a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits
with a face of perpetual surprise.
Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies
both fashion and a tender heart.
Does not a bird need an airing?

Wusih


New China: The Iron Works

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