Even distance does not seem to lend much enchantment to the Chinese child from the European point of view. He is commonly caricatured somewhat after this fashion: he never smiles; he has hardly any nose and possesses oblique eyes that are almost invisible; he wears too many clothes in winter, so that he looks like an animated plum-pudding; he wears too little in summer--his birthday dress, to be explicit--and looks like a jointed wooden doll; he has a horror of "romping"; he is unwashed, deceitful and cruel; he cultivates a solemnity of demeanour with the view of leading people to think he is precociously wise and preternaturally good; and he is always mouthing philosophic saws from Confucius which he has learned by rote and of which he neither knows nor wants to know the meaning. Of course there is much in this description that is totally false and misleading, but it is not difficult to see the superficial characteristics that may give such a caricature a certain amount of plausibility.
To form a true idea of what Chinese children really are we must take them unawares among their own people, if we are fortunate enough to have opportunities of doing so. We must go into the country fields and villages and see them at work and play; we must watch them at their daily round of duties and pleasures, at school (one of the old-fashioned schools if possible), in times of sickness and pain, on occasions of festivals, family gatherings, weddings and funerals. The more we see of them in their own houses and surrounded by their own relatives the better we shall understand them and the more we shall like them. They are highly intelligent, quick to see the merry side of things, brimful of healthy animal spirits, and exceedingly companionable. This applies not only to the boys but also in a smaller degree to the girls, who, however, are much less talkative than they come to be in later years and are apt to be more timid and shy than their little brothers. They are terribly handicapped by the cruel custom of foot-binding, which it is earnestly to be hoped will before long be utterly abolished throughout China. It has undoubtedly caused a far greater aggregate amount of pain and misery in China than has been produced by opium-smoking. In spite of the cruelty involved in foot-binding, the rather common impression that the Chinese have no affection for their daughters or regard the birth of a girl as a domestic calamity is very far from correct. That a son is welcomed with greater joy than a daughter is true, but that a daughter is not welcomed at all is a view which is daily contradicted by experience. Mothers, especially, are often as devoted to their girls as they are to their boys. In the autumn of 1909 a headman reported to me that a woman of his village had killed herself because she was distracted with grief on account of the death of her child. The child in question was a girl, fourteen years of age. "Her mother," said the headman, "begged Heaven (_Lao T'ien-yeh_) to bring her daughter back to life, and she declared that she would willingly give her life in exchange for that of her daughter." It is erroneous to suppose that the old loving relations between mother and daughter are necessarily severed on the daughter's marriage. It is often the case that a young married woman's greatest happiness consists in periodical visits to her old home.