The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [90]
Most laundrymen did not have wives in America, but some managed to pass themselves off as “merchants” to secure permission for their wives to migrate. Arriving at their husbands’ laundries was often a terrible shock. “In China in the old days women thought that people came over to pick gold,” a veteran laundry wife recalled. “Ai! Really! They thought they were coming to Gold Mountain to pick gold. You think they knew that they were coming to work in the laundry?”
Those wives who did manage to get to America had to work alongside their husbands as well as care for the children and cook meals in the back of the laundry. With babies strapped to their backs, they bent over heaps of laundry until they developed swollen legs, strained neck muscles, and varicose veins. One recalled that her veins grew so monstrously big that they “became like balls and I wrapped them with cloth around my legs.” Exhausted and overwhelmed by the volume of dirty linen, they, like their husbands, rarely stepped outdoors. One wife told an interviewer that in the thirty-eight years she worked in a laundry, she left it only three times—and then only to attend family celebrations in another city.
One reason for this slavish work ethic was the knowledge that they were giving their relatives in China a better life. “Some of these old-timers, they work almost sixteen hours a day,” said Andy Eng, manager of the Wing Gong laundry in New York City. “They save a few dollars because they have no time to do anything else. The money they picked in their hands, they didn’t spend it nowhere, except for their family back in China or in Hong Kong.” And this money transformed entire regions in Guangdong. It paid for new technology, electric lights, paved roads, and new schools. Thanks to these remittances, by 1910, Toishan county, from which more than half of all the first-wave Chinese émigrés in the United States originated, enjoyed an astounding 90 percent literacy rate among its adult men.
But many people in Toishan had little appreciation of the hard life their relatives were living in the United States. The amount of money sent home was often huge by Chinese standards, which led them to picture their relatives as wealthy merchants in the American clothing industry, an image the émigrés encouraged. In their letters and during their rare visits home, proud laundrymen would refer ambiguously to their yishanguan, which in Chinese means either “clothing store” or a business related to clothing. That they did this was perfectly understandable. Why would they jeopardize their celebrity status in their home villages, the only bit of glory in their lives? Why would they want to jump off their pedestals to announce that they were not supermen or heroes, but only menial workers? For most laundrymen, the awe and admiration in the eyes of their children gave them the only bright moments in their lives.19
Sustaining this false image, however, carried a price. Believing that these laundrymen were moguls in the United States, relatives had no qualms about making financial demands upon them. The 1920s correspondence between Hsiao Teh Seng, a Chicago laundryman, and his family in China, revealed the endless pressures placed on the overseas Chinese by their kin. Letters he received from home all harped on one single theme: money. Bandits had kidnapped Hsiao’s elder brother’s concubine, and the family needed $20,000 to pay her ransom. A cousin asked for $200 to adopt a son. Younger clan members pleaded for money to purchase a house in Canton, because they had no suitable place to stay during their vacations (“We are indeed losing face ... Please do not regard this as an unimportant thing”). After gangsters ransacked Hsiao’s village, his family begged for funds to construct a wall (“The village’s life and