Like many nineteenth-century Chinese, Ning Lao lived a precarious existence. In good times, she and her family got by well enough. However, when times were hard or they experienced even a little bad luck, they faced ruin and starvation. Ning Lao’s situation was made worse by her husband’s opium addiction, an addiction that ate up their meager savings and left her husband perpetually underemployed. In this excerpt from her autobiography, Ning Lao described the challenges her family faced during a particularly difficult two-year period in the late 1880s. As you read it, pay close attention to the role opium and foreign missionaries played in her account. Who did she blame for her husband’s addiction? How did she see the Western missionaries who lived in her city?

My husband sold everything we had.

There was a fur hat. He wanted to sell it. But I begged him not to sell it.

“Let’s keep this.” It was my uncle’s. “Take my coat.” He took my coat and sold it for grain. When he came home for food he drank only two bowls of millet gruel. I wondered why he ate so little. I looked and found that the hat was gone, and knew that he has sold it for opium. Those who take opium care not for food.

Then he said he would earn money by peddling,

“There is no capital,” I said.

So he took the quilt and bought some glutenous millet and thorn dates. He brought them and told me to make tsengtze. All the people ate them in the autumn. He had also bought palm leaves to wrap and cook them in.

“If you don’t make them well, we’ll have nothing to sell.” He peddled tsengtze for three days and the capital was all gone.

He and the old man went away. Not even one grain of millet did they leave in the house.

My outside uncle, Liu, a cousin uncle, had bought the old garden. He brought me a basket of melons and cucumbers that could not be sold. I had no oil to cook them with. I had no pine cones to make a fire to cook them with. We ate them, the children and I. We gnawed them raw.

It was autumn when the two men, my husband and his father, went away and left us. I had the two children; Mantze was in her fifth year and Chinya was in the third. There was nothing to eat. There was nothing in the house they had not sold.

I said to myself, “I will go into the fields and glean,” for it was the Seventh Month, the month of harvests. I took my trouser girdle and tied the baby to the lattice of the window so she would not fall off the k’ang [platform bed] and shut the two children up in the room. This I did many days. I went into the harvest fields and gleaned all day and came home in the afternoon. I gleaned corn and beans and we had enough to eat and left over. I had a jar half full of corn and another of beans. Also I raked dry grass by the sides of the road and on the grave plots and had a small pile left over in the corner of the room, enough to cook with.

I had been gleaning all day. When I got home I found Mantze on the street playing. I asked her how she had got out. She said, “I have only just come out.” I went into the room. The little girl had cried until her face was purple. She had fallen over the edge of the k’ang and was swinging by my trouser sash fastened to the lattice. She was asleep. She had cried herself to sleep.

There was no cooking basin in the house. I had to borrow a basin from the neighbors to boil the beans that I had gleaned. My husband had sold my cooking basin. In the night while I slept he had taken the cooking basin which my mother had given me and handed it over the back wall. He had sold it for opium. Those who eat opium have no face. There is no form or pattern of decency in their minds. I had to borrow dishes from which to eat. But we had enough to eat and more. The two children and I ate what I had gleaned, and what was left, a bowl of beans, I put away on the shelf. . . .

One year after my mother died I got a stick and a bowl and started out begging. It was the spring of the year and I was twenty-two. It was no light thing for a woman to go out of her home. That is why I put up with my old opium sot so long. But now I could not live in my house and had to come out. When I begged I begged in the parts of the city where I was not known, for I was ashamed. I went with my begging stick (the little stick with which beggars beat off dogs) up my sleeve, that people should not see it. Every day we went out begging. My husband carried the baby and I led Mantze. When we came to an open gate I would send her in, for people’s hearts are moved by a child.

Then came the winter and the snow. It fell for three days and we could not go out to beg. The children’s lips became parched. The neighbors gave them a bowl of gruel. I put on three pairs of shoes, they were each so broken, to cover my feet. I had no more foot bandages and my feet were spreading. I put on three pairs of broken shoes and went to the back door of the house of the people from across the Western Ocean, the missionaries.

The foreigners lived in great ugly houses they had built on the land where the Temple of Kuan Yin T’ang had stood. It was next door to where I used to live.

People told terrible stories of the foreigners and believed them. They said that they gave out medicine that made people go with them. The foreigners could so bewitch people that they would get up in the middle of the night and go to them. They captured people and sent them to the country of the dog-headed race where they sold them for their weight in silver.

One day there was a woman sitting in the market place. She sat with her feet folded under her and her hands folded in her lap. Her head hung low. She sat and did not move. She sat for a long time. At last the people said to her, “Why do you sit so still? Are you asleep?” Then they found that she was dead. There was a red medicinal plaster over each eye and one on each hand. And when the people examined her they found that her eyes had been dug out and her hands had been pierced with holes. Her heart had also been pulled out. It had been done, they said, by the foreigners.

But by this time I knew better. I knew that they were people of a kind heart. One day when I was begging and feeling sad and sour in my heart I saw an old woman begging on the street. She was crawling on her hands and knees like a four-footed animal. My heart turned over and I was at peace. At least I still had my legs to walk upon.

She had been a woman of substance with a home of her own. Her husband had died of consumption, so she sewed for mandarin families. She went with them to nine provinces. There was nothing she could not sew. She had a son. She sent him to school. She paid his bills by making cakes. She paid ten coppers at a time or five. She got a wife for him. He died also of tuberculosis. There was a grandson who was to be the support of her old age but he was of no account nor was his mother. They sold the old woman’s things one at a time until all was sold. There was nothing left but the glasses she wore that she might see to sew.

“Give them to me,” said the daughter-in-law.

“But what will I see to sew with?” The daughter-in-law snatched them from off the old woman’s face, beat her across the back, and went away. She took her son with her and lived in the market places.

The old woman now could not earn her living. She had no money to pay the rent. She was put out of the house. She slept in cold places and her legs became bad.

This I learned years later from an old friend who lived at the Drum Tower, near the Marble Bridge. The old woman used to sleep in her doorway. My friend was good to her and gave her money and good words and urged her to move on. She was afraid that the old woman would die in her doorway and she would be responsible to the grandson who was one with no principles. He would claim that the old woman’s death was due to the person in whose house she died, and there was danger of lawsuits. If it was but money to bury the old woman it would be light.

The old woman jumped over the edge of the Marble Bridge where the main street crosses the river inside the Water Gate. She wanted to die. I saw the old woman under the bridge, hunched up and suffering. The people went to see her as to a show. The foreign woman had mercy on her and took her home and cleaned her wound. She lived at the missionaries’ home for many days and then she died and the missionary buried her. That was good and a brave deed. The old woman’s scalp was full of worms.

It was not until after the trouble of the big sword society, the Boxer trouble, that the words of the foreigner had any effect in China. Before that they were persecuted. When they went out to preach the people threw stones at them. If they had pitched a tent as they do now the people would have pulled it down. The people in P’englai were especially antiforeign.

I knew that the foreigners were charitable. I put on three pairs of shoes and waded through the deep snow to their back gate. Their cook gave me a bundle of broken bread, a small jar of rice, and a small jar of flour. That was the first time I met Han the cook. I went and begged from the other missionaries and they gave me grain and a warm coat for my child. I went back to my house and we ate.

Source: Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), pp. 55–57, 62–65. Copyright 1945, Yale University Press. Used by permission of Yale University Press.

Questions to Consider