No. 4. Came from a brothel on Spofford alley. She was occasionally
allowed to attend the (Chinese) theatre. One evening when at the
theatre she had word conveyed to the Mission to come get her
immediately. The rescuer did so, and the girl promptly arose, when
the rescuer entered the room, from the front tier of seats, and
seizing the hand of the missionary in the presence of them
all climbed over the backs of two seats, regardless of their
occupants, and escaped. Later she was married and returned to
China.
No. 5. In a dark, dismal room where the sun never shone lay a poor
Chinese woman helpless with rheumatism. She had a baby girl 10
months old and was too sick to care for it. The invalid felt
forced to put the child in the hands of a friend she trusted, who
promised to care for it, and advanced money for the sick woman.
When the mother got better she worked two years and saved until
she had enough money to buy the child back, but the cruel woman
who had got possession of it refused to give it up unless paid
three times as much as was originally borrowed. The mother could
not do this, and finally, hearing of the Mission, reported the
case there. The baby was traced to a horrible den in Church alley,
where it was i
The "foreigners," by which name, according to a custom which prevails
to this day in the East, we shall call persons of British, European or
American birth,--called a native mistress a "protected woman," and her
"protector" set her up in an establishment by herself, apart from
his abode, and here children were born to the foreigner, some to be
educated in missionary schools and elsewhere by their illegitimate
fathers and afterwards become useful men and women, but probably the
majority, more neglected, to become useless and profligate,--if girls,
mistresses to foreigners, or, as the large number of half-castes in
the immoral houses at Hong Kong at the present time demonstrates, to
fall to the lowest depths of degradation.
These "protected women," enriched beyond anything they had even known
before the foreigner came to that part of the world, with the usual
thrift of the Chinese temperament, sought for a way to invest their
earnings, and quite naturally, could think of nothing so profitable
as securing women and girls to meet the demands of the foreigners.
Marriage having always been, to the Oriental mind, scarcely anything
beyond the mere trade in the persons of women, it was but a step from
that attitude