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Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: laundry trust and ancient Chinese secrets [1]

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Date: 2022-12-02

Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.

My granduncle ran a laundry into the 1960s which did seem more like a laundry for money, only fitting into the family stories of my paternal grandfather’s early life in the post-earthquake San Francisco as a numbers runner. He did make enough money to invest in a building on Nob Hill, kitty-corner to a nice Julia Morgan building. Like all real estate it was subject to economic manipulation by the usual family politics, there’s nothing like paper relations in immigration. Everybody was kung-fu fighting despite the gender division of labor and the economic class called “merchants”. Forming trusts to minimize price predation and maintain profit seems oh so inflationary.

x x YouTube Video The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first race-based immigration law, was designed to prohibit Chinese immigration and deny citizenship to Chinese people for a decade. In 1883, 8,031 Chinese people, including immigrants returning from visits to China, entered the United States. However, in 1884 only 279 entered the country, and in 1887, only 10 entered. In 1892, the act was extended for another 10 years, so for decades there were violent crimes and discrimination aimed at the Chinese, but they found safety in Chinatowns. By the early twentieth century, there were Chinese laundries in every major city. The Chinese persevered, taking actions such as forming the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance in 1933. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. By then, entire families worked and lived in Chinese laundries, and the new generations of Chinese Americans gradually became assimilated into American society. x x YouTube Video An ingrained part of popular culture, the old comedic associations were carried into television. A television commercial for Calgon water softener that was popular during the 1970’s featured a white woman asking a laundry owner named Lee how he gets his shirts so very clean. He replies, “Ancient Chinese secret.” The secret is exposed when Lee’s wife sticks her head out from the back room and shouts that they need more Calgon. [...] The Chinese laundryman stereotype persisted, but by the 1950’s the actual traditional Chinese laundries were becoming obsolete. Self-service laundromats proliferated during the 1950’s. Generations of children who grew up in laundries pursued higher education and entered other occupations. With the end of the civil war in China in 1949, a new wave of Chinese immigration had begun. These immigrants often came from upper- and middle-class families searching for a better life in America or were well-educated intellectuals pursuing advanced degrees wikisummaries.org/… Lived experience, however, offers an alternative periodization, because long after Chinese exclusion was repealed, paper sons and daughters lived on. The Immigration and Naturalization Service recognized this and, between 1957 and 1965, partnered with the State and Justice Departments to stamp out these multiple identities. www.cambridge.org/... (2018) We’ve grown accustomed to the dog-whistling of anti-immigrant racism. Where blood, purity and civilization were once its everyday vocabulary, anti-racist and immigrant rights activism have, at least until recently, succeeded in forcing such talk underground. Our era’s seemingly race-neutral languages of security, legality, culture, productivity and assimilation are often strongly inflected with racial meanings, but they’re subtler and deniable, attracting far less opposition than, say, likening countries to outhouses. Public utterances like Mr. Trump’s have and should inspire outrage, but we need to go deeper, challenging the racist views — both flagrant and soft-pedaled — that have long shaped America’s immigration policy. And we need to ask hard questions about the ways racism has decisively, durably shaped the immigration debate in ways that usually go unnoticed. The truth is, many of the United States’ early policies toward immigrants were conceived in recognizably Trumpian terms, in substance if not in tenor. The president’s headline-making sentiment that people from countries like Norway (read: white people) were preferable would have been recognizable to the founders. The nation’s first naturalization law, from 1790, closed off United States citizenship to all but “free white persons of good character.” People of African descent were among the first migrants singled out for surveillance and exclusion, as they sought entry to the country or moved between states. State repression of black migrants transformed them into America’s first “illegal immigrants,” laying the groundwork for durable associations between law, morality and the need to keep people of color, quite literally, in their “place.” The racialization of United States immigration law took off in the decades following the Civil War. Beginning with the Chinese, migrants from Asia were the early targets; beginning in 1917, an “Asiatic Barred Zone” (with latitude and longitude markers laid out clearly in the legislative code) kept out migrants from an imaginary mega-region that stretched from contemporary Turkey to Papua New Guinea. www.nytimes.com/...

John Jung’s website has some interesting historical pieces on the price arrangements of Chinese Laundries.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/2/2137949/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-Friday-laundry-trust-and-ancient-Chinese-secrets

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