Achmed Abdullah

“ When I am dead, and Hwa-wang is dead, our spirits will be deliciously happy when they will see two sons—the son of our finding and choosing, as well as the son of our flesh and blood—light candles and burn incense and fill the bowls with rice and pork at the blessed Spring festival of the Tsing-Ming."
Li Ping bowed with clasped hands. "I—" he stammered—"my gratitude—I shall never forget—never—never—even after your honorable souls will have mounted the dragon——"
Hwa-wang drew him to her. "May the Lord Buddha make easy the road beneath your feet, little son!" she said gently. ”

“ And late that night, when Li Ping went into the cellar, he saw there a figure writhing in torment. A twisted visage stared up at him, lacerated, blackened with caked blood. But the man had not yet forgotten the present in the inexorable mazes of the past; and not yet forgotten that he was the richest man of Pell Street, a friend of the white police, a power in the state—between the Bowery and City Hall Park.
"Fool!" he cried. "Fool—this is America——"
"No! America is out there—beyond these walls! ”

“ If a man has committed a crime, punish him—indeed. But in such a way that he understands the sentence, approves of it himself, that he bows his head to the punisher, even to the torturer, in meekness—in sincere gratitude—and says, 'Blessed be the hand that punisheth!'"
As the months grew into years, Li Ping would hear now and then from Clansmen and lodge brothers about Li Hung's whereabouts and his worldly progress, first as a laundryman, then as a petty trader, a labor contractor, finally as a rich merchant with a splendid shop on Fifth avenue, in New York. ”

“ All that evening and night Li Ping sat in the gar den of the little house, alone with his thoughts and his grief.
His step-parents—who had been Tao itself to him! Dead!—they! The thought of it tore his heart, ragged, paining, like a dull knife.
"O Buddha!" came his prayer. "Pardon and pity and pass over what Thou knowest, for Thou art the most dear and the most generous——"
He thought of the gentle lessons which Peking's yellow-robed monks had taught him. He thought of the words in Kung-Yang's commentary that "all forms are only temporary; all forms are without substantial reality ”

“ The Tartar had shrugged his shoulders.
"There is, belike, one other way," he had said, after a pause. "It is not exactly the way of the flesh, yet one approved by the ancients——"
"Tell me, Tartar——"
It was black in the cellar. It was silent. Not a sound drifted in from the bastard Pell Street motley, not a ray of light. There was no perception of Time. Time had died. All hours seemed alike; gliding, mockingly, to a far shore of rolling eternity.
Hooded and cloaked in a sable mantle seemed the place; pregnant with a terribly unswerving purpose.
Li Hung was afraid to open his eyes ”

“ There is no reason to feel grateful," repeated Li Yat. "Am I not right, wife?" He smiled at Hwa-wang, who smiled back at him.
"Indeed!" she agreed, and she added, in her homespun Chinese way, "Sons are good to have. It is only the son who can perform the proper rites of ancestor worship. Ah—if you have no children to foul the bed, you will have no one to burn crimson paper at the grave——"
"You have your real son—Li Hung!" replied Li Ping. ”

“ Li Hung had sinned the unforgivable sin. He had defiled his family's holiest of holies—the ancestral tablets which, to the Mongol, are more even than the Savior on His Cross to the Christian, which are the center, the core, the secret and intimate essence of Chinese life! The ancestral tablets of the Li's! Tab lets of smaragdine jade, reaching back to the days of the Ta-Ming, the Bright-clear Dynasty, when already the Li clan had been honorable burgesses and literati in the great city of Canton!
"And—my parents?" faltered Li Ping—"what did they do?" ”

“ This is China, little brother, and there is only one law—the law of the Hsiao King which says that there is no crime in all the world more condign of crudest torture than to be unfilial!"
"There is the law of this land. People will miss me. The police— Wait till I get out——"
"You will never get out," came the quiet rejoinder; "your absence will not be noticed. Many hands have been weighted, many lips sealed with gold. Too, a true word has been said to the heads of the honorable tongs. They approve of this—"sweeping a hand about the cellar—"most thoroughly. No, no, you will never get out! ”

“ He thought that the sin had been committed, not against himself, but against his step-parents, the ancestors, the Tao. He was only the instrument, and it was his, the instrument's, duty to be just to his step-brother. He reflected that one cannot wipe out blood with the darkening stain of blood, that, by the death of the unfilial son, the beloved parents and the ancestors would not regain the face which they had lost.
"Death—" he said to himself morosely—"is neither an answer nor an argument. A live thing is not always in the right, nor a dead thing in the wrong. ”

“ A freckled fist lashed out, connected with Li Ping's chin; and the latter, with the unutterably stony contempt of the Chinese for the foreigner, remarked that night to a countryman that a kick from a white man and a step into the mud were one and the same thing. Regrettable? Yes. Also painful. But negligible. Not to be considered one way or the other in the final balancing.
Immediately upon arriving he had made inquiries as to his half-brother's whereabouts, had been told vaguely that Li Hung had drifted east with a railway crew. Otherwise he would have killed him on sight. ”

“ Yes—as his fingers turned the doorknob—the ancients were right. One must have children to carry on the honorable traditions—sons to burn crimson paper at the grave, to kowtow before the ancestral tablets. ”

“ It is furthermore written that——"
"Oh—hell—" cried Li Hung in the language of the foreigners, which he was rapidly acquiring; and, after a while, he added condescendingly, "Don't worry, honored father! Money is the wheel of things as they are, not as you read them in those lengthy tomes of yours! Money—and success! ”

“ They had lost face—they and their ancestors for a hundred generations back. Their clean record was muddied. The exquisite essence of their clan's secret Self had been trod in the mire. Rightly they found the disgrace unbearable. What sayeth the Book of Meng Tseu? 'He who cannot fulfil his charge must resign it——'"
"And so——?" ”