Tom Genealogy

Henry Tom History

New York City Chinese Hand Laundries: One Family’s Experience

Chinese Hand Laundry

My father, Sam Lee Tom was born in Taishan, China in 1905, years after his father had returned from gold mining in California. In 1932, dad came to New York City on a ship, as a ship’s carpenter, jumped ship and evaded capture by the immigration authorities and later became a legal resident and citizen. Suey Sim Lee from Hoi-ping, China was Sam’s picture bride who he never met before, arrived in New York in 1940 and married dad. Mom was a paper daughter. But, before mom came, she went to dad’s Taishan village, Cheer –ten village and married my father, with a rooster as his proxy, in a ceremony known as “sang-gai san how”.

Dad worked in Chinese wet washes and shirt pressing laundry while mom ran a Chinese hand laundry and they lived in the rear of the laundry store and raised 5 children. Mom was ironing in our laundry right up to the hour she had to give birth to me. Our family lived in five different Chinese hand laundries throughout New York City and one Chinese hand laundry in Wilmington, Delaware during World War II. Like so many other Chinese immigrants, Sam and Suey Sim made many sacrifices so their children could be well educated and have a decent future. Mom is now 85 years old, still sharp and active as ever.

I was born in 1942 as the second child, the oldest being my sister Helen, then my two younger sisters, Mabel & Anna, and the youngest is our brother Donald and we grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I learned to iron laundry standing on top of the wooden box of starch powder. I also worked on weekends and during the summers in a Chinese shirt pressing laundry, where my father had part ownership. My father was quite proud of me when at the age of 12, I could earn a man’s salary. He told me that if anything happened to him – it was my responsibility to support the family. I learned to speak Hoi-san wah (a sub dialect of Cantonese) because the entire group of 100 Chinese men working in the laundry knew very little English.

I, unlike most Chinese sons, growing up during the rock & roll era, did not listen to my parents, left home at age 18, did not attend college, served 3 years in the US Army. At age 27, I left New York City with my wife and 3 small children to attend college in Maryland. In 1975, because of family financial needs, I discontinued my PhD studies and went to work for the US government as a geographer. I retired from government service in 1997, went to work for Oracle Corp for 3 years, and became a consultant in 2002. I am still active in international professional activities and currently consult with the United Nations. I have 3 children with 4 grandchildren. I enjoy traveling and have recently discovered that Chinese family genealogy is fascinating, a lot of fun, and have encountered new friends and cousins in the course of this research. I visited my ancestral village in Taishan, China in May 2005 and launched a family website in December 2005.

As graduate assistant in the geography department, I strongly suspected that New York City Chinatown, as an ethnic enclave, was not a result of prejudice and discrimination as professed by the current literature and academic geographers that studied historical spatial patterns in order to model and predict contemporary distributions. Unlike most ethnic enclaves, Chinatown was a central place for goods and services for the Chinese on the weekend – because Chinese lived where they worked – in Chinese hand laundries, they had a ubiquitous spatial distribution – instead of a Chinatown concentration.

Inspection of the US decennial census and New York state census manuscripts – revealed a Chinese residential distribution that was spread across New York City and not clustered in Chinatown. Chinatown was a concentration of Chinese businesses providing goods and services to the Chinese laundrymen. Most of the Chinese were sojourners, they formed a bachelor society and did not bring wives/ families because the intent was to return to China. It was only after World War II that Chinese started to emigrate to the US as true immigrants and after the changes in immigration laws in 1965 – the increase Chinese population within the US was dramatic.

Historically, the Chinese came during the California Gold Rush in 1849 and were driven from the goldfields. Because of the frontier conditions, with a scarcity of women, the Chinese took jobs cooking and washing clothes. Later Chinese worked in many other jobs and were notable in their work on the railroads. In 1869, the completion of the transcontinental railroad brought Chinese laborers to the East.

In 1870 Chinese laborers were brought to Belleville, NJ – just opposite New York City, to break a strike by Irish women that worked at the Passaic Steam Laundry. Afterwards, the Chinese took the ferry across the Hudson River and opened hand laundries in New York City. In 1878, there were over 56 Chinese hand laundries in New York City. By the year 1880, over 75 % of the 587 Chinese living in New York City worked in 444 Chinese hand laundries. Chinatown rapidly emerged as a response to supply these Chinese laundrymen.

In those days, it cost about one hundred dollars to open a laundry. Since immigrants, especially Chinese – who could barely read, write or speak English – there were few banks willing to loan them any money. The Chinese had their own banking system known as the “hui”. Basically, ten Chinese, based on kinship or coming from the same district in China, trusted each other to participate in a system whereby each one would put in $10 a week for ten weeks. At the end of ten weeks – each one would save a hundred dollars, however, if somebody wanted to borrow a hundred dollars – he could take it immediately and pay back for the next ten weeks $11 a week – this is where the interest came from. Scaled up to $50 or $100 – this became the primary way that the Chinese saved money until probably the 1980s.

By the mid 1970s, most of the Chinese hand laundries disappeared from the New York City landscape. The American Born Chinese generation graduated from college and did not want anything to do with Chinese hand laundries – though gone now, Chinese hand laundries did represent a major chapter in the New York City Chinese American experience.

Above is the 1961 photo of our new laundry – note it says “Wing Lee Hand Laundry”, afterwards it was changed to “Sam Lee Hand Laundry”.

The last couple of paragraphs are based upon my 1975 MA thesis: Colonia Incognita: The Formation of Chinatown, New York City, 1850 – 1890, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

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