Template:Did you know nominations/The Chinese in America

The Chinese in America

(

• Back to T:TDYK
• Article history

)

• ... that the book The Chinese in America said that in the gold rush era, numerous people in California sent their laundry to Hong Kong for cleaning?

• Source: "A ragged tale of riches; Chinese immigration". The Economist. Vol. 367, no. 8329. 2003-06-21. p. 76US. Archived from the original on 2024-06-30. Retrieved 2024-06-30 – via Gale.

  The article notes: "Ms Chang does not delve into the Pacific ties that might have made such a man. She does say that, during the gold rush, many Californians shipped their laundry to be cleaned in Hong Kong, at $1 a shirt. If this is true--and it is a staggering proposition, given that the Pacific Mail Steamship Company made just a dozen sailings a year, taking 33 days--then the subject deserves a chapter, not just the briefest of mentions."

• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/WIAT

Created by Cunard (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 77 past nominations.

Cunard (talk) 11:37, 30 June 2024 (UTC).

• not a full review, but the source quoted is doubting the hook fact's accuracy. Could you offer an alternative hook? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:51, 3 July 2024 (UTC) Forgot to ping Cunard, 05:00, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Rjjiii (talk · contribs), I think the hook is fine. Although the source questions the accuracy of the statement, the source verifies that the book makes this statement. Here are sources that verify that people in California during the gold rush era sent their laundry to Hong Kong:

1. Goethe, Charles Matthias (1949). What's in a Name?: (Tales, Historical Or Fictitious, about 111 California Gold Belt Place Names). p. 44. OCLC 606542. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

   This is not a reliable source as the author is a eugenicist. But I am including it here as it's the earliest source I can find that mentions that California gold miners shipped their laundry to Hong Kong. The book notes: "Apparently eggs from Hong Kong, Canton then were being shipped here with California miners' returned laundry."

2. Mau, Edward Seu Chen (1989). The Mau Lineage. Honolulu: Hawaii Chinese History Center. University of Hawaii Press. p. 170. ISBN 0-8248-1114-3. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Internet Archive.

   The book notes: "When the Gold Rush started, some of the San Franciscans sent their laundry to Honolulu and even to Hong Kong by sailing vessel because there was no one around to do it. By sailing vessel, it required about forty days for a round trip to Honolulu and about sixty days to Hong Kong."

3. Rubin, Susan Goldman (1998). Toilets, Toasters and Telephones: The How and Why of Everday Objects. San Diego, California: Browndeer Press. Harcourt Brace & Company. p. 56. ISBN 0-15-201421-7. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Internet Archive.

   The book notes: "Rich gold miners who didn't have a laundry nearby sent their shirts out to be washed, starched, and ironed-in Hong Kong, China! It cost as much as a dollar a shirt and took two to four months for the shirts to make the round-trip."

4. Williams, Dave (2000). Misreading the Chinese Character: Images of the Chinese in Euroamerican Drama to 1925. New York: Peter Lang. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-8204-4559-5. Retrieved 2024-07-03.

   The book notes: "In the early days of the Gold Rush, Euroamerican men shipped their soiled laundry to Hong Kong or Honolulu for cleaning, and received it again after two or three months."

5. Tchen, John Kuo Wei (1984). Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown. New York: Courier Corporation. ISBN 978-0-486-14069-8. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

   The book notes: "As the San Francisco economy boomed with hopeful gold seekers, the city experienced continual labor shortages throughout the 1850s and 1860s. It was cheaper for male miners who refused to wash their own clothes, for example, either to send their dirty laundry on a clipper ship to Hong Kong or Honolulu to be washed or to simply throw it away, than to pay the rates to have their clothes done locally."

6. Yee, Nick (2014). The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us—And How They Don't. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-300-19099-1. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

   The book notes: "I am describing the mid-nineteenth-century genesis of Chinese laundry shops (yi-shan-guan in Chinese) during and after the California Gold Rush. Due to the perception of laundry as women's work and the scarcity of women in California during the Gold Rush era, the local cost for doing laundry was exorbitant. Miners, both white and Chinese, routinely shipped their laundry to Honolulu and even Hong Kong for cleaning and pressing. Even then, the price was high and the process took four months. As Iris Chang describes in The Chinese in America, Chinese entrepreneurs took advantage of this economic opportunity and created local laundry shops."

7. Ling, Huping; Austin, Allan, eds. (2015) [2010]. "Laundries, Chinese". Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia: An Encyclopedia. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7656-8077-8. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

   The book notes: "The perception by most whites that washing was work demeaning to men, together with the absence of women on the Western frontier, made laundry a service in demand. Before the arrival of the Chinese, and with California labor in short supply and hence expensive, dirty laundry was routed to Hong Kong to be washed for $12 a dozen items, and then later to Hawaii for $8 a dozen. But Chinese entrepreneurs in San Francisco saw the potential profits in doing the washing themselves on the West Coast, and prices dropped to $5 a dozen as shipping and handling costs decreased. Soon, local laundries replaced the overseas ones."

8. Kuo, John; Tchen, Wei, eds. (1987). "Origin of the Chinese Laundry". The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation. New York: New York University Press. pp. 46–47. ISBN 0-8147-7859-3. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

   This source predates the 2003 book Chinese in America and discusses how laundry was shipped from San Francisco to Hawaii which cost $8 and took six to eight weeks.

   The book notes: "But it cost money for the San Franciscans to achieve such stylishness and respectability, for the laundry bills were terrific. In order to have their linen washed, starched and ironed to the right degree of whiteness and rigidity cost them eight dollars per dozen, sometimes even more. The men didn't mind paying from three to five dollars for an order of ham and eggs or a steak, but eight dollars just to scrub and iron some pieces of shirt was an excessive price. So there were grumblings aplenty. And not only that, there was also the annoyance of waiting from six to eight weeks for one's laundry to come back each time one sent it off, for mostly they were shipped to the Hawaiian Islands to be washed. And then the shirts might return with buttons missing or collars separated."

9. Strange USA: Historical Oddities, Roadside Rarities, Unique Eats, and Amazing Americans. San Diego, California: Portable Press. 2023. ISBN 978-1-6672-0115-3. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

   The book notes: "3: Number of months it took prospectors to get their clean clothes back before Wah Lee opened San Francisco's first Chinese laundry in 1851. Prior to that, there were so few laundries that miners sent dirty clothes by ship to Hong Kong, where they were cleaned, pressed, and then shipped back."

10. Blackburn, Sarah-SoonLing (2024). Exclusion and the Chinese American Story. New York: Random House Children's Books. p. 59–60. ISBN 978-0-593-56763-0. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

    The book notes: "By the mid-1800s, some people, mostly white, had managed to get rich in the Gold Rush. ... They often thought of laundry as a "woman's job," and therefore, beneath them. Without many other options, it became pretty common for people to ship their laundry all the way to Hong Kong to be cleaned. This took nearly four months and cost about twelve dollars for a dozen shirts, which is equal to about four hundred dollars today. Still, this was way cheaper than the alternative, to send the clothes back to the East Coast of the United States to be cleaned. Remember, the Transcontinental Rail- road wasn't finished yet, so the laundry would have had to go by boat all the way around the continent or over land on a wagon. Hong Kong was the best option for people with the money to spend on laundry, and so the shipment of clothing back and forth across the Pacific Ocean became another link between the coasts of the United States and China, another lane on the highway connecting Chinese Americans between their two lands. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and closer to San Francisco than to Hong Kong, you will find the islands of Hawai'i. By the mid-1800s, Hawai'i had become a stopover for people and goods as they went back and forth between China and the West Coast of the continental United States. The rich people who had been shipping their laundry to Hong Kong now had a closer, more affordable option. Instead of spending twelve dollars to have a dozen shirts washed in Hong Kong, they could spend eight dollars to have a dozen shirts washed in Honolulu."

11. Burman, Edward (2008). China: The Stealth Empire: Why the World is Not Chinese Yet. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. ISBN 978-0-7524-9619-1. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

    The book notes: "As the gold fever cooled, there was a shift in Chinese business patterns, first from mining to laundries, and then to railway construction. The second was the result of quintessentially Chinese entrepreneurship. The Chinese noticed that people in California were prepared to pay for laundry services, which involved shipping to the East Coast, Honolulu and even Hong Kong, which were all both costly and took time. It was obviously beneficial for customers to pay $5 for a dozen shirts rather than $12, and to receive the shirts in a few days rather than up to four months."

12. McKeown, Adam (2014). "Movement". In Armitage, David; Bashford, Alison (eds.). Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 154. ISBN 978-1-137-00163-4. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

    The book notes: "A similar story unfolded on the Pacific coast of the Americas. North American trade with Asia and Australia grew rapidly in the 1860s and 1870s, but failed to live up to that potential in subsequent years. In the first years of the gold rush, prices for goods and labour in California were so high that laundry was famously sent from San Francisco to Hong Kong to be washed. By the end of the 1850s, California had begun shipping wheat, quicksilver, hides, lumber, oats, beans, potatoes and wool across the Pacific to Asia and the Australian"

13. Goldstone, Lawrence (2020). On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights. Berkeley, California: Counterpoint. p. 133. ISBN 978-1-64009-576-2. Retrieved 2024-07-03 – via Google Books.

    The book notes: "Most of the men who arrived in California to hunt for gold came alone. Mining was dirty, dusty work, but washing grimy, mud-caked clothes was considered a "woman's job." Some of the more successful single men shipped dirty clothes to Hong Kong and waited months for their return. For the rest, since local Spanish and Native American women charged too high a price, Chinese men filled the void. Within a few years, the Chinese came to dominate the laundry business in San Francisco."

Cunard (talk) 09:35, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. You're right. Rather than doing a review, I'd like to offer an alternative hook. Since multiple university press sources state it as a fact, could we run a hook that also presents it as a historical fact? Like this:

• ALT1: ... that The Chinese in America documents how California gold rush prospectors mailed their laundry to Hong Kong for cleaning? "While Chang's book might first appear basic in its history lessons, even the most knowledgeable Asian-American scholar will likely find little-known facts and challenging theories within. Chang tells how gold-rush miners - both Chinese and Caucasian - sent their laundry to Hong Kong for lack of local services, hence opening up a business opportunity for entrepreneurial Chinese to take over the "women's work" that Caucasians would not do. (Hong (2003) CSM.)"

Cited to The Christian Science Monitor in the article. @Cunard: if you're not feeling that, let me know, and I'll strike my suggestion. If you have an improvement, let me know, and I'll review it. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 13:26, 3 July 2024 (UTC)