Letters from home were rare. Paper and ink and postage were too expensive for his family to buy often. When Dong-Sing did receive news, it was never happy or encouraging. Your uncle died. The crop is poor. My joints are stiff and I suffer at night. Everyone is hungry. Yes, we received the dollars. Send more next time.
And Dong-Sing did.
He had prospered in America. It didn’t take much capital to establish a laundry, and you could make good money if you worked hard. When Dong-Sing moved to Dodge City, in ’75, he built a shack near the river using scrap lumber. With a total cash outlay of $5.47, he bought kettles, and washtubs, a stove and irons. Then he went from saloon to saloon to announce in the only English words he knew, “I wash! Two bits!”
By the end of his first week, he had doubled his investment. At full capacity, he could clean and press forty pieces of clothing a day. He charged twenty-five cents per garment, which was less than the Irish washerwomen at the fort wanted, and his skill in ironing was unsurpassed. Pretty soon everybody preferred China Joe’s washing. His business grew and grew. Now there was plenty of hotel trade, which added bed linens to his work. Families were moving into town, too. Ladies like Mrs. Hoover and Mrs. Wright didn’t do their own washing anymore.
I already have two helpers and it is time to hire more, he would write home this week. Tell two strong boys in our village if they come to San Francisco, I will hire them and bring them to Dodge.
It seemed crazy to import laborers from so far away, but white people wouldn’t work for a Chinaman, and Americans were too lazy anyway. Doing laundry was arduous. You had to haul water and stoke the fire with cow chips, all day long. Sheets and clothing were rubbed with yellow soap on ribbed-tin scrubbing boards, then dumped into giant tubs of boiling water and stirred with a big wooden paddle. Heavy, hot, sopping-wet cloth had to be lifted, wrung, hung to dry, and ironed. Even with his helpers, at the end of the day Dong-Sing was too worn out to speak or eat.
In the mornings, though, when he was fresh, he planned letters in his mind as he worked. When you do laundry for people, you learn things about them. You know the size and shape of your customers. You know their habits. You know what people eat and drink from what they spill. You know who is so poor he must have his clothing mended again and again. You know who is so careless of money he leaves coins in his pockets.
Don’t keep the coins, his father would advise. You will be called a thief and punished.
Dong-Sing knew that, and he had always returned the money. Some Americans thought he was such a dumb Chink bastard, he didn’t know enough to keep the cash. Others admired his scrupulous honesty.
Big George Hoover had to have a pair of panels put into the side seams of his shirts and vests to make the buttons close around his belly. He is going to run for mayor again.
Who is Big George Hoover? Dong-Sing’s father would wonder, but he would think, If he is fat, he must be rich. Make friends with him. Get on his good side.
Dong-Sing didn’t need a letter from his father to tell him that.
George Hoover was one of the men who left money in his pocket the first time he brought clothes to China Joe. Mr. Hoover was impressed by Dong-Sing’s honesty. The investment of a few coins—returned instead of kept—had paid off handsomely. Soon Big George would build a bank right down the street from Wright’s General Outfitting; he had warned China Joe about Bob Wright’s bad accounting practices even before Johnnie Sanders was killed.
Knowing things about people is not the same as understanding them, Dong-Sing would admit in the letter he planned to send next Wednesday. Americans simply didn’t make a lot of sense to Jau Dong-Sing. In China, a smart but poor boy like Johnnie Sanders could have studied hard and taken the civil service test to become a bureaucrat. Everyone would have been glad to know him. In China, if a rich man needed a favor, he could go to the bureaucrat who used to be poor and say, “Hey, my good friend! Nice to see you doing so well! I got a problem with some business dealings. Can you help me out?” In America, when Johnnie Sanders tried to better himself, he was killed.
In America, it is dangerous for a colored man to have money, so I pretend I am poor, Jau Dong-Sing wrote when the nigger boy was found. I keep my money with George Hoover, and not in Bob Wright’s safe.
Why don’t you join a tong? his father must have wondered.
Certainly, that would have been Dong-Sing’s preference, but it took twelve men to make a tong. There were only four Chinese in all of Kansas, too few to club together for investments.
Dong-Sing was still a little nervous about doing business with George Hoover, but so far the arrangement was working out well. It was George Hoover’s suggestion that he and Jau Dong-Sing enter into a silent partnership to build small rental houses up on Military Road. Already they had three, with plans to build a fourth. Nobody knew the capital was China Joe’s, and that’s the way Dong-Sing wanted it. Big George orders the wood and supervises the carpenters so white men do not become envious of my wealth, he wrote in his mind.
Renting to Wyatt and Morgan Earp was Big George’s idea, too. He pointed out that they were Republicans and Methodists, and Wyatt was Reform like George. Dong-Sing appreciated that the Earps didn’t get drunk and break things, but he didn’t like the idea of taking the Reform side against Mayor Kelley and Bob Wright and a hotel owner like Deacon Cox. After Wyatt arrested Bob, Dong-Sing got even more nervous about the factions. The Earps might lose their jobs. Then Dong-Sing would have no tenants for two houses.
“You say yes to Doc,” Dong-Sing insisted, even though George didn’t like how much Doc drank. “He good tenant! You say yes!”
Doc likes noodles now. He is a friend who helps me with English, Dong-Sing planned to write soon. Everyone says I sound like him when I talk, and I am proud. I have not told Doc that I am his landlord. I don’t think he would mind renting from a Chinaman, but he might tell Kate and she cannot be trusted. Last week they had another fight. Doc told me to take Kate’s things to Bessie’s house, but I made an excuse and waited. Kate always returns and Doc always takes her back.
Who is Doc? His father would wonder. Who is Kate? Who is Bessie?
When you do laundry for people, you know who sleeps alone and who has taken a lover. You know who is pregnant and who is not. You observe the coming and going of semen and blood, Dong-Sing thought. You can read in these stains the stories of people who hardly notice you and never speak when they pass you in the street.
Dong-Sing was shocked when he realized that Mattie Blaylock was Wyatt’s girl. Dong-Sing had used Mattie himself a few times because she was so cheap, and because he wanted to see what a white woman was like down there.
Working on the wrong side of the tracks, Jau Dong-Sing had plenty of opportunity to observe the flesh trade, and it confused him. In China, good fathers had the right—the duty, even—to sell a daughter in order to feed the rest of the family. In America, daughters ran away from their fathers and whored to feed themselves alone. In China, when a wife grew old and unattractive, a rich man would take a concubine or two into his household. Here, rich men used the same girls as any lousy young cowherd who stank of dung and sweat. George Hoover had married a prostitute, and Doc was a gentleman but lived with Kate, even though she still sold herself.