Arizona republican., 1920-08-16

Comfortable Ineffa bleness sits are vases with paper flowers, as bright and ferSh in their colorS as in the day when some danty Chinese maiden Cor was 1t some fat and elderly Celestial matron in trousers and jacket with a tortoise shell comb in her hair and her finger nails filed to a point) cut from silk their purple and white and red petals and twisted the wire stems that hold them stifly upright. There is soft red carpet on the floor. that invites, as plainly as carpet can do, the casual vis- itor to slip off his shoes, and, walking over it, bump his head against 1t at the base of the statue.
 But the Phoenix Chinatown has more than a temple in it. There are, hidden away on the south side, tiny little stores usually in the back room, where strange, twisted roots wait the Chinese buyer, where there are boxes of li-chi nuts and cartoons of insipidly sweet Chinese candies, and where there is smell which may be variegated but which is certainly not intriguing" as novelist Chambers would say. In these shops are also American staples. espe cially tobacco, and little stacks of canned goods, usuBly sea foods. Where the merchants, however, keep their dried shark fins or preserved bird nests-the gelatine of which Is the best known of Chinese delicacies-was not | time, found shark fin soup and bird nest both entirely palatable if modicum of port wine or Manhattan cocktail were used as sauces with them.
 In one of these places, which evil dently is used at times as a restau- rant, was found a Chinese oven-of the kind that makes roast duck a dish fit i for the Olympean gods and roast pork 1 too good even for them. It was 1 square brick box, about three feet on 1 each side and 30 inches high, set in the middle of the floor. On the inner walls near the top were the hooks from which the ducks are hung, sometimes to the number of 15 or 20. To the lover of fine eating there is no more pleasing sight, especially before dinner, than such an oven in operation. When the lid, square piece of iron, is lifted from ] the top, there is a puff of wood smoke ascending to the ceiling, and then the 1 expectant diner sees the ducks (if it is the right 'time) hanging neck down ward from the hooks, just close enough to the smouldering wood to keep from l burning. And such ducks! Golden brown, glistening with the rich juices | that have oozed from the skin, and calculated to make the mouth of the most blase gastronomist run with an ticipation, they make the most appetiz- ing sight Tn the world. A leg of pork,
 
 spoken of lightly, either, but the ducks hold first place
 A Dish for a King
 l Slices of duck roasted in this man ner placed on top of chop-suey in a
 blue bowl with a little dish of sauce
 at its side and cup of honest tea at hand, make a combination which even the taste of a BriIfnt Savarin cannot
 sheer at-to say nothing of the great
 majority who eat ham and eggs from
 high stools in Jake's place around the
 corner. Tn the old days, too, such a
 dish could be accompanied (and usu-
 ally was) by a bottle of wine or cock
 tail, for the Chinese took early to occi- dental liquors, although their own rice
 wine has a stimulating effect as dam
 aging to the mental, moral and phys .
 ical man as the raisfn brandy in Co., chfse county, which is distilled. they say, in a washboiler after the lady ol the house has ended her weekly wrest ling match with the laundry, and is strained through the stirt tail of the manufacturer. But to get back tc Phoenix.
 The Chinese here have not forgotter to exercise, in the evening. that phi l losophgc lassitude which in a newer and rougher people might be called I laZiness. They know the calmness O. spirit that comes from sitting nation i less at tie front door, smoking thei 5 pipes with ridiculously small bowls and contemplating the sayings Of tn Seven Wise Men or the maxims o N Confucius or of Buddha-dependen upon how closely each individual K patterning after his Japanese neigh H bors. They know how to take Tiff easily, do these Chinese, when tn days task is done and the sun ha dropped behind the palm trees. s they sit and smoke, talking i'll sharpf M