1841:
Notices of Japan, No. VI.
71
poor creature, well knowing that she cannot please every body, some- times resolves to say nothing, and remains motionless as a statue, with an elongated visage, her eyes half-shut and fixed upon the ground, making no reply to any address, and suffering herself to be examined without uttering a word.
After the wedding is over, the son-in-law will not enter the house of his father-in-law, and vice versa, unless they are mutually antici- pated by a formal invitation to a feast, in which no point of etiquette can be dispensed with. When this duty has been performed they can visit each other at pleasure.
As the husband's father is considered as having purchased his daughter-in-law, she belongs to him, and he has the right to dispose of her. Hence it is, that many sell their son's widow to other per- sons, and often at a low price. If she has had children by her first marriage, they appertain by right to the father-in-law, and she cannot take them away with her. Henceforth these children have no rela- tion to her, and no longer regard her as their mother.
In China, no account is made of relationship on the mother's side, and therefore the children of sisters may lawfully marry each other; but on the side of fathers and brothers it has no end, and relatives by the male line, though of the hundredth generation from the com- mon stock, can in no case intermarry. The laws severely forbid it, and such a marriage would be null.
11
A woman cannot visit her parents for at least a year after her nuptials, unless the most urgent circumstances, such as the death of one of her parents, oblige her to do so. Before she
Before she pays them a visit, they must call upon her. After that she is at liberty to go, accom- panied by her husband, carrying presents with her, in great formali- ty, with a sedan, music, &c., and returns to her home only when her father-in-law recalls her ip state, after having repeated her presents
anew.
Note. These notices of Chinese usages are by us the more valued, because they afford information concerning things which exist in the interior of the coun- try, where they have been described by eyewitnesses; but more notes are requir ed than are here added, especially where the usages described are different from what we find in this part of the empire. Thus, in the present article, the writer speaks of the weeping and crying of those who go in procession when carrying the bride to the home of her new husband; in this part of the country, nothing of the kind, so far as we know, exists; but previously to her leaving the home of her parents and usually some ten or twenty days previously-there is a long season of weeping and wailing, in which she is joined by many of her, friends and relatives.