young. Mao told Edgar Snow in
Journey to the Beginning
that when he was thirteen his father arranged a marriage with a bride six years older than he was. The point of marrying young boys in this way was to use the girl’s labour in the household before the boy was mature enough for the ceremony actually to occur. Mao had often come into conflict with his father and taken refuge with his mother, who was also persecuted by the authoritarianism of the father. Rather than marry he ran away from home and wouldn’t come back until his father gave in.

The right to a love-match became a really important issue for the young of both sexes, not only in the new bourgeoisie but in peasant and proletarian families. Just before the revolution in the 1940s, Marion J. Levy noted various factors which had eroded male authority in the Chinese family.
²
Amongst them were such diverse factors as women’s work in the towns, coeducation, the emergence
of a youth culture, romantic love and the Communist Party. She observed that beating had become less common and that mothers-in-law were finding it more difficult to control the young wives. There were frequent complaints of bickering in families. These conflicts were not based on significant issues but rather on the desire to test positions. Wives and mothers-in-law were jockeying for support from male members of the family. Because the institutional authority of the mother-in-law over the young women had broken down but not yet gone, it was difficult to settle these power struggles either way.

Before the nineteenth century, apart from suicide, sexual intrigue, fantasy, and religion were the only ways women could escape. Isolated writers protested against the oppression of women from the sixteenth century onwards and in the eighteenth century women poetesses demanded equality for women in love-making. In 1825 Li Ju-chen wrote a utopian feminist novel in which a hundred fairy-folk turned into women, passed the official examination to become mandarins and instituted a kingdom of women who then oppressed the men. The hero has his ears pierced and his feet bound. But this kind of feminism was all imagining. It could only turn the world on its head in fantasy. Religion was the only other means through which female dissatisfaction could be expressed. Taoist sects, for example, attracted women as an alternative to Confucianism. The convent served as a refuge from arranged marriages. Later, Protestantism with its emphasis on the education of women, opposition to foot-binding and support for a general improvement in women’s social standing acted as a means of focusing ideas for change and making articulate female discontent. Indeed, the revolt against arranged marriages reached such a pitch that the government was forced to set up houses for girls disowned by their families. By the early twentieth century though, Christianity was too bound up with imperialism and the attempted invasion of China by the western powers to be a radicalizing force. The Christian women’s organizations retained a feministic equality, but rather after the manner of upper-middle-class philanthropizing in Europe and America. By belonging to such an organization women from the upper classes gained social standing and tried to salvage outcast girls from concubinage, prostitution, foot-binding and opium. The women’s Christian organizations were part of a more general agitation for female education and by 1917 the state
schools were admitting girls – though this still affected only a small privileged minority.