The Fight For Chinese Hand Laundries

Chinese-owned businesses are a crucial and important part of New York City’s history and culture. They are spaces that highlight Chinese and Chinese-American culture; storefronts that provide functional, everyday use to bustling communities; community institutions that celebrate the creativity and resilience of immigrants in New York City. Today, there are over 4000 Chinese owned businesses in Manhattan’s Chinatown alone.  However, throughout many decades of history — and even today, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic — many have racially targeted and discriminated against these businesses. 

When Chinese immigrants first moved from the West Coast to New York in the late 1800s and early 1900s in order to find steady work and better living conditions, they were immediately met with similarly racist treatment. By the 1930s, when Chinese hand laundries became a thriving industry — and importantly, a real competitor to white laundries — business forces and political allies lobbied to pass discriminatory laws and regulations on Chinese businesses in New York, specifically Chinese hand laundries, forcing many of them to shut down. However, Chinese business owners refused to lose their businesses and livelihoods. They recognized the need to organize to fight these laws as a community, and created the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. For the next two decades, the Alliance would experience real success in fighting against discriminatory laws placed on Chinese hand laundry workers. 

In the late months of 1864, just months before the Confederate Army would surrender to end the American Civil War, one of history’s bloodiest wars on the other side of the world, in China, finally came to an end.^¹ 

From the 1850s onward, amidst the bloodshed and horrors of the Taiping Civil War, an influx of Chinese immigrants first arrived in the United States. Large numbers of these new Chinese immigrants sought out work in California, filling the cheap, racialized labor needs of the California Gold Rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. During this window, it’s estimated that around 20,000 Chinese immigrants moved to California, and many found work in the two industries listed above. They were almost immediately met with systemic discrimination during this period, ranging from violent attacks to racist, discriminatory laws. One such example of a discriminatory law in California was the Foreign Miners Tax Act, which was explicitly created to drain Chinese and Latino immigrants’ financial resources and make it impossible for them to stay in the mining industry.^¹ The bill, passed in 1850, required immigrant (or “foreign”) miners to pay a $20 fee every month in order to continue their work, which translates to roughly $600 monthly today.^¹

Chinese workers were both being financially extorted by racist taxes and also exploited through deliberate underpayment. While working on the Transcontinental Railroad, Chinese immigrants were severely underpaid in comparison to the white workers: they received between $21-$31 dollars a month, while white workers were paid a guaranteed $34 dollars a month.^¹ Additionally, Chinese railroad workers were the ones given the more dangerous jobs. During the 1860s, Chinese railroad workers were forced to blast 15 tunnels in the Sierra Nevada Mountains using volatile nitroglycerin.^¹ This task alone led to the deaths of roughly 1200 workers, all of whom were Chinese immigrants.^¹ Excluded from white society and forced into dangerous, low-paid work, many Chinese immigrant workers gave both their tax money and their health and safety in service of the State of California.^¹ 

The indignities of legal, financial, and social discrimination did not stop there. Chinese immigrants were not only targeted by white mob violence, robberies, and forced expulsion from mining grounds, but were also banned from testifying against any white citizens in court.^¹ In 1854, prompted by a case in which a white man murdered a Chinese miner — which was witnessed by multiple other Chinese men — the California Supreme Court ruled that “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point” had no right “to swear away the life of a citizen” or participate “with us in administering the affairs of our Government.”^¹ In this particular case, it meant that the Chinese men had no legal standing to testify against the white man on trial.^¹ This ruling, known as People v. Hall, impacted Chinese immigrants, along with Latinos, Black Americans, and indigenous people.^¹ While this ruling did not fully legalize anti-Chinese violence, it certainly encouraged it. White citizens could now openly discriminate and attack Chinese immigrants, particularly within ethnic enclaves, without fear of repercussions.^¹ People v. Hall also paved the way for other pieces of anti-Chinese legislation to be passed, like 1882's Chinese Exclusion Act, 1888's Scott Act, and 1892's Geary Act.^¹ Together, these laws reveal how white anxieties over an increasingly non-white workforce attempting to carve out space for themselves was written into law in ways that would take decades to undo.^¹

Hoping that life could be less harsh elsewhere in the country, many Chinese immigrants living on the West Coast moved to New York City, where there was a more diverse population and different job opportunities. In the mid-1850s, when Chinese immigrants were first fleeing the Taiping Civil War in droves, there were only 38 recorded Chinese immigrants, all men, living in New York City.^¹ By 1870, the number had grown to 500, and would increase to almost 1100 by 1880. In New York City, many Chinese immigrants found work and economic independence in a different profession: hand laundries.  However, while certain conditions appeared better in New York City, Chinese immigrants and their businesses would still experience similar forms of systemic discrimination as they had encountered in California. 

Hand laundries emerged as a survival strategy for Chinese immigrants who were excluded from other economic opportunities by hostile, racist laws.^¹ As an alternative to heavily taxed work, like mining, or dangerous, underpaid work, like railroad construction, many Chinese immigrants turned to establishing their own small businesses. Laundries were an easier lift than many other kinds of businesses: they required minimal English-language proficiency, and a fairly small amount of start-up capital and infrastructure to get started.^¹ Indeed, many of the Chinese immigrants who moved from California to New York began to support themselves by opening hand laundries. Laundry work was considered less desirable and more labor-intensive than many jobs available to white workers, but there was a consistent need for it. For Chinese immigrants who knew little to no English and whose previous skills or education were disregarded in white-dominated industries, hand laundries were often an economic lifeline. 

By the 1930s, Chinese laundries were established in New York’s Chinatown as a pillar of the local economy. Even in the lean years of the Great Depression, there was still laundry work to be found. But even this small corner of the economy that Chinese immigrants had carved out for themselves was not immune from white resentment. In New York, one out of three members of the Chinese immigrant working population worked as a laundryman in the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.^¹ These businesses were spread throughout all communities in New York, causing conflict with white-owned laundries, who wanted to monopolize the laundry business and set higher prices for themselves. White laundry owners petitioned New York’s Board of Aldermen to pass a new law, similar to the Foreign Miners Tax Act, which would restrict laundry ownership to United States citizens and require a $1000 security bond to open a new business.^¹ The goal of this new law, transparently, was to shut down Chinese hand laundries. 

In 1933, the white laundry owners’ lobbying came to fruition. The Board of Aldermen approved the anti-Chinese ordinance that required all self-employed, or one-person, hand laundries to pay a $25 annual fee, as well as a $1000 bond for those applying for new licenses.^¹ The logic behind requiring this bond was based on racist rumors that Chinese workers at hand laundries would spit water and starch on their customers' clothes. The rumor led much of the public to believe that Chinese hand laundries were spreading bacteria or diseases such as syphilis. While this rumor was entirely based on racism and xenophobia, the bond nevertheless passed, affecting over 3,500 Chinese-owned hand laundry businesses in New York City.^¹

To combat these discriminatory ordinances, laundry workers formed the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which included thousands of Chinese laundrymen and community allies. While the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association did already exist, and claimed to “represent all Chinese [workers] in New York,” they, too, tried to financially extort the laundry workers by asking that they pay an additional fee for the CCBA’s support of their organizing.^¹ The laundrymen of the CHLA were incensed by the CCBA’s request, and continued organizing independently.^¹ The Alliance offered free legal advice to Chinese laundrymen in New York who were facing discrimination due to the ordinances. CHLA representatives lobbied against the new city laws, demanded a public hearing, held public campaigns and pooled funds to hire a lawyer.^¹ Their efforts led to the citizenship requirement being dropped, and a reduction of the annual fee to $10 and the bond to $100. Many referred to this win as the “Victory of May.”^¹ After this, membership grew more formalized and expanded to over 3000 people. 

By the 1940s, technological advancements had interfered with the fragile ecosystem of hand laundries. Commercial laundries, or power laundry, became an accepted step in the process: Chinese hand laundries would send clothes to be washed in high-powered, industrial-quality machines, and the clothing would be sent back to be ironed and folded by the Chinese hand laundries. A major issue with this was that the commercial laundries were largely white-owned companies, as opposed to the small Chinese-owned laundries.^¹ Chinese hand laundries, thanks to organizing efforts like those of the CHLA, had been fully self-sufficient and self-contained within their community. Now, they were required to work with white laundry companies, which did not favor them. Along with this, self-service laundries were rising in popularity. This allowed customers to do laundry on their own, or in their own homes, which created even less demand for hand laundries. In order to reestablish demand for the Chinese hand laundries, laundry owners turned to the CHLA to create their own worker-funded commercial laundry. Fundraising amongst their own community, the CHLA raised enough money to create the “Wah Kiu Wet-Wash Factory,” a power laundry that directly serviced Chinese-owned laundries.^¹ This act alone not only saved many Chinese hand laundries, but also allowed them independence from white American power laundries.

By the end of the 1950s through the early 1960s, the influence of the CHLA had begun to dwindle. Members of the CHLA were known to be much more left-leaning than their more conservative counterparts in the Chinese business community, the CCBA. They had been outspoken in their support for China’s fight against Imperial Japan, fundraising within the community to send money to the war effort.^¹ They also celebrated the ascension of the Chinese Communist Party to power, raising the flag of the People’s Republic of China above the CHLA offices on October 1, 1949, when the People’s Republic was officially declared.^¹ This would ultimately be the beginning of the end for the CHLA. In the paranoid atmosphere of the Red Scare in the 1950s, rumors that the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance was affiliated with communists, both domestically and abroad, proved damning.^¹ 

The threat of association with communism led to surveillance, wire-tapping, and harassment of CHLA members by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.^¹ One member states, “The FBI harassed us for more than 20 years. They could not find anything to indict us, but they kept harassing us. In those years, every week I received two calls from FBI agents. What did they say on the phone? Nothing. They just checked whether you were there. They wanted to cause fear among our members. Also, they harassed us so much that they hoped we would lose our jobs and the organization would be dissolved.”^¹ Membership declined, as people were afraid of being associated with the CHLA. The FBI’s harassment also led to the suicide of both Tan Yumin, the manager of the Wah Kieu Wet-Wash Factory, and Tan Lian’ai, a translator for the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. The deaths of these prominent CHLA organizers marked the organization's slow dissolution.^¹ 

With the invention of power laundries and laundromats, hand laundries began to slowly disappear. Office and casual fashions had also shifted away from suits and formalwear to more casual clothing, which required less laundry services.^¹ Polyester fabrics in style also wrinkled less, and could be hung to dry on one's own.^¹ The last Chinese hand laundry to exist in New York City was Sun’s Laundry in Manhattan. The owner, Robert S. Lee (李洪森 Lǐ Hóngsēn), had worked at the store with his family since 1959. But when in-person businesses were forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic, his hand laundry took a huge hit.^¹ While Sun’s Laundry was able to reopen in Summer 2020, business was slow and never rebounded to its pre-pandemic state, forcing him to shut down. Lee’s father, who founded Sun’s laundry, was one of the original members of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. He was also one of the members who was surveilled and investigated by the FBI for alleged communist affiliation. 

The closing of Sun’s Laundry was a huge loss for its community, both as a beloved community institution and as an important symbol of a chapter of Chinatown’s history.^¹ Even though hand laundries’ popularity had been in decline, even before COVID-19, Sun’s Laundry still had a fair number of regulars, some of whom had been visiting the laundry since they were children.^¹ On Sun’s Laundry’s closing day, items and memorabilia from the business were handed to visitors who had connections with the laundry and the Sun family. Even as the laundry’s physical doors shut, pieces of its history — and stories of it, like these — will stay in the neighborhood. 

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