8
economic reasons as necessitated child labour, but is not the cause of it. Child labour would exist in China with or without the mai taai system. Own children have to work, bearing burdens or taking charge of still younger ones, from the earliest possible moment. Even before that moment the child's place, directly it can leave the mother's back and can stand on its own feet, is necessarily at the mother's side, imitating her work-a training of which the mother is ready to avail herself (indeed, is almost forced to avail herself) from the instant the child's strength is equal to the carrying of two bricks. Broadly, the mui tsai is the domestic servant. The child seen working at the mother's side in the streets or on the fields is the natural child responsibility which the mother would often be too glad to escape for the child's sake as well as her own, by finding it a home as a mui tsai. The child must work in either case, and perhaps the mui tsai has the better part.
August, 1921.
10
? Thur
The Mui Tsai System.
266
May be considered to have become the means by a which the demand for domestic servants is supplied.
The circumstances of the country (for reasons given
below) have made board and lodging in a family which
can afford it something to be fervently desired for
their female children by very many parents. The girls'
maintenarice and training become the wages of the work
done,whilst a single payment to the parents representa
the support a child in other circumstances might be
expected voluntarily to afford. The age at which
children must work if they are to live is so low that
any idea of trusting the average mul tsai with wages
to be disposed of at her own will is out of the
question at the beginning: and the Chinese of the
class which would supply mui tsai cannot afford to
look far ahead. Some idea of the ultimate money value
of the girl on marriage may even be considered in the
payment made: though the exact ideas underlying the "deeds "gift" - the formal documents of transfer of
mui tsai are left to be inferred from a comparison.
of the many varying conditions they contain. The deede take many shapes down to the most illiterate,
and have little in common beyond the use of the word
"Sung" (present) and the avoidance of "mai" (sell). They generally contain conditions as to
treatment, and perhaps as to marriage: they may go
further and enter the details of the control which
the parents may continue to exercise: but all this
is as a rule omitted and has to be regulated by the
customs applicable to the facts.
H
For in theory still parents do not lose all
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