China and the West

Mansfield, Katherine. Works.
In a German pension. (London : Swift, 1911).
Chap. 4 : Frau Fischer
"Surely I wore it last summer when you were here? I brought the silk from China--smuggled it through the Russian customs by swathing it round my body.
Chap. 5 : Frau Brechenmacher attends a weeding
She lifted the lid, peeped in, then shut it down with a little scream and sat biting her lips. The bridegroom wrenched the pot away from her and drew forth a baby's bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls.
Chap. 7 : At Lehmann's
Here the floor had to be washed over, the tables rubbed, coffee-cups set out, each with its little china platter of sugar, and newspapers and magazines hung on their hooks along the walls before Herr Lehmann appeared at seven-thirty and opened business.

Journal
1916
They let me go into my mother's room (I remember standing on tiptoe and using both hands to turn the big white china door-handle) and there lay my mother in bed with her arms along the sheet, and there sat my grandmother before the fire with a baby in a flannel across her knees…
Grandmother sat in her chair to one side with Gwen in her lap, and a funny little man with his head in a black bag was standing behind a box of china eggs.
1917
A Victorian idyll
Yesterday Matilda Mason
In the Parlour by herself
Broke a Handsome China Basin
Placed upon the Mantelshelf.
1918
No, not quite sure, and that little Chinese group on the writing table may or may not have shaken itself awake for just one hundredth of a second out of hundreds of years of sleep…
To one side of the door the porter's cave dotted with pigeon holes, and a desk, furnished with a telephone, usually a big tea-stained china tea cup crowned with its saucer. In front of it a squeaking revolving chair with a torn imitation leather seat.
1920
December 27
Whence has come the tiny bouquet of tangerine fruits, the paste-pot on the writing-table, the fowl's feather stuck in Ribni's hair, the horn spectacles on the Chinese embroidery.
1920
The rivers of China
She sat on the end of the box ottoman buttoning her boots. Her short fine springy hair stood out round her head. She wore a little linen camisole and a pair of short frilled knickers.
"Curse these buttons", she said, tugging at them. And then suddenly she sat up and dug the handle of the button hook into the box ottoman.
"Oh dear", she said, "I do wish I hadn't married. I wish I'd been an explorer". And then she said dreamily, "The Rivers of China, for instance".
"But what do you know about the rivers of China, darling", I said. For Mother knew no geography whatever; she knew less than a child of ten.
"Nothing", she agreed. "But I can feel the kind of hat I should wear". She was silent a moment. Then she said, "If Father hadn't died I should have travelled and then ten to one I shouldn't have married". And she looked at me dreamily—looked through me, rather.

Bliss and other stories. (London : Constable, 1920).
Prelude [First publ. : Richmond : Hogarth Press, 1918].
As she looked a little Chinese Lottie came out on to the lawn and began to dust the tables and chairs with a corner of her pinafore…
Mother, whatever can I do with these awful hideous Chinese paintings that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt? It's absurd to say that they are valuable, because they were hanging in Chung Wah's fruit shop for months before…
At the Chinaman's shop next door he bought a pineapple in the pink of condition, and noticing a basket of fresh black cherries he told John to put him a pound of those as well…
I’ll get to be a most awful frump in a year or two and come and see you in a mackintosh and a sailor hat tied on with a white china silk motor veil. So pretty.
The wind blows
The carts rattle by, swinging from side to side; two Chinamen lollop along under their wooden yokes with the straining vegetable baskets —their pigtails and blue blouses fly out in the wind.
A dill pickle
A great many people taking tea in a Chinese pagoda, and he behaving like a maniac about the wasps—waving them away, flapping at them with his straw hat, serious and infuriated out of all proportion to the occasion.
In fact, I have spent the last three years of my life travelling all the time. Spain, Corsica, Siberia, Russia, Egypt. The only country left is China, and I mean to go there, too, when the war is over."

The garden party, and other stories. (New York, N.Y. : A.A. Knopf, 1922).
At the bay
Now she sat on the veranda of their Tasmanian home, leaning against her father's knee. And he promised, "As soon as you and I are old enough, Linny, we'll cut off somewhere, we'll escape. Two boys together. I have a fancy I'd like to sail up a river in China."
Over her white frock she wore a yellow, pink-fringed shawl from the Chinaman's shop.
The young girl
The waitress appeared. I hardly dared to ask her. "Tea--coffee? China tea--or iced tea with lemon?"

The canary. In : In : The Nation and the Atheneum ; vol. 33, no 3 (21 April 1923).
When the Chinaman who came to the door with birds to sell held him up in his tiny cage, and instead of fluttering, fluttering, like the poor little goldfinches, he gave a faint, small chirp, I found myself saying, just as I had said to the star over the gum tree, 'There your are, my darling.' From that moment he was mine!

Something childish and other stories. (London : Constable, 1924).
Ole Underwood
He walked past the Chinamen's shops. The fruit and vegetables were all piled up against the windows. Bits of wooden cases, straw, and old newspapers were strewn over the pavement. A woman flounced out of a shop and slushed a pail of slops over his feet. He peered in at the windows, at the Chinamen sitting in little groups on old barrels playing cards. They made him smile. He looked and looked, pressing his face against the glass and sniggering. They sat still with their long pigtails bound round their heads and their faces yellow as lemons. Some of them had knives in their belts, and one old man sat by himself on the floor plaiting his long crooked toes together. The Chinamen didn't mind Ole Underwood. When they saw him they nodded. He went to the door of a shop and cautiously opened it. In rushed the wind with him, scattering the cards. "Ya-Ya! Ya-Ya! " screamed the Chinamen, and Ole Underwood rushed off, the hammer beating quick and hard. Ya-Ya! He turned a corner out of sight. He thought he heard one of the Chinks after him, and he slipped into a timber-yard. There he lay panting.
Pension Séguin
Her round red face shone like freshly washed china.
Something childish but very natural
He took his watch out of his pocket, went into the cottage and popped it into a china jar on the mantelpiece.
A suburban fairy tale
Little B. dropped his bread and marmalade inside the china flower pot in front of the window.
Sixpence
In the corner of the drawing-room there was a what-not, and on the top shelf stood a brown china bear with a painted tongue.