The Joss House

Thomas Ah Lum stood in the temple at the intersection of First and Lake Streets and listened to the silence. It was a Tuesday morning in October 1926, and he had just finished sweeping the floor around the altar. The wooden planks were smooth from decades of footsteps, though fewer feet passed through the doorway now than when his grandfather had first come to Reno with the railroad.

The Joss House was new, built only two years ago. Thomas had helped raise money for it, standing in laundries from Second Street to the edge of Chinatown, asking men to contribute what they could. Most of them remembered the fire. Everyone in the community remembered the fire, or remembered hearing about the fire, the day in November 1908 when the city had decided the old Chinatown would be erased. Thomas had been a boy then, maybe six or seven, old enough to remember his father’s face the morning after.

Now, at thirty-four, Thomas kept the Joss House in the early hours before his shift at Tom’s Laundry. He lit the incense before dawn, made sure the altar was clean, performed the small rituals that had been passed to him without fanfare, the way his father had passed them to him while folding shirts or pressing collars. His father was in San Francisco now, retired, living with Thomas’s younger brother who had a restaurant there. Thomas stayed. Someone had to.

The temple was small, perhaps thirty feet square, with a ceiling high enough that sound traveled differently than it did in the laundry. Here, every movement echoed slightly. In the laundry, sound was absorbed by steam and cloth. Thomas preferred the laundry.

He finished with the broom and went to the back room where he kept the smaller items. Paper offerings, incense, the record of donations. The book was leather-bound, and he opened it to the last entry. Twelve names in the past month. It had been thirty names per month two years ago, when the Joss House was new and people still felt that collective sense of having accomplished something. Now people were dispersing. Children of the community were opening businesses in other parts of town, or leaving Reno entirely for California or Portland. Even the laundries were changing. More and more white families were buying their own washing machines.

Thomas locked the temple and walked back toward Second Street. The morning was cool, the light the particular quality of desert autumn. He passed three storefronts he remembered as occupied five years ago. Now they were boarded. The grocery that had sold the vegetables his mother preferred had closed in 1923. The restaurant where men gathered in the evenings was running half-hearted, the owner’s son was in Los Angeles.

Tom’s Laundry occupied a narrow storefront between Lake and Center Streets. Thomas’s father had opened it in 1904, not long after the fire. It had been successful for years, enough to support the family and still contribute to the community. Now it was successful enough to keep Thomas from starving, but the margins were thin. He spent twelve hours a day in humidity and heat, pressing shirts and folding linens, taking in work from the downtown hotels and some of the professional offices.

He unlocked the front door and began his routine. Lighting the boilers. Organizing the bundles that had come in the day before. At eight o’clock, Mrs. Delacroix arrived with shirts from her husband’s law office. At nine, a hotel porter left three bags of linens. By ten, the steam was rising and the work had become automatic, muscle memory and breathing rhythm the same.

Around noon, a younger man came in with a small package. Thomas recognized him as the son of one of the old neighbors, though they had never spoken. The boy looked nervous.

“My father wants to know if you still run the game,” he said quietly.

Thomas continued folding a sheet. The keno game had started in the laundries years ago, a version of the lottery games that men had played in the old country. It had spread through Chinatown, through all the laundries, a way to move a few coins around on a slow afternoon. It was illegal, though no one had been arrested in years. The game had become almost abstract, something people did without thinking about it.

“I have sheets to finish,” Thomas said.

The boy left the package on the counter anyway. Inside was money and a list of numbers. Thomas put it in a drawer without looking at it more carefully.

He thought about his grandfather, who had come across the country on the railroad in 1869. He thought about his father, who had survived the fire and rebuilt. He thought about the Joss House, which he maintained for no one in particular, or for the memory of many people, or for the simple fact that it was there and needed care.

That evening, after closing, Thomas walked back to the Joss House. He lit the incense again and stood before the altar in the candlelight. The small statue of the deity watched him without expression. Thomas had never been particularly religious, though his family had maintained the temple as long as there had been a temple to maintain. Religion and tradition had become the same thing, or perhaps they had always been the same thing and he was only now old enough to notice.

He thought about the boy, about the game, about the slow dispersal of the community into the wider town. Change was not something that happened all at once. It was accumulation. A business closing. A family moving away. A young person opening a shop on the other side of town, integrating gradually into the larger economy. The community was not dying. It was becoming something else, diffusing like steam.

Thomas left the temple and walked home through the dark streets. Tomorrow he would open the laundry and press shirts. He would maintain the Joss House in the early morning hours. He would wait for fewer and fewer people to pass through the door, and he would accept this, the way his father had accepted the fire, the way his grandfather had accepted everything by necessity.

The community was shrinking, but Thomas remained, and so the temple remained. That was enough. It would have to be enough.

---