She never touched me, for she was careful, prudish almost, when she was near me. She often put steaming towels on my face to ease the dry discomfort of my feverish skin, letting the hot damp cloths fall across my brow or cheeks and taking care not to brush my face with her fingers. I wondered, when I was somewhat recovered, what was behind all this. Did it come from what she felt about me? Or from fear of her husband, the owner? Or had she a feeling that I, a white-skinned, long-nosed foreigner in that valley of flat-nosed people, was somehow peculiar and foul?—for I remembered as I lay on the deck of the junk how an otherwise intelligent college friend of mine from Alabama had told me once that “niggers have a smell that’s different from white people’s” and that was fulsome in white nostrils. Was I a fetid, loathsome object to these Chinese? This possibility lay a new deposit on the sense of shock I was storing up, for at home I had been bred to Western superiority, and had thought of China as the home of the backward Chink, the Heathen Chinee who followed the wooden plow, the perilous yellow man, a creature so low that the gates of the sweet land of liberty had clanked shut in his face—someone, at best, to be given a helping hand. Could this simple girl look down on me?

She was barely twenty, I guess. Certainly her husband was twice her age. She had a slender frame yet gave an impression of sturdiness, having wrists that looked good and strong, and a firm neck; I suppose she had often sculled sampans. Her figure was only to imagine, for she wore blue quilted cotton gowns or, of the same upholstered material, trousers wrapped with cloth anklets and jackets buttoned down the side with cloth knots, and thus she was but a bundle to see; yet I, at my age, was well able to supply the guesses that would grace her straight body beneath with goodnesses enough. Her face was overcast with a shadow, with a sadness that I frequently saw on the broad faces of the people who lived on the Great River, a sadness that came to haunt me—of patience, of acceptance; a sadness that seemed to deepen whenever Su-ling glanced at the turbulence of the currents through which we passed. This inner melancholy seemed to be gathered about one corner of her mouth, on the left side, which was often drawn tight with a sweet stoic tensity. Her eyes, on the other hand, as I have said, were bright and keen and gay, and when she laughed, as many a time of day she did, they glistened and nearly canceled out the cramp of woe at her mouth. Her hair was coal-black, oily, and not as clean as it might have been—but even that in due course I condoned.