Night School

The law arrived in Reno on a Thursday, by telegraph, the same way everything arrived.

Wei Ah Lum read about it in the Nevada State Journal that someone had left on his counter, folded to the second page. He read English slowly but accurately, the way he did most things. The article said the President had signed the Chinese Exclusion Act on May 6, 1882, and that no Chinese laborer, skilled or unskilled, would be permitted to enter the United States for a period of ten years.

He folded the newspaper and set it on the shelf behind the copper boiler and went back to work.

He was forty-eight years old. He had been in Reno for thirteen years, washing the clothes of men who would not wash their own. His laundry occupied a narrow room on Commercial Row, between a surveyor\'s office and a feed store that was sometimes a feed store and sometimes nothing at all. He had a sign that said LAUNDRY in English and nothing else. The men who needed him knew where he was.

The Chinatown where he lived occupied two blocks near the depot, south of the river. It was not large. At its peak, perhaps three hundred people lived there, in frame buildings and canvas structures that leaked in winter and baked in summer. There was a joss house where men burned paper offerings. There was a general store that sold dried fish and tea and writing paper and small wooden stamps with family names carved into the ends. There was a doctor who treated ailments with herbs that smelled of ginger and something sharper that Wei could not name.

By 1882, the population had already begun to thin. Men left for California, for Oregon, for places where the work was. Some went home. The railroad had been finished for thirteen years, and the men who had built it were dispersing across the West like seeds from a pod, taking root where they could, dying where they couldn\'t.

The Exclusion Act did not make Wei leave. He was already here. But it drew a line around him, a border he could feel even if he couldn\'t see it. He could not go home and come back. He could not bring his brother\'s son, who had written twice asking about work. He could not become a citizen. The law said he was ineligible, and the law was the law, and there was nothing to be done about it except to keep washing clothes.

On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, he taught himself to write.

He had been doing this for two years, working from a book of English grammar he had bought from a traveling salesman who was surprised anyone in Chinatown would want it. The book was called Practical Lessons in English Composition and it had been written for schoolchildren in Massachusetts. He studied it at the table by the window after the last shirts were pressed and hung, reading by the light of a kerosene lamp that cast his shadow large against the back wall.

He practiced the letters in a ledger book. His handwriting was precise and small, each letter formed with the same care he gave to shirt collars and cuffs. He wrote sentences from the book: The boy runs to school. The farmer plants his corn. The ship sails for Boston. None of these sentences had anything to do with his life, but the grammar was the grammar regardless.

On Thursday evenings, Bridget Fitzgerald came for her husband\'s shirts.

She was one of his regulars. Patrick Fitzgerald was a railroad man who drank more than he washed, and Bridget brought the shirts every week, six of them, and collected them pressed and folded two days later. She was a small woman with red hands and an accent from a part of Ireland that Wei could not place but recognized as something close to music.

She came in that Thursday, the week the Exclusion Act was signed, and set the bundle on the counter and looked at the grammar book lying open beside the lamp.

"You\'re studying," she said.

"Yes."

"English?"

He nodded.

She picked up the book and turned it over and read the spine. "This is for children," she said.

"Yes."

She set it down. "You should have someone to practice with."

He did not say anything.

"My son is seven," she said. "He reads well. I could send him on Tuesdays. He needs something to do after school besides throw rocks at the river."

Wei looked at her. In thirteen years in Reno, no one who was not Chinese had offered him anything that did not involve paying for it.

"I cannot pay," he said.

"I didn\'t ask you to pay. I asked if you wanted someone to read with."

The boy\'s name was Patrick, like his father. He came the following Tuesday with a schoolbook under his arm and sat at the table by the window and read aloud while Wei listened and corrected his own pronunciation against the boy\'s. The boy was serious about it in the way children are serious about things adults give them permission to be serious about. He read carefully and did not laugh when Wei mispronounced a word, and Wei did not laugh when the boy struggled with the longer passages.

They did this every Tuesday for the rest of the year.

In the evenings after the boy left, Wei would sit at the table and write in his ledger. The sentences grew longer. They stopped coming from the grammar book and started coming from him. He wrote about the laundry, about the river, about the smell of soap and starch and the way cotton felt when it was pressed correctly. He wrote about the desert light. He wrote about the law.

He wrote: I am here and I am staying and there is no law against staying.

This was not precisely true. But it was true enough.

Outside, the Chinatown population continued to shrink. Between 1880 and 1890, the Chinese population of Washoe County would drop by more than half, from over four hundred to just two hundred and seventeen. Men packed up and disappeared into the same vast country that had brought them here. The joss house grew quieter. The general store stopped stocking certain items.

Wei washed clothes. He studied English. He stayed.

On Tuesday evenings, the boy came and read.

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