The Chinese in America (25 page)

Some émigrés drew on their knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine to establish herbalist businesses. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, California suffered from a severe lack of adequately trained Western doctors, prompting patients to try alternative medicine. After Western doctors pronounced them incurable, in desperation many Caucasians turned to Chinese healers. One herbalist, Tan Fuyuan, noted that “as a rule Caucasians have been unwilling to consult us until they had tried every other form of medical treatment within their reach. Therefore, it may be said that all of the cures which we have made have been cases given up by other doctors.”

The ability of some Chinese herbalists to diagnose and cure their patients created a huge demand for their services. Though these herb doctors served people within their own community, most of their clientele were non-Chinese.
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By the late nineteenth century, every Chinatown in the West had at least one herbalist business, some as many as three or four. In 1913,
the International Chinese Business Directory of the World
listed the names of twenty-eight Chinese herb doctors in Los Angeles (the real number may have been considerably higher), even though only two thousand Chinese lived in the city at that time.

Like other Chinese enterprises, Chinese herbal shops were typically family-run businesses. Historian Liu Haiming has portrayed the daily routine of Chang Yitang, who arrived in the United States in 1900. The family lived upstairs in Chang’s house in Los Angeles, while the ground floor served as the doctor’s office, pill factory, pharmacy, and teahouse. In his office, Chang would take the patient’s pulse, then dole out advice and medicine. In the kitchen, his wife, Nellie, would steep herbs into tea, which his nephew, Yee Pai, would serve with crackers to patients in the waiting room. The family also made herbal pills from scratch, an exhausting job that required the efforts of several people. Using their feet or knees, they would grind the medicine into a fine powder beneath a heavy iron device they called a “rocking boat,” as it resembled a boat with handles on the side. The powder was sifted through a sieve, mixed with honey, steamed, shaped into tiny balls, dried in the oven, and packed into bottles, to be sold later through the Chang family’s thriving mail-order business.

Some herbalists owed their success more to marketing than medical knowledge. Tom Leung, who operated a booming herbal business in Los Angeles in the 1910s and 1920s, was particularly gifted at publicity. Though he claimed to be descended from a famous line of physicians in China and trained at the Imperial Medical College of Peking, his daughter, Louise Leung Larson, believes he invented those credentials. Leung advertised frequently in the Los Angeles newspapers, mailed Christmas cards to his patients, and gave away calendars and rulers with “T. Leung Herb Co.” printed on them. Along with a prosperous local practice, he conducted a national mail-order business, sending clients herbs after they filled out questionnaires detailing their ailments. One of his most popular products was Thousand Wonders Oil, which Leung used for “countless” problems ranging from toothaches to insect bites, billing it as “one of the most valuable and inexpensive remedies in the world.” As his reputation spread, Leung’s practice flourished, and soon he was wealthy enough to afford a mansion, decorated with expensive Chinese art and staffed with maids, cooks, and private tutors for his children.

The American medical establishment, viewing practitioners like Leung as serious competition, conspired with authorities to drive them out of business. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese herbalists were frequently fined or imprisoned for practicing medicine without a license. Tom Leung was arrested more than a hundred times, but he took the situation in stride; recognizing that his success required defiance of the law, he accepted trouble with the authorities as part of the cost of doing business and incorporated the arrests into his regular schedule, developing a system so that his secretary would call the bank to arrange bail the moment the police arrived. The raids actually provided a windfall benefit: free publicity. “The [more] he was arrested, the more business he got,” his wife recalled.

A far less controversial Chinese business was retail trade. During the early twentieth century, the most famous Chinese department store owner was Joe Shoong, a former immigrant laborer. In 1903, he opened a tiny store in Vallejo, California, which he expanded into National Dollar Stores, a major chain recognized by 1920 as the largest Chinese business in the United States. Though the employees (and virtually all the customers) were white, the managers and stock-holders were Chinese. Within a few decades, his empire, which provided Shoong with the second highest income in the state of California, included more than fifty stores in the western states, and prompted
Time
magazine to describe him as “the richest, best-known Chinese businessman in the U.S.”

Of course, most Chinese-owned stores were very small. In the South, where the Chinese controlled much of the grocery industry, the typical store contained a large room in front for displaying merchandise and greeting customers, and a small room in back, where the owner ate and slept. Ray Joe, a Chinese émigré who arrived in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1920s, lived and worked in one such tiny store. During the day, he sold groceries, pies, cakes, and hot dogs, and at night, “I sleep on two trunks pulled together for bed. My brother pulled four stools together, he slept there—we tried as hard as we can to try to fight it out and make men of ourselves.”

Opening a grocery store in the South posed distinct risks for a Chinese would-be merchant; his lack of English skills and local connections left him vulnerable to unscrupulous suppliers, complaining customers, and thieves. Nonetheless, the Chinese émigré also enjoyed certain advantages. His kinship ties and Guangdong background gave him immediate access to capital and business experience, as clans often pooled their resources to pay for a relative’s emigration journey and to launch his overseas enterprise. Even more important, the southern Chinese grocer met virtually no competition. Apparently, his willingness to work long and hard hours for a thin return did not invite emulation by the locals.

One unexpected consequence of plantation slavery was that it left blacks and whites alike ill prepared to compete in a capitalist economy. As James W. Loewen, author of
The Mississippi Chinese,
points out, southern whites suffered from a precapitalist, almost feudal mindset. Many avoided service industries because they required waiting on customers, a practice the culture viewed as servile and demeaning, even when profitable. Meanwhile, most blacks were too intimidated by the white ruling class to open their own stores. Black business success in and of itself could be interpreted by whites as rebellious and “uppity,” an act of defiance against the system.

Thus the caste system installed and rigidly enforced in the Jim Crow South left a void in the retail economy that the Chinese sought to fill. Because of the social stigma attached to trade, whites did not view the Chinese grocers as a threat. And black customers preferred to patronize Chinese-owned rather than white-owned businesses, where Chinese grocers would not harass, assault, or kill them if they forgot to call them “Mister” or “Sir.” Chinese grocers also provided social services for blacks that often did not exist elsewhere. Serving in an informal banking role, the local Chinese grocery stores would often extend to black sharecroppers the credit and loans denied them by white institutions.

So severely had slavery weakened the entrepreneurial spirit in the South that even the lack of English skills did not hinder the Chinese grocers, who found nonverbal ways to conduct business. Most kept a stick in their stores for customers to use to point to the items they wanted. Chinese shopkeepers also saved the last one of each item that needed to be reordered so that they could show it to wholesale representatives. As a group, the Chinese grocers not only survived, but prospered even by white standards. In some areas, such as the Mississippi Delta region, they would eventually earn on average twice the white median income.

But the most popular business of all was the laundry, in many areas an almost exclusively Chinese enterprise since the gold rush days. According to the 1920 census, almost 30 percent of all employed Chinese worked in laundries: out of a total of 45,614 Chinese workers, 12,559 were laundry people. Opening a laundry appealed to many immigrants because it was a fast way to establish one’s own business. It required almost no start-up capital—just a scrub board, soap, and an iron—and operating costs were low since the laundry owner usually saved rent by living in his shop. It also required no special training. “In the old days, some of those fellows were really ignorant though,” one laundryman told historian Paul Siu.

The reality of the laundry business was harsh. Most Chinese washermen survived only because they lived frugally and charged at least 15 percent less for services than white laundries, leaving them with razor-thin profit margins. The work consumed almost every waking moment. Breathing steam and lint, the laundryman labored on a wet, slippery floor, washing and pressing, using an eight-pound iron heated over a coal stove, and then folding his customers’ clothes by hand. The finishing work—the starching of detachable items, like collars, cuffs, and shirtfronts—required attention to detail and time. Collars had to be handled delicately lest wrinkles form. They were first pressed through a special mangle, then moistened with a tiny brush, and finally each was rolled by hand. Decades later, elder laundrymen would remember the ordeal of having to get up each morning to finish a thousand shirt collars.

In time, the laundry became a humid prison. The typical washer-man not only worked in his laundry but slept there at night. He rarely left the premises because suppliers, sensing quick profits, came to him: salesmen called to peddle laundry supplies, wagon drivers delivered cooked meals. On some days, a laundryman might labor twenty hours continuously, without even stopping to eat. “My father used to joke [about] how flexible his stomach was—like rubber bands—he could skip meals for a couple of days,” recalled a New York laundryman’s son. “And once he ate, he had enough to last for quite a while! There was no time for meals.” Another remembered, “I heard that some of them used a string to hang a piece of bread from the ceiling, in front of them, and had a bite when they had time to do so.”

Most laundrymen did not have wives in America, but some managed to pass themselves off as “merchants” to secure permission for their wives to migrate. Arriving at their husbands’ laundries was often a terrible shock. “In China in the old days women thought that people came over to pick gold,” a veteran laundry wife recalled. “Ai! Really! They thought they were coming to Gold Mountain to pick gold. You think they knew that they were coming to work in the laundry?”

Those wives who did manage to get to America had to work alongside their husbands as well as care for the children and cook meals in the back of the laundry. With babies strapped to their backs, they bent over heaps of laundry until they developed swollen legs, strained neck muscles, and varicose veins. One recalled that her veins grew so monstrously big that they “became like balls and I wrapped them with cloth around my legs.” Exhausted and overwhelmed by the volume of dirty linen, they, like their husbands, rarely stepped outdoors. One wife told an interviewer that in the thirty-eight years she worked in a laundry, she left it only three times—and then only to attend family celebrations in another city.

One reason for this slavish work ethic was the knowledge that they were giving their relatives in China a better life. “Some of these old-timers, they work almost sixteen hours a day,” said Andy Eng, manager of the Wing Gong laundry in New York City. “They save a few dollars because they have no time to do anything else. The money they picked in their hands, they didn’t spend it nowhere, except for their family back in China or in Hong Kong.” And this money transformed entire regions in Guangdong. It paid for new technology, electric lights, paved roads, and new schools. Thanks to these remittances, by 1910, Toishan county, from which more than half of all the first-wave Chinese émigrés in the United States originated, enjoyed an astounding 90 percent literacy rate among its adult men.

But many people in Toishan had little appreciation of the hard life their relatives were living in the United States. The amount of money sent home was often huge by Chinese standards, which led them to picture their relatives as wealthy merchants in the American clothing industry, an image the émigrés encouraged. In their letters and during their rare visits home, proud laundrymen would refer ambiguously to their
yishanguan,
which in Chinese means either “clothing store” or a business related to clothing. That they did this was perfectly understandable. Why would they jeopardize their celebrity status in their home villages, the only bit of glory in their lives? Why would they want to jump off their pedestals to announce that they were not supermen or heroes, but only menial workers? For most laundrymen, the awe and admiration in the eyes of their children gave them the only bright moments in their lives.
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Sustaining this false image, however, carried a price. Believing that these laundrymen were moguls in the United States, relatives had no qualms about making financial demands upon them. The 1920s correspondence between Hsiao Teh Seng, a Chicago laundryman, and his family in China, revealed the endless pressures placed on the overseas Chinese by their kin. Letters he received from home all harped on one single theme: money. Bandits had kidnapped Hsiao’s elder brother’s concubine, and the family needed $20,000 to pay her ransom. A cousin asked for $200 to adopt a son. Younger clan members pleaded for money to purchase a house in Canton, because they had no suitable place to stay during their vacations (“We are indeed losing face ... Please do not regard this as an unimportant thing”). After gangsters ransacked Hsiao’s village, his family begged for funds to construct a wall (“The village’s life and death is depending on you. Take note of this”). A nephew wanted financial assistance to cleanse himself from the “humiliation of an embezzling uncle.” Even the embezzling uncle turned to Hsiao, seeking monetary relief from his own humiliation. Hsiao’s daughter asked for a gold watch (“Big Uncle’s daughters have gold watches, but we do not. My venerable one can use his own judgment whether jade should be inlaid or not”). His wife chastised him for his selfishness (“Month after month, I was longing for your money, but all you sent were plain letters”). His misplaced generosity, she wrote, had bankrupted her household (“I am so poor now, I have to pawn things in order to have money to buy food, while you go donating money, trying to wear your ‘high hat’ ”). She resorted to threats (“I do not want to take care of your home anymore. Even though you are a slave to them, none of your brothers love you. Why should you have pity on your brothers?”). And finally she wrote, “There is a Lou-fal monastery near Canton; let me go there and become a nun, and let your brothers take care of the children. I am not your lifelong partner. Please think it over; when you are old in the future, are you going to depend on your children or depend on your brothers? I pray you send me $200 so that I can have money to spend in the monastery. Now, I do not care how hard you work in America; I have no pity on you.” Hsiao never did learn on whom he could rely in his old age, because he died the following year.