Tsai. I have always been interested in foreign foods. I like to try them
out, and have brought home dozens of Hawaiian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese
recipes which can be made at home. This dinner was an Arabian Nights
experience. It began at seven and lasted until one in the
morning—bird’s-nest and quail egg soup, fried garoupa, ducks’ tongues
and snow fungus, roast pheasant, rice and congee, lotus nuts and pastry,
sharks’ fins, and various kinds of wine.
There must have been well over thirty guests invited for the evening,
among them an American woman, Mrs. Grover Clark, whose husband was on
the faculty of the University. Some of the students had been to her
between the lecture and dinner time and given her the transcribed notes
which they had taken down in shorthand. Would she correct them? They
wanted to get the information published. When they came to the
Chancellor’s home to call for them so that they could deliver them to
the press, I could see at a glance that this was not at all what I
desired to leave behind me; my spoken words never sound adequate or
complete in print. Therefore, I sent a boy to the hotel for a copy of
the old stand-by, _Family Limitation_. The students set to work at once
to translate it. Mrs. Clark offered to pay the expenses, and the next
afternoon five thousand copies were ready for circulation.
This little incident was significant of Young China; an idea to them was
useless if only in the head. Their motto was to put it into concrete
reality.
Symptomatic also of new China was the abandonment of bound feet,
although women of advanced years still were to be seen leaning on each
other for support as they tottered by. Amahs were carrying nurselings
about when they themselves seemed scarcely able to stand up. However, I
was glad to see only a few of the small children had these lily feet.
Fathers realized their daughters could not earn a living if thus
deformed. At the Peking Union Medical College, combining the modern
equipment of the Occident with the artistry and traditions of the
Orient, no girl was accepted for training unless her feet were normal.
One day Dr. Hu-Shih asked me to lunch in an old Manchu restaurant where
his friends were accustomed to gather and ponder. Many were business or
professional men, but all, with their little beards and intellectual
faces, had the appearance of professors. It was an unusual combination
of Wall Street and university. In our private dining room were seven
English-speaking Chinese with families of from four to nine children.
Each said the later ones had not been wanted; nevertheless they had
come.
The conversation took a scientific turn. Since man had through breeding
brought about such changes in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, why
could he not produce a class of human beings unable to procreate? Was
there any reason why the particular biological factors that made the
mule sterile could not be applied further? They discussed the
interesting possibility of creating a neuter gender such as the workers
in a beehive or ant hill.
The implications of this colloquy formed a fascinating climax to our
sojourn in Peking. Our train was the last one south for several days.
Soldiers cluttered the landscape—not alert or even military-looking, but
men or boys put into uniform and told how to act. The Tuchuns were all
trying to “unite” China, each in his own way. We read in the papers
about the war clouds hanging over the country, but nobody seemed to be
excited. We were not worried; being foreigners, we were assured, meant
protection.
The valley of the Yangtze Kiang was green and luxuriant; every inch of
ground was being utilized. Even space which should have been employed
for roads was given over to food production, and thousands of people
were born, lived, and died in boats on the river. Some water buffalo
waded in the mud of the rice fields, some horses worked the water
treadmills, but human labor predominated. Overpopulation and destitution
went hand in hand. In this land which Marco Polo once described as “a
pleasant haven of silks, spices, and fine manners,” all the hypothetical
Malthusian bogeys had come true.
Foreigners at the International and French Settlements of Shanghai
enjoyed much the same life as at home. Their hotels were the same, they
met the same sort of people, dressed in the same clothes, ate the same
meals; in fact, it was difficult to get Chinese food unless you knew
exactly where to go. They came in droves, herded together, most of them
bored to death. You could see they had appropriated the best of
everything—the houses with gardens and walls, the clean rickshas, the
well-fed boys, the prosperity. The Chinese, in their own country, lived
on what was left, which was practically nothing. They huddled wistfully
on the fringes—horrible, abject, dirty.
It amazed me to see that Americans, French, and English could be so near
and yet close their eyes to the wretched, degrading conditions of
devastating squalor in the native quarters. Once while a missionary was
guiding me through the Chinese City, we noted a crowd, children
included, gathered in curiosity around a leper woman. She was on the
ground, sighing and breathing heavily. Nobody offered to help her.
“Maybe she’s dying,” said my companion. Just then the woman gave a
fearful groan and took a baby from under her rags. She knew what to do,
manipulated her thighs and abdomen, got the afterbirth, bit the cord
with her teeth, put the baby aside, turned over, and rested. No trace of
emotion showed on the faces of the watchers.
In their respective countries Europeans would have made an effort to
improve such conditions. But here they seemed to have lost many of their
former standards and qualities of character and conscience. It was said
that China, psychologically speaking, swallowed up the morals of all
those who came to reside there.
One young American secretary related to me the joys of living in this
section of the Orient. She said her salary was far smaller than any she
would have received in the United States, but her comfort, on the other
hand, far exceeded what she could have had in Boston at double her
present wages. Among them she mentioned her ricksha boy, who cost her
only five dollars a month, out of which he had to support himself and
his enormous family. During the three years he had been working for her
she had never raised his pay, nor did she ever expect to. He dared make
no request, because in China it was almost impossible to get a job by
one’s self. When a servant was dismissed he faced practical starvation.
I really formed a bad impression of people who wanted to live in China
because of the cheapness of its luxuries.
The Grand Hotel was elegantly appointed, but the boys who served in the
rooms did not seem friendly in their hearts towards any foreigners.
Hostility was percolating throughout the country. Deep in the Chinese
mind lay the memory of many invasions, of the Boxer Rebellion, and the
intrusion of business men and, particularly, missionaries.
In Shanghai the American missionaries dominated Chinese education, such
as it was. I was surprised to find families of eight or ten children the
rule rather than the exception among them. Their salaries were raised
with each new infant, and that may have been the reason. Nevertheless,
there were many who wanted birth control information. When they learned
of my presence they called on the telephone, sent cards, came to see me.
But, apparently apprehensive of criticism, they took me if possible into
a secluded room or, if we had to meet in a public place, backed me into
a corner and stood in front to conceal the fact they were talking with
me; they acted as though they were turning up their coat collars so that
they should not be recognized.
The only method of family limitation known to the poor Chinese was
infanticide of girl babies by suffocation or drowning. The missionaries
were co-operating with the Government, which had enacted a law
forbidding the practice. They went from home to home to see whether any
woman were pregnant. If one were obviously so, her name was jotted down
in a notebook for a call soon after birth was due. At the same time both
father and mother were informed of the severe penalty they would incur
unless the baby itself or a doctor’s certificate of death from natural
causes were produced. After two years’ work ninety-five percent of
pregnant mothers showed either their babies or good reasons for not
doing so.
But the Chinese had so low a margin of subsistence that, if the law
forbade them to dispose of one child, another was starved out. Sometimes
two little girls had to be sold to keep one boy alive; in dire necessity
even he might have to be parted with to some sonless man who wanted to
ensure ancestor worship. Because the elder girls could begin to help in
the fields or become servants in some rich landowner’s household,
usually it was the three- and four-year-olds who were turned over to
brothels. There they stayed until mature enough to be set to working out
their indenture. If they ever tried unsuccessfully to find freedom, the
proprietors might beat them unmercifully, sometimes even breaking their
legs so that they could not walk, much less ever run away again.
When infanticide was stopped, the corresponding increase in sing-song
girls making their living by prostitution was almost immediately
evident. It was estimated Shanghai had a hundred thousand. Many were
Eurasians, the results of unions with white men who were in Shanghai on
small salaries as representatives of foreign business firms. I glimpsed
some of the Chinese women who had been bought as housekeepers and
mistresses as well saying good-by at the train to their American or
English masters summoned home.
Desiring to see the worst of the city I went to the prostitute quarter
in company with Mr. Blackstone, a missionary from the Door of Hope, a
house of refuge for escaping girls. In Shanghai, as in Tokyo, we found
in the Japanese section soft, low lights and an undercurrent of music in
the air. The inmates were fully grown, gay and hearty, the interiors
were immaculate and restrained in their decoration, the streets were
swarming with sailors who apparently preferred this district to the
depressingly dark and gloomy Chinese one near by.
Here and there the Chinese prostitutes could be seen through the open
doorways, heavily rouged, gowned in vivid colors, limned like posters
against the meanness of the background, their frail, slight bodies at
the service of anyone who came. Each took her turn upon a stool outside,
using her few words of English to attract the sailor trade. I thought I
would never recover from the shock of seeing American men spending their
evenings at such places with what were obviously children.
In one house we found half a dozen girls looking much younger than their
theoretical fifteen seated on hard benches around a room not more than
six feet by nine. A little one holding high a lamp so that we should not
trip and fall, escorted us to her cubicle, which had only a bed for
furniture. A chair was brought in for me.
Mr. Blackstone began to talk to her in her own dialect. Why had she
come?
“Too much baby home—no chow.” She said she was sixteen and had been
there since she was twelve.
“Why she can’t be a day over ten,” I expostulated.
The child was visibly frightened, aghast at her own loquacity. We might
be from the Government. When we had at last gained her confidence,
however, she responded eagerly to this unusual sympathetic contact,
talking freely about herself—the long time it took to pay herself out,
the precariousness and physical fatigue of her calling; some days she
had no visitors, but when a ship was in maybe as many as ten or twelve a
night. She seemed as old as the ages in her knowledgeableness; “No want
baby,” she told us. Yet her poor little frame had the immaturity of
fruit picked green and left to shrivel.
We gave her money and left in spite of her urgent and kind invitation to
stay.
All sing-song girls were not necessarily prostitutes; most hotels hired
them to entertain guests. Only their lips were made up, their faces
remaining pale. They wore flowers in their hair and although not so
soft-voiced as the geisha had greater independence. Certainly their
weird, shrill songs accompanied by the tinkle of a lute were not
attractive to Western ears.
Echoes of my visit to Japan had permeated throughout the colony of
Japanese, who aimed to give me an extra-cordial welcome, trying their
best to make up for what they thought had been an unpleasant experience
in their country. I had not realized the power of ancient feudalism over
the Japanese woman until I met her away from home, where she blossomed
into an intelligent, outspoken human being. I noticed she expressed
herself much more frankly in the presence of men, but underneath the
conversation I often sensed a propaganda which had resulted in deep
prejudice; from the horrible stories you heard of the savagery of the
Chinese you received the impression all were cannibals.
Since my plans to include China in my itinerary had been made so late, I
had few letters of introduction there. Consequently, to my regret I did
not see many Chinese women. I had not expected to do much speaking and
had had very little press in Peking. Dr. Hu-Shih, however, had arranged
for me to meet about fifteen newspaper men and women in Shanghai. We
sipped our tea, nibbled our cakes, and then they began to ask questions,
taking down the answers with the utmost care. They wanted to set forth
the pros and cons of birth control in their own vernacular, but
unfortunately could not reach the illiterate masses. They asked me to
speak at the Family Reformation Association, an organization which was
under missionary auspices. The rules were no smoking, no drinking, no
gambling. Its membership, therefore, remained small.
The young woman who interpreted paragraph by paragraph had just returned
from America, but did not prove the expert her traveling had indicated.
The chairman said I was to give both theory and practice, but when I
came to the latter my translator’s courage took flight entirely. She
whispered, “I’ll get a doctor to say that.” I gave up and switched to
something simpler. My audience, however, knew without her assistance
what I had been trying to convey, and was much diverted by her
predicament.
Of all lands China needed knowledge of how to control her numbers; the
incessant fertility of her millions spread like a plague. Well-wishing
foreigners who had gone there with their own moral codes to save her
babies from infanticide, her people from pestilence, had actually
increased her problem. To contribute to famine funds and the support of
missions was like trying to sweep back the sea with a broom.
China represented the final act in an international tragedy of
overpopulation, seeming to prove that the eminence of a country could
not be measured by numbers any more than by industrial expansion, large
standing armies, or invincible navies. If its sons and daughters left
for the generations to come a record of immortal poetry, art, and
philosophy, then it was a great nation and had attained the only
immortality worth striving for. But China, once the fountainhead of
wisdom, had been brought to the dust by superabundant breeding.
This was my conclusion when at last we were back again in the modern age
on the American ship _Silver State_ bound for Hong Kong; we had comfort,
hot water, baths, heard the softness of the little chimes as the steward
went through the corridors announcing meals. It was almost with a sense
of awe that I asked for any service. After being some time in the Orient
you were a bit embarrassed by having an American wait on you. Soon,
however, the plumbers, the carpenters, the painters who kept the vessel
trim, the sailors who swabbed down the decks at night, gave me a feeling
that in the Western countries we had gone far towards dignifying manual
labor.
_Chapter Twenty-eight_
THE WORLD IS MUCH THE SAME EVERYWHERE
A favorite sales promotion method of astrologers is to send partial
readings to people whose names appear in the papers, in the hope of
piquing their curiosity to the point of demanding fuller details
regarding their future lives and conduct. From time to time I used to
receive these and paid no attention. But just before I had sailed from
California a friend of birth control had sent me one based upon arrests
and prison. This forecast told me I would have a great deal of
difficulty in starting, and that on a certain day in May the same signs
would prevail over my House as at the Town Hall Meeting—that I should,
therefore, be prepared for police interference.
While packing in Shanghai I was looking through my briefcase and
happened to note that the date was one on which the _Silver State_ would
still be at sea; she was not due at Hong Kong until the next day. I
laughed to myself and said, “Here’s where I prove it wrong.” As it
turned out, however, the ship was ahead of her schedule and arrived in
Hong Kong twelve hours early.
We were steaming up the long reach towards the Kowloon piers when, to my
utter surprise, the immigration officer who had come on board handed me
a notice instructing me to visit the Chief of Police.
“Is this a special invitation for me, or is everybody included?”
“Only for you, Madam,” was the smiling response.
The harbor was crowded with junks and fishing boats. Children in sampans
were holding out nets for whatever might come overside, fishing up each
bit of refuse from the water. Adjoining ships were being coaled by women
coolies, hundreds of them, their faces strained and bodies stringy as
though made up entirely of tendons. They carried their two baskets on
bamboo poles across their shoulders, and clambered like ants in their
bare feet over the barges—not singing as the men coolies of the North,
but making much _wallah-wallah_—jabbering and shouting.
After settling Grant in a hotel I took a chair from around the corner,
because police headquarters was part way up the Peak, and rickshas could
not negotiate the steep ascent. The Chief was not there. I inquired
whether anything were wrong with my passport. Since my British visa was
perfectly correct, they said there must be some mistake; they had no
information about any summons. I left my card.
The next day the Chief called at my hotel but we missed each other
because I was out with Grant ordering his first pair of long trousers.
When I returned I found a calling card and another request to come to
headquarters that afternoon. Again I obeyed, and again I found no Chief
and no message for me. I left another card and the officials whom I had
seen before laughingly reiterated they still knew of no complaints.
“Well, I’m going tomorrow morning. If the Chief wants anything he’ll
have to come to the hotel.” He never did.
Once more we were off, this time on a British liner. The sea was smooth,
the air cool. It was the ideal ocean voyage I had always longed for. I
was relaxed and enervated but it was good to be so. I had nothing to do
all day but sit in the glorious breezes on deck and watch the romping
children, about fifty of whom were on board. Many had been born in the
Orient and were accompanying “pater” who was going home on leave. One
little boy might come tearing by pursued by another, both followed by
anxious Chinese amahs, thin, dark, slick-haired, wearing glossy, black
trousers and coats buttoned down the side. They seemed in constant
distress over the antics of their energetic charges.
When we dropped anchor at Singapore, agitation and excitement were again
manifest among the inspectors at the sight of my passport. I was
politely asked to stand by while they consulted, and then was ushered
off the ship to an upstairs office where I was questioned by a pleasant
young Englishman as to my intentions in going to India.
“But I’m not planning to stop in India.”
“Lectures by you are announced in Bombay and Calcutta.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” I assured him. “But if I were to
go, would there be any objection?”
“That would depend on the subject of your lectures.”
“I’m interested in only one subject.”
He pressed a button. Miraculously, almost like a scene from a mystery
play, and as though everything had been rehearsed in advance, an
attendant entered and placed on the desk a large, closely typewritten
paper.
“Am I on the blacklist?”
“Not exactly, but you said you were interested in only one subject. Then
what about this?” He actually read me from that document details of a
small reception I had given five years before in my own apartment in New
York for Agnes Smedley after her release on bail.
For a moment I was speechless with amazement. Then I ejaculated, “Why
shouldn’t I be interested when she was arrested for a cause that is my
own? Besides, you must remember the charge was later dismissed.”
“Then what about serving on the Committee for the Debs Defence and for
the Political Prisoners Defence?” He mentioned other gatherings I had
attended during that parlor meeting era, such as when Mary Knoblauch had
had Jim Larkin talk on Irish Home Rule or Lajpat Rai, the Indian
sociologist, express anti-British tendencies. Wherever my name had
appeared on the stationery of any committee he had it on his record. My
public life was there spread out, showing how careful was British
espionage.
I brought forth from my arsenal some of my most trusty arguments, and
the official ultimately agreed that if the vast millions of India wanted
birth control he was all for my going there and would visa my passport.
However, since I did not propose to include it in my trip the discussion
was purely academic.
Although Singapore when we reached it seemed to combine so many
nationalities that it was like Europe, America, and the Orient all mixed
together, Malays, whose land it once had been, appeared to be in the
minority and their dialect little used. I could not escape that fatal
horoscope, because when their language was described to me as easy and
simple, the example given was _mata_. By itself it meant eye. But, _mata
mata_, in addition to being the plural, also meant policemen, who were
the eyes of the government, and _mata mata glap_ meant secret eyes,
hence detectives.
How Europeans made themselves understood in Singapore was a wonder to
me. The Chinese ricksha boys apparently comprehended no tongue, nor knew
where any place was. You stepped into a ricksha and pointed to where you
thought your hotel was, praying your finger was extended in the right
direction. If you did not point he ran in any direction of the compass.
Even so, at the first corner he was inclined to turn into a more shady
street. After a while, since he seemed to be arriving nowhere, you spoke
to him sharply and he pulled up to a traffic officer, who told him where
to go. Still pointing and saying “hotel” loudly, you eventually were
delivered in front of the door by a much pleased coolie, grinning from
ear to ear at his own cleverness. The poor fellows were so cheerful and
willing that you could not help smiling, too.
The weather continued balmy to Penang, to Ceylon, to Aden. I had been
dreading the heat of the Red Sea, but the passage was surprisingly cool;
the facing wind was really enjoyable.
At Cairo, where we made a longer pause, Grant came down with dysentery
and his temperature shot to a hundred and four degrees. A
Czechoslovakian doctor spent three nights with him but could not reduce
the fever. Each morning when I rose early to act as nurse, I stumbled
over about six natives, our own guide Ali among them, kneeling on prayer
rugs in front of his door. All the fortune tellers had said a death was
pending in Shepheard’s Hotel and were assuming he would be the victim.
The fourth day, after the doctor had gone to his office, I ordered a
dish pan full of ice and sponged Grant off with the frosty water. Two
hours later his temperature was normal and he began to show signs of
recovering. I never divulged that cold bath to the doctor.