The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [89]
Thus the caste system installed and rigidly enforced in the Jim Crow South left a void in the retail economy that the Chinese sought to fill. Because of the social stigma attached to trade, whites did not view the Chinese grocers as a threat. And black customers preferred to patronize Chinese-owned rather than white-owned businesses, where Chinese grocers would not harass, assault, or kill them if they forgot to call them “Mister” or “Sir.” Chinese grocers also provided social services for blacks that often did not exist elsewhere. Serving in an informal banking role, the local Chinese grocery stores would often extend to black sharecroppers the credit and loans denied them by white institutions.
So severely had slavery weakened the entrepreneurial spirit in the South that even the lack of English skills did not hinder the Chinese grocers, who found nonverbal ways to conduct business. Most kept a stick in their stores for customers to use to point to the items they wanted. Chinese shopkeepers also saved the last one of each item that needed to be reordered so that they could show it to wholesale representatives. As a group, the Chinese grocers not only survived, but prospered even by white standards. In some areas, such as the Mississippi Delta region, they would eventually earn on average twice the white median income.
But the most popular business of all was the laundry, in many areas an almost exclusively Chinese enterprise since the gold rush days. According to the 1920 census, almost 30 percent of all employed Chinese worked in laundries: out of a total of 45,614 Chinese workers, 12,559 were laundry people. Opening a laundry appealed to many immigrants because it was a fast way to establish one’s own business. It required almost no start-up capital—just a scrub board, soap, and an iron—and operating costs were low since the laundry owner usually saved rent by living in his shop. It also required no special training. “In the old days, some of those fellows were really ignorant though,” one laundryman told historian Paul Siu.
They did not know even how to write down numbers. When a bundle of laundry was done, he had to put down the amount charged for the work. Being so illiterate, he could not write the numbers. He had a way though, and what a way! See, he would draw a circle as big as a half dollar coin to represent a half dollar, and a circle as big as a dime for a dime, and so on. When the customers came in to call for their laundry, they would catch on to the meaning of the circles and pay accordingly. It is indeed laughable.
The reality of the laundry business was harsh. Most Chinese washermen survived only because they lived frugally and charged at least 15 percent less for services than white laundries, leaving them with razor-thin profit margins. The work consumed almost every waking moment. Breathing steam and lint, the laundryman labored on a wet, slippery floor, washing and pressing, using an eight-pound iron heated over a coal stove, and then folding his customers’ clothes by hand. The finishing work—the starching of detachable items, like collars, cuffs, and shirtfronts—required attention to detail and time. Collars had to be handled delicately lest wrinkles form. They were first pressed through a special mangle, then moistened with a tiny brush, and finally each was rolled by hand. Decades later, elder laundrymen would remember the ordeal of having to get up each morning to finish a thousand shirt collars.
In time, the laundry became a humid prison. The typical washer-man not only worked in his laundry but slept there at night. He rarely left the premises because suppliers, sensing quick profits, came to him: salesmen called to peddle laundry supplies, wagon drivers delivered cooked meals. On some days, a laundryman might labor twenty hours continuously, without even stopping to eat. “My father used to joke [about] how flexible his stomach was—like rubber bands—he could skip meals for a couple of days,” recalled a New