Chapter X: Widows and Children (2)

The last case to be mentioned shows that it is not women only who can throw away their lives on the death of their loved ones. A native of the village of Hai-hsi-t'ou came to report the suicide of a nephew, Tung Ch'i-tzŭ. "He was twenty years old," said my informant. "He was deeply attached to his wife and she to him. She died about six weeks ago. They had been married less than two years and they had no children. He was very unhappy after her death, and would not let any one console him. He was left alone, and yesterday when his father had gone to market he hanged himself from a beam with his own girdle. There was no other motive for the suicide. He died because he loved his wife too much, and could not live without her."

Deaths and suicides have made a dismal chapter, and perhaps no better way could be devised of lightening the gloom than by turning to a source of brightness that does more to make homes happy--Chinese homes and Western homes--than anything else in the world. To say that the Chinese love their children would be unnecessary: they would be a unique race if they did not. But it may not be accepted equally readily that Chinese girls and boys are charming and lovable even when compared with the modern children of western Europe and America, who have all the resources of science and civilisation lavished on their upbringing, and for whose benefit has been founded something like a special branch of psychology. Perhaps there has been no section of the Chinese people more hopelessly misunderstood by Western folk than the children. It is not unnatural that such should be the case. It is but rarely that feelings of real sympathy and mutual appreciation can exist between Chinese children and adult Europeans. It would be futile to deny the fact that by the Chinese child we are almost sure to be regarded as fearfully and wonderfully ugly--and all good children have an instinctive dislike of the ugly. Our clothing is ridiculous; our eyes and noses are deformed; our hair (unless it is black) looks diseased; our language--even if we profess to speak Chinese--is strangely uncouth; and the particular blandishments we attempt are not of the kind to which they are accustomed, or to which they know how to respond. There is no use in saying "goo-goo" to an infant that expects to be addressed with a conciliating "fo-fo"; nor should we be surprised if we fail to win the approval of a shy Chinese youngster by talking to him on the topics that would rouse the interest of the twentieth-century English schoolboy. As likely as not he will remain stolidly indifferent, and will stare at his well-meaning interlocutor with a disconcerting lack--or apparent lack--of intelligence. No wonder is it that the mortified foreigner often goes away complaining that Chinese children are ugly, stupid, horrid and ungracious little urchins and that he will never try to make friends with them again.

Even distance does not seem to lend much enchantment to the Chinese child from the European point of view. He is commonly caricatured somewhat after this fashion: he never smiles; he has hardly any nose and possesses oblique eyes that are almost invisible; he wears too many clothes in winter, so that he looks like an animated plum-pudding; he wears too little in summer--his birthday dress, to be explicit--and looks like a jointed wooden doll; he has a horror of "romping"; he is unwashed, deceitful and cruel; he cultivates a solemnity of demeanour with the view of leading people to think he is precociously wise and preternaturally good; and he is always mouthing philosophic saws from Confucius which he has learned by rote and of which he neither knows nor wants to know the meaning. Of course there is much in this description that is totally false and misleading, but it is not difficult to see the superficial characteristics that may give such a caricature a certain amount of plausibility.

To form a true idea of what Chinese children really are we must take them unawares among their own people, if we are fortunate enough to have opportunities of doing so. We must go into the country fields and villages and see them at work and play; we must watch them at their daily round of duties and pleasures, at school (one of the old-fashioned schools if possible), in times of sickness and pain, on occasions of festivals, family gatherings, weddings and funerals. The more we see of them in their own houses and surrounded by their own relatives the better we shall understand them and the more we shall like them. They are highly intelligent, quick to see the merry side of things, brimful of healthy animal spirits, and exceedingly companionable. This applies not only to the boys but also in a smaller degree to the girls, who, however, are much less talkative than they come to be in later years and are apt to be more timid and shy than their little brothers. They are terribly handicapped by the cruel custom of foot-binding, which it is earnestly to be hoped will before long be utterly abolished throughout China. It has undoubtedly caused a far greater aggregate amount of pain and misery in China than has been produced by opium-smoking. In spite of the cruelty involved in foot-binding, the rather common impression that the Chinese have no affection for their daughters or regard the birth of a girl as a domestic calamity is very far from correct. That a son is welcomed with greater joy than a daughter is true, but that a daughter is not welcomed at all is a view which is daily contradicted by experience. Mothers, especially, are often as devoted to their girls as they are to their boys. In the autumn of 1909 a headman reported to me that a woman of his village had killed herself because she was distracted with grief on account of the death of her child. The child in question was a girl, fourteen years of age. "Her mother," said the headman, "begged Heaven (_Lao T'ien-yeh_) to bring her daughter back to life, and she declared that she would willingly give her life in exchange for that of her daughter." It is erroneous to suppose that the old loving relations between mother and daughter are necessarily severed on the daughter's marriage. It is often the case that a young married woman's greatest happiness consists in periodical visits to her old home.

On the whole it may be said that Chinese children are neither better nor worse, neither more nor less delightful, than the children of the West, and that child-nature is much the same all the world over. Among their most conspicuous qualities are their good-humour and patience. Chinese children bear illness and pain like little heroes. This need not be ascribed entirely to the oft-asserted cause that "Chinese have no nerves," though indeed there is good reason to believe that the people of the West (perhaps owing to the relaxing effects of a pampering civilisation) are considerably more sensitive to physical suffering than the people of the Orient. Another interesting characteristic of Chinese children consists in the fact that good manners very often appear, at first sight, to be innate rather than acquired. Even illiterate children, and the children of illiterate parents, seem to behave with a politeness and grace of manner towards their elders and superiors (more particularly, of course, those of their own race) which they certainly have not learned by direct teaching. A well-bred European child sometimes gives one the impression that he has learned his exemplary "manners" as a lesson, just as he learns the tributaries of the Ouse or the dates of the kings. The most remarkable point about the Chinese child's "manners" is the grace and ease with which he displays them and the entire absence of _mauvaise honte_. No doubt the truth of the matter is that courtesy is no more a natural quality in the Chinese than in other races. The average peasant's child in north China, who is always treated with what seems to us excessive indulgence--being allowed to run wild and hardly ever punished for his childish acts of "naughtiness" and disobedience--grows up a devoted and obedient son and most courteous and conciliatory, as a rule, in his dealings with the outside world; but these graces were not born in him except possibly in the merely potential form of hereditary predisposition. He has acquired them unconsciously through the medium of that "endless imitation" which, as Wordsworth said, seems at times to be the "whole vocation" of a healthy child. Doubtless he learns the forms of politeness to some extent from his schoolmaster--and indeed if ethical teaching can make a good boy, then the educated Chinese boy should be perfect; but that school teaching is not everything is proved by the fact that in a poor country-district like Weihaiwei, where only a small proportion of the children go to school, there is no essential difference in "manners" between the lettered and the ignorant, though the educated are of course quicker in intelligence and more adaptable.

Perhaps the explanation of the matter is that in China the adult's life and the child's life are not kept too far apart from each other, so that the child has endless opportunities of indulging his imitative faculties to the utmost. Children live in the bosom of the family, and it is very rarely indeed that their natural high spirits are frowned down with the chilling remark that "little boys should be seen and not heard." Strange to say, the sparing of the rod does not seem to have the effect of spoiling the Chinese child, who is not more troublesome or unruly than the average European child. The Chinese, indeed, have a proverb which shows that they, too, understand the value of occasional corporal punishment: "From the end of the rod pops forth a filial son." But the rod is allowed to become very dusty in most Chinese homes, and the filial son seems to come all the same.

Female infanticide is not practised in Weihaiwei. The only infants ever made away with are the offspring of illicit connections, and in such cases no difference is made between male and female. A young woman who has been seduced is--or was till recent years--practically compelled to destroy her illegitimate child; her own life would become insupportable otherwise, and she would probably be driven to suicide. The voice of the people would be unanimous against the Government if it caused the mother in such a case to be prosecuted on a charge of homicide, although her own female relations and neighbours often treat her so unmercifully as a result of her fall that she sometimes chooses to die by her own hand rather than submit to their ceaseless revilings.

Chinese law strongly supports the sanctity of the home and is very severe on unfaithful wives, but it regards the killing of an illegitimate child as a very light offence,--indeed case-made law regards it as no offence at all provided the killing be done at the time of the child's birth or before it. Fortunately cases of this kind in Weihaiwei are very rare. But the poorest classes have one most objectionable custom which seems to be strangely inconsistent with the undoubted fondness of parents for their children. This is the practice of throwing away or exposing the bodies of children who have died in infancy or in very early childhood. This seems to indicate an extraordinary degree of callousness in the natures of the people. How a mother can fondle her child lovingly and watch over it with the utmost care and unselfishness when it is sick, and yet can bear to see its little body thrown into an open ditch or left on a hillside to become the prey of wolves or the village dogs, is perhaps one of those mysterious anomalies in which the Chinese character is said to abound. Even New Guinea babies are treated after death with more respect than is sometimes the case in China.[186] Needless to say the British Government has not remained inactive in the matter, and the man who now refrains from giving his infant child decent burial knows that he runs a risk of punishment.

The only excuses that can be made for the people in this respect are not based on their poverty (for poverty does not prevent them from burying their adult relatives with all proper decorum) but on their theory that an infant "does not count" in the scheme of family and ancestral relationships. No mourning of any kind is worn for children who die under the age of about eight, and only a minor degree of mourning for older children who die unmarried and unmarriageable. Even when a young child's body is given a place in the family burial-ground care is always taken to choose a grave-site that is not likely to be selected for the burial of any senior,[187] for it is considered foolish and unnecessary to waste good _fêng-shui_ on a mere child, who has left no descendants whose fortunes it can influence.

Young children are not indeed regarded as soulless,[188] for there are touching ceremonies whereby a mother seeks to recall the soul of her child when it seems likely to fly away for ever; but child-spirits are not supposed to exercise any control over the welfare of the family. They never "grow up" in the spirit-world, but merely remain infant ghosts, powerful in nothing. The ancestral temples preserve no records of dead children nor are their names inscribed on spirit tablets. This is very different from the state of things existing among a race that is ethnically far inferior to the Chinese, namely the Vaeddas of Ceylon, who pay special attention to "the shades of departed children, the 'infant spirits,'"[189] and often call upon them for aid in times of unhappiness or calamity.

Fortunately the average child in Weihaiwei is an exceedingly healthy little piece of humanity and is not in the habit of worrying about the ultimate fate of either his body or his soul. He derives pleasure from the knowledge that he is loved by his elders, and in his rather undemonstrative way he loves them in return. He lives on simple fare that European children would scorn, but it is only the poorest of the poor whose children cannot _ch'ih pao_ (eat as much as they like) at least once a day. A villager in Weihaiwei who gave his children too little to eat would probably hear highly unflattering opinions about himself from his next-door neighbours, and to "save his face" he would be obliged to show less parsimony in matters of diet. That under-feeding cannot be common in Weihaiwei except in times of actual famine is proved not only by the excellent health and spirits of the children but by the fine physical development of the adults and the great age often attained by them.

We are told by many observers that theory and practice in China are often widely divergent, but in one matter at least they absolutely coincide. The Chinese hold that the greatest treasure their country can possess consists not in gold and silver, mines and railways, factories and shipping, but in an ever-increasing army of healthy boys and girls--the future fathers and mothers of the race. If the family decays the State decays; if the family prospers the State prospers: for what is the State but a vast aggregate of families? What indeed is the Emperor himself but the Father of the State and thus the Patriarch of every family within it? This is the Chinese theory, and there is hardly a man in China who does not do his best to prove by practical demonstration that the theory is a correct one. "Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord," sings the Psalmist; "Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them." The average Chinese peasant must be a very happy man.

FOOTNOTES:

[170] See p, 149. But it should be noted that if the old man had persuaded her to re-marry, this property would have reverted to himself or his family, and would perhaps have been added to his _yang-lao-ti_ (see pp. 149 _seq._). A widow has only a life-interest in her husband's real property, and even that life-interest is extinguished if she marries into another family.

[171] _Religious System of China_, vol. ii. bk. 1, p. 466.

[172] While this chapter was being written the newspapers reported a case of a patriot's suicide which may be cited as typical. "An Imperial Edict issued on September 5," says _The Times_ of September 21, 1909, "bestowed posthumous honours upon the Metropolitan official Yung Lin, who recently 'sacrificed his life in order to display his patriotism.' The Edict is in reply to a memorial from the supervising censor of the Metropolitan circuit and others asking for the Imperial commendation of an act which has attracted great attention in Peking. Yung Lin, a Manchu of small official rank but high literary gifts, bemoaning the fate of his country, recently presented a petition to the Regent 'dealing with the circumstances of the times, and then gave up his life.' Unable to present it in person, he sent his memorial to the Press. It is a model of finished literary style. Imperial approval will certainly be given to its official publication throughout the Empire." In the course of his memorial, in which he alluded to and bewailed the misfortunes of China and the crimes of those in high places, Yung Lin expressed his belief that unless reforms speedily take place, the "foreigners will seize the excuse of protection for chapels and Legations to increase their garrisons, while secretly pursuing their scheme for converting their sojourn in the land into ownership." He also makes some remarks which, though they would meet the hearty support of a Ruskin, will not be relished by foreign traders. Writing of the waste of the national resources, he says that "vast sums of money are frittered away in the purchase of useless foreign goods." After sending his memorial to the Press, Yung Lin cut his throat. The direct or indirect results of this affair will perhaps be more far-reaching than may at present be thought likely.

[173] G. Chatterton Hill, _Heredity and Selection in Sociology_, p. 187.

[174] See Campbell Oman's _Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India_ (Fisher Unwin: 1908), p. 108.

[175] Cases in modern times where Chinese widows have actually been compelled to commit suicide on their husbands' death are referred to in Smith's _Chinese Characteristics_ (5th ed.), p. 215.

[176] See p. 203.

[177] See pp. 204 _seq._

[178] See p. 47.

[179] The technical term almost invariably used for this action is _hsün_, which is the word used for the old practice of _burying alive with the dead_. In modern times, as in all these stories, the word signifies the death of a widow who commits suicide to prove her wifely fidelity.

[180] Obviously because they wished to arrange a new betrothal for her.

[181] The Underworld of disembodied souls.

[182] In Peking and many other places the bridegroom does not _ying ch'in_ or "go to meet the bride." He stays at home and awaits her arrival.

[183] This is a temporary tablet in which the soul of the deceased is supposed to reside till after the burial, when it is formally summoned to take up its abode in the wooden tablet intended to remain permanently in the possession of the family. In the present case the temporary tablet would be ceremonially destroyed by fire after it had served its purpose.

[184] See the _Chou Li_. In Peking and many other places the women still accompany the funeral party to the graveside.

[185] In China the belief that inspires this practice is that the greater the number of mourners who throw handfuls of earth on the coffin, the greater will be the prosperity of the family in future and the more numerous its descendants. The custom is not, of course, confined to China. It is mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne as a practice of the Christians, "who thought it too little, if they threw not the earth thrice upon the interred body" (_Urn-Burial_, ch. iv.).

[186] See Grant Allen's _The Evolution of the Idea of God_, pp. 52 and 69.

[187] See p. 266.

[188] According to the Fijian Islanders the souls of the unmarried are soon extinguished in the Underworld. See Tylor's _Primitive Culture_ (4th ed.), vol. ii. p. 23.

[189] Tylor, _op. cit._, vol. ii. p. 117.