The Celestials by Karen Shepard

hand to her lap. The boy’s shoulder had been small and round, softer than she would’ve guessed, and an image of cupping her hand beneath an infant’s head came unhappily to her mind.
    â€œThese Americans,” the boy would say to Charlie later that night, “they are always touching us.”
    â€œTry not to reveal your revulsion,” Charlie would advise.
    Ida and Lucy shared the table adjacent to the Sampson women and worked together to sketch and then recite the names of various simple objects.
    â€œCat,” Lucy said, and Ida went to work at the tricky drawing of chalk on slate.
    Lucy peered at the finished product. “That is not a breed I know,” she said. “Is it missing a leg?”
    The girls commenced with a laughter that left their pupils smiling politely at these most incomprehensible of instructors. But as the months passed, the attachment between teacher and student would become noteworthy, and it wouldn’t be long before a Celestial would refuse to attend his lessons unless assured his teacher would be present.
    Even so, the town’s mildly patronizing stance toward this educational endeavor would keep anyone from even considering the charge struck between seventy-five young men of one race and fifty young women of another. For although the teachers were young and old, wealthy and not, the majority of the group were the young ladies of the village, or, as they would appear in the press, “the beautiful, refined, and intellectual” young ladies. The communal work of teaching and learning, the shared space it required, was unprecedented for both American ladies and Celestial boys, and the unprecedented is almost always the certain spark to larger flame.

    As if aware of this, during that first lesson, even under the influence of the morphine, Charlie fretted. From his sickroom, he strained to distinguish one line of conversation from another. He held his good hand to his head, the failings of his group lined like soldiers across the field of his mind. Quang Chung had an inability to keep quiet. Chim Kow had proven incapable of holding eye contact. Ley My had a habit of circling the outer edge of his lips with his tongue over and over, around and around.
    Charlie knew that as a rule the Americans whose eyes came into focus as they landed on you were the ones toward whom the most caution should be displayed. He had been filled with skepticism about Sampson. It had taken much persuading by the company’s other officers to convince him that the American was interested only in what he said he was interested in: fair work for fair pay. But Charlie found the man both appealing and mystifying in equal parts. How strange that the photo he had arranged of the Chinese on their arrival was displayed outside his office. How strange that he ended each day with an exchange with Charlie, inquiring after not the boys’ work, but their welfare. Yet Charlie liked the swing of the man’s gait as he patrolled the factory. He liked the midafternoon walk to the river that the man seemed to take every day. He liked that Sampson was a man in a three-piece suit throwing rocks like a boy.
    But what could he expect from these Americans? And what did he want from them: to be one of them or to be taken care of by them?
    His injured hand was propped atop an excess of pillows, as per the surgeon’s instructions. The doctor had been blunt about the necessity of the amputation. Charlie was lucky, he had said. It was only a thumb. The tunnel workers were losing much more than that.
    Charlie did not in general engage in fantasy, but lying there listening to the swell and break of the hubbub in the other room, he believed that if he were to unwrap those bandages, he would reveal his thumb, whole and intact.
    The second week of Sunday school, Sampson asked Julia to check on his foreman during lessons. She protested that she was not a doctor, had no experience in the loss of limbs,