LETTERS OF A JAVANESE PRINCESS
plaats waar ik gezaaid heb!" [1] I shall look for it for I think much, very much, of Multatuli.
I will tell you another time of the position of the people, and of the ruling classes among us. I have written too much already, and that is a subject which demands no small space.
What do we speak at home? What a question, Stella, dear. Naturally, our language is Javanese. We speak Malayish with strange people who are Easterners, either Malays, Moors, Arabs, or Chinese, and Dutch with Europeans.
O Stella, how I laughed when I read your question: "Would your parents disapprove if you should embrace them heartily?" Why, I have yet to give my parents, or mv brothers and sisters, the first kiss! [2] Kissing is not customary among the Javanese. Only children of from one to three, four, five, or six are kissed. We never kiss one another. You are astonished at that! But it is true. Only our young Holland friends kiss us, and we kiss them back ; that has only been recently.
At first we loved to have tliem kiss us, but never kissed them in return. We have only learned to kiss since we have been such friends with Mevrouw Ovink. When she would embrace us, she would ask us to kiss her. At first we found it queer, and acquitted ourselves awkwardly. Does this seem strange to you? No matter how much I should love one of my Dutch friends, it would never come into my head to kiss her without being asked. You ask why? Because I do not know whether she would like it. It is pleasant for us to press a soft white cheek with our lips, but whether the possessor of that pretty cheek also finds it
- ↑ "Show me the place where I have sown."
- ↑ Havelock Ellis says that the kiss is unknown throughout Eastern Asia. In Japan, as in Java, mothers kiss their babies; but Chinese mothers sometimes frighten their children by threatening to give them the white man's kiss. See also Coltman, the Chinese, p. 90, p. 99.
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