The House of Exile. I

VOLUME 151

NUMBER 2

FEBRUARY 1933

BY NORA WALN

Kuo yu kuo fa, chia yu chia fa. (‘Each country has its laws, each family its regulations.')

CHINESE PROVERB

LATE in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century, Lin Yan-ken selected merchandise for J. S. Waln. Amber, alumroot, beeswax, and cassia lignea. Cinnabar, chinaware, chessmen carved from ivory tusks, and an elbowchair of rosewood. Embroidered fans, grass cloth, ginger in earthen pots. Hemp and indigo. Jute, kaolin, also lily flowers. Musk, nankeens, orpiment, a miniature pagoda of silver, and medicinal rhubarb. Packets of seeds of the melon and of the apricot. Teas, both green and black. Umbrellas, vases, and wall papers with scenes from Chinese life. Writer’s ink and xanthine.

These are some of the items neatly entered in a time-yellowed account book, as sent by the Confucian merchant from Canton, in the ancient Empire of China, on sailing ships to the Quaker merchant in Philadelphia, U. S. A.

My own interest in China began in April 1904. I was then in my ninth year and the guest of my paternal grandparents, Elijah and Ann Waln, on their farm in the Grampian Hills of Pennsylvania. The day was rainy. As I had torn a hole in one of my rubber boots, I had been forbidden to leave the house.

Grandfather was at Philadelphia visiting a vegetarian friend. Grandmother was occupied learning a new tatting pattern from Great-aunt, who had come to keep her company in his absence. I lingered in the doorway, considering a dash down the puddly path to the stable where Old William Welty, the hired man, mended harness. Then a finch, dressed in springtime yellow and black, dropped with closed wings to the level of my eyes.

The bird recovered himself with gay flips and whirled upward, breaking into humorous song on the curve of his flight. He mocked me with his freedom. And I was off into the orchard. Vested with authority on the farm, Old William Welty still had power to command me when I was nearly nine. He sent me to my grandmother with soaked black slippers, mud-stained white stockings, and the starch of my gray chambray dress made limp by tall wet grass. Told by Grandmother to go to my room, I went on into the attic. There, in a chest under the eaves, in use to keep the moths from the wedding dress of a slim-waisted Quaker bride, I found copies of the United States Gazette.

Copyright 1933, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Later, Grandmother discovered me engrossed with the Gazettes and gave them to me. They are on my table before me as I write this prelude to the selections from my Chinese journals which form the body of this story.

Many news items, both domestic and foreign, concerning the world in 1805 now arrest my attention as I turn the pages. But in my childhood it was only my own name that gleamed from the pages. Each Gazette has a column of marine notices announcing vessels ‘berthed below’ (at Philadelphia) with lists of merchandise in them and advertisement to the consignee to take delivery. It was only the goods consigned to Waln that captured my imagination, only the movements of brigs, sloops, schooners, frigates, or ships identified as at some time serving Waln that concerned me. I accepted all cargoes consigned to J. S. Waln as my own. And Canton, in Southern China, immediately became my favorite port of purchase.

Years passed. I came to possess a row of Chinese histories, and to own Chinese dictionaries. I dipped into the philosophies of Lao-tse, Mencius, and Mo-ti. I committed to memory analects from Confucius. Then on a golden autumn morning, when I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, I was called to the telephone. I took up the receiver. A lady spoke. She explained that she and her husband, of the Lin Family of China, were on a tour of the Western world, and, desiring to meet one of the Waln family, had looked through the catalogues listing scholars at the Society of Friends schools, and found my name.

Scarce able to believe that it was not a dream, I arranged to go to her at Philadelphia by the next train — the 1.23. I had never seen a Chinese other than those of my mind’s creation. I saw Shun-ko and her husband, Lin Yang-peng, standing under the clock in Broad Street Station before I passed through the exit gate. They were two exquisitely neat slim figures, with faces of smooth ivory. Both were dressed in high-collared, heel-length gowns of dark silk, with short sleeveless jackets of brocade.

Yang-peng wore a round brimless cap with a small red button on his close-cropped head. Shun-ko had no hat. Her glossy black hair was brushed tidily from a centre parting. As she turned to look up at the station clock, I saw a tiny flat bouquet of chrysanthemums in her nape knot. Their detailed perfection of dress and their self-possession, amid the staring crowd, made me timid.

But when Shun-ko’s dark eyes met mine, I was at peace. From that instant there have been no barriers between us. Strong, wise, and true, despite our difference in race she took me into her heart. She had never had a daughter. I had lost my mother four years previously.

We had a week together. Seven magic days in which we found ourselves uncannily akin in seriousness and in humor. Too soon her husband reminded her that she must travel on, and an anxious dean reminded me of college routine I had forgotten. When she was on the train, Shun-ko leaned from her compartment window and said: ‘You must come to me.’

I

It was late in December, 1920, when the waterways of North China were icesealed, that I first came to the homestead of the Lins on the Grand Canal. Accompanied by her husband, her husband’s elder brother and his wife and daughter, and three serving matrons, Shun-ko journeyed up to Peking to welcome and escort me to her dwelling place.

Of the serving matrons, — who are called ‘Bald-the-third,’ ‘Sweet Rain,’ and ‘Faithful Duck,’ — she presented the first to me, saying, ‘This is your woman.’

We were carried an hour by train and then boarded the Lin family boat. We had with us five baskets of provisions. ‘Enough for two weeks,’ Shun-ko explained, ‘ because, although this journey usually occupies only one day, it is wisest when traveling to provide so as not to be fretted if there is delay.’

The boat was fitted with sledge runners and a sail for use ‘when the wind is favorable.’ But there was no wind, so the sail was folded. There were two compartments. The men took the fore, we women the aft. Snug red mattresses, fox fur rugs, back rests padded with camel’s wool, silk quilts of duck down, and charcoal foot braziers made travel comfortable.

The craft was manned by three boatmen, working in single shifts. We were propelled forward with a long metaltipped staff. So engineered, we left the canal side and turned south on the ice without collision with similar sledge boats that careered by in like manner. In a nest of soft furs and gay quilts I was cozy between Shun-ko and her niece, Mai-da. Each held one of my hands under the coverlets.

We kept to the right on the frozen highway. On our left passed a continuous line of sledge boats piled high with country produce. Crates of chickens. Yellow-billed white geese. Brown ducks. Demure gray pigeons in wicker hampers. Rabbits contentedly nibbling at greens. Squealing black pigs protesting rancorously against carriage. Broad-tailed fat sheep. Heaps of eggs. Bushels of hulled rice. Red corn. Golden millet. Peanuts in hull. Trays of candied red fruit neatly terraced to a high ridge. Pickled mushrooms in salt-crusted tubs. Reed containers with their contents protected from the frost by wadded covers — one, blown off, disclosed celery, another lettuce, and a third beetroot.

Packed amid their produce were farmers and their wives and their children, en route to town for market day; all dressed in clean starched long blue gowns, over wadded coats and trousers, their cheeks like hard rosy pippins, their dark eyes sparkling, and their jolly faces quick to smile.

Small boys and girls darted through the more serious traffic on small sledge boats, pushed forward in the same way as ours, miraculously escaping accident by fractions of an inch. Skaters pursuing earnest errands glided swiftly up and down the frozen highway. The leisured amused themselves by skating fancy figures in wayside bays.

With care not to endanger the doubletrack sledge path, men cut ice for summer use. They stacked it in flat baskets woven of stout twigs, and hung each basket by its strong handle from the middle of a carrying pole. A man at each end of the pole carried the ice to the canal-side earth mounds, where they buried it away for summer use, exactly as explained in the annals of Wei, written thirty centuries ago.

We slid under frequent high-arched stone bridges, many with legends carved on them, some humped so that the name ‘camel-back,’ by which they are called, is apt. A few were perfect granite half-circles that cast a shadow, when the sun was just right, so that travelers passed through a ‘good-luck ring.’

There was little snow. The country was beige-colored and appeared barren. One locality was indented by rice paddies roughened by dead stubble. At intervals there were patches of sparse winter wheat on which cattle pastured. A boy whose duty it was to keep the cattle from nipping the wheat too closely sprawled on the back of the largest steer in each herd.

I saw no isolated farmsteads. Worn paths went up from the canal side to walled villages, radiated from the fields to the walled villages, and connected walled village with walled village. Each village had its ‘asking protection ’ shrine by the canal, but the people had built their homes well away from the water— ‘because it is wiser to carry needed water up and to take the washing down than to dwell where all sorts of people pass.’

The village gates were hostile to travelers, Shun-ko explained. For the accommodation of strangers there were mud-and-wattle inns on the canal side. These served meals, provided sleeping quarters, had mangers for beasts, trestles for boats, and usually a craftsman to do repairs. The rooms in the two at which we stopped to buy hot water for tea were alive with insects and putrid with the stale sour sweat of centuries of travelers.

Men and women rode over the countryside paths, straddling wooden saddles perched high on the backs of little donkeys, and often with a downyhaired baby snuggled in the curve of one arm. The donkeys had tinkling bells sewn to their scarlet collars. Other folk reclined in comfortablelooking litters swung between shaggy ponies. A few traveled in gaudy sedan chairs — green, scarlet, or yellow — carried by eight bearers, who cleared lesser folk out of the way shouting: ‘Lend light! Lend light! An important person would pass!’ All lesser folk moved aside. They appeared to enjoy the pageantry of the brilliant procession as much as I did.

Pedestrians peopled the paths, carrying sometimes a rooster, sometimes a paper image to burn at a family grave; sometimes returning a cooking pot to a next-village neighbor after a wedding, and sometimes just strolling along. But most had shoulder poles loaded with looped-up clouds of threadlike spaghetti or tissue-thin moon cakes of gelatine. Shun-ko told me spaghetti and gelatine were the two staples of the district. The bearers were en route to the town, which has as its chief industry the packing of these products in bright paper containers for sale in the cities.

At a bend in the canal the Weary Pagoda graced our journey. We loitered there to enjoy the music of the wind bells swaying under the pagoda’s fivestoried eaves. Shun-ko’s husband told the pretty legend of the pagoda’s trek from beyond a mountain three thousand miles away. The pagoda meant to go to Peking, but stopped to rest. And when it saw how the people passing along the canal, working in the fields, and living in the villages were made peaceful at heart by its beauty, it decided to stay; reasoning that the Emperor and the Empress at the Capital had already plenty of other pagodas.

The boatmen moved up close to listen. As Shun-ko’s husband spoke, he leaned forward and by accident brushed two oranges from a basket of foodstuffs. The fruit rolled over the ice. It crossed the path of a tall skater dressed in a claret-silk gown and a marten-skin cap. The stranger bent gracefully and picked up the oranges.

He returned them with a polite bow, and exchanged a few musical sounds with the men of our party. Then he skated cast. We sledged west.

Shun-ko murmured something in a stern manner to Mai-da in Chinese — then said, in the same stern tone, to me: ‘Girls of a marriageable age are as dangerous to the peace of a family as smuggled salt. Don’t ever again, while under my chaperonage, look at a man. Direct your gaze modestly to the ground when one is in front of you.’

II

Just before midday we sighted the painted ruby, emerald, and sapphire gate towers rising out of the gray wall of the City of Noon-Day Rest. Then the stoutest of the boatmen seized the staff out of turn and sped our craft forward to song. The other two kept time to his prods with handclaps. At great speed we circled under the shadow of the east wall, which rose in perpendicular height from the canal, and around to the South Gate wharf, where broad stone steps went down under the transparent ice.

We disembarked and climbed the steps to the sunny area between the wharf and the south wall, where a chatting, merry throng was gathered. Here idle sedan-chair bearers and boatmen from craft at anchor loafed. Young girls, carrying kettles of steaming water, soap, soft towels, and blue basins, sold ‘Wash your face for a penny! ’ Barbers had set down their portable barber shops and trimmed the cropped heads of republicans, or combed the queues of the old-fashioned, or jerked out with firm tweezers the stray hairs that marred the faces of their beardless countrymen, or cleaned ears with a multiple of spoon tools. Two letter writers, one at each end of the wharf, with a fortune teller midway between them, each with a stout oak-stemmed oil-paper umbrella stuck in the ground behind him and tilted to shade his worktable, brushed letters for ‘those who have no leisure to write for themselves’ and gave advice to the anxious.

Hither, also, itinerant cooks had wheeled their barrows, built to combine portable work-board and stove. The cauldrons gave off a delicious steam which whetted my hunger. Thick meat and vegetable soup, piping hot! Crusty golden doughnut twists! Sweet steamed yams! Flaky white rice! Roasted chestnuts! Pork dumplings! Buns of light steamed bread! Grain porridge! Candied red apples! Nougatstuffed dates! Fried noodles! Bean curd of rich brownness! As they worked, the cooks advertised the quality of their food with songs and gestures which brought laughter and retorts from the crowd.

As each purchaser received his filled bowl, with chopsticks laid across the top, he carried it to the communal stone tables, worn by much use, under an ancient evergreen tree. A young blind minstrel leaned against the tree trunk fingering a three-stringed guitar. ‘He was a soldier in the army of Tuan Chi-jui, and lost his sight in August 1917, in the battle which defeated the attempt to restore the Manchus,’ Shun-ko explained. ‘He found his way home and now sings for a living in public places and at such private social occasions as he can. He has new ballads of his own rhyming, and the old songs which made his grandfather famous throughout the tea houses of eighteen provinces.’

I made the mistake of supposing that we were to supplement our lunch basket from the wharf restaurateurs. But we carried it only for emergency. It was left in the boat. Bald-the-third motioned me into the fifth of a file of nine sedan chairs, in which the men led and the serving women came last. The chairs for Shun-ko, her sister-in-law, niece, and me were closed — so that we ‘need not be stared at.’ Level with my eyes there was an oblong slit covered with brown gauze. Through this I saw that we were carried inside the town; up a steep narrow street along which shop signs swung; turned to the left, into a narrow passage, between high gray brick walls broken at intervals by tightly closed, heavy vermilion gates; through one of these gates, which was clankingly unchained to Yang-peng’s order; and put down in the third inner courtyard of a quiet posada.

A man, who appeared very slim in a rich dark-blue silk gown, met us here. He bowed us into a small room, and to stools placed two and two around a square table of rosewood. We did not give a special order, but had the restaurateurs’ usual ‘five dishes,’ which cost one dollar a person.

Chicken and walnuts with sour-sweet gravy. Shrimps, mushrooms, and green onions. Cabbage, pork, and bean curd. Noodles, celery, and pigeon eggs. Fish and bamboo soup. Warm rice wine, served in thimble cups to ‘aid digestion.’ And dishes of salted radishes and red fruit jelly, set in the centre of the table.

While we ate, a soldier came in. He leaned over Shun-ko’s husband and examined our food. He stared at me for what seemed a long time. The others took no notice of him, but continued intent on their chopsticks and bowls. I tried to do the same.

Finally he laid his gun, which had a bayonet at one end, across the only other table in the room. He had a stupid heavy face and wore ill-fitting garments of coarse cotton, but our elegantly gowned inn host carried food to him with his own delicate hands. The servants who waited on us were called away to help please him, and he was even given our dish of jelly without any of the Lins seeming to notice his insolence.

He fed quickly, sucking and hiccuping. Having finished, he rose and slapped down a twenty-dollar paper note (which Shun-ko later told me was worthless because printed by a governor who had since gone out of office). Our inn host bowed so that his skirt swept the floor, and told the soldier with soft cadence that he had been the guest of the house for his meal. The soldier did not return the bow. He drew himself up stiffly. In a harsh rumble of sound he replied that he did not accept bribes of food, and wanted his change in silver. Then he thrust the note in the host’s face.

Our host took the worthless money. He deducted one dollar as the price of the dinner and gave the soldier nineteen silver dollars. The soldier rang each dollar against his bayonet to test the purity of the coin. All rang true. He dropped them into his purse. Then, picking his teeth as he went, he walked out. As he passed, I saw that his soldier shoes were of cloth like his poor uniform, and badly torn. He had put newspapers in them to keep his feet warm.

A brazier heated the room. When the noise of the soldier’s departure had died away, the innkeeper dropped the twenty-dollar bill and the chopsticks that the soldier had used into the fire.

Our meal closed with clean bowls of steaming rice and fragrant tea made in a squat brown pot. Shun-ko explained that all good restaurants and careful homes have teapots for different needs. Our inn host, who had never seen a Western girl before, had asked about me. When he learned that I was to visit in the Lin homestead, he suggested tea from ‘the pot which prevents misunderstanding.’

We were carried back to the wharf. The boatman whose turn it was to work grinned with well-fed content; the other two curled up asleep on the sledge’s broad stern. For a time fields and frozen highway were occupied as before. Then we crossed paths with a sledge boat overcrowded with soldiers and propelled by a frightened boatman. Farther on we saw another boat commandeered by half a dozen young boys and an officer. They pushed an old farmer and his ‘lily-foot’ wife about ruthlessly, scattering their produce over the ice. One lad speared the old lady’s brown rooster with his bayonet and held him high while the others applauded. When she struggled to help the dying bird, the officer clouted her on the head. Half a mile on, we heard a shot and saw a child fall — she had been reluctant to give up the donkey hitched to the mill where she was grinding flour. The soldier who shot her then led the donkey down to the canal for sledge transport to ‘the war.’

Without slackening pace, the Lins conferred in low voices with their boatmen. The serving women took an active part in the discussion. We turned down a branch of the canal to detour trouble.

All our party agreed that we were safest to keep off the main canal. We could not walk, as Shun-ko, Maida’s mother, and the serving matrons had ‘lily’ feet. We sledged devious ways. I saw plentiful supplies of hot food set in cauldrons before each barred village gate. Twice we saw tired-looking soldiers feeding on this ‘ peace rice.’

It was long after sunset when we came to the Lin homestead city. The gates are sealed at sunset. The city wall, thick enough for nine horses to trot abreast on it, rises in perpendicular height from the canal. A boatman beat against the heavy gate. Finally the gateman was roused.

But he refused to open the gates before sunrise. He acknowledged that he knew all the persons who had gone to Peking to meet the foreigner. Yes, he had known them since childhood. And the voices from without were like the voices of these Lins and their servants. Yet he could not open until the appointed time.

After much parley, the gateman’s son was dispatched to the Lin homestead. We waited in the eerie greengold moonlight a cold and weary while. At last someone hailed us from within the gate. The eldest among us replied. There was another call. The next eldest replied. So on, through all our number. Lastly Shun-ko told me to shout my name.

The gate creaked open. We walked in. Before greeting us, the elderly man from the homestead who had identified us by voice closed the gate again. He secured its locks and pasted a fresh strip of paper over the paper he had broken, across the crevices where the two halves of the gate meet. On the fresh paper he brushed his name with black ink.

He had brought sedan chairs. In them, we followed him up a steep narrow street, turned to the left through a narrower passageway between gray walls broken at intervals by closed vermilion gates, and then down a broader street to a scarlet gate in which a peephole was slid open at the sound of our coming.

Camel-back, the Lin gateman, recognized his family. He opened the ‘To and From the World Door,’ bowing and smiling his joy in their safe return from the perils of travel. Massed behind him were Lins, young and old. I stood forgotten as my escorts were welcomed home. ‘ Chia ho fung ran shong,’ they said again and again; repeating the sentence which I now know means, ‘Happiness springs up of itself in a united family.’

Thus I entered the Lin homestead, on the Grand Canal, in Hopei Province, North China — which was once named in derision, and is now called in affection, the ‘House of Exile.’

III

From the moment of my arrival in China it was as though, like Alice, I had stepped through a looking-glass into another world. The world I left behind became a dim, fantastic dream. Only this into which I entered seemed real.

‘Glazed brick, white mortar, and blue roof tiles do not make a house beautiful; carved rosewood, gold cloth, and clear green jade do not furnish a house with grace; a man of cultivated mind makes a house of mud and wattle beautiful; a woman, even with a pockmarked face, if refined of heart, fills a house with grace,’ is a literal translation of the carving on the first stone laid in the building of the Lin homestead.

There are six generations of Lins now living. They dwell in one-story-high, single-room houses, which are built foursquare about a paved courtyard. The roofs extend well over the pillared verandahs which finish the fronts of the houses, so that one can get into a sedan chair in rainy weather without exposure to wet; and, after their utilitarian duty is done, they tilt upward in easy curves displaying faëry scenes and fabulous creatures painted gayly under the eaves.

Here one is ever conscious of the beauty of the heavens, because to go from one room to another in the homestead one must always cross a courtyard. The houses have doors and windows only on one side, the side opening into the court to which they belong. The homestead is composed of sufficient courts to house comfortably the family, who are eighty-three men, women, and children at the time of this writing, and permit them to entertain in accord with their station in society.

The courtyards are connected by gateways cut in the courtyard walls in the shape of a flower, a fan, a vase, or a full moon. The courts, with their dwelling rooms for the living, cluster around the double-roofed, story-and-ahalf Hall of Ancestors, which shelters the life tablets of twenty-nine generations of Lins, and their wives, who have ‘plucked the flower of life.’

A protective gray wall, six feet thick and four times a man’s height, surrounds the homestead, which neither overlooks nor is overlooked by its neighbors. From the many times higher city wall above it, only the flamboyant roofs can be seen through the lacery of intertwined trees; or occasionally, before the poplars come into leaf, the flutter of a bright silk gown as someone walks along the path to the summerhouse by the lotus pond.

The ‘Gate of Compassion,’ a small window cut in the north wall, where charity is given to the needy, and the ‘To and From the World Gate,’ a door of solid planks large enough for a horse and carriage to be driven into the entrance court, are the only openings in the wall connecting with the outside world.

The view in through the Gate of Compassion is closed by a shrine which holds a portrait of the Goddess of Mercy. The view in at the To and From the World Gate is closed by a screen of porcelain tiles. This screen is an arm’s length thick, twice as wide as the gate, and as high as the homestead wall. On it a gorgeous green dragon writhes over a blue sea after a scarlet ball of life.

The homestead is called the ‘House of Exile.’ Thirty-five generations of the family have been born inside its stout gray walls. The people of Hopei speak of the Lin family as the ‘Kungtung Lins.’ The Lins in Canton speak of the Lins resident in the House of Exile as ‘temporarily from home.’ But Lin Fu-yi came from Canton, of Kungtung Province, in the Yuan dynasty, six and a half centuries ago.

IV

The night of my arrival at the House of Exile, Bald-the-third set up a busthigh screen and pushed me behind it to undress. She reached around the screen and took each garment as I removed it. She examined it, then passed it on to Faithful Duck for examination, and thence to Mai-da, who was undressing behind a similar screen.

Mai-da pantomimed my death from cold and cuddled down cozily in a nest of quilts on the brick bed. Bald-thethird and Faithful Duck brought an earthen jar. They filled it with hot water halfway up and pushed it behind my screen. When I was slow in getting in, Bald came behind and put me in. Then she poured more and hotter water in with me until the bunch of herbs that she had added floated just under my chin.

The jar was of a size that I could just sit in, with my feet tucked under me. I was terribly sleepy. Each time I attempted to get out Bald pushed me down.

She kept me soaking until Faithful Duck brought supper. Then I dried on warm towels and was folded up in quilts on one side of the brick bed. A six-inch-legged table was set between Mai-da’s nest and mine. Our supper was served on it.

First two lovely bowls of robin’s-egg blue and two pairs of ivory chopsticks with silver handles were laid; then three steaming covered dishes. These contained breasts of chicken, red cabbage and green pepper, and tenderloin of pork with chestnuts — each cooked in such a different and delicious sauce that I was eager to possess the recipes to send home to my sisters. When we had eaten of these three dishes, I managing as best I could with my chopsticks, Bald-the-third took them away,

I had dropped bits and spattered sauce on the tray. Faithful Duck removed it and set a clean red lacquer tray in its place. Then she placed two sea-green bowls with porcelain spoons to match. Between the bowls Faithful Duck set a covered tureen of the same sea-green china. It held fish soup. We ladled the soup into our bowls and ate it with the porcelain spoons. It was good, and, having a spoon, I got more of it than of the previous dishes.

The soup was taken away and steamed rice brought. Again we had clean eating bowls — transparent white ones. The rice was served alone. We had chopsticks to eat it with. I did not manage to convey much to my mouth. Mai-da and the serving matrons laughed merrily at my attempts. We finished our meal with hard white winter pears and cups of jasmine tea. The tea was a pale amber in color and served without milk or sugar.

After the meal we were given hot towels to wipe our faces and hands. Bald-the-third thrust more cornstalks into the fire in the stomach of the bed and snuffed the candles. To the merry music of crackling flames I went to sleep.

I woke to the homely sound of cocks’ crowing. The sun shone on my face. Mai-da was asleep. She had a block of wood, similar to the one I had pushed out of my bed, tucked under her neck. Faithful Duck was by the window combing her long black hair.

Mai-da woke. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up and glared at me. Then she spoke to the women. Faithful Duck rolled down the paper curtains, shutting out the morning light, and pushed me back into my bed. We slept again. Bald-the-third wakened us with cups of hot rice water. We drank, then washed and dressed.

My clothes were gone. Two lacquer chests stood side by side against the wall under the windows. Mai-da, who then spoke no English and has always stubbornly refused to learn any since, made me understand by gesture that one was hers and one mine. The serving matrons took identical outfits from the chests for us to put on.

Following Mai-da’s lead, I dressed. I wound myself from my armpits to my hip joints with a tight bias binding of strong flesh-colored silk, then put on pyjamas of peach silk. These were made with trousers that wrapped over in pleats in back and front. Over the under-pyjamas, I put on a second suit cut to the same pattern, but of heliotrope satin lined with white rabbit fur. Next I pulled on white socks, tucked the legs of the two pairs of trousers neatly into them, and wrapped my ankles in puttees of apple-green satin. After this I had a third pyjama suit fashioned exactly as the first two. It was of wine-red brocade, warmed with an inner lining of gray squirrel fur. I felt so stiff in all my garments that I was glad to do as Mai-da did — thrust my feet out over the edge of the bed and let Bald-the-third put on my black velvet boots lined with red fox.

Shun-ko came. She explained that my own clothes were put away because they were not suitable in the House of Exile. She pulled out my hairpins, saying that my hair had best be dressed as Mai-da’s. Otherwise it would cause unnecessary comment, since a girl does not pin up her hair in China until she is married.

It was gummed smooth, parted in the middle, pulled back behind my cars, braided at the nape of my neck into a pigtail that swung to my knees. My braid was wound, a finger length from the lower end, with half a finger reel of scarlet thread. Bald-the-third wanted to dye the hair black, since it is the color of the yellow gentian of misfortune. But Shun-ko reminded her that yellow is also the color of the innermost petals of the sacred lotus.

So Bald was content, and took satisfaction in my hands, which she then discovered measure exactly as Shunko’s. But a few moments later, when she found that my ears had not been pierced in childhood and I could not wear the sapphire earrings provided to match Mai-da’s, her depression was pitiful.

Mai-da took a sleeveless blue jacket, lined with beaver, from ‘my’ chest and told me to put it on. When it was buttoned we took leave of Mai-da and went across several courts to Shun-ko’s dwelling, which is in the Court of the White Jade Rabbit — so called because the legend of the jade rabbit is told in gay colors on the caves of the four houses that open into the court.

V

As in Mai-da’s house, Shun-ko’s dwelling has a brick bed which is built across the back of the room and touches three walls, occupying three fourths of the floor space. It is used for sleeping at night and as a sofa in the daytime, when the folded quilts are stacked at one side where they make bright layers of scarlet, gold, leaf-green, lavender, and sapphire.

We removed our shoes and our outer jackets before sitting, with our feet tucked under us, on Shun-ko’s bed. She gave me a small mortar and pestle and set me to pounding paint ready for her use on the ‘chart of the lessening of the cold’ which she was preparing.

This is an annual record kept as a help with garden and farm work. Shun-ko drew a plum tree. She gave the tree nine branches. She gave each of the nine branches nine twigs. Then she mixed the pigments I had pounded in daubs on her palette with a thin, round-pointed knife. She selected her brushes with care, and shaded the tree trunk and the branches realistically. She compounded color for leaf buds of brown, green, and silver, and added a generous number to the sketch. Finally she put in the shadow of a pink blossom on each of the eighty-one twigs, and said that after the Winter Solstice she would paint one blossom each day, according to the weather. It is the custom for the wife resident in the Second House of the White Rabbit to keep these records, as they were started twenty-two generations ago by the wife for whom this house was designed.

While we cleaned the mortar, pestle, mixing knife, palette, and the brushes with evil-smelling kerosene, Shun-ko told me how my place in the House of Exile had been decided.

‘Each dwelling place here is inherited by a person entering the family by birth or marriage in accord with customs that have grown into the family regulations with the generations. You have no place either by birth or by marriage. Neither is there precedent in our knowdedge for the entrance of an unmarried woman, without the chaperonage of her mother, as a guest in a Chinese homestead. You are also the first foreigner to enter our To and From the World Gate.

‘I am sponsor for you. I am responsible both for your conduct and for your safety. I prefer to be in the relationship of mother to you than of friend. As my daughter, your place is in the most carefully guarded court of the homestead — the Springtime Bower. I reason that the sheltered Springtime Bower is the only safe place, in a Chinese homestead, for a maiden of marriageable age.

‘But the Springtime Bower in this house is foolishly inadequate for a family of this size. It has only three houses. The twins, Ching-mei and Lamei, share the First House. The Second belongs to Su-ling. She is studying in France. But her room could not even be borrowed. The rule in the House of Exile is that each daughter’s house is absolutely hers until she acquires, by marriage, a house in another homestead. The Third House is Mai-da’s, although, but for the slackness of the Elder, she would have been married last Lotus Moon. So we puzzled for two moons about where to put you.

‘I happened to remember that you had given me the year, the month, the day, and the hour of your birth in a letter, so that I could have a horoscope cast for you, and that they were identical with Mai-da’s. Then, as Mai-da was willing to have the test made, the Elder wrote your name and hers, with this information, on a slip of red paper. He put the paper on the altar in the Circle of Ancestors. It lay there for three days. During those days tranquil weather, and fortune in the repayment of a loan made three generations ago to the Yen Family, were taken as omens of a peaceful double domicile. Mai-da prepared to share her house with you.’

Mai-da’s mother joined us. We three lunched together, waited on by her Swift Needle, Shun-ko’s Sweet Rain, and my Bald-the-third. When the meal was ended, the women fussed nervously over my appearance. They added a cuff to my outer coat, recombed my hair, plucked my eyebrows to a high thin arch, rouged my mouth and the lobes of my ears, and perfumed the palms of my hands. They changed my black velvet boots to jade silk slippers embroidered with eglantine.

Shun-ko put on ceremonial garments. She adorned herself with pearl earrings, pearl hair ornaments, pearl coat buttons. She rubbed her polished nails to a high pink gloss. Then she turned her attention to my appearance again, worrying, until at last Mai-da’s mother teasingly placed my hand in Shun-ko’s and pushed us out to the round of visits which Shun-ko dreaded.

VI

We went first to the Garden of Children. There nine little boys and girls received us. Next we went to the court adjoining the Springtime Bower, to which girls graduate from the Garden of Children. Following Shun-ko’s example, I soon learned that when a hostess lifts her teacup to her lips the polite moment to say farewell has arrived, and that one should then go no matter how much the hostess begs one to stay.

Li-la, the first mother of the House of Exile, was a ‘ green-skirt ’ mate. So, in the courtyards of the mates of Lin sons, Shun-ko was careful to stay as long in the dwellings of those who wore the green skirts as in the houses of wives. We visited first with the Fourth Generation, who live in three courts called the ‘Favorite Eaves of Nesting Swallows.’ In accord with custom, we called next on the women of the Third Generation, then on the mates of the Second Generation.

‘The First Generation will not receive you in their residences in the Three Eastern Courtyards, but in the Guest Hall of the Court of Dignity,’ Shun-ko said, and took me back to her own dwelling house.

There she anxiously re-tidied me, and rehearsed me for this audience. When she was satisfied that I could bow ‘making a curve like a bamboo sapling swept by the wind,’ that I understood how to take the cup of tea that would be offered to me in the palms of both hands and not to drink it but to offer the cup back as though I felt myself unworthy to drink in such company, then when the tea had been pressed upon me three times to walk backward, in ‘flowerlike modesty,’ and seat myself in the most lowly place, ‘the chair by the table nearest the door,’ she made me warm myself thoroughly by the charcoal brazier and started out with me again.

The opaque shell lattices at the Orchid Door were drawn aside by serving matrons. We passed out of the Women’s Quarters and around the Phœnix Screen into the Court of Dignity.

This court had a slippery ice film frozen over the paving stones. We had to walk with care and help each other. As we approached the Guest Hall, blue-clad serving women opened the cinnabar-velvet door of the Hall of Dignity.

The entire south front of this hall is of carved openwork rosewood picturing historical legends, just as in the West it is the custom to picture Biblical stories in stained glass in churches. The carvings are set off by gold rice paper placed between the two surfaces of the wood, which are identical whether viewed from the court or from inside the hall.

The hall occupies the entire north side of the court and runs back so that its depth takes in all the space of an additional ordinary court. It is beamed with dark rafters. On the sides of these beams brilliantly colored scenes from the lives of Lin men and women are painted. A portrait of Confucius hangs on the north wall, and on either side of it a gilt scroll on which is written one of his analects. Portraits of the founders of the House and other ancestors, mounted on yellow silk, all dressed in rich silk robes and done in realistic color, decorate the east and west walls. The floor is of gray tile and uncarpeted.

The furniture is of heavy black wood polished to a mirror surface. There are small tables, straight-back chairs, and stiff settees, all set in prim order against the wall. They are so arranged that Chinese people know exactly which seat is in what grade of honor. It is here that all receptions are held on Feast Days.

The only heat to combat the winter chill of the hall, which Shun-ko whispered to me had not been used since the Autumn Festival, was one small bronze brazier on the floor in the centre of the room. Each of the ‘First Ladies of the Homestead ’ had a tiny charcoalfilled hand warmer, but it would not have been polite for Shun-ko and me to have so warmed our hands.

There were three of these ladies. They sat stiffly erect, not touching the backs of their chairs. Kuei-tzu, the wife of the Elder, was directly under the portrait of the first mother of the homestead. She is small and delicately made. Her face is marked by surprisingly few wrinkles. Her eyes are two bright black crystals. Her hands taper and are very white. She wore a fitted gown of black brocade with hairpin, earrings, dress buttons, and finger ring of gold, set with large diamonds.

Ju-i, the Elder’s second mate, sat in the same settee, but to the left. Ju-i is five feet, nine inches. She has a dry yellow skin stretched over her gaunt frame. Her nose is Hebraic and she is proud of her birthplace — Sianfu. She drops her black hair in waxed wings over her ears in defiance of fashion. She heightens her high cheek bones with daubs of carmine. She paints her thin lips to a carmine line. She plucks her eyebrows out and draws in short thick eyebrows with a black pencil. That afternoon she was costumed in green taffeta and had scarlet shoes. She scared me in our first exchange of glances. I stayed scared for many years.

The widow of the Elder’s Second Brother sat in a chair to the right. She wore a gown of gray cotton and the white cord of mourning in her hair. Her wrinkled face is sweet and sad. She is blind to earthly things, but gifted with sight into the future.

I made my three bamboo-sapling bows to each lady. I took the cup of tea into my palms and then refused it three times. When it had been pressed upon me three times, I did my best to walk modestly backward to the chair nearest the door.

This over, the First Lady spoke to me. As I did not understand, Shun-ko changed her sounds into English. I replied in English.

The First Lady then made sounds that were like ice tinkling in a glass. Shun-ko told me to bow my head and to withdraw. Thus I was dismissed.

So Kuei-tzu, Lady of First Authority in the House of Exile, gave the command that I was not to be presented to audience again until I was sufficiently civilized to hear and to speak for myself, and that no member of the family was ever again to speak with me in any language except Chinese.

(Next month this account of family life among the Chinese will be continued with a further article, 1 Three Birthdays’)