Sunday Scaries: Lu’s Laundry and Other Services

Some prospectors’ ghosts leave their previous clothes real easy. My laundry shop was just a railway station on their way to the afterlife. I washed their dusty denims with the new Levi’s rivets as souls caught the steam off the hot water. They disappeared to whatever their version of heaven or hell was. Quiet, like popping suds.

This one though! This son of a bitch made my hands burn worse than lye and would not shut up.

“Murdered!” yelled the prospector. “I must be avenged!” The right side of his head was caved in, likely a shovel when his back was turned. Blood matted down his brown hair, caked around his beard. He was balding from the crown of his head and had tried to hide it under a hat. Otherwise, he was as hairy as any Westerner, chest hair leading into his beard.

Despite his injuries, I recognized the ghost from when he was a living customer and not an undead annoyance. He never tipped, not even around the holidays. The Mandarin characters for a stingy person, literally translates to small ghost, xiǎo qì guǐ.

I have to admire my people’s language sometimes.

This xiǎo qì guǐ wore the same clothes as the ones I was washing, denim overalls and a faded plaid shirt that was nearly transparent in its threadbareness. The true clothes were getting cleaner than their ghostly versions, sweat and mud darkening the water.

Haunted clothes aren’t my advertised specialty, but they were common. Some deaths are more natural, infection and consumption. Rattlesnakes and scorpions can kill you faster than the doctor can arrive. Violence was always close. So many aggrieved men with guns and pick axes. Who hasn’t had their claim with a vein of gold taken from their cold dead hands?

The laws and dangers are why I clean clothes instead of prospecting. No one wants to run a laundry with evenings of aching backs and stinging hands. It’s still better than my first job when I arrived in this accursed country.

“Won’t someone help me?” the ghost wailed. None of my customers noticed xiǎo qì guǐ as he paced through their bodies. I brought out clean bundles of clothes, took the customers’ payments and the bags of soiled clothes. If these white men couldn’t see their own brethren’s ghost, perhaps he would leave at sundown, no longer trespassing among the living.

No such luck.

My ears rang with his sobbing, his bargaining with his god. He started reciting the Lord’s Prayer as I portioned out my rice. The last time I heard those words were in a tiny apartment, crammed with other escapees from the brothel. When the pastor’s wife taught us how to read the Bible, I demanded answers. Why did your god let these men hurt us? Why did your god let my people die for trying to keep opium out of our country?

Over my dinner of dried meat, I could barely eat. I erupted at the ghost, “Shut up! How am I supposed to eat with your noise?”

Xiǎo qì guǐ was stunned into wondrous silence before he drifted to my side. “You can hear me? You speak English?”

How could I not? I have lived and worked among them for fifteen, sixteen years, and they didn’t think I could learn their language beyond please, thank you, one dollar! Did they know the type of willpower, the strength to survive crossing an ocean? Maybe their fathers made the journey, and they had crossed a country, sure, but they didn’t escape from a brothel. That courage was still fresh in my blood.

They knew they would still find Americans along every stop of their railroad stations. I found American ghosts at the end of mine.

“Yes, of course,” I answered. “How can I make you go away?” Surely my neighbors thought I had lost my mind. They knew I lived alone. Perhaps now they thought I finally had some company, ha! 

“Avenge my death!” ordered the xiǎo qì guǐ.

I laughed at the absurdity, then whispered, “Do you want me hanged for murder and come back as a ghost too?” I read the newspapers my customers left behind or threw away. I read about the massacres and lynchings up north, copied the words to help me learn this language’s writing beyond their god’s book.

Maybe all this murdering and thieving was the stolen land’s justice in a way. I tread lightly, and ask the Goddess of Mercy to send my offerings to those who lived on this land for centuries prior. By her benevolence or luck, I’ve never had a white mob turn against me. They do not look too closely at my shaved head and queue. I play the good immigrant, a background character in their lives. This man thought I was a dumb melon, easily commanded like a servant.

How xiǎo qì guǐ cried. “Please, I will know who he is if you bring him to me! You could work some Chinese poison on him.”

I decided to get rid of xiǎo qì guǐ first.

Unfortunately, while poisons work on Americans and Chinese people just the same, it turns out Chinese ghosts and American ghosts do not follow the same rules. Wards and charms had no effect. I wished I still had my jade pendant, a talisman for protection, but my family had sold it early in our fall from one of the most wealthy families in the province to selling my sisters and me. Perhaps I needed an actual Taoist priest, or maybe my translation of the Chinese characters into English was inaccurate.

The xiǎo qì guǐ at least left the laundry for hours at a time to hunt down his murderer. What was he going to do, suck the chi out of him?

Days later, a man was criticizing my laundry skills in an attempt to bring down my prices. He towered over me, hands leaning on my counter so that the wood creaked in protest. A pale green jade ring shone on his pinky finger. He was going to break my counter before I gave him a discount. I steeled my spine, refusing to be intimidated in my own shop.

I chanted back, “One shirt, one dollar.”

The customer’s spittle was flying at my cheeks when xiǎo qì guǐ swept through my door, crying out for blood.

“Murderer! Thief!”

This man wasn’t even the one who owned the clothes–too small for him. He must have sold it to the customer who brought me the accursed clothes. The dueling shouts were deafening. I watched another customer open the door and startle at the shouting. He quickly retreated, dodged a rolling tumbleweed, and stumbled to Wang’s Washing across the street.

Damn, the supposed murderer was costing me money. And Wang was going to ask about the fight, that gossipmonger.

“For you, good customer,” I held up my hands in surrender. “One shirt, one quarter.” I laid on my accent thicker than that coffee these foreigners loved so much. I desperately wanted a cup of oolong tea.

The murderer looked so pleased with himself, smug and cheap.

“And I’ll give you a tip,” he said. His breath smelled rancid. “Get that iron real hot first.” He left, laughing at his own joke. The door banged shut behind him.

“Murderer!” The ghost ran out after him, crashing his phantom body through the door. A horse’s fart would have made more of an impact than that ghost.

“Roll away,” I muttered under my breath as I wiped my face.

When I picked up his slip, I stared at the name. Jeremy Wilson. I had seen it somewhere before. I remember writing down the name in my journal, anger tightening my knuckles. What had he done? Certainly, it wasn’t this ghost’s murder. Any smart man would have left town by now if it was reported in the local papers and he was named as a suspect.

That night, I searched through my rice paper journals, pages thin enough for making lanterns and thick with hope. I switched between English and Mandarin here, reminding myself of the old characters my brothers taught me. I wrote letters I never sent to the editor, demanding an investigation into the corrupt politicians and police. A journalist had written about Captain William Douglas and the San Francisco Police’s grand show of arresting more than two hundred girls for prostitution. The Captain took the girls straight to the brothels.

My journal contained letters to a paper family who had not sold their daughters to the tong to stave off starvation. I did not write down the horrors I had encountered on the ship with my dead sisters, at the auction block, the brothel. Instead I wrote of the women who rescued me, then tried to teach me their religion until I cut my hair and changed my name, joining the knights of the washtub. I even penned some pretend letters back. They would have advised me to dress warmly, nevermind that I lived in the desert. They would remind me of festival days, as if I could find mooncakes or dumplings here. I wonder if I had forgotten their faces. How I imagined a nephew was now married with a child on the way! Time had slipped away.

I flipped back until I found the customer’s name. Wilson was a member of the mob who had hung Chan, a Chinese man, from a balcony in a town further west. The dead man’s family name could have been the same as mine, one letter off. How a letter or two can separate a family among their records. Chan had been working when the mob decided he was one of the Chinese men responsible for a white man’s death. How could he have outrun five hundred people who had been customers and neighbors the previous week? How long had he been the ‘good’ immigrant before he became the enemy?

The mob had cut off Chan’s fingers to steal his rings. The court reported that one jade ring was not recovered. There was a picture and I recognized it from Wilson’s finger.

The wind howled through the cracks of my home like an angry ghost. I rubbed my fingers, reminding myself that mine were still attached.

There wasn’t a picture of Chan in the newspaper, his ring being more important than his features. I couldn’t have looked for my father’s nose or my grandfather’s eyes in his face. Had my brothers scattered to the four corners of the world in search of their own fortune? Did Chan have nieces and nephews back home who received his red envelope money? Was he the family legend, the one who’d gone off to the beautiful country to return its riches in school fees and new clothes? Were his parents still waiting for his next letter? 

There had been a conviction, reported months later. The judge had not sent anyone to prison. They had all received a fine, a hundred dollars. I imagined Jeremy Wilson grinning with his hands held high. They should have been shackled.

I soaked Wilson’s underclothes in arsenic meant for rats. I refused to imagine the murderer as anything but his worst deed. I didn’t care if he was a doting father, or had a dog who loved him dearly. Was justice fair if it came through violence? How could I commit the same crime I was punishing Wilson for?

Wasn’t I just the conduit for justice? When I meet the judges in hell, I will ask them where they were when justice was missing. If the pastor had been right, I had more than a few questions for his god.

I could only think of the dead man, how terrified he must have been when he realized his life would end on that balcony. Where was justice when the law found so little worth in our lives?

Xiǎo qì guǐ rushed through my door a week after I returned Wilson’s clothes. He had followed Wilson, waiting for him to wear the poisoned undershirt and boxers. At first, Wilson complained that he had drunk bad water. By the sixth evening, he was cursing everyone from the outhouse. The ghost recounted every detail, how Wilson emptied himself from both ends, the groaning and tears. In the early hours of the morning, he had a seizure in his own filth. Alone, except for the ghost.

“Thank you, sir.” Xiǎo qì guǐ no longer looked at me like an instrument for his will, but he didn’t, couldn’t see the true me underneath. “I’ll make sure his ghost doesn’t haunt you.”

I scoffed. It was the least he could do, but I was sure there would be more than one ghost dragging the murderer down to hell. There would be ghosts waiting for me too. I dreamt of them for several nights. Hands on my wrists, a noose around my throat, until I bolted awake, heartbeat thundering against my bound chest. When dawn crept into my window, I wondered if I was imagining Chan’s death instead of my own.

“Rest well, older brother,” I whispered as I burned a crudely folded paper house. It was not yet time for the Ghost Festival, but after I sent that offering, the nightmares stopped.

No one claimed Wilson’s body. The city buried him in a pauper’s grave. I was right to not imagine a grieving family for him. Still, I found myself restless. The sound of approaching horse’s clopping drew sweat to my brow, certain a sheriff was coming to my door. Perhaps it was time to concede the town to Wang’s Washing and find another place where the air was cleaner, the colors crisper.

At last, I rested without a ghost whispering in my ear, my conscience no heavier than a soap bubble.