Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 12

It was a cold winter night in Seoul, Korea. I had been invited to dinner at a Korean home; the home of a former Governor under the Korean regime; and now, a respected official under the j.a.panese rule.

I had looked forward to this dinner with unusual interest.

We took Rickshas to get there and nearly froze on the way.

We took both our shoes and our coats off on the back porch and left them to the tender mercies of the zero weather which prevailed on that night.

We were ushered into this beautiful home.

A room was full of men; stately sons of the family; the gray-bearded, dignified father; but no women, not a single woman. I wondered about this, for I knew that this household was noted for its beautiful daughters and a wonderful mother. The missionaries had told me that.

I wondered why no women came to welcome me.

Finally we sat down to one of those interminable Oriental dinners, with thirty or forty courses; squatted on our haunches, on the cold floor; half-frozen, cramped and uncomfortable.

Then in came a beautiful girl. She was beautiful in every sense of the word; physically and spiritually. There was a touch of refinement about her which made me know that she had received an English education.

But she was not there for any part of the dinner. Not at all. She was there merely to serve.

I found that she could speak English and every time she came to serve me, I took the opportunity of talking with her; taking a chance on whether it was diplomatic for me to do so or not. I was after information.

"You speak good English?" I said. "Why do you not sit down and eat with us?"

She laughed aloud.

"My father would drop over dead if I did. It is not the custom in Korea for the women of the family to dine with the men on an occasion like this. We eat alone in the kitchen."

"Have you a mother?"

"Yes, but she is in the kitchen."

"Will I not get to meet her before I go?"

"Perhaps? Perhaps not. If you meet her at all it will be just at the close, of the evening, providing my father thinks to call her. It is not important; so our Korean men think."

"But you; you know better? You have been in an American School?" I said, as she came in for the fifteenth course and paused a moment to talk with me.

"Yes, I know better! I know the American way of treating women is the Christian way," she said sadly.

"And what do you think of that way? Do you not like that way better than the Korean way?" I asked.

"The American way is much better." Then she paused and much to my delight used a typical American girl's phrase, with an appealing touch of pathos in her voice and a blush of crimson in her brown cheeks, "Why, I just love the American way!" she said and then fled, blus.h.i.+ng with shame, as if she had said something immodest.

I did not see her again that evening. Nor did I see any of the other women of that household. Nor did I see the mother of the home at all.

It was in a Shanghai hospital. I was sitting beside an American newspaper friend who was at the head of the Chinese Information Bureau.

He was a world-vagabond. Beside his bed sat a beautiful Chinese girl, who had been educated in England and whose mother was a Scotch woman.

Her father was a full-blooded Chinese.

"I love her but she won't marry me!" said my friend suddenly looking up toward the Chinese girl.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TEMPLE OF HEAVEN, PEKING.

Long before a single cathedral had been built in Europe this beautiful structure was erected.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BEAUTIFUL THIRTEEN STORY PAG.o.dA NEAR PEKING.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MILLIONS OF WAYSIDE TEMPLES AND SHRINES ADORN THE FIELDS AND HIGHWAYS EVERYWHERE IN j.a.pAN, KOREA, AND CHINA. THIS IS ONE OF THEM.

A SHRINE AND A TEMPLE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SUNRISE SILHOUETTE PHOTOGRAPH OF SOME OF THE HUNDREDS OF BELLS OF BUDDHA ON BOROBOEDOER, JAVA.]

She was a beautiful girl and could play a piano as few American women I have met. She would have graced any social room in America with her dark beauty, her brown eyes, and her Oriental fire. She was rich. Her father was worth several millions; being one of many shrewd Chinese business men. She was dressed like a Parisian model, in the latest European styles. She was in China for the first time in her life. Her father had brought her back to marry a Chinese boy. She did not love him. She did love my American friend.

"Why will you not marry James?" I asked her.

"My father would kill me," she said quietly.

"Does he say so?"

"He does. He went to America a week ago; and the last thing he said was, 'If you marry anything but a Chinese I will kill you!'"

"Did he really mean it?" I asked her, astonished.

"He meant it more than anything he ever meant in his life. It would be considered a disgrace to my entire family if I married anybody but a Chinese boy."

"Even though your father married a Scotch woman?" I said.

"For that very reason it is imperative that I marry my own blood," she said.

"That is terrible!" I replied catching my first glimpse of the strange and terrible social position in which a girl of mixed blood is placed in China.

"You see," she said in a quiet, refined voice, with a marked English accent, "I have an English education but I have Chinese blood. I can never be happy marrying a Chinese after I have been educated in England. I can never be happy with Chinese clothes, Chinese customs, and Chinese people. And yet if I marry the man I love, it will break my father's heart. He would kill me to be sure; for if he says he will, that means that he will keep his word. But that would not be the worst of it. To die would be easy."

"What would be the worst of it?" I asked, my heart stirred with a strangely deep sympathy at this beautiful Chinese girl's dilemma.

"The worst thing would be that it would break my father's heart!"

Then she wept.

That was my first glimpse of the life of tragedy through which a half-breed woman of the Orient has to go.

I met them in the Philippines, with Spanish and American blood running in their veins; I met Malay girls whose fathers had been German or English; I met Dyak girls whose fathers had been Dutch; and Javanese girls whose fathers had been either American, English or Dutch.

I stayed with such a woman in a home in Borneo. She had been a Dyak girl. Yet she did not look it. She had a beautiful home with beautiful English speaking children. I met her in the interior of Borneo a hundred miles from a single white woman. And yet in this far interior; living with her English husband who was the head of a mining project; she was keeping intact the English education of her children. There was a piano and the children played beautifully while the mother, in a rich contralto voice sang.