Even before I read
a book of collected writings on Chinese and Japanese women called Rice Bowl Women, I suspected that a multiple
marriage system involved much sexual jealousy and domestic friction.
This book is a great anthology of stories,
articles, and poems actually written by the Asians themselves and going back hundreds of years.
Real life always beats fiction
for high drama, and the realities of domestic cruelty horrified me, sanctified by law and religion.
The pains
of marriage in ancient China went far beyond sexual jealousy, beyond women's hearts bound as tightly by duty as their feet
were constricted by bone crushing shoes.
One story is of a wealthy widow who still young craves male companionship.
Her own friends and family knowing the vulnerability of women advise her that she is better off without a second marriage,
and the risk that it entails.
She ignores them. She
marries an ambitious man who requires financing from her to advance his own career.
A devoted wife and increasing
wealth are not enough to satiate the greedy man, and inevitably he takes a second wife, with whom he has children.
The second wife, an attractive
singer from a lower social class, is cruel to the first wife, who is of gentler personality. That she owes all her wealth
to the first wife, as does the husband, does not give them kindness, charity, or gratitude.
The first wife has financed
her own destruction. It's she who indirectly supplied the home, the servants, and the food that the husband and his
second wife enjoy.
They flaunt their sexual passion in front of the first wife, and allow their sons to ridicule and
jeer her, as a useless being around the house. She eventually kills herself, and of course, her own home, the gift of her
first happy marriage, goes to the man and the woman who have killed her.
Now under the law the first
wife enjoyed considerable legal rights, such as the right when upon surviving the man of the household to sell the other junior
wives, the concubines, into prostitution! Not exactly Goood Housekeeping.
Another story equally or even more shocking involves a lower middle-class man who has debts. He actually rents his
own wife, the mother of his children, out to a wealthy man whose wife is barren.
The wife goes to live with the rich
man and his wife, minds the household and has to marry with the rich man until she bears a child, then the child is taken
from her, and given to the rich woman.
The rich woman, fuelled by sexual jealousy, has not a moment of compassion to see the pain and suffering of the rented
wife.
This is one of the most disgusting stories I have ever read, and what happened here was fully sanctioned by
ancient Chinese marriage law. Disgusting, because it was truthful to the times, and those times went on for hundreds of years.
Like
a form of torture, the body, the mind, and the soul of the rent-a-wfe woman are completely invaded, violated, and the
culmination of the cruelty is to rob her of her own baby.
She will have to then return to the husband who has rented her out. He was not even a beggar or a poor man. Just
a man of the middle classes who mismanaged his finances, and rented his wife out for cash.
Her sexual services, her domestic skills, and her ability to bear a healthy baby, were all given away, in a loveless arrangement.
The real wife of the richer man held psychological power in the wealthy household, to ensure that the new woman returned later
to the middle class man.
Another book that interested me recently was a history of the city of Shanghai that described
the fate of second and third wives at the hands of the first wife, after the rich husband died.
The dying husband requests of the first wife to spare the other wives from being sold to whorehouses might easily
be ignored by an irritated first wife. Payback time!
And there was lots to payback in those days if you were a woman in a polygamous world.
Stories like these
make simple infidelities look like a minor complaint, which is perhaps the point. Power need only to be implied to be power.
Of course, a caring male will understand the terrible damage to the hearts and mind of the children:
Where did Mommy go?
Your Daddy just died - I had to sell her!
People must have walked on eggshells constantly in the ancient households,
too scared to say boo to a mouse. Whatever you did was wrong, the Western advice of Just Be Yourself seems laughable!
Emotional self-containment was their survival tactic in psychically dense domestic spaces.
A British schoolteacher
in Taipei tells me about a Taiwanese marriage custom that happened all over Taiwan until around thirty five years ago.
A female child was BOUGHT, yes, you read it correctly, BOUGHT, about the age seven as a future child-bride for the
boy she lived with. My friend thinks this is abhorrent because it reminds her that the sibling relationship overlapped with
the marital relationship.
Of course the boy would be favoured by the natural parents, they would live in the same
house, the girl could never leave or even argue with the boy, since the entire family would align against her. She was
the newcomer.
Hong Kong suffered British Christian colonialism, and China Communism, and whatever the rights and wrongs of those two
systems, they excluded the practise of buying child-brides at age seven to live with their future parents-in-law, trained
to wait on them.
As teachers in Taiwan, we may even have the chance of working for such damaged, such emotionally brutalized
women. I used to feel sorry for people like this, until I realized how dangerous they are. Damaged people are dangerous people,
as the recent best-selling book began.
And these were the so-called refined, educated, and cultured classes. Sorry,
this isn't my idea of refinement, which includes words such as sensitivity, kindheartedness, and empathy for others.
***
Historical Postscript: As the new government of China ascended in 1949, millions of women all over China successfully
petitioned for the first divorces, choosing to return home to lives of greater freedom and the right to give their hearts
where they so choose.
The bird in the gilded cage does not appreciate the quality of its bars but would rather
fly freely in the forest.
