Your face is young and round and inscrutably alien. 
Your complexion is exquisite, matte gold over-lying
    blush pink, textured like ripe fruit. 
Your nose is flat, the perfect nose of China. 
Your eyes—­your eyes are witchery! 
The blank curtain of your upper lid droops sharply on
    the iris, and when you smile the corners twinkle
    upward. 
It is your eyes, I think, that move me. 
They are so bright, so black! 
They are alert and full of curiosity as the eyes of a
    squirrel, and like the eyes of a squirrel they have
    no depth behind them. 
They are windows opening on a world as small as your
    bound feet, a world of ignorances, and vacuities,
    and kitchen-gods.

And yet your eyes are witchery.  When you smile you
    are the woman-spirit, adorable.

I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of you
    moves me. 
I believe that I shall dream of you.

  Pa-tze-kiao

Our Chinese Acquaintance

We met him in the runway called a street, between the
    warrens known as houses. 
He looked still the same, but his French-cut tweeds,
    his continental hat, and small round glasses were
    alien here. 
About him we felt a troubled uncertainty.

He greeted us gladly.  “It is good,” he said in his
    soft French, “to see my foreign friends again. 
You find our city dirty I am sure.  On every stone
    dirt grows in China. 
How the people crowd!  The street is choked. No
    jee ba!  Go away, curious ones!  The ladies
    cannot breathe.... 
No, my people are not clean.  They do not understand,
    I think.  In Belgium where I studied—­
    ...  Yes, I was studying in Bruges, studying
    Christianity, when the great war came. 
We, you know, love peace.  I could not see....

“So I came home.

“But China is very dirty....  Our priests are rascals,
    and the people ...  I do not know.

“Is there, perhaps, a true religion somewhere?  The
    Greeks died too—­and they were clean.” 
Behind his glasses his slant eyes were troubled. 
“I do not know,” he said.

  Wusih

The Spirit Wall

It stands before my neighbor’s door, between him and
    the vegetable garden and the open toilet pots and
    the dirty canal. 
Not that he wishes to hide these things. 
On the contrary, he misses the view. 
But China, you must understand, is full of evil spirits,
    demons of the earth and air, foxes and shui-mang
    devils, and only the priest knows what beside. 
A man may at any moment be bewitched, so that his
    silk-worms die and his children go blind and he
    gets the devil-sickness. 
So living is difficult.