blessings of the freest
government the sun shines on." It further stated that "Honesty and justice
demand that their [Chinese] rights
shall be respected
as those of the natives of
any other foreign
country that choose to come among us." 19
Nonetheless, the majority in Lowell sup-
ported the anti Chinese
measure. The
Chinese Exclusion
bill passed the United
States Congress and
was signed into law by President Chester Arthur in 1882. The law prevented
Chinese laborers, both skilled and unskilled, from immigrating to the United
States, and provided
that "no State court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese
to citizenship. 1120
The law allowed immigra-
tion into the United
States of Chinese mer-
chants and Chinese
children of American citi-
zens. Since China
at the time was largely an agricultural nation, it produced very few mer-
chants. By preventing
Chinese in the United States from becoming American citizens, chil-
dren of American Chinese
born in China were barred from joining their parents in the
United States. In
effect, the law was a compre-
hensive measure excluding
Chinese immigra-
tion.
Making a Living as Laundry Men,
1876-1920
According to the Abstract
of the Twelfth Cen-
sus, in 1900
there were fifty nine "Mongolians" in Lowell.21 From the census manuscript,
I found fifty-three Chinese. All the Chinese
were adult men engaged
in the laundry busi-
ness. Only nine of
them said that they were married. Since no female was recorded in the census
manuscript, the nine Chinese probably left their wives in China. The fifty-three
Chinese men managed
and worked in thirty-
seven laundries. Except
two who claimed |
California as their
birthplace, the rest were immigrants from China.22
Why were all the Chinese in Lowell laun-
dry men? Most Chinese
immigrants at the
time came from the
rural areas of Guangdong
in South China. Laundry
in this part of China was done at home and exclusively by women. The chosen
occupation of the Chinese in Lowell, therefore, was "a form of accommoda-
tion" in the United
States.23
The first great wave of Chinese immi-
grants in the United
States arrived in
California as gold
miners. The miners
referred to the United
States as "Gold Mountain." When the shortage of women during California's
Gold Rush era led to a lack
of washerwomen, a
Chinese man named Wah Lee, probably having been "ejected by the
white miners" from
the gold mines, started
the first Chinese
laundry in San Francisco in 1851.24 As violence and anti-Chinese legisla-
tion on the West Coast
prevented Chinese
from entering the
general labor market, more Chinese men elected the laundry trade as a
way to sustain themselves
in the United
States. In the 1870s,
when Denis Kearney and the anti Chinese movement in California
forced Chinese to
move eastward, both the Northeast and the South witnessed growths in their
Chinese populations.
As they moved east, the laundry trade that Chinese immigrants learned in
California
proved useful. In
the 1870s, Lowell was expe-
riencing changes that
made the laundry a
viable commercial
business. Before 1870, laundry was mostly done at home, in boarding houses,
or by washerwomen. With the growth of Lowell's population, and with immigrant
men replacing "mill
girls" as the city's main
labor force, demand
for laundry services increased. Furthermore, as an industrial city, |
