VILLAGE REDDING IN CHINA

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 110, 11 May 1935, Page 25

VILLAGE REDDING IN CHINA

;.It is a red poem, the wedding procession, a red poem ,with here, and there a green word in the festal robe of a* ragged banner-bearer. All day long;a red decoration has hung over the clay hut of the Lins (writes a contributor to a Home journal). . For Lin Mci Fei, daughter x>f the village barber, is marryjng a farmer's son from down the railway, track. All last night the air. was; slashed ■ with the sound of gongs.T'aiid fi hired gramophone has been 'jolting out highly inflected Chinese 'times.' ■ ' •. ■

The village has been neglecting the harvest of the peanuts to eat/ fat white dough-gods—the fa} t'ai (wives) with brass pins arid flowers in their hair and the kuniyang (young girls) with holiday rouge on their faces.

Now the journey has begun. The ragged bearers, stuffed with food, have picked up, their tall banners; and the young bride is being carried aloft ia her square red-wedding chair. We crowd tp^pui^^ltoFSie-S?Uie, r cook! and' the;-? amah' arid'.fce^bldfgateman's' ■witclJrwife;:and.l;* x-&'.-:-' ;■»■•'■ '■ Ai-yah! Feipis pn;her' way to the bridegroom's house to begin her life of grubbing in a mud hut, to

lace the pain of bearing and tending and sometimes, burying undernourished children with round, brown little ricebellies, of ?grindijng 7 the kao Jiang under a great revolving "stone and cooking the "yellow rice* "over a smoulder of charcoal, of pausing for little fleeting moments of laughter with her babies and lazy doorstep, gossips /with the other village wives, of working in the fields like a man- and shrivelling to a hag at fifty, of stopping for a holiday onljr at'the, New ; Xe^r and a feast on the- day" of tHe Dragon 'Boat Festival and "the day of the -Babbit Moon, and withal not minding it much—for this is China, numb to poVerty.- -: ■'. Yes, the young bride is •; on her way to her husband's house in her red, wedding gown embroidered witii' tiny mirrors and her high spangled headdress of red. And she is. crying, although as the red wedding chair bounces past our gate she checks her sobs a little because the foreign t'ai t'ai is listening. Only a fortnight ago, hearing a giggle behind me, I turned and saw little Lin Mci FeL .chinning herself to peep at me over; the' garden wall with powers tucked inherhair and laughter to her black eyes. When I caught sight Of her she jumped down and scampered across the1 beanlield, her lilack pigtail flapping. -■ Only a fortnight'ago.