  Homes differ as much in China as in other lands. Some are palaces, some poor huts, some are caves cut into the face of cliffs, some are boats upon rivers, where thousands of boys and girls learn to handle the oar from their earliest childhood. Some are in dusty villages by the roadside, others are set between stairs of green rice fields upon mountain slopes, or built upon flat plains among giant millet and other crops. A large number of children are brought up in cities. You cannot easily get at their homes because of the streams of blue-clad people who throng the streets. Come for a walk among the busy shops, so that you may know something of the place where Chinese boys and girls spend so much of their time. Sedan-chairs, carried by strong men, push through the crowd, shaving butchers’ stalls and narrowly missing the heads of running children. Burden bearers, with bags of rice on their backs, or loaded with vegetables, pigs in open baskets, bales of cotton or tobacco, follow one another over the slippery pavement. Here comes a pedlar selling tapes, needles and bits of silk. He is called a ‘bell shaker,’ because he tinkles a little bell to call attention to his wares. That poor man, with shaggy hair and half-naked skin, is ‘a cotton-rags fairy,’ or beggar. He lives in a ‘beggars’ camp’ not far away. Look in at this temple. The heavy scent, reminding you of rose-leaves and stale tobacco, which comes through the open doorway, is the smell of incense. Beyond the court, inside the door, is a big room where Boys and girls do not care to go inside, unless their mothers bring them to bow before the idols. Some of the images have ugly faces, blue, black and fiery red, which children can scarcely look at without being afraid. Some are gilt and have a strange smile upon their lips. Here is description of an idol in its temple: “I dreamed I was an idol, and I sat Still as a crystal, smiling as a cat, Where silent priests through immemorial hours Wove for my head mysterious scarlet flowers. “There as I waited, day by changeless day, My people brought their gifts and knelt to pray, And I ... ... in unavailing pity sat Still as a crystal, smiling as a cat.” Let us turn down this narrow lane. Now we have left the shops and the busy street. Look at the rows of smallish houses, each with a bit of plain wall and a bamboo screen hanging in front of the door. You hear the sound of children’s voices within as you pass. How happy that little boy is, running along in bright red trousers, flying his kite. His home is near by; when he is older he will go to school, or learn a trade in one of the shops not far away. Here the streets are narrower. What strange names they have! Stone Bird Lane, Grinding Row, Old Woo’s Lane, Bean Curd Lane, Family Ma’s Market. Look at this big house. Turn in by the opening at the right of the front door. Now we are inside the first court, an open space with rooms all around. The To right and left of the chief room are two smaller ones, used as bedrooms. Behind these again is another court, with rooms ranged round it like the front one, and behind it perhaps another. Some houses have ‘five descents’; for Chinese storeys, which are called ‘descents,’ are put one behind the other, instead of being piled upwards as are ours. You may see a girl seated at a loom, driving the shuttle to and fro. How slowly the cloth grows. Every time the shuttle flies across, the web gains a line. Thread by thread it lengthens, just as a child’s life lengthens day by day; that is why the Chinese proverb says, “Days and months are like a shuttle, light and dark fly like an arrow.” The older boys of the household are at school or at work. That woman who is washing rice in an earthen pot, has a baby slung by a checked cotton cloth upon her back. The child rolls its bullet head and sucks a fat thumb, whilst one dumpy foot sticks out below its mother’s arm. The lady in a blue tunic, with bright flowers in her hair, is the mistress of the house; see how she sways on her tiny bound feet, as she moves across the tiled floor. CHILD LEADING BUFFALO If the head of the house is a scholar he wears long robes of cotton or silk, blue and grey, one above the other, or in the hot weather white ‘grass cloth,’ thin as muslin. He has the top of his head shaved and wears his back hair in a long plait or queue. On New Year’s In country homes a mill for taking the husk off rice stands inside the door, where perhaps you might expect to find a hatstand. Sometimes a sleek brown cow moos softly on the other side of the porch. Jars, full of salted vegetables, share the front court with the usual pigs, chickens and dogs. Look at that mandarin duck, bobbing her head and throwing forward her bill, as if trying to bring up a bone which had stuck in her throat just as she was in the act of curtsying to you. She bows and curtsies all day, until even the fat baby, lying on a kerb-stone at the edge of the court, grows tired of watching her antics. Children run in and out of the house. One plays with a big, green grasshopper, which struggles hopelessly at the end of a string. Somewhere outside, a little boy or girl is sure to be leading a buffalo by a rope, on the edge of the rice fields. Farther away some boys and girls are gathering leaves, or cutting fern on the hillside. About noon the household gathers for dinner. The men go to the kitchen and return with bowls of rice and sweet potatoes or vermicelli. In the middle of the table they have salted vegetables, bean-curd cake cut into small pieces, dried shrimps, and on feast days, pork hash in soy, all in different dishes. Each man has two pieces of bamboo, rather thicker than wooden knitting-needles, which he holds between the thumb and first three fingers of his right hand. With these chopsticks, as they are called, he picks up a bit of Sometimes the country people do not eat at a table, but sit in the shadow of the porch, or on the edge of the stone coping which surrounds the front court. The story is told of a poor boy, who used to eat his meals in this way. The stone on which he sat had a crack in it. When the boy began to study, he used to bring his book and a basin of food, so that he might read as he sat on the broken slab eating his dinner. By and by he became a great scholar and viceroy or ruler of the province of Szechuan. When he returned to his native place, full of riches and honour, he rebuilt the old home and made it beautiful, but he kept the broken kerb-stone unaltered, in front of the dining-room. It was left with the crack in it to remind him of the time when he was a barefoot boy and used to sit by the edge of the court, eating rice or learning his lessons. When the men have finished their meal, the women and children have theirs. How the fat little boys and girls love sweet potatoes! They take them, pink and yellow skinned ones, in their chubby fingers and stuff them down their throats, dogs and chickens waiting eagerly meanwhile to pick up the skins and stringy bits which drop upon the ground. Though eating apart, girls and women mix more freely with the men in these country homes than in those of educated townspeople, where they must keep to their |
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