Preview of Our Laundry, Our Town by Alvin Eng
Preview of Our Laundry, Our Town by Alvin Eng
EXCERPTS from OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond by Alvin Eng (Fordham University Press | Empire State Editions; May 17, 2022)
From Chapter 1: The Urban Oracle Bones of Our Laundry: Channelling China’s Last Emperor and Rock ‘n’ Roll’s First Opera
While I have been blessed to have always had a roof over my head and the honor of living with loved ones, when I was growing up, homelessness was a constant spiritual state. A child’s longing to belong is one of the most powerful forces and relentless muses on Earth. In every culture, belonging has many different nuances of meaning and resonance. What and who exactly constitutes that destination of longing changes with every age and, in childhood, with every grade. What never seems to change is the feeling that we never quite arrive, and when or if we do, it only lasts for a fleeting time and was never quite what we expected.
These memoir portraits are an attempt to decode and process the urban oracle bones from growing up as the youngest of five children in an immigrant Chinese family that ran a hand laundry. Our family was born of an arranged marriage, and our laundry was in the Flushing, Queens, neighborhood of that singular universe that was New York City in the 1970s. Like many children of immigrant or “other” family origins in late-twentieth-century America, I was constantly seeking American frames of reference with which to contextualize my own “outsider” experiences and sensibilities.
Although Flushing became New York City’s second China-town during the 1980s, a.k.a. “The People’s Republic of Floo-Shing,” in the 1960s and ’70s, we were one of only a fistful of Chinese families there. The Flushing of my childhood was still basking in the afterglow of the post–World War II suburban baby boom. That boom was celebrated at the 1964–65 World’s Fair, held in Flushing Meadows Park. That World’s Fair was the zenith of “The American Century,” when anything was supposed to be possible. In this euphoric mood, Flushing immigrants were the last wave who gave up everything. They had forsaken their customs, their language—many would have changed their appearance if they could—just to get a whiff of “The American Dream.”
The underside of growing up in the post–World War II euphoria of the World’s Fair, as well as in the shadows of the Cold War, was that China was looming as Uncle Sam’s Communist Public Enemy #2. Under this cloud, our laundry frequently became a target for salvos of verbal abuse like “Chinky Cho, Go Home!” As a child in this hostile milieu, I never envisioned even setting foot in China, let alone perform a memoir monologue, The Last Emperor of Flushing, there that I wrote in English based on my family. This monologue was inspired, in part, by Thornton Wilder’s Americana play Our Town. I also never would have imagined that this Americana work has some Chinese artistic influence and roots.
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Our “Foo J. Chin Chinese Hand Laundry” was a long, narrow railroad-styled store that stretched from a parking lot in the rear to Flushing’s bustling Union Street in the front. Going from the back door to the front door, the way we entered every morning, the rear room was the family area—comprising a kitchen, dining, and napping area. This is where we all ate and where the kids did their homework and goofed off between laundry chores.
The middle room was where the ironing and wrapping of laundered garments took place. The middle room had long rectangular padded tables for ironing and sorting laundry and large white metal sewing stations. This was the largest room and also primarily the court of our mother, Toy Lain Chin Eng or “The Empress Mother” as she is anointed in The Last Emperor of Flushing. In this middle room, The Empress Mother took her breaks, read the Chinese newspapers, and listened to her beloved Cantonese opera records.
The front room was where our family, or what I, in my Last Emperor of Flushing persona, refer to as The Eng Dynasty, interacted with the outside world. After entering through the front door, customers stood behind a wall-to-wall wooden counter. This is where they dropped off their dirty laundry and later picked up and paid for their cleaned, wrapped laundry. Directly opposite our laundry’s front door, the counter had a drawbridge of sorts—a cut-away countertop and gated swing door—to receive deliveries and children coming home from school. This was the smallest room and also the domain of our Dad, King Wah Eng. Between greeting customers and tending to all matters of laundry business, this is where he listened to WCBS Newsradio 880 on his small transistor radio and read the Daily News. On most busy Saturdays, the entire family would be in this room tending to customers.
The middle and front room walls were lined with floor-to- ceiling shelves of rows and rows of brown paper–wrapped packages of the customers’ clean laundry. Each brown paper package had a different colored ticket on the outside. In my child’s mind’s eye, each brightly colored ticket was a window into a different apartment of the big brown building represented by the shelves of wrapped laundry packages. The cleaned garments wrapped up in these packages were the silent witnesses to the events and rituals that made up the lives of their wearers. The wearers all belonged to families in which both parents did not work twelve hours a day, six days a week in a laundry. In- stead, the father worked only five days a week, 9–5 in an office; the mother was a full-time stay-at-home Mom, and both of them spoke perfect English. I called this building “The Great Wall of Laundry.”
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While I never saw my parents pull actual meat cleavers on each other, I witnessed their weekly, sometimes daily, tremors of psychological warfare on each other grow more viciously antagonistic week after week. Inevitably, this led to an explosion.
One afternoon while in the third grade, I came home from school to find that Dad had pinned The Empress Mother to one of the padded ironing tables and was threatening to strike her.
“Dad, let her go!” I screamed.
“Nee slee kie-ya!” [“You stupid bastard!”] The Empress Mother shrieked.
“Shut up!” ordered Dad, and struck her.
I raced next door to Norman’s T.V. repair shop. “Please! Please! Help me! My parents are fighting!”
A repairman ran with me to the back of the laundry, where Dad was still striking Mom. Dad saw the repairman and im- mediately stopped.
“Hey,” intervened the repairman. “Let’s just take it easy here, all right.”
After de-escalating this violent encounter, the repairman retreated back to his shop next door, leaving me alone with Dad and The Empress Mother. In the aftermath of this primal breach of trust, none of us could even look at each other. I gazed up at The Great Wall of Laundry and wished I could go home with one of those packages. To live with another family—one of those that unwrapped their packages and then wore the cleaned shirts, skirts, slacks, and ties.
Incidents like this left me petrified and scarred inside and out—reluctant to deal with conflict and confrontation on any level. I spent much of my childhood searching inward for psychological solace as well as physical protection. To escape the oft-times suffocating and intimidating environment of our laundry, thankfully my brother Herman and I bonded and created a joyous world of our own through the power of rock ’n’ roll.
I bought my first vinyl record, a single, at age six. On the second floor of the Masters department store on the corner of Main Street and 37th Avenue in downtown Flushing, I somehow broke away from my older siblings and sprinted over to the music and records department. Barely able to reach the counter, I plopped my holiday or birthday one-dollar bill on the counter and said, “‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’ by The Beatles.” The surprised clerk first looked to my older siblings, who had by now caught up to me, to confirm my purchase. They did. Just as I don’t exactly remember how I had a one-dollar bill in my pocket, I also don’t remember how I knew to ask for both songs of what I perceived to be a double A–sided single. I just did. My second record purchase one year later of a full LP album—a double LP, actually—forever changed and strongly influenced the futures of Herman and me.
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For me, Tommy launched a lifelong habit of constantly quoting rock lyrics—first as a fan and later as a music journalist and publicist and, even now, as a playwright, performer, and educator.
When we co-purchased Tommy, our five-year age difference was tenable as I was seven and Herman was twelve. By the time we became nine and fourteen, things were radically different. Herman started working outside of our laundry at the nearby Adventurer’s Inn summer amusement park and year-round gaming arcade (and we’re talking pinball). Honing their musical skills and feeling their teenage mojo, Herman and his friends were also slowly becoming neighborhood rock stars who were fully expecting to inherit The Who’s mantle.
Now often alone with my parents in the laundry, I started relating less to The Who and more to the protagonist–title character of their first rock opera. Listening to Tommy and now drawing pictures became my sanctuary and inward escape from the domestic warfare being waged by my parents. Tommy is a “deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard” whose “miracle cure” makes him a hearing, seeing, and speaking international phenom. Of course, his parents manipulate his newfound and un- sought fame for their own greed. Ultimately, Tommy retreats into his unreachable, deaf, dumb, and blind mode, as represented by the elegiac “See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me” motif.
While listening to Tommy, I often drew pencil portraits of my heroes from the New York Knicks, Mets, Giants, and, of course, The Who. Along with my drawing escape, I started becoming equally enthralled with Tommy’s accompanying artwork and packaging. The album cover artwork smartly did not include photos of the band, as was common practice back then. As a result, the twelve-page booklet and triple foldout album cover created a 36′′ × 12′′ immersive gallery or hall of mirrors to which I always had access in the back room of our laundry.
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As a very young child, during those brief years when The Eng Dynasty still consisted of the seven of us all being present in our laundry, I remember my older siblings’ groaning upon the arrival of these deliveries, for it meant we would have a lot of work to do. Later on, as usually the sole child in the laundry, I eagerly awaited the arrival of these boxes and would snatch the papers as soon as the boxes were opened. After the sorting and wrapping work was over, I eagerly filled up sheet after sheet with my pencil portraits. Years later, dramatizing the process and impact of portraiture became a primary focus as a playwright.
The Empress Mother encouraged my drawing and let me do this alongside her break station in the large middle room of our laundry. Repeatedly listening to Tommy while alternately gazing at the album cover artwork and drawing my own little pictures completely captivated my nine-year-old psyche and mind—deepening the spell with each playing. But inevitably my reverie would be broken by a bigger power, The Empress Mother’s drowning out Tommy with what my nine-year-old self called “that dreaded ‘Pots and Pans music’”—or what the cultured world calls Cantonese opera. Yes, in the early 1970s, The Eng Dynasty was probably the only American household in which the kids were pleading with their parents, “Turn that noise down!”
In that sacred back room, when not blasting me with shrill morality tales of supernatural Cantonese opera characters, The Empress Mother would frequently lecture me on the ways of the world beyond my little laundry fiefdom: “Mo ho ngen oh nguy-tie. Um tek ngen. Alloy no ho-gnen oh-key. Mo ho ngen oh nguy-tie.” [“There’s no good people out there. They don’t feel for people. All the good people you will ever need are right here at home. There are no good people out there.”]
For the next thirty years, through the sweeping worldwide changes of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, within the walls of The Eng Dynasty, the song remained the same for the dominating Empress Mother and her obliging Last Emperor of a youngest son. We could have lived in the 1870s . . . or the 1780s . . . or the 1690s.
Over half a century earlier and half a world away, China’s actual Last Emperor, Aisin Gioro Pu Yi, was receiving similar information. In 1908, Pu Yi was thrust onto the Emperor’s throne at age three to become an unknowing pawn in a ruthless war being waged by his manipulative, self-serving elders. Pu Yi “ruled” for only what would become the final decade of the Qing Dynasty. China’s Last Emperor spent most of his life trying to solve the riddle of his birthright and a legacy he was born into but never asked for . . . just like Tommy. For the first quarter- century of Pu Yi’s life, that meant his trying to be reinstated as Emperor and returning his family to its former glory. For the first quarter-century of my life, it meant living in constant struggle with my ethnicity as part of my longing to belong.
Preview of Our Laundry, Our Town by Alvin Eng
