Never, through the decades, though for years they did not see one another, did the hate of<\/p>\n
these two weaken.<\/p>\n
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\u2014there to abut and peak to a grim, rather fantastic climax in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Bowery, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.<\/p>\n
Streets of Chinatown, squatting turgid and sardonic and tremendously alien! Not caring a tinker\u2019s dam for the White Man\u2019s world roaring its up-to-date, efficient steel-and-concrete symphony on all sides.<\/p>\n
Rickety, this Chinatown; moldy and viscous, not over-clean, smelling distressingly of sewer gas and rotting vegetables and sizzling, rancid fat. Yet a fact to be reckoned with in Gotham\u2019s kaleidoscopic pattern. A cultural and civil entity not without dignity. A thing aloof, apart, slightly supercilious\u2014and intensely human. And being human, a fit background for a tragic tale. . . .<\/p>\n
Not that this tale is entirely tragic. For tragedy, no less than comedy, is after all only a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and religion\u2014two accidents whose sum-total spells prejudice.<\/p>\n
Therefore, if your sense of humor be faintly oblique, faintly Oriental, in other words, you may derive a certain amusement from the thought of Foh Wong, no longer a coolie but a prosperous New York merchant, cooped up in the sweltering garret of his Pell Street house, with the door locked and the windows tightly shuttered, and an agony of fear forever stewing in his brain. You may also laugh at the idea of Yang Shen-Li lording it gloriously over Foh Wong\u2019s Cantonese clerks, spending Foh Wong\u2019s money with a free and reckless hand\u2014and in the evening, after a pleasant hour or two at the Azure Dragon Club over an archaic mandarin gambling game of \u201cPatting Green Butterflies\u201d or \u201cLadies on Horseback\u201d or \u201cHeighoh! Flies the Kite,\u201d mounting to the second floor of the Pell Street house, there to bow courteously before Na Liu, his wrinkled old wife, once the wife of Foh Wong! She would be sitting stiffly erect, in the proper Chinese manner, on a chair of ebony and lacquer encrusted with rose-quartz, her tiny feet barely touching the floor and her hands demurely folded; and Yang Shen-Li would say to her:<\/p>\n
\u201cMoonbeam, was there ever love as staunch as ours?\u201d<\/p>\n
She would give a quaint, giggling, girlish little laugh.<\/p>\n
\u201cNever, O Great One!\u201d she would reply.<\/p>\n
\u201cNever!\u201d he would echo. \u201cThe same love until death\u2014may it not be for many years! The same love that came to you and me, so long ago, when the world was young back home in Ninguta\u2014and<\/p>\n
we were young\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd you the iron-capped prince\u2014and I the gardener\u2019s daughter!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut all the world to me\u2014as you are today.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the sake of my love,\u201d she said with a queer triumph,<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2014I shall marry another!\u201d<\/p>\n
Always, as often as he spoke the words, he made a great gesture with his strong, hairy hand. A gesture that cleaved the trooping shadows in the room with a certain brutality, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer\u2019s wand, sweeping away the dust and grime of Pell Street, the dust and grime of the dead years, and calling up the cool, scented spring sweetness of the small Manchu-Chinese border town where both had lived and loved. . . .<\/p>\n
He remembered as clearly as if it were yesterday how, on that morning after his talk with Foh Wong, he met Na Liu where they always met, in back of the Temple of the Monkey and the Stork, in the shelter of the enameled pagoda roof that mirrored the sun a thousand-fold, like intersecting rainbows, endless zigzag flashings of rose and purple and blue and green. There he told her what had happened, told her the full bitter tale; and he said to her as he had to Foh Wong:<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not fear death. But there is the honor of my father to be considered\u2014the honor of my ancestors for countless generations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPah!\u201d she cried. \u201cAnd what do I care for the honor of your father, the honor of all your noble ancestors? It is you I care for. You alone. And the thought of you dead\u2014why, I cannot bear it. Because, you see\u201d\u2014her voice was thin and<\/p>\n
brittle\u2014\u201cI love you.\u201d He was silent.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love you so,\u201d she continued. \u201cThere is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do for the sake of my love. Ah\u201d\u2014in a tense whisper\u2014\u201cfor the sake of my love, I would lie, I would steal, I would kill! For the sake of my love\u201d\u2014more loudly, with a queer triumph in her accents\u2014\u201cI shall marry<\/p>\n
another!\u201d<\/p>\n
He sighed. He spoke dully:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe book has been read. The grape has been pressed. There is no more. This is the end of our love.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe end? No, no! There can be no end to our love, as there was no beginning. Why\u2014don\u2019t you see?\u2014our love is a fact. A fact!\u201d<\/p>\n
He weighed the thought in his mind. Then he inclined his head.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is so,\u201d he replied. \u201cA fact, like the living Buddha, eternal and unchangeable. A fact, whatever may happen to you and to me!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2014there…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[14,15],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pulp-classics","tag-ab","tag-achmed-abdullah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoundingoutpost.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}