China and the West

Dewey, John ; Dewey, Alice Chipman. Letters from China and Japan.
Shanghai, May 4. [4.5.1919].
I have seen a Chinese lady, small feet and all. We took dinner with her. She did not come into the room until after dinner was over, having been in the kitchen cooking it while the servant brought things in. She has one of those placid faces which are round and plump and quite beautiful in a way, a pretty complexion, and of course a slow, rocking, hobbling way of walking. Yesterday after the lecture we went there again and she showed us all over her flat. It is well kept, with not many conveniences from our point of view, but I think it is regarded as quite modern here. It has a staircase, and a little roof where they dry clothes or sit. The bath is a tin tub, warmed by carrying water from the little stove like our little laundry stoves. It has an outlet pipe to the ground, no sewers as usual in the Orient. The kitchen has a little stove of iron set up on boxes and they burn small pieces of wood. It has three compartments, two big shallow iron pots for roasting and boiling and a deep one in the middle for keeping the hot water for tea. Only two fires are needed as the heat from the two end fires does for the water in the middle.
There is no doubt that the Chinese are a sociable people if given a chance. Of course, men like the husband of our hostess are the extreme of ability and advanced ideas here. But it is remarkable that he shows us things as they are. When we visited schools he did not arrange in advance because he did not want us to see a fixed up program. When we went out to lunch he took us to a Chinese place where no foreigners ever go.
Yesterday we went to a department store to buy some gloves and garters. Gloves were Keyser's, imported, so were the stockings, so were the garters and suspenders, etc. The gloves were from $1 to $1.60 and the suspenders were a dollar. I bought some silk, sixteen inches wide, for fifty cents a yard. The store was messy and the floors dirty, but it is a popular place for the Chinese. We paid three dollars for a book marked 1sh. 6p. in England, and everything here is like that. Gloves and stockings are made in Japan, and good and cheap there; fine silken stockings $1.60 a pair. But still the Chinese do not buy of them, but from America. We have visited a cotton mill. The Chinese cotton and silk are now inferior, owing to lack of scientific production and of proper care of seed. In weaving, they sometimes mix their cotton with ours.