Order 1648153: US History - Expanding Rights

Chinese Laundrymen

In this excerpt from his book Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki describes the circumstances that led a large number of Chinese men to open and operate laundry businesses in California in the mid-to-late 19th century.

The racially divided farm-labor force generated ethnic antagonism, and Chinese became targets of white-labor resentment, especially during hard times. “White men and women who desire to earn a living,” the Los Angeles Times reported on August 14th, 1893, “have for some time been entering quiet protests against vineyardists and packers employing Chinese in preference to whites.” Their protests did not remain quiet as economic depression led to violent anti-Chinese riots by unemployed white workers throughout California. From Ukiah to the Napa Valley to Fresno to Redlands, Chinese were beaten and shot by white workers; they were herded to railroad stations and loaded onto trains. The Chinese bitterly remember this violence and expulsion as the “driving out.”

“Ethnic antagonism” in the mines, factories, and fields reinforced the movement of Chinese into self-employment – stores, restaurants, and especially laundries. Chinese wash-houses were a common sight as early as the 1850s. A journalist visiting California in 1853 commented on the hardworking Chinese laundrymen: “What a truly industrious people they are! At work, cheerfully and briskly, at ten o’clock at night.” By 1870, there were 2,899 Chinese laundry workers in California, 72 percent of all laborers in this occupation. Twenty years later their number had more than doubled to 6,400, or 69 percent of all laundry workers. During this period, the ratio of laundry workers to all workers in the Chinese population jumped from one out of every seventeen to one out of every twelve. Nearly half of Sacramento’s 103 Chinese establishments listed in the Directory of Chinese Business Houses in 1878 were laundries.

The “Chinese laundryman” was an American phenomenon. “The Chinese laundryman does not learn his trade in China; there are no laundries in China,” stated Lee Chew, who came to America in the early 1860s. “The women there do the washing in tubs and have no washboards or flat irons. All the Chinese laundrymen here [in America] were taught in the first place by American women just as I was taught.” In China, wrote Wong Chin Foo of New York in The Cosmopolitan in 1888, laundry work was a “woman’s occupation,” and men did not “step into it for fear of losing their social standing.”

But why in America did Chinese men enter this line of work? Unlike the retail or restaurant business, a laundry could be opened with a small capital outlay of seventy-five to two hundred dollars. The requirements were minimal: a stove, trough, dry-room, sleeping apartment, and sign. A Chinese laundryman also did not need to speak much English to operate his business. “In this sort of menial labor,” said one, “I can get along speaking only ‘yes’ and ‘no.’” And he could manage without knowing numbers. “Being illiterate, he could not write the numbers,” another laundryman said describing a fellow operator. “He had a way and what a way! See, he would draw a circle as big as a half dollar coin to represent a half dollar, and a circle as big as a dime for a dime, and so on. When the customers came in to call for their laundry, they would catch on to the meaning of the circles and pay accordingly.”

But “Chinese laundrymen” were also “pushed” into their occupation: laundry work was one of the few opportunities that were “open” to Chinese. “Men of other nationalities who are jealous of the Chinese have raised such a great outcry about Chinese cheap labor that they have shut him out of working on farms or in factories or building railroads or making streets or digging sewers,” explained Lee Chew. “So he opens a laundry.” Thus the “Chinese laundry” represented a retreat into self-employment from a narrowly restricted labor market. “You couldn’t work in the cigar factories or the jute or woolen mills any more – all the Chinese had been driven out,” old Chinese men later remembered sadly. “About all they could be was laundrymen or vegetable peddlers then.” Crowded into laundry work, one out of four employed Chinese males in the United States in 1900 was a laundryman.