China and the West

O'Neill, Eugene. Marco millions : a play [ID D28771].
Quelle : Polo, Marco. The book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian. Transl. and ed. by Henry Yule [ID D5467].
Bai Niu : In Marco millions, O'Neill utilizes the myth of Chinese characters to negate Western values. But since the motivation of the myth is the advocacy of change within the West, we find that O'Neill is reluctant to mythify the East to the extent of perpetuating the status quo of the West. As a result, here and there the real history of the Chinese characters breaks through the mythical confines. In this way, the use of myth helps create a complicated vision instead of a naïve contrast between the East and West.
O'Neill approached the Marco Polo story with an initial intention to satirize and criticize greedy American businessmen. In talking about his plans about Marco millions in his Selected Letters, O'Neill writes : 'The child will be either a surprising satiric Beauty – or a most gawdawful monster'.
O'Neill found the mythologization of Chinese elements an effective way to conduct his criticism, since myth by definition could conceal his motivation in such a way that his attack on American materialism could appear to be unquestionable and thus more powerful. All the central Chinese characters are apparently mythologized, representing values, Oriental wisdom, mysticism, and spirituality, opposed to the Polos' stupidity, superficiality, and materialism. In mythologizing the Chinese figures, O'Neill does offer some dynamics to the characterization of Marco Polo. The Chinese characters highlight Marco's material greed, insensitivity, ignorance, and triteness from three perspectives : Kublai's increasing mockery and criticism, Chu-Yin's disenchanted probe into his potential to change, and Kukachin's gradually intensified sense of disappointment, embarrassment, and despair. Between Kublai and Marco is a conflict between soul and flesh. As the emblem of Taoist doctrines, Chu-Yin is detached and only an observer of Marco. Kukachin's nor a non-conflict like Chu-Yin's ; it is a process passing from eager erotic involvement to total disengagement.
Marco is totally unaware of Kublai's cynicism and criticism. His rather consistent cocksureness reveals his ignorance of anything spiritual. He is so blinded by his single-minded pursuit of material wealth that he interprets other people's remarks strictly along material lines. Instead of making direct confrontations with Marco, Chu-Yin observes him from a distance. He advises Kublai to let Marco develop naturally by himself. He wants to probe this representative of the West and find out whether Marco can change so as to realize his potential for wisdom and to achieve harmony with Tao.
What Chu-Yin finally finds in Marco is all the qualities opposed to his Taoist doctrines. Serving as a foil, Marco's failure strengthens the validity and wisdom of Taoist thoughts. Another point of contrast illustrated through Chu-Yin is the distinction between humility and arrogance. Chu-Yin embraces the idea of humility.
Marco's world is entirely controlled by money. So far as he is concerned, one can measure love only with gold and view beauty only with a mirror made of pearls and silver.
Kukachin is another emblem of Oriental spiritual values, she contrasts Marco's triteness and insensitivity through her poetic nature and sensitivity. O'Neill accentuates the correlation between the quality of language and spirituality through the contrast between Kukachin and Marco, which is, first of all, an opposition between the poetic and prosaic. Kukachin's world is a poetic realm. She simply speaks poetry, while Marco is incapable of using any poetic diction, and even his 'poem' is imbued with monetary terms. For Kukachin, life is meaningless without love. If one realizes the spiritual value of love, for him or her, the difference between life and death is not that significant, if it exists at all. Kukachin is the only Chinese character who once had a positive impression of Marco. According to her own account, she had observed all Marco's instinctive, mostly unconscious, kind behaviors and innocent remarks and interpreted them as spiritual manifestations. In actuality, it was love that drove her to Marco's defence. She still believed in Marco's soul, and it was only two years later when the journey came to its end that she painfully realized that Marco was incorrigibly acquisitive, and to him, spirituality and sensitivity were incomprehensible foreign qualities.
Bayan, Kublai's general is basically a warmonger and cannot live in peace for an extended period of time. He becomes restless and helpless because 'everywhere in the East there is peace'. The only thing which would occupy him is war.
O'Neill's mythologization of the East has created a total negation of the West. Although this total negation fulfills O'Neill's intention to criticize the materialism of the West, it would rule out any possibility for reform, since the total negation is the real myth.
Lee Sang-kyong : The Taoist idea of a dualistic world becomes the essential characteristic of Marco millions. The dualism of all earthly phenomena finds its expression not only in the antithesis of male and female, life and death, to be or not to be. The Yin-Yang-principle of Taoism is also expressed in the Western and Eastern life styles such as the modest cheerfulness of the Eastern people and the rough pragmatic life struggle of the Western people. Through his occupation with the Orient, O'Neill was more and more convinced, that Oriental wisdom could offer a hopeful alternative to the Western world's materialistic society.
Marco Polo is the personification of the Western dream of materialistic success, and the Chinese empror Kublai Khan is very disappointed of Marco's materialistic attitude. The emperor seed in Marco – who is the representative of Christianity – the spiritual abnormity of the West, as O'Neill repeatedly discloses in the course of the plot. In a romantic romance with Kukachin, the granddaughter of Kublai Khan, Marco feels the magnetic power of the East. For him, wealth and power are more important than feeling. Even the Taoist wisdom of Chu-yin, the emperor's counselor, does mean anything to him. For him, the Orient's wisdom and beauty, embodied by Kublai Khan and Kukachin, are ridiculous and inconsistent. But Kublai, interested in the spiritual development of man, intends to initiate a dialogue about the existence of soul between one hundred wise men of the West and wise men of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Marco is only deeply impressed by the 'millions upon millions of worms' of the silk industry which could produce 'millions upon millions of capital'. O'Neill shows with irony the contrast between the Western materialism and ancient China's aestheticism during Marco Polo's time, pointing out the antithesis of the Westerners' materialistic greed and the mystic wisdom and splendor of Kublai Khan's court. He wants to show the fundamental difference between the Taoist East and the superficial and pragmatic Western civilization. The two opposite world views are represented by two characters : Marco Polo stands for materialism, rationalism, pragmatism, and Princess Kukachin is the living example of idealism and intuitive mysticism. Chu-yin, the counsellor is the only character who is untouched by all the events and remains in harmony with the teaching of Laozi and Zhuangzi.
Horst Frenz : O'Neill's interest in the East is most evident in Marco millions. The presentation of a mercantile Marco sent and sanctioned by the Pope as a wise man to represent the wisdom of the West to the East is full of irony. Marco is beyond redemption ; he is totally untouched by the spiritual beauty of Kukachin, the the Taoist wisdom of Chu-yin never reaches his philistine mine. The short exchange of remarks between Chu-yin, the subtle sage of China and Marco, the rash philistine emissary from Venice, sums up the difficulty of an understanding between East and West. The shallowness of the action-oriented West prevents Marco from comprehending the subtleties of the East whose wisdom lies in a quiet observance of the true course of nature, in an attitude of wise passiveness so characteristically Taoist. The scenes, in which Marco establishes a new tax system, introduces printed money, and discovers that gunpowder, up to now used by the Chinese only for fireworks, can be employed for destructive purposes, are filled with biting satire. In a remarkably subtle manner, O'Neill manages in various ways to point out the basically irreconcilable differences between Taoist wisdom and the superficiality of Western civilization.
James A. Robinson : Marco millions follows the lines of conventional Western tragedy, which assumes a dualistic universe of irreconcilable conflict – though here, rather than God or nature defeating man, it is West destroying East. Underlying the East-West conflict of the action is a similar conflict within O'Neill, whereby Western dualism ultimately triumphs over the harmonic view of the universe O'Neill discovered in Taoist thought. The play's Eastern elements represent the dramatist's suspicion that at the deepest level, man and world and cosmos were integrated and serene ; but his pessimistic modern-Western side seems reluctantly convinc4ed that man and universe are in hopeless conflict, a conflict reflected in the irreconcilable opposition of Oriental and Occidental cultures. The similar stage groupings and character types symbolize the profound identity between different cultures that makes understanding possible. The response of Marco emphasizes cross-cultural conflict. The farther he journey East – through lands whose mystical creed preach tolerance and renunciation – the more intolerant, ethnocentric and materialistic he becomes. As a prime 'example of virtuous Western manhood', Marco learns nothing from fifteen years in China, pointing up an apparently unbridgeable gap between East and West. His materialism intensifies. The relationship between Kukachin and Marco dramatizes the polarity of the conflict between East and West. Marco exudes intolerance, while Kukachin radiates the supreme tolerance of one who loves a totally different person. Marco loves the treasures of this world, while Kukachin transcends them. Kukachin, who is feminine, passive, and spiritual, corresponds to the 'yin' principle in Chinese thought. The Occidental Marco corresponds to 'yang', the masculine, rational and active principle. The monistic Taoist influence on the play extends to O'Neill's portrait of Kublai Kahn. The Emperor, called 'Son of heaven, Lord of the earth', harmonizes the masculine rationality and aggressiveness of the West, and the feminine intuition and passivity of the East. Khan's Taoist harmony is upset by Marco and his effect upon Kukachin. Only one Chinese character remains unperturbed, and consistently maintains the detachment of the Oriental sage : Chu Yin, Khan's advisor. His advice accords with the teaching of Laozi and Zhuangzi.
James S. Moy : O'Neill sought to contrast the obsessive materialism of a Babbitt-like character with a positive representation of a romanticized historical China. Despite the clear comic intent of the piece, one could assume that the Chinese world at least receive a 'positive', if not 'realistic', portrayal within this framework. O'Neill was successful in his satirical portrayal of the Venetian trading family, his use of the Orient proves problematic. His characterizations of the Chinese are intended to show subtle differences. In designing his imaginary marginality called China, O'Neill fell into the trap of stereotyping the Orient, thereby displacing/erasing the reality while China disintegrated into representation.
Li Gang : The Taoist influence in Marco millions has been studied by quit a few critics in both the East and the West. They all seem to agree that the Taoist influence permeates almost every aspect of the play : theme, structure, characterization, dialogue, and setting.

Lu, Xun. Luosu he wei kou [ID D28835].
Lu Xun admitted that he had not read Irving Babbitt in the original and knew of Babbitt only from scanning Japanese material. He criticized Babbitt only as a means of undermining the reputation of Liang Shiqiu and others, who 'chewed over Babbitt somewhere in Shanghai' for the purpose of manifesting their special taste. It was Lu Xun's intention to ruin any preference for their 'taste'. He had the audacity of giving snorts of contempt for Babbitt without reading his works, and even went to the extreme of classifying Babbitt as a member of the New Moon Society.

Liang, Shiqiu. Fan yi jia [ID D28837].
"At present, the first-class translators are really audacious. They can translate without a dictionary and often make up for this deficiency by producing many new meanings. When they come across a foreign book - just like a blind cat meets a dead mouse - and feel its name interesting, they can immediately start to work. First, they take out several chapters, change them into a book and then translate page by page. In this way, one foreign book can be translated into at least two Chinese books. If their Chinese is not fluent, they say this is 'literal translation' ; if the foreign language has been seriously mistranslated, they may say, 'negligence is unavoidable as it is done in haste'. At least, they can even say, 'it is the fault of typesetters'.

Florence Wheelock Ayscough erhält den Honorary D. Lit. der Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Kanada.

Pound, Ezra. Prolegomena. In : Exile ; no 2 (Autumn 1927).
"The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius ; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort."

Letter from Ezra Pound to Glenn Hughes ; Rapallo, 9 November, 1927.
Dear Hughes : On reading over my translation of Ta Hio, it strikes me that the acrid and querulous preface I had sketches is a bloody impertinence and that any attempt to force local application, talk about need of present America, etc., bloody bureaucracy, etc. etc., would be a damned impertinence. I mean tacking my bloomink preface into the work itself. Hope you'll agree. Seems to me it will be introd. enough if you say in the prospectus :
In this brochure (or chapbook) Mr. Pound does for the first of the Confucian classics what he did, in Cathay, for Rikahu.
Any question of method or interpretation of ideograph can wait for or be referred to Fenollosa's 'Essay on the Chinese Written Character'…
Re the preface to Ta Hio : I don't think I ought to use Kung as a shoehorn for a curse on American State Dept. and the Wilson-Hardic Administrations, etc. At least thass the way I feel this A.M. Re printing : I think text of Ta Hio shd. be one size type and commentators' remarks (including my own) another, or possibly better italic. I had thought of having three sizes : 1) Text ; 2) Comment ; and 3) transtr's notes ; but think it would prob. Make ugly page…

Moore, Marianne. Comment. In : The Dial ; vol. 83 (Aug. 1927)
"Among all the kinds of serpents there is none comparable to the Dragon." [Edward Topsell, 1658].

Moore, Marianne. Academic feeling. In : The Dial ; no 82 (May 1927).
One cannot be dead to the sagacity inherent in some specimens of sharkskin, camellia-leaf, orange-peer, semi-eggshell, or sang-de-boeuf glaze ; nor be blind to the glamour of certain 'giant', 'massive', 'magnificent' objects in pork-fat or spinach-green jade as shown last winter in the collection of Mr. Lee Van Ching at the Anderson Galleries.
[Betr. Chinese carved jades & objects of art : a collection formed by Lee Van Ching, Shanghai : rare antiques in crystal, agate, jade, rose quartz & malachite, statuettes, snuff bottles, porcelains & enamels, old Chinese pottery, Anderson Galleries, New York, Jan. 1927.]

Moore, Marianne. To accept congratulations. In : The Dial ; no 84 (March 1928).
We confessed to admiring instinctiveness, concentration, and tentativeness ; to realizing that gusto is not incompatible with learning, and to favoring opulence in asceticism. It is apparent also in lines by Sung Lien that such liking is not recent.
"In the dormitory I had two meals a day, but nothing fresh, fat, or of any good taste. All other schoolmates were dressed up in fine silk and with embroidery ; their hats were decorated with jewels ; their girdles made of white jade. Every one bore a sword on his left, and perfume at his right. They looks as shining and dignified as angels. While living among them I wore my cotton robe and tattered clothes, but had not the slightest desire to be like them, for I had my enjoyment focused upon something different, knowing not that my bodily wants were not as well supplied as those of others." Translated from the Chinese by Kwei Chen. Literary Magazine of the University of Wisconsin. December, 1927.
[Betr. Song, Lian. Farwell to my young friend.]

Wilder, Thornton. The bridge of San Luis Rey. (New York, N.Y. : Grosset & Dunlap, 1927).
http://ajaytao2010.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-bridge-of-san-luis-rey-thornton-wilder.pdf.
Last night he [Captain Alvarado] described to me some of his voyages. Imagine him pushing his prow through a sea of weeds, stirring up a cloud of fish like grasshoppers in June ; or sailing between islands of ice. Oh, he has been to China and up the rivers of Africa…
A Chinese junk had been blown from Canton to America ; he dragged up the beach the bales of deep-red porcelain and sold the bowls to the collectors of virtú…

Ou, Yanglan. Yingguo wen xue shi [ID D30612].
Introduction
"Of all her six novels, Pride and prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma are most celebrated. They are all great works that describe social life, or recount countryside events. Her novels are less quickly developed than Scott's, but more delicate in characterization. As Scott says, the events, or incidents, even of the simplest kind, are elegantly written, and highly appealing to the reader."

Lowry, Malcolm. China [ID D30878].
China
China's like a muddle to me, it's just like a dream, mostly a queer dream.
For though I've been there it takes on a quality sometimes that my imagination bestowed on it before I went. But even if I lived there it would still seem to me to be unreal; for the most part I don't think of it and when I do it makes me laugh.
I live down at the docks now in Hoboken, New Jersey, and now and again I wander down there to see a ship that's crossed the Western Ocean. That doesn't make me homesick or stir up in me the old love of the sea or of memories I've got of China. Nor does it make me unhappy when I think I've been there and really have so few memories after all.
I don't believe in China.
You can say I'm like that man you may have read about who spent his life as a sailor on some vessel plying from Liverpool to Lisbon and on retiring was only able to say of Lisbon: The trams go faster there than in Liverpool.
Like Bill Adams I came fresh to sea life from an English pub¬lic school where I had worn a tophat and carried a silver- topped cane, but there the resemblance ceases. I was a fireman.
There was a terrible war on in China at this time and in this I did not believe either. Just across the river from where we were moored, China thundered her guns Doom! doom! doom! but the whole thing crashed over our heads without touching us. Not that I would have believed in it any more had we been blown all to hell: we do not associate such dooms with ourselves. But it was as if you were dreaming, as I often have, that you are standing unscathed beneath the tumult of an immense waterfall, Niagara for instance.
We were moored nose on to the English battle-cruiser, H.M.S. Proteus. Astern lay a high, brightly-painted Ningpo junk. Apart from this, there was little in our surroundings, before the stevedores arrived, to suggest that we were not at home: even the war, palpable as it seemed to be through the river fog eclipsing the opposite bank, did not dissipate this illusion: much might have happened for good or evil in our absence from England. And this perhaps brings me to my only real point. We are always "here." You've never felt this? Well, with me this was very cogent. In an English paper I could read about the famous city near at hand, divided against herself, tortured not only by the possibility of invasion but with threats of its own ochlocracy, but when the chief engineer forbade us to cross the river to it, I turned over and went to sleep. I didn't believe I was there at all. And when it was proposed by the chief steward that a cricket match take place between the Arcturion, which was the name of our ship, and the H.M.S. Proteus I was certain I was not. I had seen this coming, however.
They started it in the Indian Ocean.
I was coming off watch at eight bells and when I got to the galley I knew they were starting it.
The seamen were standing round outside their forecastle winding up strands of heaving line. They were like old maids, holding each other's knitting, I thought. Then I saw that they were making cricket balls. The Arcturion carried a spare propellor which was shackled to the break of the poop and the captain was chalking on this. A wicket!
While I was having my chow I knew they were starting it and when I finally came out, they had begun. From the broom-locker to the spare propellor along the seaman's side of the welldock was about the length of a cricket pitch and at the far end Hersey was bowling. He took a long run right down the companion ladder and then bowled. At the wicket chalked on the spare propellor trembled Lofty. He milled about in the air with a bat the carpenter had made him. The ball was returned to Hersey. Fieldmen stood round on the hatches, on the steam-piping, among the washing. Now Hersey was bowling again. Lofty had missed. Hersey had the ball once more. One or two were still winding heaving-lines.
When the seamen saw me they started to mince for my benefit. Oh, I say, pass the bally ball, —And so on.
I made up my mind I hated these men and then I wished I could crush them: they would never be anything but underdogs. Unctuousness and servility flowed in their very veins and even now it seems necessary to me to say these things with mere malice. Imitating a workingman's accent, they were even more unpleasant than my own class.
Old bourgeois maidservants with mob cap and broom, that's what English steamboat sailors are.
A few blackened firemen stood around, watching and grinning like niggers. They wouldn't join in. They had solidarity, they had one enemy, the chief steward. The sailors and the others were petty Judases who had to keep in with both sides. They let each other down and they would steal the milk out of your tea. But the firemen were solid. We were prime. And we stood together against the chief steward because of the food.
They had begun by jeering at me: Where is Heton, Hoxford or Cambridge? But in the end they took the attitude, Eton, Oxford, Cambridge and the fireman's forecastle. At any rate he didn't become a seaman and that's something. That was their attitude.
I was a coal passer and worked on the 12 to 4 or duke's watch, and after a while they accepted me silently as one of them. I worked hard and didn't growl. I respected them but to them that was neither here nor there. But now standing together looking at the sailors with contempt, they gave me a sidelong glance as if suspicious that I had gone over to the enemy.
Then the chief steward came out of the galley smoking a cigar, paused imperiously at the top of the companion ladder and descended slowly, puffing.
—Hello boys, give me a knock.
And Lofty handed over the bat to the chief.
Soon he was slogging the balls all over the place; he hit two into the Indian Ocean and it was very clear he fancied himself. Oh it was very clear he thought he had some class.
—Silly sailors, said the firemen in a long drawl.
That night as I was pacing up and down the poop in carpet slippers smoking, the chief steward came up to me.
—Tell me, he began. Surely you play cricket. Now I'm not just a chief steward you might say. I've got education. But let me see, you're not the—
Suddenly I felt I had to tell him that I was. I told him how I fared in the Eton and Harrow match, how I'd played against the Australians, there was nothing I didn't know about cricket.
I also told him to hold his tongue, but I ought to have known better than to trust a sailor.
It was only after he'd gone that I thought of all the things I ought to have said to him.
He kept his promise as long as it suited him, only as long as it suited him. Meantime we were getting nearer and nearer to China.
And the nearer we got the less I believed in it.
What I want to convey to you is that to me it was not China at all but right here, on this wharf. But that's not quite what I wanted to say. What I mean is what it was not was China: somewhere far away. What it was was here, something solid, tactile, impenetrable. But perhaps neither one thing nor the other.
You see, I had worn myself out behind a barrier of sea life, behind a barrier of time, so that when I did get ashore, I only knew it was here. Even if I perked up after a few drinks, I always forgot I was in China. I was "here." Do you see that?
The first thing I knew when I got there was the extent of this mistake. I don't mean I was disillusioned, I want to make that clear. I didn't feel with Conrad "that what expected had already gone, had passed unseen in a sigh, in a flash together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions." That sigh, that flash, never happened. There was no moment that crystallized the East for me. This moment did not occur. What happened was different. I had been looking forward to something anxiously and I called this China, yet when I reached China I was still looking forward to it from exactly the same position. Perhaps China wasn't there, didn't exist for me just as I could not exist for China.
And I even began to believe my work was unreal, although there was always one voice that said: you get hold of a firebar and you'll soon enough know how real it is.
Then we were alongside and not long after the captain called for me.
—We've arranged a cricket match with the H.M.S. Proteus and we want to show them, he said.
—Sure, said the chief steward. We've arranged a cricket match and we' ll show them foxy swaddies what we think of them.
—And you're going to play, said the captain.
—Sure, said the chief. And now you've got to titivate yourself up a bit, make yourself look a bit smart you know. You can't play with an old towel round your neck. What would they think of us?
—That's right, said the captain. The last time you went ashore with a towel round your neck, you were a proper disgrace to the ship.
—You were the only man who went ashore without a tie, said the chief.
—I went to have a swim, I began. But what was the use of talking to these old washerwomen anyway? And I was highly amused to be looking right down once more into the corrupt heart of the life I'd left behind; I thought it extremely funny that my existence had not changed at all and that wherever I was I would be evaluated, smelt out, by my own kind.
A little later the chief steward came down to the forecastle with all sorts of fancy white ducks he'd rooted out and pretty soon I found one hanging on the curtain rail of my bunk. As I changed the firemen grinned.
—Now you'll feel at home, Jimmy.
No other fireman had been selected to play and inwardly I raged.
Outside the chief was saying: —We'll show these swaddies we can make a proper respectable turnout.
Then we strolled along the wharf towards the cricket field which was situated between a slagheap and a coaldump. A river mist was rolling thickly over towards the city, but the atmosphere was clear where we were going save for a thin rain of coal which drizzled in our faces from the tips, speckling our white trousers with dust. Now you could make a fine character study out of this. There was old Lofty and Hersey and Sparks and Tubby and the three mates and the doctor and you could make a fine description out of each one. But unfortunately I can't discriminate, maybe it's my loss, but they all looked the same to me, those sailors: they were all sons of bitches and now after so long I can only see them at all through the kind of mist there was then. So I won't bother you with that. They just looked damned funny as they straggled down the wharf. And I must have looked the funniest of all straggling along with them, all of us in the fancy white ducks the steward had given us. Some trousers far too short and some far too long, which made us look more like a bunch of Chinese coolies than a proper respectable turnout.
Then the swaddies came out of the H.M.S. Proteus and they hadn't bothered about any whites. Some wore khaki shorts, some dungarees, others singlets and khaki trousers. And now after so long I only see them through a kind of mist. I can't even say, Well, there was one fellow like this. Hell, they were just swaddies, misled, exploited, simple, handsome and ugly like the rest of us.
Their captain and the chief steward spun a coin. The chief steward won.
The captain of the Arcturion, who was not playing but who was reported to be "keen" on cricket, stood behind a godown and watched the proceedings with a heavily critical air.
—It was my call, I laughed. You should have run.
—I thought you said you could play cricket, the chief grumbled.
—I called. It was up to you to run, I laughed.
—Don't laugh, said the chief.
But I went right on laughing. Then the captain appeared and it seemed that he was damned angry too.
—What are you laughing at? I thought you said you could play cricket, he said. And you've run our best man out and been bowled yourself. Why, I thought you said—
—Firemen don't play cricket, I said shortly and walked away from the wharf.
Once I looked back. Lofty was playing hard with a cross bat, defending the honour of the welldock. Then rain sluiced down and stopped play. It was the monsoon season.
I ran for the Arcturion and changed quickly.
At the entrance I watched the others shuffling back mourn' fully into the seaman's forecastle, their white trousers clinging to them like wet rags. Doom! Doom! Doom!
Other firemen joined me at the entrance and we watched the stevedores unloading our cargo, of scouting planes, a bomber, a fighting plane, machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, 25 pound bombs, ammunition. I did not believe in all this. I was not there.
And here's what I want to ask you again. Haven't you felt this too, that you know yourself so well that the ground you tread on is your ground: it is never China or Siberia or England or anywhere else... It is always you. It is always the earth of you, the wood, the iron of you, the asphalt you step on is the asphalt of you whether it's on Broadway or the Chien Mon.
And you carry your horizon in your pocket wherever you are.

Sekundärliteratur
Gutted arcades of the past : China – short story. http://guttedarcades.blogspot.ch/2012/05/china.html.
The story was left by Lowry at the home of his friend James Stern in the summer of 1934.
The story is set in China in 1927 during the Chinese civil war. Lowry visited Shanghai in 1927. He had a romantic view of China developed through a reading of the novels of Conrad and the plays of O'Neill, sea literature and other readings.

Malcolm Lowry's father expected him to go to Cambridge and enter the family business, but Malcolm wanted to experience the world, and in rebellion against his conventional bourgeois upbringing, convinced his father to let him work as a cabin boy on a ship to the Far East.
"No silk-cushion youth for me, I want to see the world, and rub shoulders with its oddities, and get some experience of life before I go back to Cambridge University".
13 May 1927 his father's chauffeur drove him to the Liverpool waterfront and, while the local press watched, waved goodbye as he set sail on the freighter S.S. Pyrrhus : Suez Canal, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Singapore, Wladiwostok. The five months at sea, until October 1927, gave him stories to incorporate into his first novel, Ultramarine.

Lowry, Malcolm. Marching down the road to China. (1927). In : Lowry, Malcolm. The collected poetry. (Vancouver, BC : UBC Press, 1992) http://www.otago.ac.nz/englishlinguistics/english/lowry/content/00_annotations/00_pages/ann_frameset6.html.
"Marching down the road to China,
You will hear me singing this song,
Soon we'll be aboard an Ocean Liner sailing for Hong Kong,
And when we've put these Yellow Faces in their proper places,
We'll be home once more,
And I'll take my Alice to the Crystal Palace at the end of the China War."

Malcolm Lowry and China general.
Chen John Ming : Malcolm Lowry's sustained interest in China and in its rich cultural legacy spans nearly three decades until his death. From his first published novel Ultramarine, about a trip bound for the China coast, through his vignette China, his unfinished works, and a typescript named La mordida, to his novella The forest path to the spring, we never fail to be deeply impressed by his unflagging efforts to search for knowledge and wisdom from the land of Taoism. The first stage of his contacts with China unfolds to Lowry a diverse spectrum of concrete and memorable experiences, which in turn inspire his literatury productions. The openmindedness and readiness in the latter to reshape his images of China pave the road for his acceptance of Chinese wisdom.

Lin Huiyin studiert Stage Design an der Yale University.

Dos Passos, John. Orient Express. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Bros., 1927).
"With the name of Allah for all baggage, you could travel from the Great Wall of China to the Niger and be fairly sure of food, and often of money, if only you were ready to touch your forehead in the dust five times a day and put away self and the glamorous West. And yet, the West is conquering."

Lawrence William Faucett ist Associate Professor an der Yanjing-Universität in Beijing. Er unterrichtet Englisch-Lehrer.

Zheng, Zhenduo. Wen xue da gang [ID D11275].
Erwähnung von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Henrik Ibsen, Walt Whitman, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Darin enthalten ist eine Abhandlung über Faust von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Zheng alluded to William Dean Howells' famous appellation for Mark Twain as 'the Lincoln of American literature'. He asserts that Huckleberry Finn is Twain's most important representative work.
He described Georg Brandes as 'the most important critic of Europe'.
Zheng mentioned Jane Austen, but said very briefly that her works have calm irony, delicate characterization, and pleasing style.
Washington Irving made American literature first recognized in Europe, while it is Edgar Allan Poe who first made American literature greatly influence European literature. In 1909, the year of Poe's centennial, the whole of Europe, from London to Moscow, and from Christiania to Rome, claimed its indebtedness to Poe and praised his great success.
Zheng Zhenduo regarded Nathaniel Hawthorne as "the first person who wrote tragedy in America". It was Hawthorne's emphasis upon psychological description that led to Zheng's high praise. According to Zheng's theory, the American tradition in literature exerted a strong influence upon Hawthorne's exploration of the depth of the human soul. "Hawthorne's psychological description could be traced back to Charles Brown."

Karl Ludvig Reichelt ist Missionar in Shanghai.