Teaching Materials - Lesson - Chinese Literature Regents

DING LING
In another part of town, buried beneath a jungle of big black smokestacks, is a dense tangle of dilapidated shanties, home to tens of thousands of Asians. At this hour, they are just getting out of their beds, from beside their undernourished wives, and use the coarse blue sleeves of their work clothes to wipe the filth from their faces. Their hair is unkempt, their shoes are tattered, and their toes poke through the holes in their socks. They all scurry out the door and rush down the mucky road alongside the putrid canal toward the factories that exploit the labor of these working masses. The canal is jammed with boats on which the conditions are still worse. A few of the lucky ones join the throngs on the banks and, with empty bellies, head for the early shift at the factory. The shrill whistles of hundreds of factories built by Caucasian and Asian capitalists, including some of our very own greedy Chinese, blow simultaneously and the gates of the factories open wide as the filthy swarm pushes its way in. There is an even filthier crowd of workers who have just been let out the gates and who have not had a wink of sleep the whole night, since taking up where the day shift left off, together these men keep the machines in perpetual motion, day and night. Even amid the excessive noise and commotion of this part of town one can hear the wails of hungry children. Who here can admire the splendor of the morning sun and the drifting clouds; when shadows stretch down from the chimneys and thick black smoke races along the ground and colorful patterns float on the putrid canal as it catches the light of the sun? The lives of these people are wretched and their minds are numbed; they are stripped of all hope and ideas as they eke out a living from one day to the next. Why don't these people, if not for themselves then for their posterity, think of a way to put an end to this, to temporarily halt their back breaking labor and take up a different kind of work?

In yet another part of this metropolis, there's a section where, in spite of being under Caucasian jurisdiction, only Asians live because even the most impoverished foreign nationals refuse to. Huge red residential structures have been precariously erected up and down every street. More than one hundred families live in each, and the size of each family is absolutely shocking. When the first faint rays of dawn brighten the windows of one of these homes, Yisai, who hasn't been asleep for long, wakes up. She is a woman in her twenties who lost her innocence long ago; her face, for lack of exposure to the sun, has turned from yellow to an unhealthy shade of pale white. She has not been roused from her dreams by the sun shining down upon the earth or by the lovely dear morning, nor have her eyes been opened by the dawn breeze carrying in the scent of damp grass. It is a habit, an unfortunate habit, but she never sleeps soundly and even the slightest noise wakes her. For instance, the child crying next door or the mah jongg tiles being slapped on the table a little too heavily in the room across the hall all minor noises that wouldn't bother an average person are enough to disturb her. But at this early hour every day, it is the sound of the garbage carts in the street down below, their iron wheels clanking over the pavement, that wakes her. A metal cart turns down the street, the man pushing it shouting loudly. The landladies and servant girls in each family then hurry out from their dark beds beneath the stairwells. A thick pungent odor rites, spreading up along the high walls and into the congested apartments, as hundreds of housewives scrubbing hundreds of wooden buckets with bamboo brushes create a cacophony of random swishes and splashes of water that shake the thin walls of each apartment. Each morning, Yisai is startled awake by the sounds of chamber pots being emptied and cleaned, and every morning it irritates her.