My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard

Excerpt

-Preface_.

A writer on things Chinese was asked why one found so little writing
upon the subject of the women of China. He stopped, looked puzzled
for a moment, then said, "The woman of China! One never hears about
them. I believe no one ever thinks about them, except perhaps that
they are the mothers of the Chinese men!"

Such is the usual attitude taken in regard to the woman of the flowery
Republic. She is practically unknown, she hides herself behind her
husband and her sons, yet, because of that filial piety, that almost
religious veneration in which all men of Eastern races hold their
parents, she really exerts an untold influence upon the deeds of the
men of her race.

Less is known about Chinese women than about any other women of
Oriental lands. Their home life is a sealed book to the average person
visiting China. Books about China deal mainly with the lower-class
Chinese, as it is chiefly with that class that the average visitor or
missionary comes into contact. The tourists see only the coolie
woman bearing burdens in the street, trotting along with a couple of
heavy baskets swung from her shoulders, or they stop to stare at the
neatly dressed mothers sitting on their low stools in the narrow
alleyways, patching clothing or fondling their children. They see and
hear the boat-women, the women who have the most freedom of any
in all China, as they weave their sampans in and out of the crowded
traffic on the canals. These same tourists visit the tea-houses and
see the gaily dressed "sing-song" girls, or catch a glimpse of a
gaudily painted face, as a lady is hurried along in her sedan-chair,
carried on the shoulders of her chanting bearers. But the real Chinese
woman, with her hopes, her fears, her romances, her children, and her
religion, is still undiscovered.

I hope that this book, based on letters shown me many years after
they were written, will give a faint idea of the life of a Chinese lady.
The story is told in two series of letters conceived to be written by
Kwei-li, the wife of a very high Chinese official, to her husband when
he accompanied his master, Prince Chung, on his trip around the
world.

She was the daughter of a viceroy of Chih-li, a man most advanced for
his time, who was one of the forerunners of the present educational
movement in China, a movement which has caused her youth to rise
and demand Western methods and Western enterprise in place of the
obsolete traditions and customs of their ancestors. To show his belief
in the new spirit that was breaking over his country, he educated his
daughter along with his sons. She was given as tutor Ling-Wing-pu, a
famous poet of his province, who doubtless taught her the imagery
and beauty of expression which is so truly Eastern.

Within the beautiful ancestral home of her husband, high on the
mountains-side outside of the city of Su-Chau, she lived the quite,
sequestered life of the high-class Chinese woman, attending to the
household duties, which are not light in these patriarchal homes,
where an incredible number of people live under the same rooftree....