Returning to China on a visit, Professor Kiang had an uncomfortable experience. On the steamer an American borrowed a hundred dollars from him, promising to return it at the journey’s end. Later, in China, when Professor Kiang needed his money, the man turned on him with angry threats, saying that he was known to be living with a woman not his wife, and that the man would report him to the university and cause him to lose his job.
Now, the situation regarding Professor Kiang’s wife was that for eight years his first wife had been hopelessly insane. In many parts of America you can divorce a wife who is insane, but in China you do not do this, because to divorce a woman is to inflict both upon her and her relatives a most dreadful disgrace. Insanity not being the woman’s fault, nor the fault of her relatives, it is unthinkable in China to seek a divorce for such a reason. What you do is to avail yourself of the privilege of having a second wife. As a rule the Westernized Chinese have but one wife, but in a case such as this they would have two, and the second wife would be treated with especial consideration because of the particular circumstances. When Professor Kiang married again, the relatives of his first wife attended the ceremony, and this same attitude to the matter was manifested by everyone. Witter Bynner went to China with Kiang, to collaborate with him in translating Chinese poetry into English, and Bynner writes:
I can testify that the second wife has been signally honored; she was the first woman, for instance, to address a body similar to our chambers of commerce in the capital of Kiang’s native province, and she broke another precedent by addressing, together with her husband, the officers of Wu Pei-fu’s army. Wu Pei-fu is now, as you know, the Dictator of Pekin and more or less of China. It will interest you to know that he and his leading generals, being Christians, were concerned to know whether there might be any conflict between Socialism and Christianity, and found them upon investigation to be expressions of the same thing. If there were any objections to Kiang’s second wife, Wu Pei-fu, as a Christian, might have been expected to feel it. Perhaps his being a Socialist, however, incapacitates him for true morality!