Sons of Chinese Laundrymen Speak Out on Lost Childhood

Editor's note: This story appeared originally in AsAmNews.

For the sons of laundrymen, pressing shirts on hot and humid summers summons a distinct memory of acrid-smelling laundry. “Was it a dirty laundry smell? Was it a chemical smell? Or was it me smelling my own sweat?” Biggs Chin, a son of a laundryman, remembered thinking at five years old.

From the 1880s to the 1960s, Chinese hand laundries were a prominent employer in the Chinese labor force, its prevalence ending with permanent press. Until recently, their narratives had not been told. That changed with this generation, the sons of laundrymen, who were born in or immigrated to America in the 1950s.

These early memories symbolize, at times, a lost childhood. “When we were even younger, we wanted to go out and play, but we couldn’t play because we had to help... (We had to) wash the dirty laundry of white men,” said Walter Wong, another son of a laundryman.

Wong began front desk duties starting at eight years old before moving onto laundry work in his teens. He remembers his father working 16-hour days almost every day at their laundry called Wong’s Laundry, and soon, he and his siblings joined him. Born in 1949 in Boston, Wong remembers the living quarters were separated by a curtain.

Biggs Chin moved from Toisan, China with his mother to Boston’s Chinatown at two years old, making him one of few Chinese children around at the time because the U.S. still had a quota limiting the number of visas for Chinese each year to only 105. This was 1953, and the quota wouldn't be lifted until the Immigration Act of 1965 during Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration.

When a nosy neighbor asked Chin, “Does your father love to work in the laundry?” he responded: “He loves working in the laundry. He’s there almost 7 days a week for 10, 11 hours. He loves that job!”

Chin laments how mistaken he was as a child about the realities of laundry life.

Their laundry, called Modern Laundry, was no larger than 45 feet long by 15 feet wide and processed 5,300 pounds of clothes a day. It held a compressor, washer, and three ironing tables, each shirt costing a dime at the time.

Chinese laundry work was common because it didn’t require much capital and was considered too menial for white workers who controlled the job market.

“The Chinese were locked out because work would be done by referral,” Wong said. “Legislatively, you can change things, but you can’t legislate attitudes.”

Born in 1950, Ray Chin, another son of laundry workers, toiled in his father’s laundry almost every day until he graduated high school. He remembers a scar on his hand from when he was four, wanting to press shirts, and placing a handkerchief on the press before it came down on him. “(The scar) reminds me of how much work my father and I did,” he said.

His father came during the Great Depression in 1930 through Ellis Island under the name “Chin,” eventually building landing ship tanks for World War II troops at Dravo shipyard in Delaware as a foreman. Primarily Toisanese immigrated to the U.S. in the 1840s to capitalize on the Gold Rush, then the railroads, before moving into other labor industries. Usually the eldest son went overseas to send money home. Ultimately, his father bought a laundry building above which their family lived.

Ray Chin's family was one of four Chinese families out of a population in Wilmington, Delaware, of almost 110,000 in 1950. Even so, they enjoyed dinners with neighbors and church members, cooking egg rolls and roast beef for church suppers from deep fat fryers they kept in the laundry’s backroom. Despite the social bonds the Chin family enjoyed, Ray remembered feeling ashamed of having to work in a laundry, noting that none of his classmates had parents who were laundrymen. “(My parents would) always say, ‘We’re doing this, so you don’t have to,’” Ray Chin remembered.

The family's laundry sat between a segregated white and Black neighborhood in downtown Wilmington where he was exposed to Black culture, and his father employed two Black workers. In addition to the family's rich community of friends, Chin admires his parents for the moments of grace they found in the laundry. They had a teakwood display of the Eight Immortals and a civilian award his father received as a foreman.

Wong, however, did not experience the same social community in Boston as Ray Chin did. Wong remembers names like “chink,” “slant-eye,” “gook,” and “Commie” were commonly thrown around. Starting with the Vietnam War, “Charlie” would be added to the list of derogatory terms. Biggs Chin heard the same insults, growing up in Chinatown.

“No one invited us to have dinner. No such thing as sleeping over. No birthday parties, none of that. I call that limited engagement….We were tolerated,” Wong said.

Named “Szeto” from his adopted family, Wong’s father came to the South End as a paper son under the name “Wong” in 1939 and, after serving in WWII, naturalized and brought Wong’s mother to the U.S. via the War Brides Act of 1945. Many got around exclusionary laws that banned immigration of Chinese by using false documents and surnames to claim citizenship. they became known as “paper sons.” “I grew up with no aunts or uncles….I had no community,” Wong said.

Ray Chin first learned about “paper sons” while in college before bringing it up with his father. “He didn’t talk about it all, and we never used that term,” Ray said.

Biggs Chin’s father was also a paper son, coming under the name “Chin” to Boston when he was 13. “Because my father was a paper son, he was always under scrutiny, always under the threat of being deported if he did anything wrong,” he said. Paper lineage and illegal entry into the U.S. was used as blackmail during rivalries between Chinatown family clans as many paper sons feared deportations.

Wong’s family moved to public housing in Roslindale, a former working-class Italian and Irish neighborhood that now homes Michelle Wu, the first Asian American mayor of Boston. Around when Wong grew up, the Chinese were outnumbered, with only 5,500 people counted in Boston in 1960. This led to a permeating sense of isolation Wong has only recently begun to unpack. “Her being elected mayor was pretty emotional,” he said.

Biggs Chin, unlike Ray Chin and Wong, had a blood relative in America, in Boston no less. His great-grandfather owned a laundry in Roxbury and, after passing, was buried in Mount Hope, a cemetery for early Chinese immigrants starting in the 1930s. So was Ray Chin’s uncle, Arthur. “It’s the worst cemetery in the city, or that area where the Chinese are,” Biggs Chin said.

Due to lack of maintenance, fallen tomb stones are stamped into the earth, the carvings of names barely legible, the stone with Biggs Chin’s great-grandfather’s name indiscernible and lost. He thinks it looks better nowadays, revamped with grass, where it had just been dirt.

Like those gravestones, the story of laundrymen has been largely disregarded. “There was nothing written about it. Nothing discussed about it. Most of my friends, fathers also worked in laundries or restaurants. There was nothing special about it. There was no reward for being a laundryman,” he said.

Around the mid-1970s, permanent press decreased demand for laundries, causing Chinese labor in laundries to drop from a quarter to 1.7% compared to 1930. Around then, Wong’s father became a traveling mechanic, and Biggs Chin’s entered the restaurant industry. Ray Chin’s father kept the laundry until he retired, selling it at 65.

Now, Wong, Ray Chin, and Biggs Chin want to honor their parents’ stories, bringing attention to their lives. “We’ve come to respect and admire our father and mother’s work in the laundries even more than when we were in the heyday,” Wong said.

In addition to feeling devoted to telling his family’s story, Biggs Chin feels empowered hearing Wong and Ray Chin speak out. “We’re not letting anybody else tell our truth….We’re fighters and advocates for our presence in America.”