Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 October 1891 — Humors of Chinatown. [ARTICLE]

Humors of Chinatown.

“Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing,” says Mr. Rus in his “Studies Among the Tenements of New York.” But he found some things therein to tickle his sense of humor,' and other things at which he laughed that he might not weep. One evening, while going through Mott street —the Chinese quarter—ho heard a woman shrieking in a cellar. Descending with his companion, a policeman, he discovered a Chinaman beating his white “wife” with a broomhandle. “She velly had!” shouted the Chinaman, as the two Americans, prejudiced against wife-beating, caught held of his armsjand released the woman. “S’pose your wifee bad, you no lickee her?” he asked, turning fiercely upon Mr. Rus. “No, I wouldn’t; I’d never think of, striking a woman,” answered the American. The amazed Chinaman eyed him in silence for a moment, and then contemptuously answered: “Then, I guess, she lickee you.” Going into a joss-house, he discovered among the Chinese scrawls on the wr:lls the inscription, in English letters: “In God We Trust.” It had been copied from the trade dollar, and the priest explained that the inscription was a delicate compliment to “Melican Joss,” the almighty dollar. On his own shores John Chinaman may be a thousand years behind the age, but here he has been so influenced by the “Melican Joss” that he is abreast of the age in his scheming to “make it pay.” He turns everything, from “Joss” down, into cash, or that which cash buys.