by Carl Crow
XIX
The China coast housewife
“To be for one day entirely at leisure is to be for one day an immortal.”
In the search for that tranquility which is the earnest desire of all members of his race, the Chinese servant in the foreign household of China finds that his first and most difficult task is to tranquilize the minds of his master and mistress. This is never an easy task and is complicated by the fact that what will tranquilize one may have an entirely different effect on the other for each cherishes many highly individualized irritations. It is always surprising to a Chinese how many trivial things a foreign devil or his mate will find to lose his temper about, and, having lost it, the pertinacity with which they will refuse to look for it again. In a month a pair of them will lose enough tempers to last the average Chinese through a long lifetime. But no matter what the discouragement the servant never gives up but tries to get through each day with a minimum of trouble. He always makes life as easy as possible for his employers in the hope that the necessary and unavoidable intervals of glaring and swearing, on the part of the male; or of scolding, picking and nagging on the part of the female; will be interspersed with periods when a blessed calm and serenity will spread its effulgence over the household.
Because of the greater tranquility of the male, bachelors make the best masters and therefore have the pick of the servants. Houseboys who serve bachelors are conscious of their superior positions and have a poise and a dignity and an assured efficiency not to be found in boys who are subject to whimsical and impractical female orders, and they do not willingly change their status. Indeed when a bachelor on the China Coast decides to marry he is always confronted by the problem of whether or not his boy is going to like his bride and will continue to bring his morning tea and mix his evening cocktails. Those who have lived in China for some years are well aware of this problem and many a distressed bachelor makes pitiful attempts to convince his boy that a bride may be brought into the house without upsetting its serenity and happiness.
These attempts are rarely successful. In his younger and less experienced days the boy may have worked in a house where a woman issued the orders so he knows what he and his master are in for. If he has been fortunate enough to be a bachelor’s boy all his life he has heard the sad stories of other boys. When his master begins shaving twice a day and complains about the spots on his clothing he knows that there is danger ahead. The wheel of fate has turned and he has drawn an unlucky number. He feels that his master is temporarily deranged by this love pidgin and can neither be bullied or cajoled out of it. In spite of his loyalty and possible genuine affection for a master to whose ways he has become accustomed, he declines to be dragged into subjugation with him and makes his plans accordingly.
The most he will do is to hang on for a time, but usually no longer than is necessary to get the couple settled and satisfy his curiosity about the bride. Why anyone should want to marry one of those talkative foreign females is more than any Chinese can understand. The way their eyes pop out of their faces is enough to prove that they are lacking in feminine modesty. The boy hopes this one may be different but they never are. In fact when a China Coast bachelor announces his engagement, other bachelors who are in need of a servant assume that his boy will soon be looking for another position and look him over with an acquisitive eye. Years ago I got a very good boy myself in that way and later lost him through the same course of events. The boy usually doesn’t remain long enough to get well acquainted with the bride. After his own very efficient management of his master’s household he bitterly resents the interference of a woman who probably doesn’t know how to mix a cocktail or take care of a morning-after headache.
It is an anxious honeymoon period for the newly wedded husband. His happiness would be so complete if the boy would only remain and he can’t imagine the house being run without him. He usually makes every effort to compose the difference between boy and wife, praising each to the other and assuming a false satisfaction with everything around the house. The boy is surprised to see that burnt toast now passes unnoticed and is eaten with apparent relish. The bride’s impractical suggestions about meals are accepted with enthusiasm. But it is all in vain. Too often the bridegroom sees from the very first that the bride will not do. He thought she was perfect but the boy holds a dissenting opinion which she unwittingly helps to justify. She upsets the routine of the household, issues orders just to show her authority and makes changes that are obviously unnecessary. The bridegroom brought romance in the front door but comfort flew out of the kitchen window. No matter how efficient, considerate and obliging a wife may be, she can never run a house for a man as comfortably as the experienced Chinese boy. If the bachelor didn’t know this he soon learns it for the boy informs him that an aged parent requires his presence at Ningpo, puts in a substitute and never comes back.
Eventually the bride finds a new boy who will put up with her whims and unreasonableness and the contest between them starts to see who is really going to run the house. She always appears to be winning and to have the upper hand but is really fighting a battle in which from the very beginning she never had a chance. The boy agrees with everything she says, carries out her orders with a great show of punctiliousness and, without her suspecting it, manages things to suit himself. Daily she is of less importance as a housewife and daily the house regains some of its old bachelor comforts, though it is never as it was in the past.
By the time he has served the champagne at the first wedding anniversary dinner, the boy usually has his missie well trained as to the household duties of a wife on the China Coast. According to his ideas there is but one function for her to perform and that is to pass the monthly bills for payment without too much fuss and bother and with no petty and suspicious inquiries as to the final disposition of the eggs and sugar. Having gone through this routine she can return to her bridge or mah-jongg games and the household settles down to another month of peace and quiet. His code of conduct for wives is implemented by the phrase “proper missie no can do,” a suggested code of conduct that is both flattering and beguiling. It is an easy code to follow for in the long run it means that the “proper missie” is not allowed to do anything that the boy can do for her.
He takes care of all of the details of housekeeping and as the years go by the wife falls deeper into the easy habits of the China Coast and, his domination of the household grows. There are, of course, other servants in even the most modest establishments and the cook may be of even more importance than the boy. But he is an isolationist who prefers to remain in the kitchen and devote himself to his pots and pans and leave the responsibility of foreign relations to the boy. Frequently he avoids a lot of trouble for himself by affecting to be entirely ignorant of English so that the boy will have to do all the talking, and if there is a woman in the house, all the listening. It is a device which the husband may at times wish he could adopt. He may not know it, but in stormy times, he has the complete sympathy of the servants.
An essential part of the cook’s code is that no “proper missie” ever goes into the kitchen. This idea has been propagated by so many generations of Chinese cooks that it has finally become a sacred old custom presumed to have the support of the kitchen god whose pictured face is pasted over every cook stove. It is undoubtedly very unlucky for a foreign missie to violate this custom. She invariably finds some perfectly harmless dirt and the consequences are unhappy for everyone. On the rare occasions when she does go into the kitchen the cook and the other servants always look at her with expressions of pained surprise - as if she had intruded in a strange gentleman’s bedroom. There is no occasion for the master to see the cook and he seldom does. It is not at all unusual for a cook to be employed in a foreign household for years and be as mysterious and unknown as the chef who makes canned soup imported from a distance of thousands of miles. I once stepped into a taxicab in Shanghai and the chauffeur drove me straight home without a word being said by either of us. A
s I paid the fare I inquired, “How fashion you savvy what side my home?”
“My plenty savvy you,” he assured me. “My belong your cook four years.”
With the assistance of the cook the boy will do all the marketing and, if she doesn’t want to be bothered with such details, the two of them will plan the meals always with an uncanny instinct as to what master - who pays the bills - will want to eat. It usually develops that the boy brings her his and the cook’s suggestions for the day and she approves it. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to do that and many a China Coast housewife sits down to dinner with no more definite idea of what is going to be served than she would have if she were a guest in the home of a stranger. This dependence on the boy and the cook finds its most complete development in households which actually board with the cook. For a certain fixed sum each month he will provide all the provisions and pay all the other servants. A supplementary schedule provides a tariff to be charged for guests. There is one charge for those who drop in for cocktails, stay for a potluck meal, and a much higher charge for those who are invited for dinner with flowers on the table, the theory being that they will be served superior food and eat a great deal more of it. The arrangement is much more common than it is generally supposed to be for few housewives care to admit such a complete abandonment of their duties and surrender of their privileges.
But the development is always in that direction. After the first adjustments have been comfortably made few women either resent or resist the system under which the boy runs their homes for them. It is not only the inexperienced brides who find the arrangement intriguing. Middle-aged women have come to China after a reasonable amount of cooking, dishwashing, bedmaking and floor sweeping and in a year or less are completely under the thumbs of the boy and the cook and accustom themselves to the messy discomfort of having breakfast in bed.
The leisure enjoyed by the women adds to the sale quotas set by the manufacturers of playing cards. The custom of daily card games at teatime started on the China Coast as soon as four women who would speak to each other got together and has continued ever since. With the advent of bridge and its opportunities for recriminating conversation, luncheon bridge parties became the rule. But as this left a whole morning free with nothing at all to do some of the more energetic hostesses started breakfast bridge games and thus a whole day could be very satisfactorily disposed of. It is also a wonderful thing for the vendors of food supplies, for with a boy and a cook to prepare and serve the meals at these parties they assumed elaborate and gigantic proportions. Everyone can serve equally good food so the only way one hostess can rouse the envy of another is to serve more of it. I never heard of a planked steak being served at bridge tea but it may have been done. I also never heard of tea being served as that beverage is entirely too mild for China Coast tastes. These heavy and frequent meals are not without their effect on figures - which are pleasingly plump - to those who like plumpness. Some are actually fat - no ladies of my acquaintance but strangers I have seen at the country club.
A few who have been housewives at home do attempt to keep up the old routine, either through a sense of duty or force of habit, but they always run into difficulties and the attempt is seldom persisted in for very long. The idea that a foreign housewife should be underfoot as little as possible is one on which the servants hold the strongest possible convictions and not one woman in a hundred can change, or seriously attempt to change the time-honored customs of the country, In the first place, she is hopelessly handicapped in the matter of marketing. She can order imported canned goods of all kinds by telephone, but, having given the order to the supposedly English-speaking shop assistant, the puzzle of what one will receive remains for solution until the cargo arrives. It is a certainty that something will be delivered but that is the only certainty there is about the transaction. If the articles received should correspond in all details with the articles ordered, that can only be set down as one of those peculiar coincidences which add interest to life. Almost invariably something will be wrong. She said soup, but the shop assistant understood her to say soap. If she tries to specify certain brands there is a hopeless tangle for they are known to but few Chinese by their foreign names but enjoy plentiful nicknames of Chinese invention. Some of the nicknames involve the use of terms that no “proper missie” would knowingly use. In the end the boy has to be called in to straighten things out. After a few experiences of this sort the housewife gives up and the boy does the ordering.
When it comes to the purchase of meats and vegetables, this is a transaction which can only be attended to by a personal visit to the market. Each piece of meat and each assortment of vegetables must be personally inspected and weighed before the cash is paid over. In no other transaction is the old legal caution “let the buyer beware” of such imperative importance. The Chinese housewife who does her own shopping not only bewares of quality and price but also of weight and each carries her own scales. But this matter of short weight and uncertain quality is only one of the many difficulties the foreign housewife meets.
The principal one is the question of language. There are, of course, any number of smiling and obliging vendors of meats and vegetables who speak a variety of English which is limited in vocabulary, strange in construction and queer in pronunciation - but theoretically adequate for the purpose of quoting price. However, there is one very strange thing about the Chinese language which has been noted by almost every foreigner who ever lived in the country. In spite of the fact it is concise and definite, it seems impossible to get a correct translation of Chinese into other languages where prices are concerned. By the time they are translated into any foreign tongue they are invariably higher. This appears to be as automatic as the operations of a sound amplifier. The housewife who comes home with purchases she has made is invariably told by the boy that he could have bought the same things much cheaper and when they are served they are as invariably found to be of inferior quality.
The first mental jolt the husband receives comes with the discovery that his boy doesn’t approve the bride. But after another boy becomes a fixture in the household and gives the wife the training she needs, the husband often has reason to wonder just what his own position is as titular head of the household. As the wife leans more and more heavily on the boy and as he relieves her of all the work and worries of housekeeping, he comes to occupy a peculiar and very important position in the routine of her life. In practical everyday affairs he is more helpful than any husband could be, just as he is more helpful than any wife could be. Since she depends on him for advice in all manner of petty and homely things she often develops an exaggerated idea of his abilities and comes to rely on him for advice in many problems. If there is any question as to whether or not it is going to rain, the authenticity of a piece of porcelain, or the proportions of vermouth and gin to be used in a Martini, the China Coast housewife is prepared to back the opinion of her boy to the limit - even to the point of taking sides against her husband. When the boy has spoken all others might as well remain silent.
With the arrival of a baby, the boy is for the moment eclipsed by the amah, but not invariably for sometimes things can be arranged more agreeably. The boy’s wife may be quite expert at what is known as “baby pidgin.” If that is the case then she is already as good as installed in the house, was in fact employed long before the baby was born. When the baby arrives the boy, without even hinting at the relationship between himself and his candidate, may insist that of the thousands of other baby amahs in the place, all are either sick or employed. If that doesn’t work, an assortment of carefully selected amahs is brought in for inspection and all are found to be so young or so old, or so stupid or so dirty that they cannot even be considered. Beside them the original candidate stands out as a model of perfection. It was in order to accomplish this that the boy made his careful selection of the other candidates. The boy’s wife is installed and may remain in the house for months before the relationship is discovered.
&
nbsp; The position of amah is indispensable for it would be as unthinkable that a foreign missie should take care of her own baby as that she should wash her own clothes or darn her husband’s socks. “Proper missie no can do.” Sometimes a young mother does make the attempt but it doesn’t last any longer than her earlier attempt to run her own house and soon the baby is transferred to the more expert care of the amah. Every servant in the house works to bring this about, not only because it will help to tranquilize the house hold, but also because there is a universal belief that foreign women know nothing about how to care for a baby. They are not, from the Chinese point of view, very good at producing them - as shown by the amount of fuss and bother they make about it and the very small number of children.
Once the amah is installed the baby is in safe hands and is given the most affectionate care. Chinese veneration for old age is balanced by Chinese love for children, the two forming the perfect whole which is the ideal of Chinese metaphysics. The baby in a foreign household is automatically adopted by all the servants so that in addition to a doting father and mother it may have a half-dozen or more devoted foster parents who cheerfully assume parental responsibilities. A scolding wife may drive servants from a house, but they never appear to mind being kept up all night by a crying baby. The boy, cook, gardener and chauffeur all help and most of them could pinch-hit for the amah if that were necessary. The first month I was in China an overly garrulous boy who applied to me for a position said that he could pull corset strings and mentioned among his other accomplishments the fact that he had once “borned a baby.” When that rather startling statement was explained it developed that in the unavoidable absence of a doctor and midwife, he had officiated for them. I didn’t employ him but another bachelor did and the boy remained with him until the bachelor got married.