Achmed Abdullah

“ My life is a blackened crucible, but my love for you, Crusher of Hearts, is the golden bead at the bottom of the crucible.”
He stepped close up to her, disregarding Yung Long, who was torn between fury and laughter and amazement.
“Crusher of Hearts,” he went on, and it was not the cripple speaking, the outcast of Pell Street, the taker of alms, the butt of rough coolie wit, but a Manchu, a scholar, a poet, “I love you. To have you again I would curse the memory of my honorable ancestors and spit on the name of the Blessed Lord Buddha. For I love you, Si-Si. Can it be that you have forgotten?” ”

“ A dramatic thing, to be sure; but, paradoxically, the Chinaman is never dramatic in dramatic moments. His drama lies in the slow, proud agony of repression, in smooth words woven close to the loom of lies; also, in unsaid words, then suddenly leaping out in a stony, incontrovertible fact.
“P’i Hsiao” (“Cobbler’s Wax”) , said the smiling Yung Long, waving a careless, introductory hand at the cripple. “An honorable Manchu who has condescendingly come among us to fill his honorable belly with our refuse. ”

“ The tale of her beauty had been bruited about Pell Street long before her coming. For when Yung Long, twelve months earlier, had decided to “sip vinegar,”—this being a Chinese euphemism for taking a second wife,—he had furthermore decided, as a sound business man, that it would not do to hide the fact of her beauty in the cloak of decorum.
“Only a rich man can afford two wives,” he said to Yu Ch’ang, the priest. “Too, then, it may be that I shall love her.” ”

“ I have not forgotten, Crusher of Hearts, that I am a cripple who cannot earn his own bread or that of the woman he loves, he still loves. I have not forgotten the pride of race and—” Suddenly he turned to Yung Long, who stood like a statue. “Take ye another woman unto yourself, Grocer! ”

“ A word is dirt. A word is an infidel act. The deed is the thing, food is the witness, and a full stomach the divine arbiter.”
Pell Street would have been well pleased had Cobbler’s Wax done the decent thing and committed suicide. They even told him so in a roundabout manner, and one Friday when the cripple was burning Hung Shu joss-sticks in front of Sakya Muni Buddha, Yu Ch’ang, the priest, mentioned to him casually that the price of coffins was rising. ”

“ It is easier to measure the depth of the ocean with a jackal’s tail than to probe the heart of woman. One thing only is certain! I am—Cobbler’s Wax, and you are Si-Si—and the bride of Yung Long.”
Yung Long looking from the cripple to Si-Si, picked up the words and tossed them to the lowering murky Pell Street sky with an avalanche of gurgling laughter:
“The bride of Yung Long! The bride of the grocer, the Cantonese coolie, the pig! Ahi, my bride!” He drew her to him with a sweep of his stout arms, and crushed her wedding finery against his breast. “My bride!” ”

“ Youth to the vaporings of youth. To the wise man of years the carved crystal of knowledge, the polished emerald of satisfaction, the cooling fan of the many accomplishments. The matchmaker in San Francisco, an honest woman with whom I have had dealings before, writes that Si-Si is of most honorable family, that she is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry, and that thirty-seven summers have only increased her charms thirty-seven times. ”

“ Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant, remarked with ready wit when he saw him make obeisance in front of the crimson stained joss-house.
“When one is eating one’s own, one does not eat to repletion; when one is eating another’s, one eats till the tears run,” was the sententious comment of Nag Hong Fah, the pouchy proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, when he gave him a bowl filled with left-over salt duck, pickled cabbage, and soy. ”

“ Cobbler's Wax
“The upper and lower jaws mutually assist each other,” it says in the Tso Chuan. “If the lips shrivel, then must the teeth catch cold,” a quotation which leads directly, if you be a yellow man, indirectly, if a white, to the fall and rise of P’i Hsiao.
They called him P’i Hsiao, or Cobbler’s Wax, in Pell Street, because, to quote Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, “he is soft, being helpless; hard, being proud; and his skin is dark.” ”

“ She has small feet,—what the foreign devils call deformed feet,—real golden lilies, each worth a kang of tears. It is said that when she washes her hands she scents the water. I wonder what my respected first wife will say. ”