[Magdalen] Mike & Everett face a demon.

[ME Michaud]

I'm always fascinated by these stories.

My mother had a friend who fled China with her husband in 1950. Until she
came to the United States, she had never dressed herself. My mother taught
her how to button her blouses, how to shop, a bit of western-style
cooking. She was very intelligent and eager to learn. What frosted us was
that both she and her husband were trained physicians, but they were
advised to adopt traditional roles here. So he did orthopedic surgery and
she became a housewife. He was trained to do the work he ended up doing,
she had to rely on resiliance and pluck and the support of her new
neighbors.

One of my friends was sitting for her grand-niece one weekend and the
little girl followed her around like a baby duck. She was eager to learn
and happy for the attention and, by the time the weekend was over, this
five-year-old had learned how to fold laundry, how to boil an egg, how to
make a sandwich, and was picking up a basic knowledge of knitting.
-M


On Sunday, January 10, 2016, Marion Thompson <marionwhitevale at gmail.com>
wrote:

> In my strange life, age 11 in the late Fifties in Montreal when I was no
> longer at boarding school and lived just east of  McGill University, a
> Chinese laundryman came every week to collect the outgoing stuff and bring
> back what had been done.  What an utterly wretched life this man must have
> had!  Down the block from our apartment was his little laundry, always
> completely steamed up and with numerous sansevierias and jade plants on the
> sill of the large front window.  It was a hell-hole of heat and humidity
> inside. Sometimes I was sent to pick it up, otherwise the clean laundry was
> returned in neat brown paper parcels tied with string and with a slip of
> paper with Chinese characters slipped under the string.  I guess that said
> who we were and how much.  I don't know.  Stuff that he washed was
> permanently marked on the hem with a neat O in laundry ink.  He was known
> generically as 'Sam' and he was forever trudging along with a huge grey
> cotton bundle over his shoulder.   Even when we moved elsewhere, Sam
> followed us. He called me 'May-ling' and at Christmas he would give us a
> box of lychees which I loved.  At the time he was just part of the rich
> passing scene, but I came to know he was another part of our sorry
> treatment of immigrants.  Shameful.
>
>