Survival Till Seventeen

Our street was intended to be purely a residential one. But the owner of a vacant lot directly opposite our house grew tired of paying taxes on property that yielded him no revenue.

And so he erected two small shops on his land and rented them for business. A baker hired one of these shops, and Wing Lee, Hand Laundry, the other.

A rumble of resentment went up in our neighborhood when Wing Lee, Hand Laundry, moved in. Our neighbors were mostly Whigs, but they became Torys when ruffled in the matter of prestige. Appeals were sent to the City Ordinance Department, and even to the Mayor, to prevent Wing Lee from joining us. But the Mayflower legislators, when writing our local rules, had, by some miraculous oversight, failed to proscribe a Chinaman. The reason was simply that they had not foreseen him. And so Wing Lee, Hand Laundry, remained in our midst, by way of a yellow blunder in the Blue Laws of Massachusetts.

One can easily be mistaken in interpreting data reported by the senses, but hardly in the case of a Chinese laundry. And so it was no time until our noses knew that Wing Lee, Hand Laundry, had not only set up in our street, but was going full steam. And what is more, the bakeshop adjacent to his had an electric fan to blow off the foul air, with the result that the odors from the two establishments became so confused in the general let-off, that there were times when you did not know whether you were smelling a mince pie being scrubbed with ammonia, or a winged collar being fried in lard.

Wing Lee may have been an annoyance to our elders, but he was a revelation and a delight to us children. He was one of a wave of Chinamen who came to our shores in the early nineteen hundreds, a type highly tenacious of the exalted customs and ancient culture from which they sprang. For, unlike the Japanese — who are of a decidedly inferior civilization — the early Chinese were slow in adopting the Western manners and dress. The Japanese have always wanted to ape us. Not so the Chinese. A Japanese will be smuggled into New York one day, and the next go marching down Riverside Drive dressed like a Wall Street broker. But a Chinaman has always clung to his ancestral garments, observances, food, as long as it was humanly possible to preserve them. The later-day Chinaman has, alas, succumbed to the hammering imposed on him by life in our crowded cities, and his pig-tail, chop-sticks, baggy blouse and decorative slippers, have largely gone. He has even become Joe Lee and John Lee in place of Wing Lee and Lung Foo. But a greatness has been sacrificed in these surrenders. Nothing survives in the Americanized Chinaman but his jaundiced complexion and his almond eyes.

Our Wing Lee, thank God, was an authentic Chinaman, primitive, unspoiled, dressed and mannered exactly as he would be in his ancient country. He fascinated me beyond anyone I have known in my youth. Make no mistake, I was reluctant to believe he was not an animal, for his skin was a perpetual yellow and he smiled like a chimpanzee. If he must be taken as human and I saw eventually that he must — then he seemed a composite of both sexes and all ages. He had a face as smooth and fresh as a boy’s; he had long braided hair like a girl’s; he had eyes like a doll’s; but he wore a lady’s blouse like your mother’s and ornamental shoes like your fashionable aunt’s; yet he smoked a pipe like your father, and made a noise when he talked like your grandfather being recorded on a gramophone.

I have never seen anyone so dissociated from human consolation as Wing Lee was — so inarticulate, so sad-eyed, so alone. He slept in the rear of his shop, and seemed to have no wife, no children, no relatives, not even any friends. There were times when I was prepared to believe that he even escaped having parents, though there seemed to be something logically wrong with that theory. At any rate, I asked few questions about him of those capable of instructing me. Wing Lee was my discovery, and I was determined to figure him out by myself.

Our family was one of the first to patronize Wing Lee. We sent him some collars to do. He was conveniently located just across the street, and you could bring the collars any time; you did not have to be prompt with them as you did with our Yankee laundryman, who would penalize you an extra week if your wash was not ready when he arrived. Wing Lee’s work on our collars satisfied us, and we proceeded to let him do some of our shirts. But there the matter stopped. We had a superstition, partly religious, partly hygienic, about giving Wing Lee any of our more personal clothing. So he saw only the externals of our wardrobe. The rest of our things were sent to a wash factory to be torn apart by wringers and mangled by machines.

Oh, the patience of the East! Was it not this lesson Wing Lee was sent to teach us? Night and day he toiled, washed, ironed, smoked, without the solace of a single friend. He had no companions, only customers. He strengthened his morale by humming little curious tunes, making little curious marks on sheets of red and yellow paper, identifying merchandise with his own private signals, keeping ledgers secret to himself and his gods. What an assignment for a man with whom not one of us could compete in ancestry, who had heirlooms in his family that had descended through the ages!

Bereft of his relics, his rice fields, his tinkling temples, his open-air pagodas, Wing Lee braved the sloppy springs, sweltering summers, and icy winters of New England. He piled up his pennies against a slow return to his homeland and a burst of riches and surprises for those he loved. He endured a decade as though it were a day. He spoke seldom and saw all things. Nothing interested him less than a clock. He listened without a murmur to the angry landlord, scolding him for something he did not understand. He bore the complaints and rebukes of his clients, and sought always to appease them with Oriental courtesies. He hated the mechanical contrivances employed in the laundry trade. He washed every single item of your clothing with his own bare hands. He would have done even better if you had put him out of doors, given him some good strong suds and supplied him with a river. His was not the artificial cleanliness of the Occident, but the essential cleanliness of the East, where libation is a religious ritual and every pool has been adopted by a deity.

One day, suddenly, with no warning, the sign “Wing Lee, Hand Laundry” was taken down. He vanished as silently as he came. No one knew why, or where. Was it that this great lover of silence could no longer stand our noise?

I do not know. It may be that he went to New York and drugged himself with opium in an effort to forget us. It may be that he was killed in one of the tong wars in San Francisco, still trying to put us out of his mind. But I have a suspicion that Wing Lee sailed home to China, and that he remembered us very well. I have a notion that you might find him even now in the suburbs of some metropolis, in the hills above Canton or the valleys below Peiping, chuckling to his grandchildren, patting their heads, and telling them of his days in distant Massachusetts when he laundered the dirty linen of the low-brows of Lynn.