Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain by John Jung

Author:John Jung [Jung, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, history, Chinese American history, Americn history, Chinese laundry
ISBN: 9781257149247
Google: YXVNCAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Lulu Press, Inc
Published: 2013-03-12T23:59:34.478542+00:00

KEN LEE, age 52, is Professor and Head of the Food Science Department at Ohio State University where he had the honor of giving the Commencement Address for the first graduating class post 9-11, coincidentally on Pearl Harbor Day. He spoke about joining a nation at war, and about his personal experience facing bigotry growing up in a Chinese laundry. He asked graduates that day for their help in making America a safe place to be different.

My dad came over when he was 10 or 12 from Canton, China. There is confusion about his age since there are both differences in the Chinese and American calendars and outright lying about age for work. My mom was born in Newark, New Jersey, and her mom born in San Francisco, California. Despite being born a U.S. citizen our government deported my grandmother under the blatantly racist Chinese Exclusion Act. Some paperwork was lost, presumably in a San Francisco fire. So my mom was partially raised in China with her dozen brothers and sisters. Only my mom and three uncles survived the Japanese invasion. Grandma sold most of the family jewelry to get everyone out on one of the last boats to leave in the early days of the war.

Dad spent his childhood working in my grandfather’s laundry in the Bronx, New York, just under an elevated subway line. Ironing tables were also his bed. It seems all he ever did since he was a kid was work seven days a week in the laundry. Somehow he managed to get a college degree in chemistry from Fordham University in N. Y.

With this high education, why did he put in 30 years of hard labor in a Chinese laundry in West Orange, New Jersey? There are vague stories about racial discrimination: whereas blacks were physically thrown from the employment office, Chinese were allowed to apply, but the paper just later trashed. There are resentful stories about a mother-in-law with a vice-grip lock on her daughter, forcing my family into the proximate laundry business. The truth was lost somewhere in the New Jersey meadowlands, a foul urban swamp that we navigated each weekend to stock up in Chinatown, NYC.

It was an arranged marriage. Dad never said much about it. Mom said she was given a choice, and picked him, as he was the best looking. The laundry was something that mom initially ran while dad pursued his dreams and an advanced degree. But racial discrimination and family issues made the laundry his only ‘choice.’

As the last of five children raised over a laundry in an all-white town, there was little chance that I was going to learn to speak or write Chinese. They tried to send me to Chinese school, but that was futile.

Dad had a 2B deferment from the army and married mom in 1943. The honeymoon was sad as my uncle, James Eng, the first Chinese American to enlist in the US Air Force, 42nd Quarter Squadron, crashed and died. Dad worked as a chemist for Ballantine Brewery at $65 per week, but that income could not support a family.

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