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death is depending on you. Take note of this”). A nephew wanted financial assistance to cleanse himself from the “humiliation of an embezzling uncle.” Even the embezzling uncle turned to Hsiao, seeking monetary relief from his own humiliation. Hsiao’s daughter asked for a gold watch (“Big Uncle’s daughters have gold watches, but we do not. My venerable one can use his own judgment whether jade should be inlaid or not”). His wife chastised him for his selfishness (“Month after month, I was longing for your money, but all you sent were plain letters”). His misplaced generosity, she wrote, had bankrupted her household (“I am so poor now, I have to pawn things in order to have money to buy food, while you go donating money, trying to wear your ‘high hat’ ”). She resorted to threats (“I do not want to take care of your home anymore. Even though you are a slave to them, none of your brothers love you. Why should you have pity on your brothers?”). And finally she wrote, “There is a Lou-fal monastery near Canton; let me go there and become a nun, and let your brothers take care of the children. I am not your lifelong partner. Please think it over; when you are old in the future, are you going to depend on your children or depend on your brothers? I pray you send me $200 so that I can have money to spend in the monastery. Now, I do not care how hard you work in America; I have no pity on you.” Hsiao never did learn on whom he could rely in his old age, because he died the following year.

Nonetheless, the Chinese laundrymen in America viewed their families back home with pride; for many, it was all that kept them going in their hard lives. Perhaps nothing better illustrates their enduring love and self-sacrifice than L. C. Tsung’s novel The Marginal Man, in which the character Charles Lin walks into a laundry and sees a withered old Chinese man ironing under a bare light bulb, even though it is past ten o’clock at night. After a brief conversation, the laundryman tells Lin he has lived in the United States for forty years, working and sending money back to his family. He proudly shows Lin a photograph. “In the center sat a white-haired old woman, surrounded by some fifteen or twenty men, women and children, of various ages ... The whole clan, with contented expressions on their faces, were the offspring of this emaciated old man, who supported not only himself but all of them by his two shaking, bony hands ... Charles Lin realized that this picture was the old man’s only comfort and relaxation. He had toiled like a beast of burden for forty years to support a large family which was his aim of existence, the sole meaning of his life. The picture to him was like a diploma, a summa cum laude to an honor student.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A New Generation Is Born

It is ironic that so many Chinese émigrés, all part of a culture that cherished large families, would never enjoy the special satisfaction of raising their own children. True, many sent regular remittances back to their home villages in China to support wives, children, and other relatives, but this was hardly the same experience as watching one’s own beloved sons and daughters mature into adult-hood. Yet this was the price so many Chinese men paid for the extreme shortage of Chinese women in the United States; thousands of them were forced to live out their days either as bachelors, or in family arrangements split between two continents.

The numbers alone tell a discouraging tale. Back in 1880, on the eve of the Exclusion Act, the male-female ratio in the ethnic Chinese community was more than twenty to one—100,686 men and 4,779 women. By 1920, deaths and departures had reduced the male Chinese population, while a small number of births had increased the female population, but there were still seven Chinese men for every Chinese woman. One significant cause of this disproportion was that U.S. immigration policies prevented Chinese workingmen from bringing their wives into the country. The law automatically assigned to women the status of their husbands, so if their husbands