Mrs. Spring Fragrance
concerning the Liu family, and also watching me for some time. How a
woman can loathe and hate the man she has once loved!
We were nearing my lodgings. Perhaps the child had awakened and was
crying for me. I would not, however, have entered the house, had he not
stopped at the door and pushed it open.
“Lead the way upstairs!” said he. “I want to see the kid.”
“You shall not,” I cried. In my desperation I wrenched myself from his
grasp and faced him, blocking the stairs.
“If you use violence,” I declared, “the lodgers will come to my
assistance. They know me!”
He released my arm.
“Bah!” said he. “I’ve no use for the kid. It is you I’m after getting
reconciled to. Don’t you know, Minnie, that once your husband, always
your husband? Since I saw you the other day on the street, I have been
more in love with you than ever before. Suppose we forget all and begin
over again!”
Though the tone of his voice had softened, my fear of him grew greater.
I would have fled up the stairs had he not again laid his hand on my
arm.
“Answer me, girl,” said he.
And in spite of my fear, I shook off his hand and answered him: “No
husband of mine are you, either legally or morally. And I have no
feeling whatever for you other than contempt.”
“Ah! So you have sunk!”—his expression was evil—“The oily little Chink
has won you!”
I was no longer afraid of him.
“Won me!” I cried, unheeding who heard me. “Yes, honorably and like a
man. And what are you that dare sneer at one like him. For all your six
feet of grossness, your small soul cannot measure up to his great one.
You were unwilling to protect and care for the woman who was your wife
or the little child you caused to come into this world; but he succored
and saved the stranger woman, treated her as a woman, with reverence and
respect; gave her child a home, and made them both independent, not only
of others but of himself. Now, hearing you insult him behind his back, I
know, what I did not know before—that I love him, and all I have to say
to you is, Go!”
And James Carson went. I heard of him again but once. That was when the
papers reported his death of apoplexy while exercising at a public
gymnasium.
Loving Liu Kanghi, I became his wife, and though it is true that there
are many Americans who look down upon me for so becoming, I have never
regretted it. No, not even when men cast upon me the glances they cast
upon sporting women. I accept the lot of the American wife of an humble
Chinaman in America. The happiness of the man who loves me is more to me
than the approval or disapproval of those who in my dark days left me to
die like a dog. My Chinese husband has his faults. He is hot-tempered
and, at times, arbitrary; but he is always a man, and has never sought
to take away from me the privilege of being but a woman. I can lean upon
and trust in him. I feel him behind me, protecting and caring for me,
and that, to an ordinary woman like myself, means more than anything
else.
Only when the son of Liu Kanghi lays his little head upon my bosom do I
question whether I have done wisely. For my boy, the son of the Chinese
man, is possessed of a childish wisdom which brings the tears to my
eyes; and as he stands between his father and myself, like yet unlike us
both, so will he stand in after years between his father’s and his
mother’s people. And if there is no kindliness nor understanding between
them, what will my boy’s fate be?
HER CHINESE HUSBAND
SEQUEL TO THE STORY OF THE WHITE WOMAN
WHO MARRIED A CHINESE
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, though 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; to him I could talk as women love to do at times of the
past and the future, the mysteries of religion, of life and 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 though unlearned in a sense, could
discriminate between the good and 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 it, I should say that it was
composed by the Chinese.” Music had a soothing though 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 by accident 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 gray memory of James Carson would arise. How his cold
anger and contempt, as exhibited on like occasions, had shrivelled 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 has 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 afterwards. 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 ideas, had been an educated
broad-minded 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 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 had come to divert from her 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 me. 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 arms. 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. All I was interested in were the pretty things and
the women who would come in and jest with him. He could jest too. Of
course, the women did not know that I was his wife. Once a woman in rich
clothes gave him her card and asked him to call upon her. After she had
left he passed the card to me. I tore it up. He took those 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 suitable.
“Wear the dress with the silver lines,” he said to me one day somewhat
authoritatively. I was attired for going out, but not as he wished to
see me. I answered that the dress with the silver lines was unsuitable
for a long and dusty ride on an open car.
“Never mind,” said he, “whether it is unsuitable 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 expressed in
the presence of some of his countrymen. “You should not talk like that,”
said he. “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, though true,
seem slight and mean.
Yes, life with Liu Kanghi was not without its trials and tribulations.
There was the continual uncertainty 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. There was also on Liu
Kanghi’s side an acute consciousness that, though belonging to him as
his wife, yet in a sense I was not his, but of the dominant race, which
claimed, even while it professed to despise me. This consciousness
betrayed itself in words and ways which filled me with a passion of pain
and humiliation. “Kanghi,” I would sharply say, for I had to cloak my