Christmas... Here and There (1940)
This dark Christmas sketch from Shanghai offers quite a contrast to the optimistic missionary letter from 1930.
Christmas eve in Shanghai...
A Chinese urchin opens the door of a limousine, pressing his wasted body against the handle. The white man, loaded to the chin with champagne bottles, thrusts out a ten-dollar bill (about 70 cents). The child looks at the note with hungry eyes; he can’t take it: he has no arms. The foreigner slips inside his ragged shirt.
Pretty flower girls dart through the crowds... selling boutonnieres... getting 10, 20, even 100 Shanghai dollars. And in an alley, three Chinese are beating up a coolie because he couldn’t pay two miserable coppers for his bowl of rice. He dies on the wet flagging, black blood gushing from his mouth.
Christmas eve... and tomorrow Shanghai public benevolent cemetery will find more than 100 corpses in the street, for there are always at least 100 and sometimes more who die from cold and hunger or both; and more than half will be small ones -children and even babies.
White men in white ties and white men in rags; Chinese in brocaded silk and Chinese in gunny-sacking... The piercing wail of the beggars sounds mournfully through the laughter of the crowds.
At a barricade a soldier wraps red and green bunting on the spikes and barbed wire.
Wilmington Morning Star, December 25, 1940.