Sam Wu

Sam Wu is a Chinese laundryman whose modest, changing roles—as a model, a wartime correspondent, and the trusted keeper of Rabo Karabekian’s paintings—make him one of the few civilian connections that survive Rabo’s isolation. Their relationship is warm but bounded: Wu reaches out to a lonely soldier, helps protect what he buys in France, and then, once the war is over and the paintings have been returned, vanishes from his life.

Identity and Introduction

Wu first enters Rabo’s story at Dan Gregory’s New York mansion, where Rabo has been placed at the servants’ table, conspicuously apart from the guests and staff. As Rabo eats alone under Fred Jones’s watch, Wu arrives with clean shirts for Gregory. Rabo recognizes him with a sudden flash of familiarity, though he does not yet understand why, and Wu himself does not recognize Rabo.

The explanation lies in Gregory’s commercial image-making. Dressed in silk robes and a skullcap, Wu had served as Gregory’s model for Fu Manchu, the sinister fictional mastermind presented in the illustrations as the personification of the Yellow Menace. The encounter joins Wu’s ordinary work to the demeaning racial stereotype that Gregory turns into popular imagery. It also gives Rabo a glimpse of how a person can be made into a character for someone else’s purposes, without thereby becoming known to that person.

Work and Changing Roles

Wu’s work for Gregory changes over time. He is initially a laundryman bringing clean shirts to the mansion, later becomes Gregory’s cook, and eventually returns to laundry work. Rabo’s account records these shifts without suggesting that Wu’s identity is exhausted by the jobs he performs; rather, it is Rabo who repeatedly meets him through the roles that Gregory’s household and wartime circumstances assign him.

The household setting sharpens the contrast between Wu and Rabo. At the dinner where Rabo is excluded from the servants’ gathering, Wu is himself arriving to perform a service, yet he becomes the person Rabo recognizes amid an evening designed to make the apprentice feel that he belongs to no one. Their connection begins not in a formal introduction but in Rabo’s mistaken certainty that he already knows the man at the door.

Correspondence During the War

Before Rabo goes overseas, he runs into Wu in New York City. Wu asks for Rabo’s address, explaining that he has heard on the radio how lonely soldiers can be abroad and that people should write to them often. Rabo is the only soldier Wu knows well, so Wu offers to write. The gesture is practical and humane: Wu does not promise to change the conditions of war, but he recognizes a soldier’s isolation and makes a place for him in an ordinary routine of attention.

Wu’s letters become a small event at mail call in Rabo’s platoon. The other soldiers tease him with questions about the latest news from Chinatown or jokes about whether someone has poisoned Wu’s chow mein. The joking makes Wu a recurring presence among men far from home, while also turning the letters into a social marker that the platoon can recognize and rib Rabo about. For Rabo, who later describes the loneliness of wartime life, Wu’s correspondence is a tangible connection to a civilian world.

Paintings and Trust

During the war, Rabo and his platoon of artists are sent into combat as the Germans make a final major breakthrough. Amid that setting, Rabo buys several paintings in France. He does not claim an entirely flawless eye or record: he buys an unsigned charcoal drawing that seems to him like a Cezanne and is later authenticated as one; he acquires a Matisse from a widow who says her husband received it from the artist; and he is stuck with a fake Gauguin. These varied outcomes give the purchases both artistic importance and the ordinary risks of collecting.

Rabo sends the works to Wu for safekeeping, choosing him as almost the only person in the United States he still knows and trusts. Wu is particularly suited to that role because their association has grown beyond the service encounter at Gregory’s house: he has written to Rabo during the war, and their correspondence has carried a personal concern that the military setting cannot provide. Rabo’s remark that the only civilian he knows is a Chinese laundryman expresses the strangeness of his position, but it also makes clear why Wu’s trustworthiness matters so much.

Separation and Significance

After the war, Rabo retrieves his paintings from Wu. He never hears from him again and admits that Wu may not have liked him much; from Wu’s perspective, Rabo may have been strictly a wartime activity. The qualification prevents their bond from becoming a sentimental claim of permanent friendship. Wu’s kindness is real in its consequences—he writes, and he keeps the paintings safe—but the relationship has its own limits and ends when the circumstances that brought them together end.

Wu’s brief presence therefore links two kinds of preservation. He helps preserve Rabo’s morale through letters and protects the paintings that will become part of Rabo’s private collection. Yet he remains largely outside the later world in which the collection is displayed to visitors and Rabo answers questions about what the pictures mean. That contrast gives Wu’s role its quiet significance: he contributes to the material history of the art without becoming part of its public story, and offers care to Rabo without being made into a permanent fixture of Rabo’s life.