"The Pleasures of a Nonconformist"

[fiefoe]

Mr. Yutang gives one piece of excellent advice:
    The reader must be impressed. He likes it.

He certainly follows it himself. Here are two opening lines:
__ The most difficult thing in travel is the art of getting lost.
__ Not until everybody loses face in China, will this country ever become a democratic nation.

Times that he lived through are not all that distant, but one would hope they will keep their distance.
<During the Great Leap Forward>:
    (A boy queued from 1:30 am to buy one cruller for his entire family.) The Chinese cruller... is an oil twist. The dough which is the skin is extremely thin and crisp, the inside being practically empty. When you eat it, it collapses in your mouth like a popover.
<Peking circa 1956>:
    A national campaign to exterminate the sparrows was on. You didn't want the poor sparrows to live because they ate the gleanings of the crops. They hurt socialist reconstruction.
<When the warlords ruled>:
    I figure I could safely make three to four betrayals, but I should not overdo it.
    Before the very sight of (a flesh-and-blood warlord): Idealism must wither and Romanticism evaporate into thin air ... while Realism, joining hands with Reality, feels too tickled to laugh and too bitter to shed a tear.

Edward Bellamy ("Looking Backward'), Heywood Brown, Stephen Leacock, Alan P. Herbert ("Holy Deadlock"), Ellis Parker Butler.