CORAL, AMBER AND JADE
There are no gold and scarlet lanterns bobbing like fat little oriental Pierrots over this street. No firecracker colors daub its sad walls. Walk the whole length and not a dragon or a thumbnail balcony or a pigtail will you see.
Instead, a very efficient, very conservative Chinatown and a colony of very efficient and very matter-of-fact Chinamen who have gradually taken possession of a small district around Twenty-second Street and Wentworth Avenue. A rather famous district in its way, where once the city's tenderloin put forth its red shadows.
But now as you walk, the night stares evilly out of wooden ruins. Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling little houses—these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless, snoozing amid the debris of another day.
Then the Chinamen begin. Lights twinkle. Clean-looking interiors and carefully washed store windows. Roofs have been hammered back in place, stairways nailed together again. The sagging walls and lopsided cottages have taken a new lease on life. Another of the innumerable little business districts that dot the city has fought its way into evidence.
There are few oddities. Through the glass of the store fronts you see curiously immobile groups, men seated in chairs, smoking long pipes and waiting in silence. Strange fruits, foods, herbs, cloths, trinkets, lie on the orderly shelves around them. The floors look scrubbed and there is an absence of litter. It is all very efficient and very natural except for the immobility of the men in the chairs and the silence that seems to have descended on them.
* * * * *
A Chinese silence. And if you linger in the neighborhood you begin to feel that this is more Chinese than the gaudy dragons and the firecracker daubs and the bobbing paper lanterns of fiction.
This night I am looking for Billy Lee. No. 2209 Wentworth Avenue, says Mr. Lee's card. We are to talk over some matters, one of which has already been made public, others of which may never be.
He sits in his inner office, attired like a very efficient American business man, does Mr. Lee. We say hello and start the talk. In the rooms outside the inner office are a dozen Chinese. But there is no sound. They are sitting in chairs or standing up. All smoking. All silent. A sense of strange preoccupation lies over the place. Yet one feels that the twelve silent men are preoccupied with nothing except, possibly, the fact that they are Chinese.