Achmed Abdullah

“ A white woman! Her name is——wait!"
Ching Shan could hear Nag Hong Fan's staccato, stuttering English, and a woman's softly slurred reply, then again the former speaking through the tube in Chinese:
"Her name is Sa-lah! Can you hear, Worthiness? Sa-lah Allen! She says she must see you, speak to you at once. She says that——"
"Wait!"
For the fleeting fraction of a moment, Ching Shan was undecided. For the fleeting fraction of a moment, he wondered, speculated. Sarah! Sarah Allen! The woman he had loved, who had been like incense in his heart, who had been to him the breath of all things! ”

“ He had lived on Riverside Drive for business reasons. Now, retired, with no pursuit in life except that of peace, beauty, long life, and happiness, he preferred to herd with his own people. Pell Street, the White Man called it and cursed its reek and dirt; but Ching Shan, who for a couple of decades had moved m the White Man's best social and commercial circles, called it the Street of the Thousand and Three Beatitudes, and praised its rich flavour. ”

“ To youth the world looks for good manners, as a peasant looks for the harvest of glutinous millet in the first month of autumn. But old age, being careless of the world's opinion, can afford the splendid elevation of thoroughly bad manners. I know it. I have thought about it. I have thought left, and thought right."
The whole—from the studying of the noon sky to the burning of the incense sticks, from the baiting of P'i Hsiao to the noisy tea sipping—was a ceremony to Ching Shan ”

“ With ruthless single-mindedness, he had arranged all his daily acts, from the moment of rising to his final pipe in the back room of Nag Hong Fah's restaurant known as the Honourable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity, where he was a passive listener and onlooker, silent, self-contained, and much respected by the Pell Street aristocracy.
He looked at his watch. It was a little after one. Time for his second pipe, and then a leisurely stroll across Chatham Square, through the East Side, and over to the North River. Yesterday the sun had been wonderful ”

“ For, while there are times when life is only acted psychology and other times when it seems an illogical deduction killed by a crassly logical fact, there are finally those rare and grey-misted moments when life is just nilly- willy submission. ”

“ Why? Because they are weak—thus fools."
Turning away from the window, he lit two lotus incense sticks before a hideous, paunchy joss idol with whom he was on terms of tolerant and rather saturnine intimacy, went back to his bedroom, pressed his lips to the rubber tube which led into the kitchen of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace downstairs, and gave his order for breakfast in a gentle singsong:
The same order, day after day:
"A dish of fried noodles. A heaped platter of rice. A handful of dried shrimps. A cup of cloudy-mountain tea. ”