The Chinese lady is trained not to show emotion of any kind. Her face, to be beautiful, must be absolutely placid, care-free, “like unto the full moon in its glory.” They consider the foreign woman extremely ugly, with their long, care-lined faces. They say that if it were not for the clothing they could not distinguish men from women. Their faces, with their prominent noses and deep-set eyes, appear to them coarse and unrefined. I have seen children when suddenly confronted with a foreign woman scream in terror.
The Chinese do not impress the casual visitor as a nervous people. It is said that they can bear without murmuring the most severe punishments, and a torture that would reduce a foreign man to frenzy will elicit only a groan from a member of this phlegmatic race. The women seem to share with their menfolk in this lack of “nerves.” I once made a visit to the wife of the city magistrate, whose home was in the official “yamen.” She showed me over her house, and on entering her bedroom I went to the only window in the room to see what kind of a view was to be obtained. What was my horror to find that the window looked directly upon the punishment courtyard, where a man was then being held down upon his face and a bamboo vigorously applied by the lictor. The moans of the victim could be faintly heard, and what it would be in the summer-time, when the windows were open, could very well be imagined. I turned to my hostess and said, “How frightful! How can you stand it?” She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Oh, one becomes used to it.”
The Chinese woman is very devout, and observes all the feast days and days of fasting. It is really the woman who keeps up the religion of Confucius and Buddha. An official who had just returned from sacrificing to the dragon who was supposed to have swallowed the sun at the time of an eclipse, was asked if he believed in this dragon. He laughed and said, “Of course not.” “Then,” the curious questioner continued, “why do you do it?” He said, “Why do men in America go to church? Mainly because their wives wish them to go. It is the same here. It is the women who are the spiritual force of China. It is they who are devout, and it is they who keep open the temples and preserve the belief in the gods.”