The Laundryman's Boy, page 1
Dedication
For Jinah and Erica, and in memory of
Donald D. C. Lee and Lee Tang Yin
Epigraph
We know that when the Chinaman comes here . . . he is a stranger, a sojourner in a strange land . . . he has no common interest with us. . . . He has no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations. . . . It is not desired that they should come; that we should have a mongrel race . . .
—SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD, Prime Minister of Canada
May 4, 1885, Debates in the House of Commons
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Drink the Waters Deeply Village,
Toisan County,
GuangDong Province,
Southern China.
November 21, 1913
To Hoi Wing, the son of my heart, if not my womb:
This fall, bandits struck at Fung-gong village and stole a woman (I do not know her name). Your third cousin, Jin-Jee, birthed a son with a split lip, but needless to say, I did not preside over that maternity.
The third harvest was poorer than the second, and the villagers of nearby Won-Goong-San are said to be peeling bark from trees. For weeks, we ate only salt-fish flakes on the blackened rice from the bottoms of our pots. Then your first blessed remittance arrived. Now we feast on tender spring chicken and succulent pigskin crackle. Your father paid some arrears on the lots he tills, and he even purchased a new stool so Little Mei-Mei can sit in school. Ten times lucky we are to be a Gold Mountain household!
How do you fare in the New World? Do the lofan ghosts measure seven feet with blood-red faces and hairy paws? Are the women all prostitutes? Wear my amulet! I purchased it from a mad soothsayer on the night of your birth when I succoured your mother through a twenty-two-hour labour. Be well-listening and well-learning with your new employers at the laundry. I know the work is hard and the hours long, but do not despair. Remember the fortune teller’s prophecy!
The night watch is banging at my door. Outlaws have been roaming, and the oil in my lamp burns low. I will write again soon. Each night, Little Mei-Mei and I light candles for you and your beautiful mother. Ayah, may the Ancestors grant that this old woman lives to see your return!
Your loving Eldest Great Auntie
P.S. And please don’t delay your next remittance. Perhaps you could post it before the new moon passes? The taste of pigskin crackle wets my mouth even now, and a single piece of Gold Mountain silver is worth twenty here. Might the amount you send be augmented?
Part One
1
ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO
OCTOBER 1913
“Chinky-Chinky Chinaman,
Wash my pants.
Put them in a boiler
And make them dance!
“Chinaman, Chinaman,
Belly full of cats.
Next time I catch you
I’ll feed you to the rats!”
The first clod of grass and mud stung the back of Hoi Wing’s neck. He fell to his knees, unbalanced by the laundry sacks hanging from the pole across his shoulders. Clutching his hat, he turned as another clump of sod exploded against his chest. A half-dozen street children leapt from the barrels outside St. Catharines’ largest dry goods emporium (“candies, sundries, gasoline, oils, and more!”), and several more emerged from behind the carriages hitched at the wooden sidewalk. Whooping and whistling, the pack charged, hurling stones and rotting vegetables. Two brandished sticks as they continued their inane chanting. A little boy waved a flag. “Kill him! Kill the Chinky Chink!”
Hoi Wing cursed and tasted blood where a stone had cut his lip. Although there were seven or eight in the gang, none of his grubby assailants looked older than ten years of age, three years younger than he was. The biggest boy, a bucktoothed hoodlum whose grimy kneecaps peeked out of his torn trousers, pulled his eyes into slits. “Ching-ching-maka-hye-ying!” he shouted.
Hoi Wing scanned the storefronts for escape. He would fight any two, three, or even four of the little rascals, but not burdened as he was. All morning, he had been collecting laundry from the uncles’ wealthiest customers in town: those who lived in the palatial homes in the environs of Montebello Park, the neighbourhood the men of China called the Golden Li.
A soggy tomato splattered against one of Hoi Wing’s sacks. Taunts rang in his ears as he fled past the saddlemaker’s. A rock bounced off the small of his back, and a spray of pebbles grazed his cheek. He stumbled, but kept afoot as the laundry swung wildly on his pole.
Anger and humiliation burned in his chest, and the children chased him past a woman pushing a pram and a gentleman in a bowler hat and greatcoat. At a tannery, Hoi Wing paused before a heavy-set man who stepped out into the cloudy autumn afternoon. His apron was splattered, and his forearms were stained brown to the wrists. He had a long, drooping moustache that flicked in consternation as he recognized some of the neighbourhood’s scamps running in the street.
“Stop! What are you ragamuffins up to?” The tanner held out his hand. Then he spotted Hoi Wing, and a knowing smirk came to his lips. He waved the little band through. “Get that Chinaman, boys!”
The pursuers leapt forward.
Hoi Wing ran.
Later that evening at the Sam Kee Luk Chinese Hand Laundry, Hoi Wing heaved an enormous sack of soiled clothes over his shoulder and staggered across the floor. He emptied the bag into a vat of boiled water and gripped a long-handled paddle. With both hands, he plunged the splintered blade into the wooden barrel, thrusting, twisting, and agitating the mass of grime-encrusted sheets and shirts.
As Hoi Wing churned the putrid mix, blood, vomit, and bits of fecal matter swirled at the surface. The pork fat he had rubbed on his hands had washed away, and the skin over his knuckles was cracking again. Cramps knotted his forearms, but he sank the paddle deeper into the scalding water. The stench rose, and the paddle slipped from his grip. His stomach roiled as he reached into the soup of excrement to retrieve it.
Gagging, Hoi Wing stumbled from the vat. At the laundry’s big window, he breathed deeply, cleaning his hands on a rag and rubbing his bloodshot eyes on his sleeve. He fingered the bandage over his chin where he had been cut during his altercation with the ragamuffin gang earlier that afternoon.
Outside, darkness had fallen, and the gaslights on St. Paul Street spit and flared in a late autumn storm. The roads were slick, and a horse-drawn wagon delivering ice clip-clopped past, its driver huddled beneath an oilcloth cape. As the rain beat against the clapboard walls of the laundry, Hoi Wing wrapped himself in a woollen blanket, shivering despite the heat of the big copper boilers.
How cold it was in this foreign land! Hoi Wing stared out the window into the slanting rain. Could it only be October? A week had passed since he had arrived in the town of St. Catharines (called Seng-cah-doun by the men of China), and no matter how many garments he pulled over his body, he was never warm.
He remembered the day his father (whom the villagers derided as Ying the Scholar) had told him he would soon be leaving their home in southern China to sojourn in the Gold Mountain.
“I am sending you overseas to work in a washing establishment.” Ying the Scholar’s eyes had been solemn behind their thick glasses. “Your employers will be two countrymen of ours. The men are brothers. I have not met them, but we have exchanged letters, and they are known to be honest and hard-working. When you arrive, you will address them respectfully as you would any stranger in the village square. You will call them Elder Uncle and Second Uncle.”
Hoi Wing’s stomach twisted with apprehension. “But I won’t know anyone there!”
“You must work and send money from the West. Our second harvest was poor, and the drought continues. Bandits ravage the countryside. War looms on the horizon. Your little sister Mei-Mei and Eldest Great Auntie will be counting the days to the remittance you send each month.”
“Will I go to school there?”
His father glanced away. “The work will be hard and the hours long. Your new employers will demand much of you. Education will have to wait.”
“But for how long?” Hoi Wing asked, but as was often the case, Ying the Scholar only shrugged his shoulders.
Despite his misgivings, Hoi Wing felt a small spark of excitement at the idea of journeying to the New World. In his home village of Drink the Waters Deeply—nestled in the rolling hillsides of Toisan County in GuangDong Province—Hoi Wing had liked nothing better than to eavesdrop amongst the Gold Mountain veterans whenever they gathered around the town’s famous fountain.
In the cool of late summer evenings, he would sit cross-legged on the ground as the men smoked and reminisced. Many of the older adventurers had passed long sojourns in the mysterious West, working to send remittances home each month, returning to the village every four or five years to father a son or daughter before departing after a single year of repose.
Studying their grizzled faces—some scarred, some battered, but all touched in some manner—Hoi Wing was mesmerized by their tales of the high mountain chasms they had scaled, buried to their chests in icy snow (a frozen white rain, so cold it burned!), often roped together in a quest for gold and adventure. Others boasted they had laid an iron road across an endless stretch of forest (trees so tall, they scraped the sky!), or bored tunnels so long they had not seen the sun for weeks (I held the dynamite in my fingertips until the fuse was no more than a half inch long!).
Some lowered their voices—and here Hoi Wing strained his ears—to narrate lascivious encounters on island paradises with foreign women, warm of heart and limb, and epic nights followed by golden dawns over azure seas.
Sometimes Hoi Wing scoffed at the dire tales of ferocious Gold Mountain winters. Winds so cold as to steal one’s fingertips? Frozen birds falling out of the sky? He had been audacious enough to even sneer (to himself, of course, when no one was looking) at the accounts of Old Kwok, a man so tough, he was rumoured to have hammered railroad spikes with his fists and chiselled mountain tunnels with his teeth.
What was the truth about the foreign lands? Who could tell him? Certainly not his father, Ying the Scholar, who was so ridiculed in Drink the Waters Deeply that the story of how he had travelled as a swollen-headed young man to the provincial capital to write the Imperial Examinations—only to return ignominiously empty-handed—was a joke told so often, its punchline had become superfluous in the Four Counties.
Now, in the laundry, Hoi Wing’s thoughts of home were interrupted by the rumbling of his stomach. It was already past six. When would they be having dinner? Whatever his father’s faults, the man had been absolutely right about the challenges of a Gold Mountain Chinese hand laundry. The work duties consumed every waking minute of every day; the men barely took the time to eat.
On top of that, Hoi Wing had not yet found the courage to speak with Second Uncle about attending school or lessons. Nor had he even met the senior partner of the enterprise. That was Elder Uncle, the older brother, who was away in the big city of Toronto, meeting with other Chinese laundrymen and members of their clan association.
But how would Hoi Wing go to school without first learning the lofan tongue, which sounded to his ears like the barking of dogs or squealing of pigs? He knew nothing of the lofan people or their customs, and like most Gold Mountain sojourners, he would likely spend the next five years in back-breaking toil. By that time, his window of opportunity for education would have closed.
In Drink the Waters Deeply, the children had teased Hoi Wing mercilessly since his first lonely days in Teacher Lee’s schoolroom, and despite everything Eldest Great Auntie had said—the elderly woman, who was also the county’s pre-eminent midwife, believed he had been born under a lucky moon—he feared he would never escape the legacy of his father’s great failure. Would it be his fate to grow up an illiterate and ignorant laundryman, with no more than a seventh grade education from his own country?
In bitterness, Hoi Wing remembered the dead-naughty lofan boys who had chased him through the streets that afternoon. Was this typical of the treatment he would receive here? Would he be fighting every day? He touched the bandage over his chin again. Second Uncle had applied the dressing—along with sticky orange tiger balm—upon his return from deliveries earlier that afternoon.
Hoi Wing’s stomach rumbled once more. When would it be the dinner hour? He was famished now; he had saved a half-eaten apple in his pocket from his lunch. To help pass the tedium of his work, he had devised a new game: every time he added clean water to the big vats, he allowed himself a tiny bite of apple.
Chewing the fruit, Hoi Wing went to the sorting tables. From the heap of dirty clothes collected from the Golden Li, he plucked a stained ladies’ undergarment, the colour of bone, laced and frilled. Holding it before the kerosene lamp, he rolled it in his fingers, luxuriating in its soft, velvety texture. He breathed the faint flowery scent clinging to the cotton. His thirteen-year-old imagination took flight. How was such a garment worn? He toyed with the tiny clasps, picturing the long-limbed lofan ladies he had seen on the sidewalks of town, their fair hair bouncing over their shoulders.
The laundry’s doorbell jangled. Through the curtain into the reception area, he saw an elderly woman enter, accompanied by a young girl whose head just crested the top of the oaken counter. The woman wore a mushroom-brimmed hat and a gabardine raincoat. She snapped her umbrella open and shut, staining the wooden floor. For an instant, Hoi Wing thought she was Pinched-faced Lady, one of their regulars, but this woman was older, more gaunt, and her lips were withered beneath the rouge.
The two stood in reception, eyeing the packages of laundry crammed into the cubbyholes behind the counter. The woman fitted spectacles over her nose and studied the price list tacked to the wall beside a calendar depicting the recent excavations of the giant locks of the fourth Welland Canal.
On the counter were pads of laundry tickets, spools of thread, and packages of hand-washed clothes. The little girl climbed a stool and rested her forearms on the work surface. Removing her bonnet, she revealed hair the colour of millet. Her cheeks were flushed, and she flicked the beads of Elder Uncle’s abacus click-clackety-clack up and down. Then she drew a cautious hand over one of the brown paper bundles.
“Oh Nana, it’s warm!” she said, not noticing Hoi Wing, who studied her intently through the part in the curtain.
“Child.” The woman perused the price list with displeasure. “Don’t touch anything!”
Although Hoi Wing could not read the lofan words on the sign, the Sam Kee Luk Chinese Hand Laundry—“The best and most economical”—advertised collars for two cents, cuffs for four cents, and shirts for ten cents. It guaranteed “authentic Chinese hand washing without acids, lime, or any other caustic chemicals to destroy the clothes.”
Emboldened by her grandmother’s inattention, the child traced her fingertip over Second Uncle’s smooth-flowing calligraphy painted on the paper-wrapped bundle. “Look! What’s it say?”
The woman didn’t turn. “Chicken scratch. They’re just swiggles.”
“But they’re beautiful!”
“Nonsense! They’re meaningless.”
The little girl stretched her body across the counter and peered through the curtain. Her mouth fell open when she spied Hoi Wing at the tubs, clutching his splintered paddle. “Look, Nana, it’s a boy!”
“My Lord! Come down from there.”
“But who is he? Can he talk?”
“Never you mind.” The woman wrestled the girl from the counter. “What are you thinking? Your father would be furious!”
Hoi Wing retreated behind the presser as the woman lifted a bag onto the counter.
“Charlie!” she cried out. “Is anyone home? I have washee-washee.”
“Second Uncle!” Hoi Wing called to the back of the laundry. “We have customers.”
Second Uncle emerged from the drying room, sweat glistening on his naked torso. His muscles were lean and his forearms like braided rope. The crown of his head was as smooth and lustrous as a pearl. A toothpick dangled at the corner of his mouth, and he was the only man Hoi Wing had ever seen who could smoke and clean his teeth at the same time. He towelled his face, pulled a smock over his body, then squeezed Hoi Wing’s shoulder as he went to the counter.
“Charlie!” The woman shoved her sack forward as Second Uncle appeared through the curtain. “I need this done quick-ee quick-ee. Extra starch-ee on the collars.”
Second Uncle spilled the bag onto the counter and rummaged through the clothes. “Hmm . . . ten shirt. One doll-ah.”
“Tsk! One dollar? Come now, let’s be reasonable. I can get shirts washed at Foo’s Laundry for eight cents apiece. You don’t want me to go all the way down to the Foreign Quarter, do you?”
