OCR Text |
Show CHANGES IN CHINATOWN. Residents of New York's Oriental Quarter Dress for Dinner. One reliable source of big city wheezes seems to have dried up. The Chinks are no longer to be considered funny, the New York correspondent of the Cincinnati Times-Star writes, Time was when hard working humorists could take a turn through Chinatown and come back with a screamingly funny story about flapping panties and streaming queues and pigeon English. Now the Chinese residents res-idents have taken on a different air. They act like regular people ever since their moldy old country got out of its grave clothes long enough to put up a fight for liberty. They talk straight to you, and their dialect isn't a bit funnier than is the brogue of the newly arrived Irishman or the broken English of the German Immigrant or the lingo of the newcomer from Russia or the patois of the French Canadian. They look you right In the eye. They never did cringe any memory fails to recall any John Chinaman who would rub his hands together to get trade but they are independent inde-pendent and self respecting now. Maybe the facts are not related, but there has been little disorder dis-order in the Chinese quarter since that fever broke out in the Chinese body politic. It may be, of course, due to the fact that other people respect re-spect them nowadays. In the old days they broke Into the news only as the objects at which wit was aimed, or as mysterious Orientals who liked the black smoke and sold chop suey. Nowadays they are figures in a movement of world importance, impor-tance, and they appreciate the fact. The other night a reporter went to Chinatown to see one of the prominent residents. The last time the reporter re-porter talked to him the Chinaman was garbed a la John Laundryman, although his house was illuminated il-luminated by gold embroidery. This time the reporter re-porter found him wearing a dinner Jacket Two or three guests were similarly attired. "Just a symbol of our new status," said the Chinaman, with a smile. He is a graduate of an American college, by the way. "We are no longer to be considered con-sidered barbarians." |