Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 251, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1911 — SPELL HOLDING WIFE [ARTICLE]

SPELL HOLDING WIFE

Woman’s Heart is Breaking Because Friends Forsake Her. Mrs. Charlie Song Endures Seven Years of Torture, but Cannot Break Oriental’s Charm—Was His Sunday School Teacher. New York. —A contrast of religion and hideous vice, of the utmost common place and the fantastic was the story told by Mrs. Charlie Song, who had been seized In Newark, N. J., In a federal raid on Chinese opium smugglers In her rooms in the Newark Chinatown the other afternoon. Mrs. Song is an American woman and graduated to her present position as wife of a Chinese from being his preceptor In a Sunday school. “Seven years of hell,” is the way she characterizes her sojourn among the yellow men. She says her life there has been one long fight against slavery for herself, yet she has been unable to leave because of some subtle spell that her association with them has cast over her. She is not an opium user nor a drinking woman, she says, and In spite of her troubles she has kept her religious enthusiasm At first she was afraid to admit a reporter to her room, as she was afraid of the vengeance of the Chinese whose secrets she holds and who may be Im plicated at the hearing. She probably will be called as a witness. “I was a country girl,” she said. “I married and moved to Newark. My husband and my two children died, and for two years I was very lonely. I had always been religious and interested in missionary work, so to bury my trouble I began to teach a class In the Chinese Sunday school of the Centenary Methodist Episcopal church Charlie Song being among my pupils. “On New Year’s in 1905, he asked me to go to New York with him and see the time celebrated among his own people. Other teachers went on such excursions with their pupils, so I saw nothing wYong in it. “1 refused to have any wine, because I had never drunk any, but he told me the rice wine was harmless. I drank two tiny cups. I could scarcely see the table, the wine went to rny

head so. Then he said, 'I love you. I will never let you go away now. You marry me. We go to China, be missionaries together.’ "We went to the home of Rev. George Dowkart at 90 Madison avenue, and he married us. Then we went right home, I to my home and Charlie to his. Next day, when I realized what I had done, it seemed to me that I would die with shame. That has been my hell ever since—to be ashamed, to be cut off from my people, to have everybody think I am an outcast, something unspeakable, the wife of a Chinaman. “Finally we went to living together. The first few months he was a wonderful "lover. Then he changed. “I have been praying and praying this last year that some way would open for me to get away. I have tried to leave, but there Is something, a Sort of hypnotism that draws a woman back. A Chinaman never loses his influence over a woman when he has once had it. You have no Idea how many white women are here in Newark living with Chinese. Some are girls In their early teens."