When Laundrymen Returned to Visit Home Villages

When Chinese laundrymen made visits back to their home villages, there was the expectation that they had made small fortunes on Gold  Mountain when in fact most of them had lives of daily hardship with meagre income.  As noted by Leong Gor Yun in a 1936 book, Chinatown Inside Out, to save face, they would

Why Chinese Laundries Use No Machinery (1892)

An 1892 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explained the reason why Chinese laundries, save one, did not use machinery. It rejected the view of many people that Chinese did not believe in machinery and preferred to do laundry by hand. The real reason, according to the article, is that “Chinese laundrymen cannot get laundry

A White Southerner’s 1886 Impressions of New York’s “Heathen Chinee”

                  A white man from Charleston, South Carolina, made a visit to New York City in 1886 and his impressions of many aspects of his trip were published in the Charleston newspaper, including his unflattering comments about Chinese laundrymen. Excerpts of what he wrote are presented here.