3THE LAUNDRYMAN

I wash your handkerchiefs soaked in grief

I wash your white shirts black with crime

Grease of greed, ashes of lust

In your house all the grime

Give me to wash, give me to wash

—WEN YIDUO, “A Laundryman’s Song” (1925)¹

ONCE AN ENDURING EMBLEM of Chinese life in America, the laundry occupies a unique place in the nation’s Oriental imagination. A Dickensian curiosity shop of stereotypes, it is not only a crucible of cheap labor but also a storefront historical museum of Chinese immigration and American imagination.

Like the chop suey joint, or its distant cousins—the Greek gyro stand, the Jewish clothing store, or the more recent taco truck—the Chinese laundry was a ubiquitous fixture on the cultural landscape of America. In prelapsarian time, at least one such quaint emporium seems to have stood on every Main Street of small-town America—distinguished by a red sign printed with a “chopstick” font, and occasionally bejeweled with some hieroglyphic characters. “Sam Lee Laundry” and “Sing Lee Laundry” are said to have been two of the nation’s most popular Chinese-laundry names. The owner and his immediate family, whose last name was most assuredly not Lee, were usually the only Chinese in town.² Indeed, as one sociologist quipped, “Each Chinese laundry is a Chinatown in every neighborhood.”³

The year Anna May Wong arrived in the world, the National Laundry Journal ran a vignette titled “No Laundries in China,” which ribbed Chinese laundrymen:

A Chinese laundryman, Los Angeles, early 1900s *(Courtesy of Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History)*

“It’s the funniest thing to me,” said an old sea captain who for many years was in the China trade, as he settled himself comfortably in his chair and blew a few rings of smoke into the air, “that nine out of every ten Chinamen who come to this country open laundries and engage in a business which does not exist in their native land. As everyone knows, the Chinese at home wear soft cotton and woolen garments, according to the season, and there is not a pound of starch in all China. Stiffly starched clothes are unknown, and the Chinese men do not do the washing, as they do in this country. Neither is there any regular laundry in the Flowery Kingdom. Therefore it is more than passing strange that Chinamen should all come to America to engage in a trade so foreign to their home industries.”⁴

We should, of course, take such a satirical piece with a generous grain of MSG. After all, the National Laundry Journal was the trade publication of an association controlled by white owners of machine laundries, who regarded Chinese hand laundries as competition. The idea that all Chinese could afford a seasonal change of clothing between soft cotton and warm wool was yet another American shibboleth. Even so, the fictional sea captain was correct about one thing: Before coming to America, Chinese men did not do laundry. In fact, the Chinese laundry was entirely a product of happenstance and necessity, an American-born enterprise that got its start in the mining camps during the gold rush.⁵

When those early Chinese argonauts arrived on the West Coast, they found not the fabled Gold Mountain of El Dorado but rather a swirling sea of discrimination and violence. Besides the Foreign Miners’ Tax burning a hole in their pockets every year, the Chinese were also driven out of promising goldfields, so they could try their luck only in areas deserted by white miners. “No Chinaman’s chance,” a time-honored gem in the colossal compendium of American racist lingo, was born exactly in that context, referring to the slim chance that one’s efforts would, to use another mining term, “pan out.”

However, as Charlie Chan says, “Door of opportunity swing both ways.” Out on the frontier, there was a shortage of women to do domestic chores like laundry and cooking. Miners would have to wash their own clothes or send them by clipper ship all the way to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) or even faraway Canton. Outsourcing was not a twentieth-century invention; nor was cheap Chinese labor. Laundry became a meal ticket for the Chinese men down on their luck in mining and eager for any opportunity to eke out a living. Learning on the go, Chinese men, who might have learned to plow the fields or hold an ink brush but had never “stooped” to washing clothes back home, started operating hand laundries to serve the same clientele who had just deprived them of any other means of survival.

The sporadic success of the Chinese laundry in mining camps would lead to the advent of shops in the cities. According to Paul C. P. Siu, a laundryman’s son who did a trailblazing study on the subject for his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, the first urban Chinese laundry was established in the Gold Rush boomtown of San Francisco:

Early in the spring of 1851 one Wah Lee hung a sign over his door at Grant Avenue and Washington Street. It read: “Wash’ng and Iron’ng.” Wah Lee, as it was told, was an unsuccessful gold miner turned laundryman. Where did Wah Lee learn the trade? No one knows. If he had been in a mining community, he might have had some experience with “wash’ng and iron’ng” before his return to San Francisco.

We do not know whether Wah Lee celebrated the grand opening with obligatory firecrackers to bring good luck and prosperity. As a pioneer, he was unable to monopolize the trade for long. Judging by the latter-day pattern of this immigrant economy, the Chinese laundryman tended to hire or partner with his clansmen. The helpers or partners, having learned the trade and saved enough funds, would often take off and open their own shops. Before long, variations of Wah Lee’s signage popped up everywhere on the streets of San Francisco. In 1855, a British theater aficionado visiting the city reportedly was amused by the sign of “King Lee,” which at first glance he mistook for the Elizabethan tragedy King Lear. It is reasonable to speculate that the sign had less to do with Shakespeare than with the possibility that the proud owner of “King Lee” was a blood relative of Wah Lee or simply a creative copycat. In this way, out of the cradle of necessity and by a twist of fate, the Chinese laundry began its sudsy saga in America.⁶ As the Bard of Avon famously put it, “Double, double toil and trouble” (Macbeth 1.5).

Hailing from Northern California’s mining region of Michigan Bluffs, laundryman Sam Sing had certainly followed the well-trodden path of his compatriots.⁷ In Los Angeles, the laundryman stood at the very apex of Chinese professions. As we saw earlier, the trailblazer Tambolin had opened the first washhouse in town in the ancien régime of 1856. By 1860, ten of the fourteen “Chinamen” in Los Angeles were laundrymen. In 1872, according to the Los Angeles Star, eleven of the thirteen washhouses in the city were owned and operated by Chinese. The growth was exponential. By the time of Sam Sing’s arrival, the 1900 census recorded fifty-seven heads of Chinese households as laundry owners, of whom one-third were Wongs.⁸ Indeed, the Wong Kung Saw (association) was one of the two largest and most influential in Chinatown, the other being Louie Kung Saw. Deprived of cultural and civic ties to mainstream America, Chinese immigrants had to rely on these surname-based family associations or region-based district societies for almost everything, including job opportunities, emergency loans, arbitration of disputes, and frequently room and board, if one could call it that, at the association hall.⁹ Over the years, the Wong clan, by dint of its numerical superiority and early entry into the niche business, had accumulated sufficient capital and knowledge to assist its members in opening their own shops. Thus, being a Wong had certainly provided Sam Sing with a decidedly economic advantage.

Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, and having paid a visit to the local chapter of the Wong Kung Saw, Sam Sing first set up his laundry on Marchessault Street, the crowded restaurant row. He soon moved his business and family to 351 South Flower Street, and his choice of new location, where his second daughter, Anna, would be born, is noteworthy. Flower Street was slightly at a remove from Chinatown, giving the Wong family easy access to everything in the Chinese community they would need—language, grocery, service, network, and so on—while avoiding the grime and overpopulation of the ethnic ghetto. Fong See, a prominent contemporary of Sam Sing and a future Chinese tycoon, had also chosen to live on the outskirts of Chinatown when he moved from Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1897. According to Fong’s illustrious descendant, the bestselling author Lisa See, settling in Chinatown “would have been a step backward” for her aspiring Chinese progenitor and his Caucasian wife.¹⁰

Within shouting distance, though more than a stone’s throw, from the racially monolithic Chinatown, Flower Street was a miniature melting pot. An amalgam of Germans, Mexicans, Japanese, and Eastern Europeans, the neighborhood was culturally diverse, prompting some historians to speculate on its influence on the future global star. In his pioneering biography, Graham Hodges maintains that the multiracial street instilled in Anna May Wong “an awareness of if not always a comfort with a diverse population.” Such a view is reaffirmed by Karen J. Leong, who writes in her book The China Mystique that the neighborhood “rendered Wong and her siblings vulnerable to the challenges of being a minority among the increasingly diverse Los Angeles population.”¹¹

While the toxic geographical influence on the future film star will be explained later, more pressing for the newborn was the spread of measles, a disease that was plaguing the world and killing a sizable population each year. Sometime after her birth, Anna, her sister Lulu, and their mother all contracted the dreaded disease.¹² A virus spread via the respiratory effluvia of infected individuals, measles caused red rashes to appear all over the body, often bringing fever, diarrhea, and pneumonia at the same time. It is especially deadly to young children under five and anyone who was malnourished. In one of the worst recorded epidemics in history, measles wiped out 20 percent of Hawaii’s population in the 1850s. Not long afterward, it killed more than forty thousand Fijians in 1875. Thus, it was a true crisis when three people in one household fell victim to the disease. One can easily imagine Sam Sing’s anxiety or paranoia, as he sought help from Chinese herbal doctors and advice from his clansmen, wondering whether he had made the wrong decision to venture beyond the boundaries of Chinatown.

Miraculously, Anna, Lulu, and their mother recovered. Within a few weeks, the rashes disappeared, the fevers subsided, and one by one they regained their health. After that scare, Sam Sing decided, with the Chinese New Year approaching, to shell out a hard-earned dollar bill for a full-length family portrait. For the formal occasion, he disdained the stereotyped soft cotton and woolen garment and donned his finest robe, a neat skull cap with a black silk band, and a new pair of padded shoes. In his left hand was a folding fan, probably a studio prop, thus allowing him to affect the leisurely air of a contented man. At the other edge of the portrait, sitting slightly at an angle, was his wife, her smooth black hair finely combed and arranged in a chignon at the back of her head. Draped in a traditional gown that went all the way down to her crossed ankles, she wore embroidered shoes that conspicuously revealed her unbound feet. Having been born in America, Gon Toy did not have to endure the torture of having her feet bound when she was a girl, unlike most women in her ancestral land. But she did follow Chinese custom by sitting to the right of her man in the portrait.

Between the parents, and perched on chairs about three feet high, were the two daughters—Anna next to their mother and Lulu by their father. Both girls were dolled up like princesses, with headgear, tiny shoes, and miniature robes over patterned pantaloons. While the older girl, Lulu, sat straight up like her parents with both hands resting on her lap, Anna gripped the armrest with her right hand, seemingly afraid of falling off the chair. Students of period portraiture can tell you that, in this picture, Anna was not the only one remarkable for her unusual posture. As the shutter box clicked, Sam Sing smiled, a facial expression that defied the era’s artistic and cultural norms. In those days, Chinese people did not smile in formal photos, probably afraid to reveal their inner souls, which might then be captured or stolen by the camera, the spirit machine. But superstition be damned, Sam Sing could barely contain his happiness, knowing that his family had dodged a potentially fatal bullet. The coming year would be the Year of the Horse, a creature of hard work and perseverance. Sam Sing was ready.

He had no inkling, of course, and neither did his wife, that their second daughter—a timid, clear-eyed girl of two, sitting aslant on the high stool—would one day rise to become the icon of Chinese femininity, enrapturing millions through the magic lens of the camera. The same machine would be, one might argue, far more effective at capturing her soul.