We can't hang drywall in here until the tin knockers are done.
The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all.
He was forever playing the bespectacled, strawhatted, bound-to-succeed American boy, garbed in bargain-basement suit.
Ma Pu-fang, who rules Chinghai, is a trim, soldierly man with a very Muslim-looking beard, and he is the third member of a local family dynasty that has controlled the province for the past two decades. His father, Ma Ch'i, became provincial chief in 1929, soon after Chinghai was made into a province. Ma Ch'i was succeeded by his brother, Ma Ling, and then, in 1938, Ma Pu-fang inherited the governorship from his uncle.