Old Madam Yin

Old Madam Yin: A Memoir of Peking Life, 1926 - 1938  – Ida Pruitt

Ida Pruitt was born in Shantung province to missionary parents in 1888, After she grew up bilingual and bicultural in China, she was educated in the United States. She returned to China in 1918, worked as a medical social worker, and worked for twenty years as head of the Social Service Department of the Peking Union Medical College hospital. She had to leave in the late 1930s because of the what the Japanese still delicately call the China Incident, i.e, the war against China that cost roughly 20 million Chinese men, women, and children their lives.

Pruitt is best known for her book, Daughter of Han, which told about her friendship with an ordinary working woman the late 1920s and 1930s. Old Madam Yin is about a lady of the leisure class that Pruitt met when madam applied to the hospital for an orphan boy to be adopted by her second son. Pruitt and Madam Yin became friends, as they shared an affinity for keeping busy and managing the affairs of others (in a good sense).

Pruitt describes the graceful manners and gracious sensibility this social class. She keenly observes clothes, furnishings, gardens, courtyards, and houses. Pruitt’s subject, Madame Yin enjoys her life and the challenges of using her social and political skills to establish and maintain all she can to ensure the prosperity of her family. But change is inexorable. Harmony and concord are impossible to preserve. A daughter shockingly defies the family by marrying a cousin who is also a political radical. To Madam’s deep bewilderment, a son marries a Frenchwoman, who could not care less about learning Chinese and adjusting to Chinese ways though she married a Chinese man and moved to China. Pruitt candidly observes the success or failure of an international marriage largely depends on the wife.

For readers into traditional China, Republican China, deep descriptions of artifacts and places, and women’s issues this book is worth reading. Also interested would be readers who are into the bittersweet experience of reading about traditional civilizations and their customs that are utterly vanished from our modern-a-go-go world.