Interprets Old and Modern China: Rose Quong, Chinese Actress, Appears Before Woman's Club, Greenwich Connecticut USA (1936)

Source: The Greenwich Press, Greenwich, Connecticut USA
January 23, 1936.

Miss Rose Quong, the Chinese actress with a long experience on American and European stages, presented a unique interpretation of ancient and modern China before a large audience of the Woman's Club of Greenwich in the Masonic Temple yesterday afternoon. Dressed in a flowing Chinese kimono elaborately embroidered in  blue with her hair drawn back in coils at her ears in the traditional Chinese fashion, Miss Quong belied her Oriental appearance by speaking clear, an accented English no different than that spoken by any number of cultured American actresses.

If her speech was Broadway, her presentation was wholly Chinese, however. After discussing China briefly and comparing the Oriental with the western world, she presented a program of monologues illustrative of Chinese life, poems, stories and Chinese proverbs. The poems she first recited in English and then chanted in Chinese.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the program that was Miss Quong's discussion of Chinese philosophy, illustrated with the proverbs so dear to every Chinese heart. Among those which, she said, best expressed her people's philosophic attitude towards life were the following:

If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily. 

Never stoop to tie your shoestrings in another man's melon patch. 

Better to be a tiny piece of jade than a whole tile.

As an illustration of the influence on Chinese life and thought of the teachings of the great Chinese philosophers, Miss Quong said that the first words that a Chinese child learns are from Confucius: Man by nature is born good. She contrasted this serious thought with the first words in the first English primer she ever saw. They were: The cat sat on the mat.

Preceding the main portion of the program, Mrs. Maynard W. Linn, commissioner of the Greenwich Girl Scout Council, discussed the needs of the council and the functions that it performs in Greenwich. 

"There are 2000 girls in Greenwich who have no connection with character agencies," she declared. "The Girl Scouts perform a service not only to girls but to the community as a whole, and are a privilege that all can enjoy."