Peculiar Chinese Parents and Daughters

1896

It is a disagreeable fact that Chinese parents are in the habit, in certain circumstances, of abandoning female infants to death by starvation, and it is one that an apologist for China would like to pass over in silence.

On the other hand, nothing is gained by exaggeration, and as far as my most limited experience allows me to speak, it is enormous exaggeration to talk as if Chinese mothers exposed their daughters habitually and without a second thought. At any rate, the people of Fair-Reply would repudiate the charge with amazement. "He han kai, tso mak kai fit?" "Is she a good one, why throw away?" they would ask.

Why indeed, when a girl of ten in good health and fairly bonny will always fetch $100; while each of the next five or six years will add $10 to her market value? So remembering that from the age of five she will be useful to gather bambu husks for fuel, mind the baby, feed the buffalo, and a year or two later cut fern, dig up pistachio nuts, and carry water, it will be seen that a healthy female child will be by no means an unprofitable investment.

But if the child be sickly, then it is different. The nasty little thing looks so red and helpless and repulsive. If it dies within doors its fractious spirit will remain there, and add another torment to the teeming world of imps that surround us. Better for all parties to deport the tiny spirit to some lonely spot, turn away quickly, and think of something else.

Charity might possibly accept some such revulsion of the maternal instincts in explanation; and the anthropologist will remember "Nature," that "holy thing," and the case of the rabbits once so aptly cited in this connection. — Blackwood's Magazine.