All he spoke were the few words he needed to interact with customers: “Dollar two cents.” “Okay okay okay.” And of course: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – Sa-ta-nee!” Saturday sounded to her father like Toisanese for “slaughter you,” Chiu explains, so “every time he said it he would laugh.” (Like most Chinese in America back then, Chiu’s parents were from an area of China that spoke Toisanese.) A laundry on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., circa early 1900s. Chiu has no idea how the relationship developed, given that her father didn’t speak English. “They’d give me a quarter or nickel to turn their lights on or off, or turn on the gas.” For some reason, there was also a rabbi who used to come in, get handed a bowl of white rice by their father, and eat it sitting behind the counter, where he couldn’t be seen from the street. “That was how I made money,” says Gong, now 76. It was a Hasidic Jewish area, and on Saturdays, neighbors would come get Debbie’s brother Richie Gong-one of those babies from the black bag-to do tasks prohibited on the Sabbath. The family lived in the back of their laundry in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Driggs Avenue near the Williamsburgh Savings Bank. Then the next day she’d be working again, and she’d tell me to watch the baby.”
#CHINESE LAUNDRY SHOES FULL#
“ would work a full day, even though she had pains and everything, then finally they called the midwife. “Most of us were born at night,” says Chiu, who is an older sister to five brothers.
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