The Chinaman — Stay, all ye Oriental Americans. In July of 1914, the guy who did the neighborhood laundry was called “The Chinaman,” or better yet, “The Chink.” The Chinaman, then (or the Chink, if you prefer), was a man named Chon Tsu, the T-s-u being exceedingly difficult to pronounce unless you are yourself of Chinese extraction, in which case you would speak it as though it were a cross between “Sue” and “She.” In the neighborhood, they called him Charlie Shoe. Charlie was thirty-eight years old, a short, slender man who still wore a pigtail and clothes he had brought from his native province of Kwang-tung, meaning that he looked as though he were wearing pajamas and bed slippers in the streets of Italian Harlem. He had been in America for two years, having been one of those fortunate Orientals who’d smuggled himself into this gloriously democratic land after the Exclusion Act of 1882.
Charlie worked eighteen hours a day in his laundry shop just downstairs from where Stella and the entire Di Lorenzo brood lived, his establishment being a two-by-four cubbyhole wedged between the grocery store on the corner and the salumeria on the other side, the tailor shop being the next in line on First Avenue. It is doubtful that he even knew Stella existed before that afternoon in July.
There was, of course, a steady stream of customers in Charlie’s laundry, but to him all white people looked the same, and besides, they smelled bad. Charlie had a wife and four children in Canton, and he sent them most of his earnings, living at a bare subsistence level in the back of his shop, where he washed the clothes and ironed them and then wrapped them in thin brown paper, slipping an identifying pink ticket under the white string, Chinese calligraphy and bold Arabic numerals, no tickee no shirtee.
He did not speak English at all well, his vocabulary consisting of a scant hundred or so words, and he always looked harried and somewhat bewildered, and sounded rude or irritated because his words were monosyllabic to begin with, and delivered with a clipped Chinese accent usually accompanied by a frown that seemed to denote impatience but actually was a direct facial translation of utter confusion. He wasn’t such a happy man, Charlie Shoe. There were very few Chinese women in America in the year, 1914, and the Chinese like to fuck the same as anyone else, witness the population problem in Mao’s thriving little commune over there. As inscrutable as Charlie may have appeared to the parade of wops who marched in and out of his shop with their dirty laundry, chances are he occasionally entertained the wildest fantasies of a sex life denied to him here in America. Have you ever seen any of those Far Eastern pornographic line drawings, tinted in the most delicate shades, and advertising the Oriental tool as one of truly remarkable dimensions — or at least so Rebecca described it to me, and mentioned in passing that the Chinese dong put my own meager weapon to shame. But what white woman in her right mind would even have entertained the thought of bedding down with a hairless, yellow-skinned, slant-eyed runt like poor Charlie Shoe?
Stella maybe.
I have no desire to probe too deeply into the fantasies of an eleven-year-old girl, especially when she happened to grow up to be my mother. I can only imagine what the sight of Agnelli and Filomena interlocked in interruptus did to fire the imagination of someone already hooked on the sloppy romances that were pouring out of the Hollywood dream factory and inundating the neighborhood playhouses. I have little or no respect for the theory that fiction triggers real events. But I cannot discount the fact that my mother was always a movie buff, and that her addiction started sometime in 1912 or ’13, when films began to influence American life in a very important way. As a matter of fact, the two most significant changes in Harlem since the arrival of Francesco in 1901 and the initiation of Stella into the mysteries of tickle-and-grab in 1914 were the appearance of the automobile and the ascendance of the motion picture. It’s difficult to estimate how many people in New York owned a tin lizzie, but there were nearly four million of the flivvers on the nation’s roads, and it’s safe to assume at least a goodly portion of them were clattering along the cobbled streets of the country’s largest city. Where horses had once clopped upon and crapped upon the streets of New York, making it difficult to find the gold beneath all that manure, Henry Ford’s new contrivance now rattled and clanked around every corner, adding to the general din that had so disturbed Francesco upon his arrival. New York was never a quiet place, but the advent and subsequent popularity of the automobile did little to restore my grandfather’s sense of tranquility.
To Stella, cars were exciting. She watched them jangling by, she dreamed of riding in one (it was rumored that her Uncle Joe, Tess’s oldest brother and a gambler in Arizona, had bought one and, if he came east again this Christmas, might take her motoring), she bought all the paper-bound cheapbacks of jokes about the Ford car, and memorized them, and delighted her classmates by reeling them off one after another, with rapid-fire precision and nearly total recall. A label she saw pasted to the hood of one car — COME ON, BABY, HERe’s YOUR RATTLE — hinted at pleasures remote from the joys of motoring, promised delights she had not yet experienced except vicariously in the movie houses she frequented with her brother Luke every Saturday afternoon; Cristina and Dominick were still considered too young to spend hours in the dark watching what Francesco called, in the coined language of the immigrant, garbagio. The Italian word for “garbage” is immondizie, but in much the same way that Italian immigrants invented the word baschetta for “basket” (the choices in true Italian are either paniere or cesta), so did many other words come into half-breed existence. The funniest of these was probably minted by the earliest immigrants at a time when toilets were still in backyards and not in the hallways of the tenements. The Italian word for “toilet” is gabinetto. But those poor struggling souls who had to race out to the backyard to sit upon a makeshift wooden seat in a tar-paper shack learned the word “backhouse,” and immediately transmogrified it to, bacausa, instant Italian-English.
The movies were garbagio to Francesco, and it was with great reluctance that he shelled out the admission price of fifteen cents apiece to his daughter and son each Saturday. On the particular Saturday that Stella was supposedly exposed to the rapacious intent of Charlie Shoe, she and Luke saw a winner called Hearts Adrift, starring Mary Pickford —
“Yes, but what’s your real name, Miss Pickford?”
“Gladys Smith.”
“Would you spell that for me, please?”
— and a Mack Sennett Keystone Kops two-reeler starring Ford Sterling and Mabel Normand, and the latest biweekly installment of the twenty-episode serial called The Perils of Pauline. Now here’s where a little second-guessing comes in, not that Stella’s story is to be doubted, you understand. (It had better be believed, or that poor hapless Chink suffered a southern Italian vendetta for no reason at all.) Such was the popularity of Pauline that, in addition to showing her continuing adventures on the screen once every two weeks, the episodes were also serialized in local newspapers, their appearance in print timed to coincide with the theater runs. But since Harlem wasn’t Forty-Second Street, and since the “chapters,” as Stella called the filmed episodes, sometimes reached the Cosmo on 116th Street several months after the fictionalized accounts appeared in the newspapers, it’s entirely possible that she had already read the episode she saw that day, and was conditioned to be excited by it, and therefore more susceptible to it than she otherwise might have been. It is a matter of record (go look it up) that on May 17, 1914, a full two months before Charlie Shoe reportedly lost his pigtailed head, the New York American ran a fictionalized account of what happened to Pauline when she went to visit New York’s Chinatown: