Chinese laundry free#

Back then, if you were Chinese, you had a choice of either opening up a Chinese hand laundry, or you opened up a Chinese restaurant.”Įveline Chao, in Atlas Obscura, wrote about the “thousands of laundries across owned and operated by Chinese immigrants. Soo Hoo explained, “It was a typical immigrant story. His father and mother moved to Massachusetts in the 1930s and in 1949, respectively, in order to escape the ramifications of the Chinese Revolution. His family immigrated from Toishan, a village west of Hong Kong.

Her husband had already begun to take over the family business, as relatives left to pursue other opportunities.Ībout 20 miles away in Salem, Dick Soo Hoo’s family operated Wing Kang Laundry on North Street, one of the three Chinese hand laundries in town. Upon graduating middle school, he began to work in the laundry full-time.

Chinese laundry free#

His father had immigrated to the United States in 1918 as a teenager and settled down in Boston, where he attended school to learn English during the day and worked in a hand laundry operated by his relatives in his free time. Thomas Chin’s family worked in their hand laundry on Main Street in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The laundries remain a point of shared connection between many Chinese American families today.

The Chinese needed to survive in an English-speaking world in which they did not have access to most employment opportunities. Along with construction of the railroads, the laundry business was a mainstay of the Chinese immigrant economy. For first-wave Chinese immigrants in the mid-1800’s, laundries were a primary source of income and a significant part of Chinese-American labor history.