The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [30]
Not all the dishes served, however, were traditional Chinese fare. According to gold rush folklore, a group of drunken white miners invaded a San Francisco restaurant late one evening, demanding service. On the verge of closing for the night, the Chinese proprietor prudently decided to feed them and avoid trouble. His cook stir-fried the table scraps in his larder—a melange of fried vegetables, meat, and gravy—and called it chop suey. The miners raved about this new Chinese delicacy, and soon people all over San Francisco were clamoring for it.
After their success in the food industry, the Chinese soon began to seek other ways to earn money. Many recognized that the path to riches lay, ironically, in domestic service. In those days before care-free fabrics, washing and ironing was difficult as well as tedious work, something most white men considered beneath their dignity. It was considered women’s work, but few women could be found to help them. Many Californians during the gold rush era, both Chinese and white, shipped their laundry to Hong Kong to be cleaned, but the prices were exorbitant—twelve dollars for a dozen shirts—and the process took four months. Still, sending dirty linen to be washed in Asia was cheaper and faster than mailing it back east. Laundrymen in Honolulu soon captured the business by washing shirts for only eight dollars a dozen. Finally, Chinese men in San Francisco saw a market need and moved to meet it. The first Chinese laundryman in the city was Wah Lee, who washed shirts for five dollars a dozen and advertised his services in 1851 by hanging the sign WASH‘NG AND IRON’NG.
The Chinese also opened curio stores, enticing white miners to trade gold dust for a variety of collectibles: porcelain vases, carved ivory and jade art, Oriental chess pieces, inkbrush scroll paintings, fans, shawls, and teapots. The modest shops advertised themselves with gaudy signboards and red ribbons, but in the grander establishments merchants installed glass windows in their storefronts and kept lavish shrines to bring them good luck: luxurious, gilded altars decorated with silk scrolls and ritual artifacts of worship.
By 1853, the Chinese had occupied most of Dupont Street, one of the best retail areas in San Francisco. Although the structures in that neighborhood were hardly exceptional (the San Francisco Daily Alta California noted they were “mere shells and tinder boxes, which could be fired by a single spark”), the location was excellent. As a group, the Chinese were mostly tenants, not homeowners, renting from white landlords who preferred the Chinese because of their willingness to pay more than Caucasians. For instance, one house that rented to a white man for $200 a month (an exorbitantly high figure at that time) went to a Chinese for $500 a month. On this street and others, a sophisticated Chinese business community soon appeared. By 1856, a Chinese directory called the Oriental listed thirty-three merchandise stores, fifteen apothecaries, five herbalists, five restaurants, five barbers, five butchers, three boarding homes, three wood yards, three tailors, two silversmiths, two bakers, one carver, one engraver, one interpreter, and one broker for U.S. merchants.
Not all of the Chinese settlers could read or write their own language, so this new community soon had need of professional writers. Some of the better-educated Cantonese picked up languages quickly, a few becoming fluent not only in English but also in Spanish. Most hired out as scribes, so illiterate Chinese could dictate letters to relatives back home. A few with journalistic skills published small ethnic newspapers in San Francisco and across the state. In 1854, the Gold Hills News became quite possibly the first Chinese newspaper published in the United States. Two years later, the Chinese News appeared in the northern California town of Sacramento, causing a local historian to later comment, “It is a little singular that the only paper