Profiles from China: Sketches in Free Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior

These are snapshots in free verse, captured in the interior of China in 1917, when the old world was colliding with the new. Eunice Tietjens was an American poet and journalist who traveled deep into Chinese cities and villages, and what she found she rendered in sparse, striking lines that feel almost like ink wash paintings brought to life. The cormorant fishermen working their birds at dawn, the scholar quietly reciting Confucius, the storyteller holding crowds spellbound with ancient tales, the desperate beggars at roadside, the bride in her ceremony of silk and ritual - each profile is a window onto a world that was already vanishing even as she witnessed it. The poems capture the texture of daily existence: festivals blazing with color, workers bent over their crafts, the quiet dignity of the poor and the quiet decay of dynasties. What emerges is neither the romanticized Orient of Western fantasy nor the clinical gaze of the tourist, but something more honest: a foreigner's clear-eyed witnessing of a civilization at the crossroads between ancient custom and modern upheaval. These 88 sketches endure because they preserve what no history book can - the human face of a moment in time, frozen in language that still breathes.