Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/408

 388 the desert as bathing-houses on a beach. This is the Chinese quarter. It tells at a glance the story of the peculiar people who tenant it: the social ostracism on the one hand, and their own indomitable clannishness on the other.

There is now hardly any hamlet so insignificant, even in the wastes of Arizona, that the Chinese have not penetrated it, in search of labor and opportunities. Every settlement of the Pacific slope has its Chinese quarter, as mediaeval towns had their Ghetto for the Jews. It is not always without the place, as at Fresno; but, wherever it be, it constitutes a close corporation and a separate unit. In dress, language, and habits of life it adheres to Oriental tradition with all the persistence the new conditions will admit.

The Celestials do not introduce their own architecture, and they build little but shanties. They adapt what they find to their own purposes, as has been said, distinguishing them with such devices that the character of the dwellers within cannot be mistaken.

A great incongruity is felt between the little Yankee wooden dwellings and the tasselled lanterns, gilded signs, and hieroglyphics upon red and yellow papers with which they are profusely overspread. Here Ah Coon and Sam Sing keep laundries like the Chinese laundry the world over. Yuen Wa advertises himself as a contractor for laborers. Hop Ling, Sing Chong, and a dozen others have miscellaneous stores. In their windows are junk-shaped slippers, opium pipes, bottles of saki, rice-brandy, dried fish, goose livers, gold and silver jewelry, and packets of face-powder and hair ornaments for the women. The pig-tailed merchants themselves sit within, on odd-looking chests arid budgets, and gossip in animated cackle with customers, or figure up their profits gravely in