Word: mandarin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Chinese. An interpreter laboriously translated. Then Mr. Johnson got up, paused, bowed to hosts and guests. The audience set itself for a weary, long-winded speech which most of them would not understand. With a grin, Nelson Johnson proposed a toast and made a short speech in perfect Mandarin. From then on, he had no need of paper airplanes to make friends. Here was a white man who treated his yellow hosts as equals-as superiors, sometimes...
...sheds on world affairs flickers somewhat dimly beside the flashes of Duranty, Gunther, Sheean; but for character vignettes and earthy episodes, he beats the lot. Examples: >The headmaster of his grammar school in Gorcum, Holland, was a tightlipped, frog-eyed, wrinkled Huguenot with the curling fingernails of a Chinese mandarin and the literal severity of a Spanish Inquisitor. He beat a boy to unconsciousness for writing the phrase "snowflakes fluttering from a pitilessly gray heavenly roof." Heaven, it seemed, was never pitiless. After morning prayers he took snuff, which made him sneeze so vehemently that he staggered. This staggering, says...
China has five major cinema-producing companies, about 300 theatres, which show both Chinese and Hollywood films. Three of the Chinese companies make pictures in Cantonese (South China) dialect, two in classical Mandarin (North China) dialect. Chinese movie stars are borrowed from the Chinese stage and music halls. Average picture-production cost is about $15,000. Invasion by Japan has not interrupted Chinese cinema production. While Sable Cicada, which took two years to make, was in production at Shanghai, the studio was bombed twice. (Studio officials kept blueprints of the sets so that, in case of serious damage, they could...
Like Henry James, the greatest of them, many U. S. expatriate writers have come to troubled old age, have shown uneasy consciences over their expatriation. But not Logan Pearsall Smith. Now 73, a lanky, aristocratic, pink-cheeked bachelor who has been called the most perfect living British mandarin, he has contentedly lived 50 years in France and England. His autobiography, Unforgotten Years (Little, Brown, $2.50), is witness that he finds in England a happiness as poised and honeyed as his perfected prose (in Trivia, Reperusals and Recollections...
Snow found Soviet China a territory about the size of England. He was welcomed by wiry, black-bearded Red Commander Chou Enlai, scion of a Mandarin family, one-time head of Whampoa Academy (Chiang Kai-shek's officers' training school), who suggested a 92-day itinerary, gave Snow permission to write as he pleased. Astonished at the youthfulness of the Red Army personnel (average age of its officers was 24, of its rank & file, 19), Snow was more astonished by the background of Red Army leaders. One was Commander-in-Chief Chu Teh, an "old-shoe sort...