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.
And speaking of cruelty, this is perhaps the place to mention the cruelty to animals which shocks so many foreigners when they visit China. There is indeed a vast difference between the way in which animals are treated in China and the way in which they are treated in the West. Animals are not petted and fondled and made much of by the Chinese. On the contrary, Chinese visitors in the United States are usually shocked and disgusted by the affection with which animals are treated, an emotion which the Chinese feel should be reserved for human beings. I believe in kindness toward animals and human beings and I used to wonder why my Chinese friends, whom I knew to be merciful and considerate toward people, could be quite indifferent to suffering animals. The cause, I discovered as I grew older, lay in the permeation of Chinese thought by Buddhist theory. Though most Chinese were not religious and therefore not Buddhist, yet the doctrine of the reincarnation of the human soul influenced their thinking, and the essence of that theory is that an evil human being after death becomes an animal in his next incarnation. Therefore every animal was once a wicked human being. While the average Chinese might deny direct belief in this theory, yet the pervading belief led him to feel contempt for animals.
Another seeming cruelty among the Chinese, also very shocking to Westerners, was that if a person fell into a danger, as for example if he fell into the water and would be drowned if not pulled out, no other Chinese, or only a very rare one, would stretch out his hand to the drowning one. Cruel? Yes, but again the pervading atmosphere of Buddhism through the centuries had persuaded the people generally to believe that fate pursued the sufferer, that his hour had come for death. If one saved him, thus defying fate, the rescuer must assume the responsibilities of the one saved. A man, however kind, might hesitate if by saving a person who had fallen into the danger of death, he had thereafter to care for this person and even perhaps his whole family because he had made himself responsible for giving new life to one who was supposed to die.
Time went on in our quiet northern town, and at last we, too, became embroiled in the national troubles. War lords had the country firmly in their rude clutches by now and in our own region battles began to break out between them. It was never called war but always “attacking the bandits.” This is, each war lord would claim that he was the real ruler and the other one was the “bandit chief.” At least once or twice a year bullets would fly over our town in brief but alarming scuffles, and the little hospital would be filled with wounded soldiers from both sides. We learned when the bullets whistled over the roof to run for the inner corners of a room and stand there until the battle moved on and certainly never to remain near windows. At sundown the battle usually ended, or if we were lucky enough to have a rainstorm come up, the soldiers on both sides prudently called a truce and returned to their encampments outside the city wall so that they would not get their uniforms wet. The city fathers never let either side camp in the city. When a battle threatened, the main gates were barred and the wounded were brought in through a small wicket gate.