A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY
Germinal Idea: Captain Abdullah, an Asiatic, but educated partly, and living altogether, in the Occident, finds himself at times, he declares, in the position, less emotional than intellectual and cultural, where he has to make a choice between the ideals of East, or West of Suez. In addition, his friends often ask him to explain certain Oriental characteristics, motivations and viewpoints.
“Due either to a vital difference in the acceptance and usage of basic standards, or to my personal inability of expressing with the spoken word what I feel tersely to be true, I have always been unable in these discussions to express the one truth which I know; namely, that all this talk about the Orient being romantic and mysterious and rather high strung is asinine drivel, that indeed the shoe hurts on the other foot, and that it is the West which is romantic, both as to life and motivation of life, while the East is as drab and grey and square as a question in abstract dynamics.
“I make this claim chiefly in regard to the Chinese, who are the Orientals par excellence. I consider them the most logical, the most straight thinking, and by the same token, the most civilized race on earth, not excepting the Latins, the Hindus, the Arabs, or the Anglo-Saxons. I believe them to be the only people who live up to the sound dogma that two and two make four, and never four and a quarter, or three and two thirds. I hold that they are the easiest people in the world to understand, that they carry their hearts on their sleeves, and that they always mean exactly what they say, and say exactly what they mean, in direct contrast to the Occidentals....
“The starting point of my tale, a whole series of Chinatown tales, directly due to a conversation I had in Chicago with Mr. Ray Long of the Red Book, who said that since I seemed unable to interpret the Sons of the Middle Kingdom with the spoken word I should try the written word, was therefore the fundamental prosiness and simplicity of the Oriental, the Chinaman, in contrast to the complicated, suicidal emotionalism and maniacal psychologizing of the Occidental—the latter characteristic including a painful trick of dissecting emotions to such a degree that they cease to be emotions. I know China and the Chinese intimately, and am fairly familiar with some of their dialects.
“From a primitive, Occidental viewpoint, murder and a wife’s faithlessness seem to be the most important things. From an as primitive Eastern viewpoint, the same two things are the most negligible things. The thing which matters most to the Oriental is honor and piety, including their correct, codified outer observances.
“Thence my story.”
Plot. Structurally perfect, the plot grows naturally out of character.
The order of presentation begins with the
Dénouement: Nag Hong Fah kills Señora Garcia.