INDEED the latter—whose American odyssey was destined to be quite as hard as that of Foh Wong, decades earlier—needed every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars. To enumerate all those whom he had to bribe would be to give an ethnographical survey of many of the Far East’s more gaudy rogues. But let us pick …
Pell Street Blues Chapter 5
WHENEVER he thought of Si-Si, which was often, he beat his wife. And one day, at the Azure Dragon Club, stretched out on a mat, between them a table with opium-lamps, pipes and needles and ivory and horn boxes neatly arranged, he complained of his fate to Yung Tang, who inclined his head and spoke …
Pell Street Blues Chapter 4
Once in a while Foh Wong had news of Yang Shen-Li. His friends would read in Canton papers, or in the local Chinatown weekly, the Eminent Elevation, owned and edited by Yung Tang, how the Manchu also was steadily making his way—how, a favorite of the Dowager Empress, he had been appointed captain-general of the …
Pell Street Blues Chapter 3
They stood there. For long minutes they looked at each other. They did not touch hands. For was she not now betrothed to Foh Wong? They turned and went their different ways. And a few days later Na Liu became the coolie’s bride, while Yang Shen-Li traveled south, to be a captain in a Manchu …
Pell Street Blues Chapter 2
Never, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of these two weaken. It stretched, hard and stark and blighting, athwart the full span of both their lives. It followed the churned steamship lane to San Francisco and Seattle. It traveled thence across the continent to New York—there …