Explore "China" by Harry Alverson Franck on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For nine months we lived in the Chinese capital, and found it a delightful home. Our house was out on the eastern edge of the Tartar City, so close under the great Tartar Wall that the sun was late in reaching us every morning. It was a Chinese house. That is, it had no cellar and no upstairs, not even a garret. Really it was four houses, one on each side of a brick-paved court about thirty feet square, each house having two rooms. Whenever we went from the bedrooms to the dining room, or from the living room to the nursery, we had to go outdoors. But as the sun is almost always bright in Peking, even on the coldest winter day, we did not mind doing that. The courtyard of a Chinese house insures plenty of light and air and makes up for the lack of certain conveniences that Westerners are used to.
We had five servants, all of whom cost less than one servant does in most parts of the United States. Four of them were men and one was a woman, and none of them knew a word of English. So of course we had to learn Chinese. By his third birthday my son spoke Chinese better than he did English. One servant, called "boy," though he was forty years old, was a kind of butler and chambermaid. He made the beds, waited on table, answered the doorbell, and bossed the other servants. The cook was also a man, and he was an excellent cook, for he had once worked in the kitchens of the Manchu court. The coolie was a tall, strong young man who swept the floors and the court, kept the coal stoves burning, washed the dishes, and did all the laundry. The rickshaw-man had nothing to do but draw us about town in his shining rickshaw on its pneumatic-tired wire wheels. This was kept just inside the street door which opened into the court. Sometimes he ran five miles with me, as fast as a cross-country runner, although I weigh about 170 pounds and might have with me my son or some baggage. The woman servant was called the _ama_. She took care of the children, besides doing all the sewing and other work of that kind.