New China: The Iron Works

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Title:     New China: The Iron Works
Author: Eunice Tietjens [More Titles by Tietjens]

The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
    glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living
    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
    in the east, a graft but not a growth.
And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar way
    between the dynamos, the cars, the piles of rails--
    you too are of to-morrow, grafted with an alien
    energy.
You wear the costume of the west, you speak my
    tongue as one who knows; you talk casually of
    Sheffield, Pittsburgh, Essen....
You touch on Socialism, walk-outs, and the industrial
    population of the British Isles.
Almost you might be one of us.
And then I ask:
"How much do those poor coolies earn a day, who
    take the place of carts?"
You shrug and smile.
"Eighteen coppers. Something less than eight cents
    in your money. They are not badly paid. They
    do not die."
Again I ask:
"And is it true that you've a Yamen, a police judge,
    all your own?"
Another shrug and smile.
"Yes, he attends to all small cases of disorder. For
    larger crimes we pass the offender over to the
    city courts."
       *       *       *       *       *
"Conditions" you explain as we sit later with a cup
    of tea, "conditions here are difficult."
Your figure has grown lax, your voice a little weary.
    You are fighting, I can see, upheld by that strange
    graft of western energy.
Yet odds are heavy, and the Orient is in your blood.
    Your voice is weary.
"There are no skilled laborers" you say, "Among
    the owners no cooperation.
It is like--like working in a nightmare, here in China.
    It drags at me, it drags"....
You bow me out with great civility.
The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
    glow, gigantic machinery clanks and in living
    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
Beyond the gate the filth begins again.
A beggar rots and grovels, clutching at my skirt with
    leprous hands. A woman sits sorting hog-bristles;
    she coughs and sobs.
The stench is sickening.
To-morrow! did they say?
  Hanyang

[The end]
Eunice Tietjens's poem: New China: The Iron Works

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