PROLOGUE

ON A HUMDRUM DAY in the mid 1910s under a crepuscular sky, the City of Angels spread out like a cut of nickelodeon reel. Having replaced gas lamps in 1882—the same year Congress halted Chinese immigration to America—the electric streetlights, the first in any thoroughfare of an American municipality, just came on. Like sleepers newly awake, rubbing sleep off their eyes, the lights blinked in the evening mist permeated with factory soot and Mojave sand. Pedestrians were as scarce as ghosts in this lull between day’s-end rush and late-night prowling. Now and then, streetcars jangled, piercing the din of the city, which was in the final stages of a transformation from frontier town to a west-coast dystopia carved out of cacti and sand.

On a hilly street downtown, a Chinese girl, about nine, maybe ten, was climbing the steep sidewalk and hauling a bundle of laundry that appeared heavier than her small body. Fresh-faced, the child sported black bangs cut neatly above her big, bright eyes. Even as she strained under the weight of her load, she was agile like a bird, moving uphill in nimble steps. As she approached a plain frame house fronting the street, a gaggle of street urchins suddenly spilled out of a dim alley. Prancing and grimacing like a band of little griffins, they taunted her with a chant:

Chink, chink, Chinaman,

Wash my pants.

Put them into a boiler,

And make them dance.

She halted her steps, face flushed, round eyes flaring with anger. She turned and looked downhill, where a Chinese laundryman in a blue cotton shirt was watching her with the keen eyes of a father hawk. His hands were swollen from years of washing other people’s soiled linen. Around his neck hung a police whistle, a must-have talisman for Chinese working outside the safety zone of Chinatown. Ever since the massacre of eighteen Chinese by white mobs in 1871, followed by two arsons in 1887 and 1892, the Chinese community in the city, facing unabated violence and harassment, had banded together and tried to live within the small plot of land sandwiched between the old Spanish Plaza and the railyard. When trips outside Chinatown became unavoidable, whether traveling to the docks or delivering laundry, these police whistles would prove indispensable.¹ And when the hoodlum boys saw the eagle-eyes of the elder Chinese man and his obligatory whistle, they beat a quick retreat while employing yet another popular, turn-of-the-century rhyme:

Ching Chong Chinaman sitting on a fence,

Trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

Along came a choo-choo train,

Knocked him in the cuckoo brain,

And that was the end of the fifteen cents.

As the hecklers all disappeared into the dark alley, their refrains still pierced the noisome night air. Wiping a tear off her cheek, the girl quickly pulled herself together and went up to the frame house. A white woman came to the door and took her delivery. To her delight, the woman gave her a penny tip.

After a curtsey with a sweet smile, the girl turned and scampered down the hill, the penny jangling against others in her coat pocket. Taken together, these coins would be enough for a ticket at the movie theater, evidence that the girl was dreaming something bigger: She planned to use the money not just to buy a ticket to a movie—or even, as the rhyme went, to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. She wanted to be a star, like those blonde actresses she saw on the silver screen: Pearl White, Alla Nazimova, Mary Pickford, and many other “picture personalities” displayed on lobby cards.

Entranced by these thoughts, the girl would invariably return to her father, who would be moping by the laundry baskets. Soon these two silhouettes would totter down another darkening street lined with faceless houses, windows dimly lighted, filled with stories of obscurity and anonymity. There would be another delivery to make, another hill to climb for her, a girl known at this point only as Anna.²