GERMINAL IDEA: Captain Abdullah, an Asiatic, but educated partly,
and living altogether, in the Occident, finds himself at times, he
declares, in the position, less emotional than intellectual and
cultural, where he has to make a choice between the ideals of East, or
West of Suez. In addition, his friends often ask him to explain certain
Oriental characteristics, motivations and viewpoints.
“Due either to a vital difference in the acceptance and usage of basic
standards, or to my personal inability of expressing with the spoken
word what I feel tersely to be true, I have always been unable in these
discussions to express the one truth which I know; namely, that all
this talk about the Orient being romantic and mysterious and rather
high strung is asinine drivel, that indeed the shoe hurts on the other
foot, and that it is the West which is romantic, both as to life and
motivation of life, while the East is as drab and grey and square as a
question in abstract dynamics.
“I make this claim chiefly in regard to the Chinese, who are the
Orientals _par excellence_. I consider them the most logical, the most
straight thinking, and by the same token, the most civilized race
on earth, not excepting the Latins, the Hindus, the Arabs, or the
Anglo-Saxons. I believe them to be the only people who live up to the
sound dogma that two and two make four, and never four and a quarter,
or three and two thirds. I hold that they are the easiest people in the
world to understand, that they carry their hearts on their sleeves, and
that they always mean exactly what they say, and say exactly what they
mean, in direct contrast to the Occidentals....
“The starting point of my tale, a whole series of Chinatown tales,
directly due to a conversation I had in Chicago with Mr. Ray Long
of the _Red Book_, who said that since I seemed unable to interpret
the Sons of the Middle Kingdom with the spoken word I should try the
written word, was therefore the fundamental prosiness and simplicity of
the Oriental, the Chinaman, in contrast to the complicated, suicidal
emotionalism and maniacal psychologizing of the Occidental--the latter
characteristic including a painful trick of dissecting emotions to such
a degree that they cease to be emotions. I know China and the Chinese
intimately, and am fairly familiar with some of their dialects.
“From a primitive, Occidental viewpoint, murder and a wife’s
faithlessness seem to be the most important things. From an as
primitive Eastern viewpoint, the same two things are the most
negligible things. The thing which matters most to the Oriental is
honor and piety, including their correct, codified outer observances.
“Thence my story.”
PLOT. Structurally perfect, the plot grows naturally out of character.