My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard — Part 2 Letters 16 - 17

Kwei-li.

16 My Dear Mother, I received thy letter which was full of reproaches most unjust.

I have not broken my word, given to thee so long ago.

I opened the home for friendless children, not because it belonged to a mission of a foreign religion, but because I think it a most worthy cause.

There are many homeless little ones in this great city, and these people give them food and clothing and loving care, and because it is given in the name of a God not found within our temples, is that a reason for withholding our encouragement?

Thou hast made my heart most heavy.

Twenty-five years ago, when my first-born son was taken from me, I turned from Gods who gave no comfort in my time of need: all alone with hungry winds of bitterness gnawing the lute strings of my desolate mother-heart, I stood upon my terrace, and fought despair.

My days were without hope and my nights were long hours filled with sorrow, when sleep went trailing softly by and left me to the old dull pain of memory.

I called in anguish upon Kwan-yin, and she did not hear my prayer.

The painted smile upon her lips but mocked me, and in despair I said, "There are no Gods," and in my lonely court of silent dreams I lost the thread of worldly care until my tiny bark of life was nearly drifting out upon the unknown sea.

Thou rememberest that the servants brought to me from out the market-place the book of the foreign God, and in its pages I woke to life again.

I looked once more from out my curtained window, and saw the rosy glow of dawn instead of grey, wan twilights of the hopeless days before me; and, as on a bridge half seen in shadows dim, I returned to the living world about me.

Thou saidst nothing until it had brought its healing, then thou tookest the book and kept it from me.

Thou toldst me with tears that it would bring thine head in sorrow to thy resting-place upon the hillside if I left the Gods of my ancestors and took unto my heart the words and teachings of the God of an alien race.

I promised thee that I would not cause thee grief, and I have kept my word.

In my ignorance I have longed for knowledge, for some one to explain the teaching that rolled away for me the rush of troubled waters that flooded all my soul; but as I looked about me and saw the many warring factions that follow the great Teacher of love and peace, I did not know which way to turn, which had the truth to give me; and I wanted all, not part.

I have this book, and have not sought for wisdom from outside, but only search its pages to find its messages to me.

Thou must not say I have deserted China's Gods, nor is it just to write that my children are wandering from the Way.

I have observed the feasts and fastings; each morn the Household God has rice and tea before him; the Kitchen God has gone with celebrations at springtime to the spirit up above.

The candles have been lighted and the smoke of incense has ascended to propitiate the God of Light, Lord Buddha, and Kwan-yin, and my children have been taught their prayers and holy precepts.

It is not my fault, nor shouldst thou blame it to my teaching if rites and symbols have lost their meaning, and if the Gods of China are no longer strong enough to hold our young.

Oh, Mother mine, thou knowest I would not cause thee sorrow, and thou hast hurt me sorely with thy letter of bitterness and reproach.

If thou couldst have seen within my heart these many ears, and known the longing for this light that came to me in darkness, then thou wouldst not have burned the book that brought me hope and life again when all seemed gone.

Thou askest me to promise thee anew that I will not trouble thy last few years with thoughts that seem to thee a sacrilege and a desecration of thy Gods.

Thou art the mother of my husband, and 'tis to thee I owe all loyalty and obedience.

I promise thee, but-- that which is deep within my heart-- is mine.

Thy daughter, Kwei-li.

17 My Dear Mother, I, thy son's wife, have been guilty of the sin of anger, one of the seven deadly sins-- and great indeed has been my anger.

Ting-fang has been bringing home with him lately the son of Wong Kai-kia, a young man who has been educated abroad, I think in Germany.

I have never liked him, have looked upon his aping of the foreign manners, his half-long hair which looks as if he had started again a queue and then stopped, his stream of words without beginning and without end, as a foolish boy's small vanities that would pass as the years and wisdom came.

But now-- how can I tell thee-- he asks to have my daughter as his wife, my Luh-meh, my flower.

If he had asked for Man-li, who wishes to become a doctor, I might have restrained my anger; but, no, he wants the beauty of our house-hold, and for full a space of ten breaths' breathing-time, I withheld my indignation, for I was speechless.

Then I fear I talked, and only stopped for lack of words.

My son is most indignant, and says I have insulted his dear friend.

His dear friend indeed!

He is so veiled in self-conceit that he can be insulted by no one; and as for being a friend, he does not know the word unless he sees in it something to further his own particular interests.

I told my son that he is a man who leads a life of idleness and worse.

The tea-house knows him better than his rooftree.

He is most learned and has passed safely many examinations, and writes letters at the end of his name, and has made an especial study of the philosophers of the present time; and because of this vast amount of book learning and his supposedly great intelligence he is entitled to indulgence, says my son, and should not be judged by the standards that rule ordinary people, who live upon a lower plane.

I say that his knowledge and greater intelligence (which latter I very much doubt) increase his responsibilities and should make of him an example for the better living of men.

[Illustration: Mylady25.

] A clever bad man is like vile characters scrawled in ink of gold, and should be thrown aside as fit only for the braziers.

He is handsome in my daughter's eyes; but I say virtue is within the man, not upon his skin.

He fascinates my younger sons with his philosophy and his tea-house oratory.

I do not like philosophy, it is all marked with the stamp of infidelity and irreligion.

It is rarely that a man devotes himself to it with-out robbing himself of his faith, and casting off the restraints of his religion; or, if they do not lose it utterly, they so adulterate it with their philosophy that it is impossible to separate the false from the true.

The reading of philosophic writings, so full of vain and delusive reasonings, should be forbidden to our young folk, just as the slippery banks of a river are forbidden to one who knows not how to swim.

I will have none of them in our library, nor will I allow their father to read them where his sons can see him.

The snake-charmer should not touch the serpents before his child's eyes, knowing that the child will try to imitate him in all things.

It is "as pouring water in a frog's face" to talk to these, my children, who think a man, with words upon his lips, a sage.

I say a dog is not a good dog because he is a good barker, nor should a man be considered a good man because he is a good talker; but I see only pity in their faces that their mother is so far behind the times.

These boys of ours are so much attracted by the glimpses they have had of European civilisation, that they look down upon their own nationality.

They have been abroad only long enough to take on the veneer of Western education; it is a half-and-half knowledge; and it is these young men who become the discontented ones of China.

When they return they do not find employment immediately, since they have grown out of touch with their country and their country's customs.

They feel that they should begin at the top of the ladder, instead of working up slowly, rung by rung, as their fathers did before them.

They must be masters all at once, not realising that, even with their tiny grains of foreign knowledge, they have not yet experience to make them leaders of great enterprises or of men; yet they know too much to think of going back into their father's shop.

I realise that the students who go abroad from China have many difficulties to overcome.

It is hard to receive their information and instruction in a language not their mother tongue.

They have small chance to finish their education by practical work in bank or shop or factory.

They get a mass of book knowledge and little opportunity to practise the theories which they learn, and they do not understand that the text-book knowledge is nearly all foreign to their country and to the temperament of their race.

I often ask, when looking at my son, what is his gain?

I presume it is in securing a newer, broader point of view, an ability to adjust himself to modern conditions, and a wider sympathy with the movements of the world.

China has for centuries been lost to the world by reason of her great exclusion, her self-satisfaction and blind reliance upon the ways marked out for her by sages of other days.

These young men, with the West in their eyes, are coming back to shock their fathers' land into new channels.

The process may not be pleasant for us of the old school, but quite likely it is necessary.

Yet, I feel deep within me, as I look at them, that these new Westernised Easterners with their foreign ways and clever English are not to be the final saviours of China.

They are but the clarion voices that are helping to awake the slumbering power.

China must depend upon the firmer qualities of the common people, touched with the breath of the West.

It is with great sorrow that we mothers and fathers see our boys and girls, especially those who return from abroad, neglecting and scoffing at our modes of education that have endured and done such noble work for centuries past.

I know it is necessary to study things modern to keep up with the demands of the times; but they can do this and still reserve some hours for the reading of the classics.

Instead of always quoting Byron, Burns, or Shelley, as do my son and daughter, let them repeat the beautiful words of Tu Fu, Li Po, Po Chu-i, our poets of the golden age.

In no country is real learning held in higher esteem than in China.

It is the greatest characteristic of the nation that, in every grade of society, education is considered above all else.

Why, then, should our young people be ashamed of their country's learning?

The Chinese have devoted themselves to the cultivation of literature for a longer period by some thousands of years than any existing nation.

The people who lived at the time of our ancestors, the peoples of Egypt, the Greeks, the Romans, have disappeared ages ago and have left only their histories writ in book or stone.

The Chinese alone have continued to give to the world their treasures of thought these five thousand years.

To literature and to it alone they look for the rule to guide them in their conduct.

To them all writing is most sacred.

The very pens and papers used in the making of their books have become objects of veneration.

Even our smallest village is provided with a scrap-box into which every bit of paper containing words or printed matter is carefully placed, to await a suitable occasion when it may be reverently burned.

Change is now the order of the day, educationally as well as politically.

We do not hear the children shouting their tasks at the top of their voices, nor do they learn by heart the thirteen classics, sitting on their hard benches within the simple rooms with earthen floor, where the faint light comes straggling through the unglazed windows on the boy who hopes to gain the prize that will lead him to the great Halls of Examination at Peking.

If, while there, he is favoured by the God of Learning and passes the examination, he will come back to his village an honour to his province, and all his world will come and do him reverence, from the viceroy in his official chair to the meanest worker in the fields.

These old-time examinations are gone, the degrees which were our pride have been abolished, the subjects of study in the schools have been completely changed.

The privileges which were once given our scholars, the social and political offices which were once open to the winner of the highest prize, have been thrown upon the altar of modernity.

They say it is a most wise move and leads to the greater individualism, which is now the battle-cry of China.

The fault of the old examination, we are told, is the lack of original ideas which might be expressed by a student.

He must give the usual interpretations of the classics.

Now the introduction of free thought and private opinion has produced in China an upheaval in men's minds.

The new scholars may say what they think wisest, and they even try to show that Confucius was at heart a staunch republican, and that Mencius only thinly veiled his sentiments of modern philosophy.

Perhaps the memory work of the Chinese education was wrong; but it served its purpose once, if tales are true.

It is said that many hundreds of years ago, the founder of the Chinese dynasty, the man of pride who styled himself Emperor the First, conceived the idea of destroying all literature which was before his reign, so that he might be regarded by posterity as the founder of the Chinese Empire.

It is believed by many Chinese scholars that this wicked thing was done, and that not a single perfect copy of any book escaped destruction.

He even went so far as to bury alive above five hundred of the best scholars of the land, that none might remain to write of his cruel deed.

But the classics had been too well learned by the scholars, and were reproduced from memory to help form the minds of China for many tens of years.

This could be done to-day if a similar tragedy were enacted.

Thousands of boys have committed the great books to heart, and this storing in the mind of enormous books has developed in our race a marvellous memory, if, as others say, it has taken away their power of thinking for themselves.

Which is the best?

Only time will tell.

But we are told that the literati of China, the aristocracy of our land, must go.

Yet, as of old, it is the educated men who will move China.

Without them, nothing can be done, for the masses will respect education and the myriads will blindly follow a leader whom they feel to be a true scholar; and it will be hard to change the habits of a people who have been taught for centuries that education is another word for officialdom.

This new education, in my mind, must not be made so general; it must be made more personal.

Three things should be taken into account: who the boy is, where he is, and where he is going.

It is not meet to educate the son of my gate-keeper the same as my son.

He should be made a good workman, the best of his kind, better to fill the place to which the Gods have called him.

Give our boys the modern education, if we must, but remember and respect the life work each may have to follow.

Another thing we should remember: the progress in the boy's worldly knowledge should not make him hard in his revolt against his Gods, nor should his intelligence be freed without teaching him self-control.

That is fatal for our Eastern race.

Let him learn, in his books and in his laboratories, that he moulds his destiny by his acts in later life, and thus gain true education, the education of the soul as well as of the mind.

I have written thee a sermon, but it is a subject on which we mothers are thinking much.

It is before us daily, brought to our courtyards by our sons and daughters, and we see the good and the evil of trying to reach at a single bound the place at which other nations have at last arrived after centuries of weary climbing.

I must go to the women's quarters and stop their chattering.

Oh, Mother mine, why didst thou send to me that priest of thine?

[Illustration: Mylady26.

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