For more than a century, Chinese in America were synonymous with laundries in the American imagination. As recently as the 1970s, a Calgon commercial portrayed a Chinese-American couple who owned a laundry and washed clothes with the help of “ancient Chinese secrets” (a.k.a. Calgon detergent).
The link began during the Gold Rush: there were few women available out West to do laundry, and white men generally considered the work beneath them, so laundry was shipped all the way to Hong Kong for an exorbitant $12 per dozen shirts, and took four months to come back. Later, it was sent to Honolulu for $8 per dozen. (Both options were cheaper than shipping it back East.) Chinese entrepreneurs in San Francisco spotted an opportunity. The first known Chinese laundry was opened by one Wah Lee in 1851, who charged $5 to wash a dozen shirts.
As more Chinese arrived out West, white resentment began to build against them, flaring into violence when the economy worsened during the 1870s. In Los Angeles, a white mob killed 17 Chinese men on one night in 1871. Accounts vary as to the killing methods, but all or almost all were reported to have been lynched. In other towns, Chinese were burned or driven out at gunpoint. Whites who hired Chinese were attacked, too. Over time, Chinese were pushed out of mining and other “men’s” work, and into safely undesirable industries like laundry. In 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred low-skill Chinese immigration and further cemented their ghettoization into an industry that required little training, English, or startup costs. The 1920 Census showed nearly 30 percent of all employed Chinese in the United States working in laundries.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was still in place when Chiu’s and Lee’s parents came to this country. For that reason, many laundry workers arrived as “paper sons” and daughters, i.e. under citizenship papers purchased in other names from other Chinese. The Act was finally repealed (but replaced with a tiny quota of just 105 Chinese immigrants per year) in 1943, due in large part to World War II, when the U.S. needed China as an ally against Japan. The negative perception of Chinese in the country began to shift, and more opportunities opened for increasing numbers of Chinese —including the children of laundry workers.