THE YELLOW PEARL : A Story of the East and the West

Here I am in this strange country about which I have learned in the geography and history, and about which I heard my father talk. The daughter of an American man and a Chinese woman, I suppose I am what is called a mongrel. My father was a Commissioner of Customs in China, and living for years in that country he fell in love with my mother and married her—as was natural. Who could help falling in love with my dear, yellow, winsome, little mother? My name is Margaret, called after my father's mother; my father said that the word Margaret means a pearl, so he gave me the pet name "Pearl." Dear father!

"It was a monstrous thing for Brother George to marry away there," I overheard my Aunt Gwendolin remark a short time after my arrival. "Why could he not have come back home to his own country and found a wife?—And above all to have married a heathen Chinese!"

"Not a heathen," said my grandmother, reproachfully, "she had previously embraced the faith of Europeans; so my dear George wrote me from that far-away country."

"Oh, they are all heathens in my estimation," cried my Aunt Gwendolin, scornfully; "what faith they embrace does not change the fact that they belong to the yellow people."

My mother died while I was yet a child, and my father has died and left me alone in the world within the last year. Grandmother, my father's mother, when she learned about her son's death, sent at once for me.

"I cannot leave a granddaughter of mine in that country, and among that heathen, if not barbarous, people," she wrote to the American consul, "and I ask your services to assist her to come to my home in America."

The consul, absent-minded, gave me my grandmother's letter to read, and thus I learned her feeling about my mother's people and country. I never would have come to this horrible America if I could have helped myself; but I am scarcely of age, and by my father's will grandmother is appointed my guardian.

The result of it all is, that having crossed the intervening waters, I am here in the home of my grandmother, my Aunt Gwendolin and my Uncle Theodore Morgan.

When I arrived this morning I was ushered into the sitting-room by a maid, and the first one I beheld was my grandmother, sitting in a rocking-chair. She called me to her, and crossing the room, I kotowed to her, that is I went down on my hands and knees and touched my forehead to the floor, as my Chinese nurse had taught me when I was yet a baby that I should always do when I came into the presence of an elderly woman, a mother of children.

"My dear grandchild!" cried my grandmother, "do get up. All you should do is to kiss me—your grandmother!" And she put out her hand and assisted me from the floor.