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out.
    He watched the water seep into the boards.
    â€œI have money,” he said, and he stumbled to his pallet, rummaged for the change knotted in a rag, thrust the coins under her nose. “See!”
    She pushed his hand away, and when he shoved it back in her face, she knocked it aside so roughly that the coins scattered, one of them rolling across the floor until it tumbled through a crack in the floorboards to fall into the slough.
    They both stilled as if listening for the splash.
    Ling knew that some Chinese refused to sleep with whores who slept with ghosts. “I’m not like those others,” he told her softly, and would have told her of his parentage, except she shook him off.
    â€œYou think they won’t have
me?
I won’t have
them,
any of you.” Her eyes flashed.
    He pressed a hand to his side, suddenly winded. “But why?”
    â€œIt’s like they say.
Chinamen
”—she snarled the word learned from her customers—“only brought their womenfolk here so someone could be lower than them. So they’d have someone to look down on. You left us the only job you couldn’t do for the ghosts.”
    â€œBut how can you hate your own people?”
How can you hate me?
he meant. And yet, he calculated, would she sleep with him if she knew he was half white? Would half be enough?
    â€œHow? I tell you how! You know who sold me to Ng?” She paused to catch her breath. “My father! You know why? So he could send a brother to Gold Mountain to make the family fortune.” She nodded heavily. “That’s right. Chinamen love gold more than girls. The same brother who knocked on my door once. Yes! He didn’t recognize me until he was in the room.” She laughed sourly. “Probably wasn’t looking at my face! And you know what he does now? He’s a laundryman, just like you. So my father, you see, sells me as a whore for my brother to come to Gold Mountain to do women’s work.” She spat, a frothing gob of spittle that seemed to sizzle on the floorboard between Ling’s feet. “So no, I don’t sleep with laundry boys. You stink of other men’s sweat. Your fingers are wrinkled like old women’s hands. I won’t have you touching me. At least you don’t see
them
selling their women to
you.
But that’s Chinamen for you! You all want wives, lovers, but none of you want daughters. Daughters are bad luck, daughters are shameful, dirty, to be drowned like wash in a tub.” She was sobbing now. “Well, this is what you deserve, the lot of you. You send all your girls away, one day you find there’s no women for you. Just men, men, men, as far as the eye can see.”
    He thought of her teaching him once to starch collars, how to make the creases sharp. “This one,” she had said, holding up a band with the triangular wings standing stiff and proud, “this is my favorite. They call it ‘patricide.’ The story goes a son came home one time wearing this kind of collar and when his father embraced him the wings cut the old man’s throat!” She had grinned wickedly. It was just a story, Ling knew, but she told it with such relish he couldn’t help imagine blood on the pointed tips of the collar.
    â€œI’ll show you,” Ling tried now. “I’ll be rich.”
    â€œNot if you spend your savings on me!”
    For a moment the only sound between them was the drip of laundry.
    â€œI will be,” he muttered, fingering his stitches warily.
    â€œAnd what will you do?” She sniffed, humoring him. “When you’re rich?”
    â€œCome back for you!”
    â€œHa!” But he could see she was touched, as if he’d stroked some bruise of hers.
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œWhy, go home. Of course.”
    â€œOf course!” She laughed rancorously. “You think
I
can ever go home? Chinamen are sojourners here. Even if you die,