The Razing

The snow came early that November, and Wei Ah Lum was sweeping it from the boards in front of his laundry when the men came down Lake Street with their axes and their crowbars and began, without speaking to anyone, to take the quarter apart.

He was seventy-four years old. He had come to Reno in 1868, a young man of thirty-four with a single bag and a debt to the labor contractor, and he had laid track east of the town until the road was finished, and then, when the other men moved on to the next grade and the next, he had stayed. Forty years. He had washed and pressed the shirts of three generations of Reno men, the railroad men and the saloon men and the lawyers and the divorce women’s husbands, and he had buried a wife and raised a son and seen his son James become a merchant with a store of his own, and in all that time he had learned that the town did not want him and could not, somehow, do without him, and that these two facts could live side by side in the same place for a very long while without resolving.

The men worked their way up from the river. They started at the foot of Lake Street, where the flimsy frame buildings stood closest together, and Wei watched the first wall come down in a spray of splinters and old paper and the gray dust that forty years of dirt floors will make, and he understood that this was not a fire and not a flood and not anything that could be called an accident. This was a decision. Someone had decided, and the deciding had been done somewhere Wei had never been allowed to go, in a room with a long table, and now the men with the axes were carrying the decision out into the snow.

He had heard the rumors for weeks. Everyone in the quarter had heard them. The Board of Health had sent its doctor through in the fall, a thin man who held a handkerchief to his face and wrote in a notebook and looked at the open ditch along the south edge of the quarter and the rats and the privies and wrote and wrote, and the doctor had gone to the grand jury and called the place a plague spot, a breeding ground, a thirty-year accumulation of filth, and the grand jury had walked through with their foreman and looked and agreed. No one had told the Chinese directly. That was the thing Wei kept returning to as he stood with the broom in his hands. No one had come to the door. The word had reached them the way weather reaches a town, by rumor and by sky, and now the weather was here.

James came running up from his store. He was forty-three, heavier than Wei had ever been, in a wool coat with a collar, and he took his father by the arm and said they had to get the goods out, the ledgers, the good iron, the bolts of cloth, before the crews reached the door. Wei did not move. He looked at his son and then at the men, who were perhaps six buildings down now, swinging, and behind them a second crew was piling the broken wood and pouring oil and setting it alight, so that the snow fell into rising columns of smoke and turned to nothing before it reached the ground.

“They are burning it,” James said. He said it in the village dialect, which he rarely used anymore, and the words came out of him like something pulled loose.

“Yes,” Wei said.

He had seen this before. That was the part James did not know, or did not remember, because James had not been born. In 1878 the first Chinatown had burned, the one at the crossing of Virginia and First, fifty buildings gone in an hour while the fire brigade stood in front of the white blocks and let the Chinese section go, and the talk afterward had been of a gambler and a fight over a woman, and no one had ever been charged, and the quarter had simply picked itself up and moved two blocks to the foot of Lake Street and started again. Thirty years here. Now this. Wei thought that a man could spend his whole life moving two blocks at a time, ahead of the axes, and call it a life, and it would be one.

The temple they were leaving standing. He could see that from where he stood. The men went around it. Whatever the doctor had written, whatever the grand jury had decided, someone in that long room had drawn a line around the joss house and the few painted rooms where the white men liked to come at night, and those were spared, and Wei did not let himself laugh because if he started he was not sure what the sound would become.

He set the broom against the doorframe. Then he went inside, past James, who was wrapping the good flatirons in a quilt, and he took down from the shelf above the stove the things that mattered, which were not many and were not the things James was saving. A photograph of his wife. A small brass weight from the scale he had carried from the village. The English primer the Fitzgerald boy had used to teach him his letters, thirty years gone, the policeman now, the boy now a man with gray in his mustache who still tipped his hat when he passed. Wei put these in the front of his coat. Out in the street the fire took the building two doors down and he felt the heat of it come through the open door, sudden and welcome against the cold, and then he heard the first axe strike the wall of his own laundry, the wall he had nailed up himself in 1879 when his hands were still young.

James was shouting something at the men. It would do no good. Wei knew it would do no good and he let his son shout anyway, because a man should be allowed to shout at the thing that is taking his father’s house, even when the shouting changes nothing, even when the men do not turn their heads.

He walked out into the street. A hundred and fifty of them were out there now, the whole quarter, standing in the snow-lined street with bundles and birdcages and children, watching their forty years come down, and Wei went and stood among them, an old man with a photograph against his chest, and he looked east up Lake Street to where the smoke was, and he thought: not again to the river. There was no two blocks left that would be far enough. The town had grown around them on every side. Wherever they went next would be inside Reno now, and Reno would have to carry them whether it wanted to or not.

The axe struck the wall again behind him. He did not turn to watch it fall. He had watched enough walls fall for one life, and he found, standing in the cold with his son still shouting and the snow coming down through the smoke, that he would rather keep his eyes on the people, on the children who would have to begin again, on James, who would buy a lot somewhere and rebuild because that was what their family did, that was the only thing their family had ever done. Wei reached out and put his hand on the shoulder of the nearest child, a girl he did not know, and the girl looked up at him, and he said, in English, so she would have the word she would need, “We stay.”

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