Looking at Chinese laundry workers

This week I followed up on a couple of footnotes from Hsu’s introduction talking about the historiography of Chinese immigration to the United States. I’m now pretty sure I want to analyze how racism and policies relating to the Chinese immigrant population shaped the historiography.

Part of this includes looking at the role of Chinese-Americans who contributed to the historiography while living through the political, racial, and academic obstacles that they described in their narratives (or attempted to minimize). Hsu identified Paul C. P. Siu as one of the “minority of scholars of Chinese America” who actually used “Chinese-language materials to produce groundbreaking work that nonetheless has yet to provide analysis that transcends the nation-state” (Hsu, 188).

So I dutifully checked out Paul Siu’s The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation, not knowing what to expect but knowing that Hsu deemed it as one of the early approaches to Chinese American studies that was not as fully developed as the field is now…and I was gratified to find not only a exemplary study within the book’s pages, but a fascinating backstory to the author, told through an informative foreword and editor’s introduction.

Sui was a member of the Chicago School of Sociology and was one of the Chinese students first recruited by Robert Park to do ethnographic research among the Chinese population (as I previously discussed during my post about “The Oriental Problem”). Though working within what was often a constricting sociological view of immigrants, Siu managed to contribute invaluable scholarship about Chinese social life, particularly through his examination of laundrymen in Chicago. Siu uses the hallmarks of social history’s methods (and the new labor history) before the social history turn, which is quite remarkable: he looks at census records, documents, letters, interviews, and anecdotes to reveal patterns and individual experiences among the hardworking Chinese Chicagoans who worked in laundries. Interesting sidenote: He was also from Taishan, which is the subject of Hsu’s own book!

Unfortunately, his own experience in writing his dissertation, trying to find a job, and get it published was marred through his existence as a Chinese immigrant in a country hostile to people of his background. He found that getting a publisher to accept his dissertation manuscript was difficult because they typically deemed it as of “little interest” to readers. He also faced a lot of prejudice when trying to get an academic job and even encountered rude comments from students who found his English to be “hard to understand” in one university. I will keep examining the works of other Chinese Americans to see how their own experiences played into the writing of their subjects.

Siu first became interested in his study after being encouraged to write a dissertation about what he knew well – and having worked in his own father’s laundry for some time, Siu was well-suited to writing a history of these people. As the editor, John Kuo Wei Tchen notes in his introduction that Paul Siu was unlike many other sociologists or historians who looked at his subjects solely as “objects” for detached academic scrutiny. Tchen cites an author noting that “only those with an interest can be disinterested” – an interesting concept as I go forward in looking at Chinese Americans writing about Chinese Americans.