The street remained eerily empty until the two old men appeared again, bringing their caged birds back from their morning outing. I was busy observing them and jumped a mile when a door behind me suddenly opened. I half expected to be grabbed and dragged inside, but instead I turned around and found myself looking at the most unexpected person. She was a big-boned Irishwoman of middle age with a round, fresh-scrubbed face and faded red hair twisted up on top of her head. She was wearing a white apron over her summer dress, and she held a bucket in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other.
“I didn’t mean to startle you, dearie,” she said, in an Irish accent even broader than my own. “Just coming out to do the step. I do like a nice clean front step, don’t you?” And she gave me a warm, friendly smile. “I saw you passing by yesterday. And I notice you’re wearing a ring on your left hand. So I thought I’d be bold enough to find out whether you’ve joined our ranks yet.”
“Ranks?”
“Are you marrying that nice Chinese boy I saw you with? Frederick Lee, isn’t it?”
“No! What gave you that idea?” I suppose I sounded shocked.
“Well, you don’t look like one of those earnest missionary ladies, so I couldn’t think of any other reason an Irish girl would be walking through Chinatown on the arm of a Chinaman. There’s quite a few of us, you know.”
“Married to Chinese men?”
“Exactly. Mrs. Chiu’s the name. Aileen Chiu.” She held out her hand to me. I shook it. It felt as rough as old leather.
“Molly Murphy,” I said.
“A fellow Irishwoman. I knew it.” She beamed at me. “What part of the old country are you from?”
“County Mayo. Near Westport.”
“Are you now? I’m from Limerick myself. I couldn’t wait to get away, but now I long for those green hills and that soft rain, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Especially when the weather is as hot as it’s been lately.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” she said. “Like most of the neighborhood, we’ve taken to sleeping on the roof this summer, it’s been so unbearable in the house.” She hesitated then said, “Look, this may seem forward, but would you like to come in for a spot of tea, Miss Murphy? The kettle’s always on and I don’t get much company from the outside.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’d like that very much.” It had occurred to me how useful she might be, watching the street from behind her lace curtains. And besides, I liked the look of her face. I followed her into the darkness of a small entry hall. Only a couple of steps inside we came upon a screen, similar to the one in Mr. Lee’s apartment with a large painted dragon on it.
“Watch yourself,” Aileen warned as she steered me around it. “My man insisted on it. He’s a Christian, you know, but he can’t do away with all the old Chinese superstitions. ‘We have to have a screen, Aileen,’ he says to me when we are furnishing the place. To keep out the demons. And he still has an altar to the ancestors. Aren’t they funny, bless them?”
She led me around the screen and into a fine living room that looked out onto the street. It was well-furnished in American style with a comfortable plush sofa and armchairs, marble side tables, and lace curtains at the window.
“Sit down, my dear,” she said, gesturing to the sofa. “Kitty!” she called. “Kitty, where are you—we’ve got company.”
A girl of about ten came running into the room. She had light hair and skin like her mother, but her eyes were almond-shaped like those of her Chinese father. It was an extremely attractive combination. She gave me an inquisitive stare.
“My daughter Kitty,” Aileen Chiu said. “My youngest. I’ve three older girls and a boy. Our boy goes to college—Princeton, no less, but he’s home for the summer.” She turned to the girl who was lingering in the doorway, still staring at me with interest. “Kitty, tell Ah Fong that we want tea and see if he made any of his soda bread this morning.” She nodded to me. “We’ve a marvelous cook—he can cook anything, you know. Not just Chinese. Makes better soda bread than me.”
The girl went running off and I heard her calling out something in Chinese in a high little voice.
“You seem to have a good life here,” I said, looking around the room.
“I came to this country with nothing and I don’t think I could have done better,” Aileen Chiu said. “Certainly not if I’d married some drunken lout of a lazy Irishman. My man owns four laundries—two in Brooklyn and two here in Manhattan. He provides well for us and he’s a good father too.” She smiled, then the smile faded as she stared out at the net curtains. “Of course, it’s a trifle lonely at times. We’re neither one thing nor the other, you see. The Irish will have nothing to do with me; neither will the Chinese.”
“That must be hard,” I agreed.
“We survive. There are the other Irish wives to take tea with and sometimes we go to a theater and out to a picnic on Staten Island on Sundays, so I can’t complain. But how about you, my dear? I don’t often see a white woman coming up Mott Street, unless it’s on one of these slumming tours.”
“Slumming tours—what are they?”
She laughed. “Oh, it’s the latest craze, so they tell me. This man called Chuck Connors—he gives guided tours of Chinatown, as if we’re exhibits in a zoo, you know. He plays up all the vices—gambling and opium dens, houses of ill repute, and the tourists are suitably shocked and titillated. The young women pretend to swoon at the horror and degradation of it.”
She was still chuckling as her daughter brought in a tray of tea things and put it on the table in front of her mother. “Should I pour?” she asked.
“No, you go and get on with your schoolwork. I can do my own pouring,” Aileen said.
“But Ma—it’s the summer vacation,” the girl protested. “Nobody else has to do schoolwork.”
“You know how keen your father is that you get on,” Aileen said. “Look how well your brother and your sisters have done. You don’t want to let us down, do you?”
The girl sighed and stomped upstairs.
“My Albert is very keen on education,” she confided. “He was quite a scholar back in China. Of course I had no schooling myself, but I can see the value of it. If you’ve enough education you can move where you want in society, can’t you?”
“That’s very true,” I said. I watched her pour the tea and then hand me a slice of soda bread, liberally dotted with raisins. I ate with relish before I paused to ask, “Is there really that much degradation going on in Chinatown?”
“Of course there’s plenty of gambling. One thing about the Chinese—they are all gamblers. They’ll gamble on how many buttons the next man to come into the room has on his jacket or whether it will be fine the next day. Some of them will bet their clothing when they’ve spent their last cent and have to be given a sack to wear home. My man is more sober in that department than most, but I have to keep an eye on him.”
“And opium? Are there really opium dens?”
“Oh, yes. They’re here, all right. That stupid Connors fellow has concocted a fake opium den that he shows to his tourists—he hires actors to play the part of addicts. The real ones are hidden away, but they’re here, all right. And it’s not just the Chinese that visit them either. There are plenty of white men sneaking in at night.”