Dinner finished, the guests spoke briefly to the guest of honour and most of them left as soon as they decently could. Mimi sensed the bewilderment of the Chinese (she wasn’t sure whether the most proper word for him was “the Chinese” or “the Chinaman”). His calm dignity interested her—beside the uneasy and garrulous, the sophisticated and unsophisticated, the smartly and the not so smartly dressed group in the room, he seemed to her to possess the wisdom and the dignity of a bronze Buddha. She went over to him and sat down beside him. “I was talking last night to a young professor who’s spent some time in your country, Mr. Chuan” (she wished she had asked beforehand what the proper form of his name was), “and he was telling us you of the East are beginning to look on Western civilization with considerable less enchantment than you used to.”
He looked at her fleetingly but sharply and with acute inquiry. Mimi met his eyes frankly and he seemed satisfied with what he saw in them.
“There is a change taking place in China—all over the world, in fact,” he assented in precise Oxford English. “Gandhi in India, we in the Far East, in Africa, in Turkey, in the whole Near East—there is a stirring going on. But it isn’t against what you call your ‘Western civilization’ nor is it primarily against white people as white people—it’s a healthy movement of people who for centuries have been asleep—it’s a rising, given form by the late war, of peoples who have been exploited.”
“But isn’t that the same thing?” Mimi inquired. “These peoples are rising because they have been exploited—and who has done the exploiting but the white nations? I seem to remember a story of a Chinese who told a white man the Chinese could never attain to the marvellous civilization of the white man because, as he put it, ‘I can’t shoot straight enough.’ ”