4FUN IN A CHINESE LAUNDRY

IT IS MORE THAN a little peculiar that Josef von Sternberg, the charismatic filmmaker who played a notable part in Anna May Wong’s career, would one day title his memoir Fun in a Chinese Laundry. Creatively inserting a “von” in his own name to make it sound aristocratic, the self-ennobling Jewish Austrian had started out in life as a so-called pants-presser in Brooklyn, a work experience that provided some intimacy with fabric and lace. Yet we can safely assume that he never set foot inside a Chinese laundry, unless it was a film set. Except for the title, Sternberg’s unconventional, engrossing autobiography makes no reference to that symbol of Chinese life in America. In fact, according to his most sympathetic biographer, hardship in his early youth had endowed him with “a contempt for working-class Americans.”¹ It begs the question, then: Why did Herr von Sternberg choose such an odd title for the personal account of a savant? The answer may lie in—astonishingly—the umbilical cord that ties the birth of Hollywood to the Chinese laundry.

Even before the arrival of the motion picture, the “pigtailed Chinaman”—usually going by the generic name of “Charlie” and sweating over steam and starch while muttering “no tickee, no washee”—had long been a familiar racist trope in America. In songs, vaudeville skits, melodramas, comic strips, and pulp fiction, a Chinese laundryman’s eight-pound livelihood (referring to the primitive eight-pound iron he used) was a staple of such racist caricature. Unlike the anonymous horde packed inside Chinatown, launderers such as Sam Sing were the first Chinese to venture outside the ethnic ghetto, hoping for better opportunities. When Jacob Riis asserted that each Chinese person in America is “a homeless stranger among us,” he was at best only partially right. A Chinese launderer might be a stranger, but he had a home—his workplace. In San Francisco, Chinese, like European Jews in the shtetls, were forbidden to live outside Chinatown unless they were in their own laundries. Though less draconian in restrictions but nonetheless vehemently Sinophobic, Los Angeles did not see too many Chinese willing to move out of the community safe zone, except for launderers and storeowners catering to non-Asian clienteles. Thus, as one historian notes, laundries were an early target of the anti-Chinese alarmists, for washhouses were highly visible operations: “Laundrymen would locate either a vacant building suitable to their needs or a lot on which they could construct an appropriate building to set up shop.… Many residents found such intrusions into their neighborhoods objectionable.”² Especially at times of economic crisis and labor agitation, the conspicuousness of Chinese laundries and their inhabitants in urban streetscapes made them easy targets for attack and ridicule in political rhetoric, popular art, and everyday life.

Putting aside the patently false but wildly popular notion that cheap Chinese labor stole white men’s jobs—a trope conveniently applied to Mexicans in the toxic vapors of the twenty-first century—there were a few things about a Chinese laundry that particularly irked the racists, and some of these features would, somewhat perversely, grab the imagination of the earliest dabblers in the art of the motion picture. Ironically, when it comes to the Chinese laundry, racial bias and cinematic imagination seemed to walk hand in hand.

First, the store sign. We do not know exactly how Wah Lee’s sign looked to San Francisco’s citizens when it first appeared in 1851, but we can be pretty certain that it was red, since, to Chinese, red symbolizes good luck and prosperity. In a milieu where the prevailing wisdom was “not a Chinaman’s chance,” people like Wah Lee would need oodles of good fortune just to survive, let alone thrive. For decades, those Chinese laundry signs painted on red backgrounds with white or black lettering, occasionally sporting Chinese ideograms to add exotic appeal, dotted the nation’s landscape like red pins on a map. Virtually a poetic collage or even an epigrammatic haiku, a sign can exert a powerful influence on the viewer’s mind. We may point to at least two instances where the lasting effects of Chinese laundry signs can be detected. First, the large sign of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, that shrine of Hollywood’s chinoiserie, adopts the cartoonish chopstick font, almost a mocking replica of those laundry signs once ubiquitous in America. Second, even into the twenty-first century, Abercrombie & Fitch would try to sell T-shirts that read, WONG BROTHERS LAUNDRY SERVICE. TWO WONGS CAN MAKE IT WHITE.

As one enters the interior of a Chinese laundry, mystery deepens for the curiosity-seeker. A wooden counter of typical height is built around the front room, with a swinging door attached to the counter as the only passage to the inner chamber. The traplike door is locked from within, its hook hidden somewhere under a loose panel. Experts have explained the peculiar design of the counter: “As the Chinese laundry was founded under conditions of extreme conflict of racial and labor agitation against it, it could be the aftermath of the feeling of insecurity—some protection would be better than none.”³ In other words, the counter facilitates both business transactions and self-defense against intruders.

Following the same rationale, there is a secret cash drawer where the laundryman keeps small change—just enough for the day. It is an old-fashioned wooden box, “usually installed either underneath the counter or under one of the laundry shelves. A little bell is attached to it and every time it is opened it produces a tinkling sound.” Someone unfamiliar with the mechanism would have difficulty opening the cash drawer, and the bell would not tinkle unless the box was opened. The adoption of the hidden drawer, further deepening the Oriental mystique, was certainly a marked improvement from the early years when traditional Chinese, much to the chagrin of white customers, would simply stick nickels and dimes in their ears for convenience. One year, the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco actually considered banning the use of one’s ears as purses.⁴

Behind the counter, against the walls of the front section, are laundry shelves and “ironing beds.” Called hong-choong in Cantonese, the latter is so named, rather than the popular term “ironing board,” because these rigs had indeed started out as sleeping beds for early Chinese launderers. Once again, Paul Siu, the sociologist son of a Chinese laundryman, knows best the secrets of his father’s trade: “As the whole structure looks so much like the wooden bed commonly used for sleeping by the Chinese peasants in China, we might speculate that the pioneer laundryman could have converted his own sleeping bed into the ironing board. Imagine how he might do a laundry job when it was first offered to him in the mining town! … Under such a condition he might have tried to iron shirts on his own bed and found it practical.”⁵

And then there is the abacus, perhaps the most unique cultural exhibit in the shop that would fascinate or befuddle a non-Chinese visitor. In Chinese, an abacus is called suanpan, literally meaning “a calculating plate.” Usually made of hardwood, it looks like a long, narrow tray. Siu gives us the most accurate description of this essential tool of the trade: “In the tray a dozen or so metal sticks are installed vertically, parallel with one another, and each goes through seven beads. The tray is divided by another piece of wood horizontally across the upper side of the tray, making two sections. On each column two beads appear in the upper section, and five beads appear in the lower section. Each bead in the upper section represents five points, and each bead in the lower section represents one point. The bead on the left is always ten times the bead on the right.”⁶

The next item that appears quaint to Main Street USA is the laundry ticket, almost as inscrutable as a Charlie Chan aphorism. In the earlier times, some laundrymen were illiterate and did not know how to write numbers. So they came up with an ingenious method of issuing a laundry ticket, as recalled by an old-timer: “When a bundle of laundry was done, he had to put down the amount charged for the work.… He would draw a circle as big as a half dollar coin to represent a half dollar, and a circle as big as a dime for a dime, and so on. When the customers came in to call for their laundry, they would catch on to the meaning of the circles and pay accordingly.”⁷ But soon the impromptu method graduated to printed tickets, which nonetheless contain equally cryptic ciphers—Chinese characters. Usually, the customers could understand only the amount charged, written in Arabic numerals, making the ticket another piece of the Chinese puzzle surrounding the laundry. Most important, though, the ticket also serves as the claim receipt. If, as often happens, a customer loses the receipt but still tries to claim the laundry, a problem will arise for the laundryman. The ensuing friction—or even confrontation—thus gave birth to the racist refrain that renders a stereotypical Chinese man the butt of the joke: “No tickee, no washee”—or, more familiar, “No tickee, no shirtee.”

The Chinese laundryman’s method of sprinkling the clothes for ironing was another major source of his misfortune. In those early years, he would use a brass mouth-blower shaped like an insect sprayer, except a tube was built in it instead of an air pump. To spray water, he would need to blow at the opening of the tube, making it look as if he was spitting. Consequently, rumors circulated about Chinamen spreading virulent diseases through the community via contaminated clothing. “Leprosy, plague, tuberculosis and the like were thought to be directly passed on by the laundrymen’s method of spraying clothes with their mouths,” though not the aforementioned measles.⁸ In later decades, even though the sprayer in the Chinese laundry had progressed from a mouth-blower to a gas atomizer, the urban legend died hard. As late as 1974, in the Roman Polanski film Chinatown, the private eye Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, wisecracked that one could “put Chinamen in jail for spitting on laundry.” Not everyone found it funny, and in hyping the slur about the Chinese laundryman’s alleged maleficence, it was one of the most racially nasty lines coming out of post–Golden Age Hollywood.

Yet Jake Gittes’s Chinese joke—he delivered a few more of that sort in the movie—stood him in very good stead, for Hollywood was hooked on the Chinese laundry and the double-entendres that surrounded it. The earliest filmmakers were eager to draw upon the exotic settings and robotic movements as sudsy material for the nascent art of the motion picture. As Robert Sklar puts it in Movie-Made America, films “rose to the surface of cultural consciousness from the bottom up, receiving their principal support from the lowest and most invisible classes in American society.” It is important to note that not only were those storefront cinemas, penny arcades, and nickelodeons mostly located in urban slums, appealing to the desires of the working class and the “huddled masses,” but also the material for these early movies drew on the lives of “the other half.” In the decades of “nickel madness,” before filmmakers such as Adolph Zukor figured out the more successful formula of “Famous Players in Famous Plays,” typical film contents included vaudeville acts, sporting contests, curiosities and grotesqueries, and, most popular of all, comic scenes of everyday life, such as fun in a blacksmith shop, a dentist’s office, a barbershop, and a Chinese laundry.⁹

In 1895, Thomas Edison had made a short reel titled Chinese Laundry Scene, followed in 1898 by a technically more experimental work, Dancing Chinamen—Marionettes. The latter consists of just one scene in which two marionettes on strings dance together. For the duration of the brief film, the marionettes are “pulled up by the strings above ground, then quickly let down until they sit on the ground doing splits, pulled up, let down, pulled up, let down, and so on.” Manipulated by an invisible hand, the dancing figures present an image of strangely multijointed bodies that seem to be able to perform physically impossible feats.¹⁰

As a trailblazer, the American wizard of early cinema was certainly not alone in having fun in a Chinese laundry. Edison’s competitor at American Mutoscope and Biograph made Chinese Rubbernecks in 1903, a film that shows one laundryman grabbing the head of his coworker and pulling it until the neck stretches across the screen and then springs back. Such a feat, created with dummies, reflects white fantasies about the supposedly robotic Chinese physique as well as violence toward the Chinese body. In fact, when Senator John F. Miller of California introduced the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act in Congress in 1882, he had not simply denigrated the Chinese as a “degraded and inferior race”—comparable to “rats,” “beasts,” and “swine”—but he also claimed that Chinese laborers posed a serious threat to white workers with their “machine-like” ways and their “muscles of iron.” The cartoonish portrayal in Chinese Rubbernecks surely echoed Miller’s techno-Orientalist paranoia that the Chinese were “automatic engines of flesh and blood.”¹¹

Such imagery continued to proliferate. Another Biograph film, The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers (1904), depicts a different kind of “Yellow Peril”—the Chinese threat to the chastity of white women. The protagonists are once again Chinese laundrymen, who are invited by three good-natured, God-fearing white women to attend Sunday school. Somehow the licentious Chinese manage to seduce the church ladies, and soon they are seen cavorting together in an opium den. Fortunately, the police arrive just in time to rescue the white damsels in distress.¹²

Besides blatant Sinophobia, such an obsession with the Chinese washhouse can also be attributed to Hollywood’s fetish for the exotic, and it provided a recipe for commercial success with an audience looking for low-cost peep shows. It fulfilled the wish, as Stanley Cavell puts it, “for the magical reproduction of the world by enabling us to view it unseen.”¹³ As we will see later, watching Chinese laundry scenes was a cheaper alternative, at least cinematically, to those Chinatown “slumming” tours, which would attract the more affluent consumers.

But in those years when film technology was still in its infancy, the fascination with the Chinese laundry became commingled with the very nature of cinema. As film historians have written, commerce in the earliest phase of cinema was driven by the economics of hardware: “The first film companies were the patent holders and manufacturers of camera and projection equipment. These manufacturers regarded the technological display of moving images in itself to be the prime appeal to audiences. The films themselves were of secondary concern.” As a result, early filmmakers between, say, 1895 and 1906, developed what historian Tom Gunning calls “a cinema of attractions,” which explored the range of uses for film to simply show something or even transform reality. For example, the Lumière brothers’ film Démolition d’un Mur (Falling Wall, 1895) recorded the reduction of a wall to a pile of rubble and then used reverse printing to create the illusion of the wall returning to its former state.¹⁴

In this early stage of cinema before the advent of stars, filmmakers were preoccupied with recording the activities of human subjects, using a static camera to capture people in everyday rituals. Besides the two Chinese laundry scenes, the numerous short films coming out of Edison’s studio all carried descriptive titles matching their realist contents, such as Blacksmith Scene (1893), Record of a Sneeze (1894), Amateur Gymnast (1894), and The Barbershop (1894). In the words of film historian Kevin Brownlow, “During the primitive years, the emphasis was on movement for movement’s sake.”¹⁵ Besides this addiction to human action, as Siegfried Kracauer points out, film “gravitates toward unstaged reality.” Understanding film as a redemption of physical reality, Kracauer reminds us that the most unforgettable figures in D. W. Griffith’s early films are those who occasionally walk into them “almost directly from the street.”¹⁶

All these characteristics of film made the Chinese laundry seem like an ideal choice of subject. In addition to the unscripted exotic setting and the foreign appearance of Chinese to most Americans, the laundry was also the locale of noisy operations and repetitious actions. The sounds of washing and the din of the workers’ chatter could not make it into those silent films, but the whirring images grabbed the imaginations of the camera and viewers just as they were attracted to the robotic actions of an assembly-line worker in, say, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, a silent film made as late as 1936, when talkies were already predominant. In fact, films based on Chinese washhouses became so ubiquitous that there were two productions in 1901 bearing the same title Fun in a Chinese Laundry, one by Edison and the other by Siegmund (“Pop”) Lubin, a pioneer from the 1890s. It seems that those early filmmakers could never get enough fun from a Chinese washhouse.

Here we finally understand not only where Josef von Sternberg had gotten the bizarre title for his autobiography, but also why the phrase has such a strong pull on his career. According to his biographer, “Sternberg dated his own discovery of the cinema to around 1910 and his days of ‘sleeping rough,’ when a nickel or dime would buy a few hours off the streets in a warm if smelly and noisy nickelodeon.”¹⁷ But both versions of Fun in a Chinese Laundry were made in 1901, suggesting an earlier connection. Anyway, by borrowing the title, Sternberg obviously compared the backbreaking work in the film industry to the menial labor inside a washhouse on the one hand, and unwittingly acknowledged the umbilical cord that ties the birth of film to that symbol of Chinese adaptation to America on the other.

Thus, it is only fitting—some might say serendipitous—that the first Chinese American star in Hollywood, indeed in global cinema, arose literally from a Chinese laundry.