The stereotypical Chinese laundry is well-known in the US, Britain, Australia and elsewhere and, according to this site, it is down to being allowed to at a particular time in history and economic neccessity.
However, that does not explain the prevalence of Chinese laundries throughout the Soviet Gulag system. From “Gulag: A History” (Anne Applebaum) memoirist Karlo Stajner recalls: “I cannot remember seeing any non-Chinese laundry workers in any of the camps I passed through” (p278).
So, do the Chinese for some reason other than neccessity gravitate towards the laundry business?
“Ancient Chinese secret”?
A few guesses:
Laundries are a necessity in larger cities where there can be a lot of traffic from businesses as well as homes, making them a relatively sure-thing business
Laundries require less of a knowledge of the language of the country you are in, aside from the person manning the front, there is little customer/worker interaction
In a documentary on Chinatowns in North America, they also mentioned a lot of Chinese immigrants turned to these businesses after they were forced out of the fishing trade. Apparently the methods of fishing they were using were far more prolific than the ways the western fisherman were fishing and they were cutting into their livelyhood.
Slightly related question. I thought I remembered reading that in nineteenth-century California, people would regularly ship their clothes off to Hong Kong to be laundered. Was I hallucinating this? If not, how can that possibly be efficient?
When I was growing up there was an elderly Chinese couple in my town of Cherokee, IA, and they ran a laundry. I’ve often wondered how they found the town of 6000 and why they stayed in a place of relatively insular people many of whom were prone to mocking those who were “different.”
Who would send their clothes on a months long trans-Pacific voyage to get laundered? How would you even know when they came back? Do you sit around in your underwear for a few months and tell your employer “Hey, I’m out of clean shirts, but once the big Clipper ship comes in next month, I’ll be ready.”
Many Chinese immigrants set up laundries wherever the miners were.
As I said, it’s possible I hallucinated that. But I’ve been web searching to confirm it, and one site suggested that the Chinese got into the laundry business because little capital was required and a lack of fluency in English wasn’t a barrier to entry.
OK, here is a site suggesting that I didn’t hallucinate that factoid:
I think you’re onto something here. Also, washing clothes in the days before automatic washing machines was hard, unpleasant work. The locals aren’t likely to get too angry about recent immigrants “stealing” that sort of job, just as today people in wealthy countries don’t gripe too much about immigrants doing the nastier agricultural work.
True. Hong Kong Chinese are quite happy to hire Filipinas and Indonesians to work as live-in domestic helpers. The demand for Chinese helpers has dropped off to a trickle.
I understand and except the reasons why the Chinese started laundries in the US but why did they gravitate to that line in work in the Gulag? And why didn’t other migrant groups take to the business in the US?
Perhaps there wasn’t much call for Gen. Tso’s Chicken in the Gulag. 