AsAmNews reported July 10 that sons of Chinese laundrymen are breaking their silence to honor an overlooked chapter of American history, when racial exclusion made hand laundries a last-resort livelihood for Chinese immigrants.
According to a July 10 report by the Asian American news website AsAmNews, several descendants of Chinese-American laundry workers are breaking their long-standing silence to recount their parents’ years working in laundries. They are all born or came to the US around the 1950s and hope to bring their parents’ little-documented experiences to light. From the 1880s to the 1960s, hand laundry was an important means of livelihood for Chinese laborers, gradually declining after the widespread availability of wrinkle-free fabrics. Walter Wong recalled working at the front desk of a laundromat from the age of eight, taking on laundry work as a teenager, while his father later became a mobile mechanic. Ray Chin admitted that he felt ashamed of his parents’ laundry business as a child, as almost none of his classmates had parents in this line of work. His father ran the laundromat until he retired and sold it at the age of 65.
The large-scale concentration of Chinese people in the laundry industry was largely a product of structural discrimination during the anti-Chinese era—when Chinese were excluded from many professions, laundry became one of the few viable options for making a living. The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) documented this history in an article titled “Eight Pound Livelihood,” and assisted families in marking the locations of their former laundries. As those who experienced these events gradually pass away, their descendants are actively tracing and recording these events, bringing a long-overlooked history of Chinese labor, neglected by mainstream narratives, back into the public memory.
Source: AsAmNews