Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 42, May 1947

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She was sitting straight and stiff in one of the Old Man’s chairs when he called me into his office — a tall girl of perhaps twenty-four, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, in mannish grey clothes. That she was Oriental showed only in the black shine of her bobbed hair, in the pale yellow of her unpowdered skin, and in the fold of her upper lids at the outer eye-corners, half hidden by the dark rims of her spectacles. But there was no slant to her eyes, her nose was almost aquiline, and she had more chin than Mongolians usually have. She was modern Chinese-American from the flat heels of her tan shoes to the crown of her untrimmed felt hat.

I knew her before the Old Man introduced me. The San Francisco papers had been full of her affairs for a couple of days. They had printed photographs and diagrams, interviews, editorials, and more or less expert opinions from various sources. They had gone back to 1912 to remember the stubborn fight of the local Chinese — mostly from Fokien and Kwangtung, where democratic ideas and hatred of Manchus go together — to have her father kept out of the United States, to which he had scooted when the Manchu rule flopped. The papers had recalled the excitement in Chinatown when Shan Fang was allowed to land — insulting placards had been hung in the streets, an unpleasant reception planned. But Shan Fang had fooled the Cantonese. Chinatown had never seen him. He had taken his daughter and his gold — presumably the accumulated profits of a life-time of provincial misrule — down to San Mateo County, where he had built what the papers described as a palace on the edge of the Pacific. There he had lived and died in a manner suitable to a Ta Jen and a millionaire.

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