Her Chinese Husband

View a copy of the original publication of "Her Chinese Husband" The Independent 18 August 1910, 358-61. (via Issuu)

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“I would like to write,” said the White Woman, “some reminiscences of my Chinese husband.”

“Do,” I urged.

So she wrote:

Now, that Liu Kanghi is no longer with me, I feel that it will ease my heart to record some memories of him, if I can. The task, tho calling to me, is not an easy one. So throng to my mind the invincible proofs of his love for me, the things he has said and done. My memories of him are so vivid and pertinacious, my thoughts of him so tender.

To my Chinese husband I could go with all my little troubles and perplexities; he would smooth them out; to him I could talk as women love to do at times, of the past and the future, the mysteries of religion, or life, of death. He was not above discussing such things with me. With him I was never strange or embarrassed. My Chinese husband was simple in his tastes. He liked to hear a good story, and tho unlearned in a sense, could discriminate between the good and the bad in literature. This came of his Chinese education. He told me one day that he thought the stories in the Bible were more like Chinese than American stories, and added: "If you had not told me what you have about the Bible I should say that it was composed by the Chinese." Music had a soothing tho not a deep influence over him. It could not sway his mind, but he enjoyed it just as he did a beautiful picture. Because I was interested in fancy work, so also was he. I can see his face, looking so grave and concerned, because one day I spilt some ink on a piece of embroidery I was working. If he came home in the evenings and found me tired and out of sorts, he would cook the dinner himself, and go about it in such a way that I felt that he rather enjoyed showing off his skill as a cook. The next evening, if he found everything ready, he would humorously declare himself much disappointed that I was so exceedingly well.

At such times a grey memory of James Carson would arise. How his cold anger and contempt as exhibited on like occasions had shriveled me up in the long ago. And then I would fall to musing on the difference between the two men as lovers and husbands.

James Carson had been much more of an ardent lover than ever had been Liu Kanghi. Indeed, it was his passion, real or feigned, which had carried me off my feet. When wooing, he had constantly reproached me with being cold, unfeeling, a marble statue, and so forth; and I, poor, ignorant little girl, would wonder how it was I appeared so when I felt so differently. For I had given James Carson my first love. Upon him, my life had been concentrated as it had never been concentrated upon any other. Yet.

There was nothing feigned about my Chinese husband. Simple and sincere as he was before marriage, so was he afterward. As my union with James Carson had meant misery, bitterness, and narrowness, so my union with Liu Kanghi meant, on the whole, happiness, health and development. Yet the former, according to American idea, had been an educated and broadminded man; the other, just an ordinary Chinaman.

But the ordinary Chinaman that I would show to you was the sort of man that children, birds, animals, and some women, love. Every morning he would go to the window and call to his pigeons, and they would flock around him, hearing and responding to his whistling and cooing. The rooms we lived in had been his rooms ever since he had come to America. They were above his store and large and cool. The furniture had been brought from China, but there was nothing of tinsel about it. Dark wood, almost black, carved and antique; some of the pieces set with mother of pearl. On one side, against the wall of the inner room, stood a case of books and an ancestral tablet. I have seen Liu Kanghi touch the tablet with reverence; but the faith of his fathers was not strong enough to cause him to bow before it. The elegant simplicity of these rooms had surprised me much when I was first taken to them. I looked at him then, standing for a moment by the window, a solitary pigeon peeking in at him, perhaps wondering who it was that had come to divert from her friend's attention. So had he lived since he had come to this country—quietly and undisturbed—from twenty years of age to twenty-five. I felt myself an intruder. A feeling of pity for the boy—for such he seemed in his enthusiasm—arose in my breast. Why had I come to confuse his calm? Was it ordained, as he declared.

My little girl loved him better than she loved him. He took great pleasure in playing with her, curling her hair over his fingers, tying her sash, and all the simple tasks from which so many men turn aside. Once the baby got hold of a set rat trap and was holding it in such a way that the slightest move would have released the spring and plunged the cruel steel into her tender arm. Strange coincidence! both Kanghi's eyes and mine beheld her thus at the same moment. I stood transfixed with horror. Kanghi quietly went up to the child and took from her the trap. Then he asked me to release his hand. I almost fainted when I saw it. "It was the only way," said he. We had to send for the doctor, and even as it was, came very near having a case of blood poisoning.

I have heard people say that he was a keen business man—this Liu Kanghi, and I imagine that he was. I did not, however, discuss his business with him. He never seemed to have any desire to talk over sales and figures with me, and I'm sure I had not. I went down to his store occasionally. All I was interested in were the pretty thing, and the women who would come in and jest with him. He could jest, too. Of course, the women did not know what I was his wife. Once a woman in rich clothes gave him her card and asked him to call upon her. He handed me the card after she left. I tore it up. He took these things as a matter of course and was not affected by them. "They are a part of Chinatown life," he explained.

He was a member of the Reform Club, a Chinese social club and the Chinese Board of Trade. He liked to discuss business affairs and Chinese and American politics with his countrymen, and occasionally enjoyed an evening away from me. But I never needed to worry over him.

He had his littlenesses as well as his bignesses—had Liu Kanghi. For instance, he thought he knew better about what was good for my health, and other things, purely personal, than I did myself, and if my ideas opposed or did not tally with his, he would very vigorously denounce what he called "the foolishness of women." If he admired a certain dress, he would have me wear it on every occasion possible, and did not seem to be able to understand that it was not always fit. "Wear the dress with the silver lines," he said, authoritatively, to me one day. I was attired for going out, but not as he wished to see me. I answered that the dress with the silver lines was not suitable for a long and dusty ride on an open car. "Never mind," said he, "whether it is suitable or not. I wish you to wear it." "All right," I said, "I will wear it, but I will stay at home." I stayed at home, and so did he.

At another time he reproved me for certain opinions I had exprest in the presence of two visiting countrymen. "You should not talk like that," he said. "They will think you are a bad woman."

My white blood rose at that, and I answered him in a way which grieves me to remember. For Kanghi had never meant to insult or hurt me. Imperious by nature, he often spoke before he thought—and he was so boyishly anxious for me to appear in the best light possible before his own people.

There were other things, too: a sort of childish jealousy and suspicion which it was difficult to allay. But a woman can forgive much to a man, the sincerity and strength of whose love, makes her own, tho true, seem slight and mean.

Yes, life with Liu Kanghi was not entirely without its trials and tribulations. There was the continual uncertainty during the first year about his own life here in America, the constant irritation caused by the assumption of the white men that a white woman does not love her Chinese husband, and their actions accordingly, also sneers and offensive remarks.

Sometimes Kanghi would talk about returning to China. The thought filled me with horror. I had heard the wives of Chinese talk about secondary wives. One afternoon, the cousin of Liu Kanghi, with whom I had once lived, came to see me, and showed me a letter which she had received from a little Chinese girl who had been born and brought up in America until the age of ten. The last paragraph in the letter read: "Emma and I are very sad and wish we were back in America." Kanghi's cousin explained that the father of the little girls, having no sons, had taken to himself another wife and the new wife lived with the little girls and their mother.

That was before my little boy was born. That evening I told Kanghi that he need never expect me to accompany him to China.

"Very well," said he, soothingly, "We will neither of us go."

"You see," I began, sobbing hysterically, "I look upon you as belonging to me."

He wouldn't let me say more. After a while he said: "In China, it is true a man may and occasionally does take a secondary wife; but that custom is custom, not only because sons are denied to the first wife, but because the first wife is selected by parents and guardians before a man is hardly a man. If a Chinese man marries for love, his life is a filled up cup, and he wants no secondary wife not even for sake of a son. Take, for example, me, your great husband."

I sometimes commented upon his boyish ways and appearance, which was the reason why, when he was in high spirits, he would call himself "my great husband." He was not boyish always. I have seen him, when shouldering the troubles of kin folk, the quarrels of his clan, and other responsibilities, acting and looking like a man of twice his years.

Among his friends was one more distinguishing in many respects than most. He came often to the house and I got to know him well. He was in love with a half white, half Chinese girl who was a friend of min, and they might have been happy. But he had been married on the day he left China. The girl had certainly been great friends with him in her own half Chinese, half American style, and he was very indignant over his refusal. "It is different with you from what it would be with an American girl," said he. "You are Chinese yourself and would be recognized as my wife in China." This man was reputed a scholar among the Chinese, yet his wife, from whom he had been absent nearly fifteen years, could neither read nor write.

But for all these strange marriage customs of my husband's people, I looked upon them as far more moral in their lives than the majority of Americans. I exprest myself thus to Liu Kanghi, and he replied: "The American people think higher. If only more of them lived up to what they thought, the Chinese would not be so confused in trying to follow their leadership."

If ever a man rejoiced over the birth of his child it was Liu Kanghi. The boy was born with a veil over his face, "A prophet," cried the old mulatto Jewess who nursed me, "A prophet had come into the world." She told this to his father when he came to look upon him, and he replied, as he slipped over my middle finger a ring set with one large pearl, "He is my son; that is all I care about." But he was so glad, and there was feasting and rejoicing with his Chinese friends over two weeks. He came in one evening and found me weeping over my poor little boy. I shall never forget the expression on his face. "Oh, shame!" said he, softly, drawing my head down to his shoulder. "What is there to weep about? The child is beautiful. The feeling heart, the understanding mind is his. He will be a great writer. More than that; he will be proud that he is of Chinese blood; he will fear none, and after him, the name of half Chinese, will no longer be one of contempt."

Kanghi in his boyhood, had attended a school in Hong Kong. There he had learned English and made the acquaintance of several half Chinese, half English lads. "They were the brightest of all," he told me, "but they were low in the eyes of the Chinese, because they were ashamed of their Chinese blood and ignored it."

His theory, therefore, was that if his own son was brought up to be proud instead of ashamed of his Chinese strain, he would become a great man.

Perhaps he was right; but he could not see, as I, an American woman, could the conflict before our boy.

After the little Kanghi had passed his first month and we had found a good woman to look after him, his father began to take me out more than I had ever been before, and then began the most enjoyable period of my life. We dined often at a Chinese restaurant kept by a friend of his, and afterward attended theaters, concerts and other places of entertainment. We frequently met Americans with whom he had become acquainted thru business and he would introduce them with great pride in me shining in his eyes. The little jealousies and suspicions of the first year seemed no longer to irritate him, and tho I had still cause to shrink from the gaze of strangers. I knew that my Chinese husband was for several years a very happy man.

Now, I have come to the end. He left home one morning, followed to the gate by the little girl and boy. We had moved to a cottage in the suburbs.

"Bring me a red ball," pleased the little girl, "And me, too," cried the little boy.

"All right, chickens," he responded, waving his hand to them as he went down the road.

He was brought home at night, shot thru the head. There are some Chinese, just as there are some Americans, who are opposed to all progress, and who hate with a bitter hatred all those who would enlighten or be enlightened.

But that I have not the heart to dwell upon. I can only remember that when they brought my Chinese husband home, there were two red balls in his pocket. Such was Liu Kanghi—a man.

Boston, Mass.