China and the West

Norris, Frank. Vandover and the brute. (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914).
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=14712.
He was not what would be called in America a rich man, but he had made money enough to travel, to allow himself any reasonable relaxation, to cultivate a taste for art, music, literature
or the drama, to indulge in any harmless fad, such as collecting etchings, china or bric-a-brac…
There were the usual bottles of olives and pepper sauce, a plate of broken crackers, and a ribbed match-safe of china…
Her father had a three-fourths interest in a carpet-cleaning establishment on Howard Street, and her mother gave lessons in painting on china and on velvet…
The family kept two servants, June the "China boy," who had been with them since the beginning of things, and Delphine the cook, a more recent acquisition…
Her hands were red and knotty, smelling of soap, and they touched the chinaware with an over-zealous and constraining tenderness as if the plates and dishes had been delicate
glass butterflies…
The stores were closed and in their vestibules one saw the peddlers who were never there on week-days, venders of canes and peddlers of glue with heavy weights attached to mended china plates…
The single bartender was reading a paper, and in the passage between the private rooms a Chinese with a clean napkin wound around his head was polishing the brass and woodwork…
The mixing of his tobacco was a positive event and undertaken with all gravity, while the task of keeping it moist and ripe in the blue china jar…
He found amusement for two days in twisting and rolling these "lights," cutting frills in the larger ends with a pair of scissors, and stacking them afterward in a Chinese flower jar he had bought for the purpose and stood on top of the bookcases….
A Chinese "boy" in a stiff blouse of white linen, made a great splashing as he washed down the front steps with a bucket of water and the garden hose…
The college men in the front ranks were singing one song, those in the rear another, while the middle of the column was given over to an abominable medley of fish-horns, policemen's rattles and great Chinese gongs…
The work that Field secured for him was the work of painting those little pictures on the lacquered surface of iron safes, those little oval landscapes between the lines of red and gold lettering--landscapes, rugged gorges, ocean steamships under all sail, mountain lakes with
sailboats careening upon their surfaces, the boat indicated by two little triangular dabs of Chinese white, one for the sail itself and the other for its reflection in the water…
The neighbourhood was low--just on the edge of the Barbary Coast, abounding in stores for
second-hand clothing, saloons, pawnshops, gun-stores, bird-stores, and the shops of Chinese cobblers…
A Chinese woman passed him, pattering along lamely, her green jade ear-rings twinkling in the light of a street lamp, newly lighted…