The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [60]
“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