There are no gold and scarlet lanterns bobbing like fat little oriental
Pierrots over this street. No firecracker colors daub its sad walls. Walk
the whole length and not a dragon or a thumbnail balcony or a pigtail will
you see.
Instead, a very efficient, very conservative Chinatown and a colony of
very efficient and very matter-of-fact Chinamen who have gradually taken
possession of a small district around Twenty-second Street and Wentworth
Avenue. A rather famous district in its way, where once the city's
tenderloin put forth its red shadows.
But now as you walk, the night stares evilly out of wooden ruins.
Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to
have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling
little houses--these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless,
snoozing amid the debris of another day.
Then the Chinamen begin. Lights twinkle. Clean-looking interiors and
carefully washed store windows. Roofs have been hammered back in place,
stairways nailed together again. The sagging walls and lopsided cottages
have taken a new lease on life. Another of the innumerable little business
districts that dot the city has fought its way into evidence.
There are few oddities. Through the glass of the store fronts you see
curiously immobile groups, men seated in chairs, smoking long pipes and
waiting in silence. Strange fruits, foods, herbs, cloths, trinkets, lie on
the orderly shelves around them. The floors look scrubbed and there is an
absence of litter. It is all very efficient and very natural except for
the immobility of the men in the chairs and the silence that seems to have
descended on them.
* * * * *
A Chinese silence. And if you linger in the neighborhood you begin to feel
that this is more Chinese than the gaudy dragons and the firecracker daubs
and the bobbing paper lanterns of fiction.
This night I am looking for Billy Lee. No. 2209 Wentworth Avenue, says Mr.
Lee's card. We are to talk over some matters, one of which has already
been made public, others of which may never be.
He sits in his inner office, attired like a very efficient American
business man, does Mr. Lee. We say hello and start the talk. In the rooms
outside the inner office are a dozen Chinese. But there is no sound. They
are sitting in chairs or standing up. All smoking. All silent. A sense of
strange preoccupation lies over the place. Yet one feels that the twelve
silent men are preoccupied with nothing except, possibly, the fact that
they are Chinese.
Mr. Lee himself is none too garrulous. We have been talking for several
minutes when he becomes totally silent and after a long pause hands me a
cablegram. The cablegram reads: "Hongkong--Ying Yan: Bandits captured Foo
Wing and wife. Send $5,000 immediately. Signed: Taichow."
* * * * *
"I just received this," says Mr. Lee. "Ying Yan is my father. Foo Wing is
my brother. His American name is Andrew Lee. He went to Hongkong ten
months ago and was married. This is terrible. I am worried to death."
Mr. Lee appears to sink into a studious calm. His eyes regard the
cablegram stolidly. He remarks at length: "Bad news. This is very bad
news."
From outside comes a sudden singsong of Chinese. One of the twelve men has
said something. He finishes. Silence resumes. There seems to be no answer.
Mr. Lee puts the cablegram back in his pocket and some one knocks on the
door.
"Come in," says Mr. Lee. A Chinese youth enters. He carries a bundle.
"Meet Mr. Tang," says Billy Lee. We shake hands and Mr. Tang begins
talking in Chinese. Mr. Lee listens, nods his head and then holds out his
hand for the bundle.
"This is a very interesting event," says Mr. Lee in English. "Mr. Tang is
just over from the Orient. He comes from north of China, from Wu Chang,
where the revolution started, you know. He has with him a very interesting
matter."
Mr. Lee unwraps the bundle. He removes a long necklace made of curiously
carved wooden beads, large balls of jade and pendants of silk and
semi-precious stones.
Next he removes a second necklace somewhat longer than the first. It is
made of marvelously matched amber beads, balls of jade and pendants of
coral.
"A very interesting matter," says Mr. Lee. "Mr. Tang is son of a formerly
very wealthy and high-born mandarin family. But his family has lost
everything and Mr. Tang is here seeking an education in modern business.
He has left of his family's wealth only these two things here. They are
necklaces such as only mandarins could wear when they appeared before the
emperor in court in the old days.
"You see these have three pendants, so they show the mandarin was a
gentleman of the third class under the emperor. They have been in Mr.
Tang's family's possession for generations. You will notice this one of
carved beads is made of beads which are formed from the pits of the
Chinese olive. There are two hundred beads and on each is carved some
figure or scene which in all represent the history of China."
* * * * *
Mr. Lee holds the two necklaces in his hand. Mr. Tang stands by silently.
His eyes gaze at the beads.
"Your father wore them at court?" inquires Mr. Lee in the manner of a
host.
Mr. Tang nods his head slowly and adds a word in Chinese.
"He says his family wore them for generations," explains Mr. Lee. "Now the
family is vanished and all that is left are these insignia of their
nobility. And Mr. Tang wishes me to dispose of them for him so he may have
money to go to school."
Mr. Lee and Mr. Tang are then both silent. Mr. Lee slips one of the
necklaces over his head. It hangs down over his American coat and American
silk shirt in a rather incongruous way. But there seems to be nothing
incongruous in the matter for Lee and Tang. Billy Lee with the necklace
around his neck, the three mandarin pendants against his belt, looks at
Mr. Tang and Mr. Tang bows and leaves.
Our matters have been fully discussed and I follow a half-hour later.
There are still twelve men in the room. They stand and sit and smoke. None
speaks. I notice in the group the immobile figure of Mr. Tang. He is
smoking an American cigarette--one of the twelve silently preoccupied
residents of Chinatown who have gathered in Billy Lee's place to wait for
something.