The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (18 page)

By the time they got to the laundry, the boiler was screaming hot and the machines were ready. “Don’t touch or lean against any machine,” Brave Orchid warned her sister. “Your skin would fry and peel off.” In the midst of the presses stood the sleeve machine, looking like twin silver spaceships. Brave Orchid’s husband fitted the shirt sleeves over it with a karate chop between the shoulder blades. “You mustn’t back into that,” said Brave Orchid.

“You should start off with an easy job,” she said. But all the jobs seemed hard for Moon Orchid, who was wearing stockings and dress shoes and a suit. The buttons on the presses seemed too complicated for her to push—and what if she caught her hands or her head inside a press? She was already playing with the water jets dancing on springs from the ceiling. She could fold towels, Brave Orchid decided, and handkerchiefs, but there would be no clean dry clothes until afternoon. Already the temperature was going up.

“Can you iron?” Brave Orchid asked. Perhaps her sister could do the hand-finishing on the shirts when they came off the machines. This was usually Brave Orchid’s husband’s job. He had such graceful fingers, so good for folding shirts to fit the cardboard patterns that he had cut from campaign posters and fight and wrestling posters. He finished the shirts with a blue band around each.

“Oh, I’d love to try that,” Moon Orchid said. Brave
Orchid gave her sister her husband’s shirts to practice on. She showed her how family clothes were marked with the ideograph “middle,” which is a box with a line through its center. Moon Orchid tugged at the first shirt for half an hour, and she folded it crooked, the buttonholes not lined up with the buttons at all. When a customer came in, her ironing table next to the little stand with the tickets, she did not say “hello” but giggled, leaving the iron on the shirt until it turned yellow and had to be whitened with peroxide. Then she said it was so hot she couldn’t breathe.

“Go take a walk,” Brave Orchid said, exasperated. Even the children could work. Both girls and boys could sew. “Free Mending and Buttons,” said the lettering on the window. The children could work all of the machines, even when they were little and had to stand on apple crates to reach them.

“Oh, I can’t go out into Gold Mountain myself,” Moon Orchid said.

“Walk back toward Chinatown,” suggested Brave Orchid.

“Oh, come with me, please,” Moon Orchid said.

“I have to work,” said her sister. Brave Orchid placed an apple crate on the sidewalk in front of the laundry. “You sit out here in the cool air until I have a little time.” She hooked the steel pole to the screw that unrolled the awning. “Just keep turning until the shadow covers the crate.” It took Moon Orchid another half-hour to do this. She rested after every turn and left the pole hanging.

At noon, when the temperature inside reached one hundred and eleven degrees, Brave Orchid went out to the sidewalk and said, “Let’s eat.” She had heated the leftovers from breakfast on the little stove at the back of the laundry. In back there was also a bedroom for the nights when they finished packaging too tired to walk home. Then five or six people would crowd into the bed together. Some slept on the ironing tables, and the small children slept on the shelves. The shades would be pulled over the display windows
and the door. The laundry would become a cozy new home, almost safe from the night footsteps, the traffic, the city outside. The boiler would rest, and no ghost would know there were Chinese asleep in their laundry. When the children were sick and had to stay home from school, they slept in that bedroom so that Brave Orchid could doctor them. The children said that the boiler, jumping up and down, bursting steam, flames shooting out the bottom, matched their dreams when they had a fever.

After lunch, Brave Orchid asked her husband if he and the children could handle the laundry by themselves. She wanted to take Moon Orchid out for some fun. He said that the load was unusually light today.

The sisters walked back to Chinatown. “We’re going to get some more to eat,” said Brave Orchid. Moon Orchid accompanied her to a gray building with a large storefront room, overhead fans turning coolly and cement floor cool underfoot. Women at round tables were eating black seaweed gelatin and talking. They poured Karo syrup on top of the black quivering mass. Brave Orchid seated Moon Orchid and dramatically introduced her, “This is my sister who has come to Gold Mountain to reclaim her husband.” Many of the women were fellow villagers; others might as well have been villagers, together so long in California.

“Marvelous. You could blackmail him,” the women advised. “Have him arrested if he doesn’t take you back.”

“Disguise yourself as a mysterious lady and find out how bad he is.”

“You’ve got to do some husband beating, that’s what you’ve got to do.”

They were joking about her. Moon Orchid smiled and tried to think of a joke too. The large proprietress in a butcher’s apron came out of the kitchen lugging tubs full of more black gelatin. Standing over the tables and smoking a cigarette, she watched her customers eat. It was so cool here, black and light-yellow and brown, and the gelatin was so cool. The door was open to the street, no passers-by but
Chinese, though at the windows the Venetian blinds slitted the sunlight as if everyone were hiding. Between helpings the women sat back, waving fans made out of silk, paper, sandalwood, and pandanus fronds. They were like rich women in China with nothing to do.

“Game time,” said the proprietress, clearing the tables. The women had only been taking a break from their gambling. They spread ringed hands and mixed the ivory tiles click-clack for the next hemp-bird game. “It’s time to go,” said Brave Orchid, leading her sister outside. “When you come to America, it’s a chance to forget some of the bad Chinese habits. A person could get up one day from the gambling table and find her life over.” The gambling women were already caught up in their game, calling out good-byes to the sisters.

They walked past the vegetable, fish, and meat markets—not as abundant as in Canton, the carp not as red, the turtles not as old—and entered the cigar and seed shop. Brave Orchid filled her sister’s thin hands with carrot candy, melon candy, and sheets of beef jerky. Business was carried out at one end of the shop, which was long and had benches against two walls. Rows of men sat smoking. Some of them stopped gurgling on their silver or bamboo water pipes to greet the sisters. Moon Orchid remembered many of them from the village; the cigar store owner, who looked like a camel, welcomed her. When Brave Orchid’s children were young, they thought he was the Old Man of the North, Santa Claus.

As they walked back to the laundry, Brave Orchid showed her sister where to buy the various groceries and how to avoid Skid Row. “On days when you are not feeling safe, walk around it. But you can walk through it unharmed on your strong days.” On weak days you notice bodies on the sidewalk, and you are visible to Panhandler Ghosts and Mugger Ghosts.

Brave Orchid and her husband and children worked hardest in the afternoon when the heat was the worst, all
the machines hissing and thumping. Brave Orchid did teach her sister to fold the towels. She placed her at the table where the fan blew most. But finally she sent one of the children to walk her home.

From then on Moon Orchid only visited the laundry late in the day when the towels came out of the dryers. Brave Orchid’s husband had to cut a pattern from cardboard so Moon Orchid could fold handkerchiefs uniformly. He gave her a shirt cardboard to measure the towels. She never could work any faster than she did on the first day.

The summer days passed while they talked about going to find Moon Orchid’s husband. She felt she accomplished a great deal by folding towels. She spent the evening observing the children. She liked to figure them out. She described them aloud. “Now they’re studying again. They read so much. Is it because they have enormous quantities to learn, and they’re trying not to be savages? He is picking up his pencil and tapping it on the desk. Then he opens his book. His eyes begin to read. His eyes go back and forth. They go from left to right, from left to right.” This makes her laugh. “How wondrous—eyes reading back and forth. Now he’s writing his thoughts down. What’s
that
thought?” she asked, pointing.

She followed her nieces and nephews about. She bent over them. “Now she is taking a machine off the shelf. She attaches two metal spiders to it. She plugs in the cord. She cracks an egg against the rim and pours the yolk and white out of the shell into the bowl. She presses a button, and the spiders spin the eggs. What are you making?”

“Aunt, please take your finger out of the batter.”

“She says, ‘Aunt, please take your finger out of the batter,’” Moon Orchid repeated as she turned to follow another niece walking through the kitchen. “Now what’s this one doing? Why, she’s sewing a dress. She’s going to try it on.” Moon Orchid would walk right into the children’s rooms while they were dressing. “Now she must be looking over her costumes to see which one to wear.” Moon Orchid
pulled out a dress. “This is nice,” she suggested. “Look at all the colors.”

“No, Aunt. That’s the kind of dress for a party. I’m going to school now.”

“Oh, she’s going to school now. She’s choosing a plain blue dress. She’s picking up her comb and brush and shoes, and she’s going to lock herself up in the bathroom. They dress in bathrooms here.” She pressed her ear against the door. “She’s brushing her teeth. Now she’s coming out of the bathroom. She’s wearing the blue dress and a white sweater. She’s combed her hair and washed her face. She looks in the refrigerator and is arranging things between slices of bread. She’s putting an orange and cookies in a bag. Today she’s taking her green book and her blue book. And tablets and pencils. Do you take a dictionary?” Moon Orchid asked.

“No,” said the child, rolling her eyeballs up and exhaling loudly. “We have dictionaries at school,” she added before going out the door.

“They have dictionaries at school,” said Moon Orchid, thinking this over. “She knows ‘dictionary.’” Moon Orchid stood at the window peeping. “Now she’s shutting the gate. She strides along like an Englishman.”

The child married to a husband who did not speak Chinese translated for him, “Now she’s saying that I’m taking a machine off the shelf and that I’m attaching two metal spiders to it. And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically. Now she says I’m hunting for something in the refrigerator and—ha!—I’ve found it. I’m taking out butter—‘cow oil.’ ‘They eat a lot of cow oil,’ she’s saying.”

“She’s driving me nuts!” the children told each other in English.

At the laundry Moon Orchid hovered so close that there was barely room between her and the hot presses. “Now the index fingers of both hands press the buttons, and—ka-lump—the press comes down. But one finger on a button
will release it—ssssss—the steam lets loose. Sssst—the water squirts.” She could describe it so well, you would think she could do it. She wasn’t as hard to take at the laundry as at home, though. She could not endure the heat, and after a while she had to go out on the sidewalk and sit on her apple crate. When they were younger the children used to sit out there too during their breaks. They played house and store and library, their orange and apple crates in a row. Passers-by and customers gave them money. But now they were older, they stayed inside or went for walks. They were ashamed of sitting on the sidewalk, people mistaking them for beggars. “Dance for me,” the ghosts would say before handing them a nickel. “Sing a Chinese song.” And before they got old enough to know better, they’d dance and they’d sing. Moon Orchid sat out there by herself.

Whenever Brave Orchid thought of it, which was everyday, she said, “Are you ready to go see your husband and claim what is yours?”

“Not today, but soon,” Moon Orchid would reply.

But one day in the middle of summer, Moon Orchid’s daughter said, “I have to return to my family. I promised my husband and children I’d only be gone a few weeks. I should return this week.” Moon Orchid’s daughter lived in Los Angeles.

“Good!” Brave Orchid exclaimed. “We’ll all go to Los Angeles. You return to your husband, and your mother returns to hers. We only have to make one trip.”

“You ought to leave the poor man alone,” said Brave Orchid’s husband. “Leave him out of women’s business.”

“When your father lived in China,” Brave Orchid told the children, “he refused to eat pastries because he didn’t want to eat the dirt the women kneaded from between their fingers.”

“But I’m happy here with you and all your children,” Moon Orchid said. “I want to see how this girl’s sewing turns out. I want to see your son come back from Vietnam. I want to see if this one gets good grades. There’s so much to do.”

“We’re leaving on Friday,” said Brave Orchid. “I’m going to escort you, and you will arrive safely.”

On Friday Brave Orchid put on her dress-up clothes, which she wore only a few times during the year. Moon Orchid wore the same kind of clothes she wore every day and was dressed up. Brave Orchid told her oldest son he had to drive. He drove, and the two old ladies and the niece sat in the back seat.

They set out at gray dawn, driving between the grape trees, which hunched like dwarfs in the fields. Gnomes in serrated outfits that blew in the morning wind came out of the earth, came up in rows and columns. Everybody was only half awake. “A long time ago,” began Brave Orchid, “the emperors had four wives, one at each point of the compass, and they lived in four palaces. The Empress of the West would connive for power, but the Empress of the East was good and kind and full of light. You are the Empress of the East, and the Empress of the West has imprisoned the Earth’s Emperor in the Western Palace. And you, the good Empress of the East, come out of the dawn to invade her land and free the Emperor. You must break the strong spell she has cast on him that has lost him the East.”

Brave Orchid gave her sister last-minute advice for five hundred miles. All her possessions had been packed into the trunk.

“Shall we go into your house together,” asked Brave Orchid, “or do you want to go by yourself?”