SOHO YELLOW PERIL.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2204, 18 November 1920, Page 4

SOHO YELLOW PERIL.

WILL THERE BE A NEW CHINATOWN.

When you arc eating in a French or Italian restaurant in Soho, London, your petit pois, your haricots verts, or your poiumes sautees, you do not reflect, probably, that the peas were shelled or that the scarlet runners were cut, or that the potatoes were peeled, by a Chinaman. But the yellow man is stealthily, subtly, invading 1 the Latin streets and underground kitchens of Soho. At one restaurant in this 'polyglot region you could not have found a few months ago any sign of the Celestial Land. Then this restaurant started yellowism with mu* Chinaman.- Now ’they have three. It is not a common little out-of-the-way restaurant. It is the resort of a good deal of wealth, fashion and beauty. Now and then, if you are observant while eating your youlet-en-casserole or drinking your glass of red St. Georges, or toying with your peebe Melba amid the chatter of Latin races, you will see a yellow man steal silently up from below with a big dish of salmon mayonnaise or a bowl of macedoine.de fruit, set it down on a sideboard, and pass silently down again. The Chinaman is doing now what the young German did before the war. He is arriving with very little English and very little money, and be is constantly enlarging his store of both.

We have been accustomed, when thinking of the Chinaman in England, of visualising him its a denizen of a few opium dens and small shops in a few streets in the EasJ End. The new Chinaman is no longer content with it semi-oriental garb, a handful of riee, a pipe full of poison, a game of fan-tan, and wages ot a few pence. Marching westward, he lias dug in at Soho, and be is on the lookout for European wages, and probably also for Western responsibility and power. The newcomer, discarding his pigtail, and his Mowing Oriental garb, bis long centuries of Peking exclusiveness, and bis Far Eastern lan-o-nao'e,’ is dressed in a neat tweed suit, collar, lie, and an air of calm confidence, and is learning English. Is this a new significant phase of (he Yellow Peril ? At all events, the Ear East end of the world is entrenched in the West End of London.