Bless the Bride

but he can’t do away with all the old Chinese superstitions. ‘We have to have a screen, Aileen,’ he says to me when we are furnishing the place. To keep out the demons. And he still has an altar to the ancestors. Aren’t they funny, bless them?”
    She led me around the screen and into a fine living room that looked out onto the street. It was well-furnished in American style with a comfortable plush sofa and armchairs, marble side tables, and lace curtains at the window.
    “Sit down, my dear,” she said, gesturing to the sofa. “Kitty!” she called. “Kitty, where are you—we’ve got company.”
    A girl of about ten came running into the room. She had light hair and skin like her mother, but her eyes were almond-shaped like those of her Chinese father. It was an extremely attractive combination. She gave me an inquisitive stare.
    “My daughter Kitty,” Aileen Chiu said. “My youngest. I’ve three older girls and a boy. Our boy goes to college—Princeton, no less, but he’s home for the summer.” She turned to the girl who was lingering in the doorway, still staring at me with interest. “Kitty, tell Ah Fong that we want tea and see if he made any of his soda bread this morning.” She nodded to me. “We’ve a marvelous cook—he can cook anything, you know. Not just Chinese. Makes better soda bread than me.”
    The girl went running off and I heard her calling out something in Chinese in a high little voice.
    “You seem to have a good life here,” I said, looking around the room.
    “I came to this country with nothing and I don’t think I could have done better,” Aileen Chiu said. “Certainly not if I’d married some drunken lout of a lazy Irishman. My man owns four laundries—two in Brooklyn and two here in Manhattan. He provides well for us and he’s a good father too.” She smiled, then the smile faded as she stared out at the net curtains. “Of course, it’s a trifle lonely at times. We’re neither one thing nor the other, you see. The Irish will have nothing to do with me; neither will the Chinese.”
    “That must be hard,” I agreed.
    “We survive. There are the other Irish wives to take tea with and sometimes we go to a theater and out to a picnic on Staten Island on Sundays, so I can’t complain. But how about you, my dear? I don’t often see a white woman coming up Mott Street, unless it’s on one of these slumming tours.”
    “Slumming tours—what are they?”
    She laughed. “Oh, it’s the latest craze, so they tell me. This man called Chuck Connors—he gives guided tours of Chinatown, as if we’re exhibits in a zoo, you know. He plays up all the vices—gambling and opium dens, houses of ill repute, and the tourists are suitably shocked and titillated. The young women pretend to swoon at the horror and degradation of it.”
    She was still chuckling as her daughter brought in a tray of tea things and put it on the table in front of her mother. “Should I pour?” she asked.
    “No, you go and get on with your schoolwork. I can do my own pouring,” Aileen said.
    “But Ma—it’s the summer vacation,” the girl protested. “Nobody else has to do schoolwork.”
    “You know how keen your father is that you get on,” Aileen said. “Look how well your brother and your sisters have done. You don’t want to let us down, do you?”
    The girl sighed and stomped upstairs.
    “My Albert is very keen on education,” she confided. “He was quite a scholar back in China. Of course I had no schooling myself, but I can see the value of it. If you’ve enough education you can move where you want in society, can’t you?”
    “That’s very true,” I said. I watched her pour the tea and then hand me a slice of soda bread, liberally dotted with raisins. I ate with relish before I paused to ask, “Is there really that much degradation going on in Chinatown?”
    “Of course there’s plenty of gambling. One thing about the Chinese—they are all gamblers. They’ll gamble on how many buttons the next man to come into the room has on his jacket or whether it will be fine the next day. Some of them will bet their clothing when they’ve spent their last cent and have to be given a sack to wear home. My man is more sober in that department than most, but I have to keep an eye on him.”
    “And opium? Are there really opium dens?”
    “Oh, yes. They’re here, all right. That stupid Connors fellow has concocted a fake opium den that he shows to his tourists—he