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BA Languages and European Studies graduate from the University of Portsmouth 2007

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Extrait de «les conquérants» par André Malsause

The long straight avenues and boulevards of a deserted country town, where the grass grows under the tall tropical trees. We at last arrived in China town, full of gilded signs in beautiful black lettering.

Behind me in the middle of a wide grass covered avenue was a frolicking little railway. We stopped in front of a house with a plaque of little known Cantonese business. Inside the dusty counters ready to collapse, two sleepy Chinese employees, one deadly pale dressed in white. The other plump and the colour of the baked earth and naked to the waist. I was at the home of president Kuomintang, of Cochin China. I asked in Cantonese:

- Is the owner here?

- Not long to his return sir, but go up, sit down.

I went up to the first floor by a kind of ladder; I sat down and idly stared at a European wardrobe, a Louis-Philippe table upon it a marble statue. A black wooden Chinese canapé and magnificent American armchair spiked with leavers and screws. In the mirror in front of me I could see a large portrait of Sun-Yat-Sen and a smaller photograph of the master of Céans.

By the bay window he came in, the restaurant owner, sputtering and clattering with a strong smell of greasy Chinese cooking.