Japs are clean; Chinese are dirty. Why? I don’t know ‘cause I don’t read Pearl Buck. Suburban Chinese restaurants, though, can be quite nice. They’re learning!
If you are happy with them, DON'T GO INTO THEIR KITCHENS unless it's just a QUICK peek. Don't look up or down; don't look beyond the chef's face.
The Chinese restaurants aren't clean. They haven't learned because they KNOW that inspectors can be bribed. Be warned. Amen.
Pearl S. Buck's story don't tell of the filth. They tell of the way life was like back then. It was hell for all females. The Chinese bound the feet of their WEALTHY females, so they would have the "lotus feet."
The ONLY way a female could redeem herself was to bear sons. When the female slaves, usually raped by any/all of the males in the family, born a son, she was "in like Flynn."
If she bore a daughter, baby girl was thrown down a well or strangled.
Whoa, that brings back a memory. Early 60s, I was in fourth or fifth grade, and the school brought in the Technology Breakthrough Of The Day, a (drum roll..........) SPEAKERPHONE, so we could all have a conversation in the gym/auditorium with Pearl S. Buck. My mother, whose dream from her childhood was to see China, wanted to hear all about it when I got home. Little did we know that just three years later we would be moving to Japan and got to see Yokohama's Chinatown, which was essentially a Maoist enclave at the time, and as close as one could get to China in those days. (The last time I was there was in Nov 2006, and it was very different from what it had been in the late 60s.)