Questions | Yonkers | Chinese Communities
Life in a Laundry: Chinese in Pre-World War II Yonkers
Document 6
Vocabulary
Residential: Consisting mainly of homes.
Dusk: Darker stage of twilight, early evening.
Endure: Tolerate, bear.
Tolerable: Bearable, able to be endured.
Colleagues: Fellow workers.
Calluses: Areas of thick, hardened skin.
TB: Short for tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that affects the lungs and other organs.
In New York, perhaps seven out of ten Chinese survived by working in Chinese Hand Laundries. At the end of almost every residential block or alley, there was always a Chinese laundry. A Chinese laundry was usually small - about the size of five dining tables, equipped only with an ironing board and a shelf to put cleaned, ironed clothes that were packaged and ready to go. When I first handled the dirty clothes, I could not take the smell. I almost threw up. Father saw my reaction and comforted me, "Take your time. You know, picking up these clothes is even worse than moving corpses back in China. I never mentioned the unhealthy conditions of the laundry in my letters to China. Knowing those things would not do the family any good back home. Frankly, I was busy from dawn to dusk. How could I find time to write about all these things? I always wrote 'I am well and healthy here. No need to worry.' It didn't matter whether I was well or sick. Being here, you had to endure.
Some Chinese could not rent a decent place, and had to use the basements of old buildings. The basements were dark all day long. In the winter, working in the basement was actually tolerable because it kept the place warm. But on hot summer days, the temperature hit over 100 degrees F and your whole body would sweat.
At the beginning, I thought the work that my father and I did was really hard. Later I was surprised to learn from my father's "colleagues" that we were already using a modern iron that made the work much easier. When my father first came to the U.S., there weren't any electric irons. Steel irons were used. Compared to the hot charcoal irons used in China, these steel irons were even worse. My father's laundry still kept them around. They weighed eight pounds each. Chinese heated them on a hot stove. When the iron was hot enough, you took it off the stove and ironed until it cooled down. Then you heated it up again. After ironing all day, marks would appear on your palm. Blisters would turn to calluses so thick that even if you cut them open with a knife you would not bleed. Long time Chinese immigrants all had those calluses on their palms.
Many Chinese developed health problems after only three years of laundry work. Some caught TB. Some had ulcers, internal bleeding, or swollen feet .
Document 6: Excerpt from Life in New York Chinatown, by Yeung-Sing Ng, Hong Kong, 1955, translated by Vivian Wai-Fun Lee. Asia Society, 1997. http://asiasociety.org/.
Document 6 Short-Answer Questions
- Approximately how many Chinese worked in hand laundries in New York?
- What were the working conditions like in a Chinese laundry?
- According to the author, what health problems developed after working in Chinese laundries?
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