For first-wave Chinese immigrants in the mid-1800’s, laundries were a primary source of income and a significant part of Chinese-American labor history. Along with construction of the railroads, the laundry business was a mainstay of the Chinese immigrant economy. The Chinese needed to survive in an English-speaking world in which they did not have access to most employment opportunities. The laundries remain a point of shared connection between many Chinese American families today.
Thomas Chin’s family worked in their hand laundry on Main Street in Charlestown, Massachusetts. His father had immigrated to the United States in 1918 as a teenager and settled down in Boston, where he attended school to learn English during the day and worked in a hand laundry operated by his relatives in his free time. Upon graduating middle school, he began to work in the laundry full-time. Chin’s mother immigrated in 1932. Her husband had already begun to take over the family business, as relatives left to pursue other opportunities.
About 20 miles away in Salem, Dick Soo Hoo’s family operated Wing Kang Laundry on North Street, one of the three Chinese hand laundries in town. His family immigrated from Toishan, a village west of Hong Kong. His father and mother moved to Massachusetts in the 1930s and in 1949, respectively, in order to escape the ramifications of the Chinese Revolution.
Soo Hoo explained, “It was a typical immigrant story. Back then, if you were Chinese, you had a choice of either opening up a Chinese hand laundry, or you opened up a Chinese restaurant.”
Eveline Chao, in Atlas Obscura, wrote about the “thousands of laundries across [New York City] owned and operated by Chinese immigrants. Such businesses were so prevalent—at the beginning of the Great Depression, there were an estimated 3,550 in New York City—that they constituted an industry unto themselves, referred to and advertised as “Chinese hand laundries.” For the adults who toiled in them, it was tough, smelly work: it hurt your back, ruined your hands, required touching dirty underwear and used handkerchiefs, and was considered demeaning enough that many hid the true nature of the work from relatives in China. (In letters home, they referred to the laundries as ‘clothing stores.’)”
“These were occupations, especially the laundry business, that did not require very much capital to enter, and it didn’t require very much training. But it was long hours, a laborious type of work that many other folks did not want to pursue,” T. Chin echoed.
T. Chin’s father died early in 1948, leaving his wife and 9 children. His wife maintained her laundry in Charlestown into the 70’s. All of the family’s children worked there in the laundry while attaining their education.
Soo Hoo’s parents sent home a share of their earnings each week in hopes of supporting their family in China. While hand laundries were not ludicrous businesses, the currency exchange rates meant that their meager earnings in the United States became what he described as “a small king’s ransom” in China.
Daily life in the laundries entailed long days and hard work. For six days each week, work began at 6 a.m. and did not end until 9 p.m. Even when the business was closed, however, customers dropped by, knowing that the family lived in the same building.
“When you wash people’s dirty clothes by hand … It is a dirty affair. It wasn’t just shirts; it could be like undergarments as well. It could be quite a challenge to get through some of these customers,” said Soo Hoo.
Soo Hoo closed his parents’ laundry in 1972, when the structure of the building had deteriorated beyond repair. Just a couple of years later in the mid-70s, T. Chin’s mother closed her laundry in Charlestown after deciding it was time to retire.
For both T. Chin and Soo Hoo, their parents’ work instilled in them a deep belief in the value of education and a determination to overcome the discrimination faced by their parents. Both graduated from Harvard College, earned their master’s degrees in business administration from Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School, then went on to work in finance.
“There was a lot of prejudice at that time, where work was pretty restricted to certain classes of people.” T. Chin said, “I was determined to get an education and improve my opportunities for working in the outside economy.”
“Education is the way out and the way in”, says Mary Chin, CEO of Asian American Civic Association. “My parents believed that the only way to beat prejudice was to get an education. As poor immigrants with no English, the opportunities were not there for them but they did everything they could to guarantee a future for me.”
She comes from two generations of laundrymen in Lowell and worked in the laundry with her 3 siblings throughout college.
The common thread that runs through T. Chin, Soo Hoo, and M. Chin’s stories, as well as the narratives of many immigrants, is the immeasurable determination and drive with which they worked for their dreams. The Chinese laundry workers faced the racism they found in America with a strong belief in hard work, pride in their ancestors, and an unfaltering hope for better days for themselves and their children.
M. Chin remembers
“How grueling it was for my parents but they just kept going. By the time I was 12, they had saved enough money to buy a house so my three siblings could move out of the back of the laundry. They persevered through the racism in Lowell but, like all Chinese and other people of color, not unscathed. We all went to college and have become successful and we owe everything to our parents.”
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
