Stanley, Timothy J.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

162 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 75 (mai-May 2005)Despite its format, however, Hesketh and Hackett’s CD-ROM ultimately reflectsthe traditional approach of Canadian historians, namely our marriage to print forms.In history, a discipline that has always begun and ended with words on paper —whether researching original documents, reading findings at conferences, or publish-ing conclusions in journals or books — computer technologies have been used topreserve our textual culture. For most of us, the computer has become an enhancedword processor, and related technologies such as CD-ROMs and the World WideWeb have been used as electronic scholarly journals and archives. These uses oftechnology have no doubt enhanced the communication and teaching of history(Hesketh and Hackett’s CD-ROM, for instance, has given students one-stop access tohistoriography that might otherwise have been spread over several publications), butthey have still essentially involved the transfer of existing materials and skills of thediscipline from paper to screen.Historian John Lutz, in an article published in these pages in 2001, called on his-torians to explore other ways in which computers might be used for communicationand teaching (“Riding the Horseless Carriage to the Computer Revolution: TeachingHistory in the Twenty-first Century”, Histoire sociale/Social History, vol. 34, no. 2[2001], pp. 427–436). With historian Ruth Sandwell and others, Lutz is drawingupon gaming metaphors to build web-based Canadian history mysteries. In anentirely different vein, John Bonnett, a historian at the National Research Council,has been using virtual 3-D computer reconstructions to illustrate the challenges ofcreating coherent explanations of the past. Digital environments come with their ownset of properties, and scholars are only beginning to draw upon these to create inter-active histories. Hesketh and Hackett have shown how computer technologies canartfully blend the familiar form of print with the novel form of the CD-ROM to com-municate a vast quantity of contemporary scholarship, and in so doing have chal-lenged the rest of us to consider new ways in which computer technologies might beused to teach Canadian history.Kevin KeeMcGill UniversityHOE, Ban Seng — Enduring Hardship: The Chinese Laundry in Canada. Gatineau,QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2003. Pp. iv, 86.For most of the twentieth century, every Canadian city and town of any size had atleast one Chinese laundry. In an era before automatic washers and electric irons, Chi-nese hand laundries provided relatively inexpensive laundry services to working andmiddle-class families, especially for fussy items like starched collars or nurse’s caps.Despite their presence as an integral part of the urban landscape, only with the pub-lication of Hoe Ban Seng’s Enduring Hardship by the Canadian Museum of Civili-zation are the lives of quiet desperation lived within them well documented.In October 2000 “Enduring Hardship: Chinese Hand Laundry” opened as one ofthe permanent exhibits of the Canada Hall, the walkthrough of Canadian history atHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 75 (mai-May 2005)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 163the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec (available on-line atCanadian Museum of Civilization, Canada Hall, “5. Enduring Hardship – ChineseHand Laundry”, http://www.civilization.ca/hist/phase2/mod5e.html, accessed April5, 2005). The exhibit brings together the narratives of Chinese laundry workers andof their surviving family members with various artefacts taken from actual laundries.By its inclusion in the museum’s permanent collection, the exhibit symbolicallyaffirms a place in the grand narrative of Canadian history for Chinese Canadians,emphasizing their endurance in the face of severe racism, profound poverty, and evengreater social isolation.This volume is the companion history to the exhibit written by the exhibit’s curatorand the museum’s curator of Asian Studies. As such, Enduring Hardship providesthe background to and expands on the research for the exhibit. It incorporates thefindings of over 50 interviews conducted between 1976 and 2001 with laundry work-ers and their descendants, as well as materials drawn from sources as diverse asnewspapers and cemetery records. The result is an account that pulls few punches. Itgraphically attests to the racism, social isolation, and unending toil experienced bythe mainly male laundry workers.Particularly moving are the laundry workers’ own accounts. Their days were aconstant cycle of unending toil and mind-numbing drudgery. Work would start earlyin the morning, usually with boiling water to do the washing, followed by drying thelaundry. In winter, drying involved hanging laundry in an overheated room insepara-ble from the cramped quarters in which the laundry workers often ate and slept aswell as worked. Drying was followed by ironing and packaging. Days began at 5:30or 6:00 a.m. and would not end before 10:00 p.m. Some workers reported regularlygetting little more than two to four hours of sleep a night. Their standard of livingwas so low that they usually had to live in the laundry since they could not affordother accommodations. Hoe documents the toll exacted by these conditions. Spend-ing all day and night in the constantly damp, crowded, and poorly ventilated laundry,compounded by overwork and sub-standard nutrition, many died young. He illus-trates this with the records of 50 Chinese laundry workers buried in Ottawa’s Beech-wood Cemetery between 1907 and 1947, a finding made all the more remarkablegiven the tiny size of the Ottawa Chinese community.There were no economies of scale in the laundries. Revenues were directly propor-tional to the number of hands that could be mobilized. Most laundries had at most twoor three workers (including the owners), invariably men who were often members ofthe same extended family. The more workers, the more laundry that could be handledand the higher the total revenue, but this then had to be divided among more people.Most of these workers had families in China, which under the Chinese ImmigrationAct of 1923 were not allowed to come to Canada. Even after the repeal of this act in1947, sponsorship requirements decreed that laundry workers could only bring familymembers over one at a time, often needing decades to reunite the entire family.Among other things this meant that Chinese workers in Canada endured tremendousisolation, in many cases only seeing their family members two or three times in halfa century.Laundry workers were even more isolated from the rest of Canadian society.164 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 75 (mai-May 2005)Enduring Hardship demonstrates how racism was integral to the day-to-day experi-ence of laundry workers. Hoe notes how racist measures in British Columbia forcedthe Chinese to spread across Canada and how laundries or restaurants were oftentheir only possible sources of employment. He contrasts their desperate living condi-tions with the fantastic speculations of a white supremacist press that warned of thehuge sums they were allegedly sending out of the country or that called on local gov-ernments to prevent the laundries from competing with white-owned, commercialsteam laundries. As a result, the laundries were subject to a web of regulations andinspectors to prevent them from operating after hours or on Sundays. Hoe points outthat, with little or no English, often themselves illiterate, and in the face of the con-stant work, the laundry workers had almost no means of integrating into the largersociety. He even records the racist rhymes and taunts that laundry workers endured.Finally, Hoe notes that, despite all of this, some succeeded in reuniting their familiesor starting new ones in Canada and even succeeded in financing the university edu-cation of multiple children.This volume is not really an analytic history, but is intended as a popular accountof the kind that might appeal to the museum’s visitors. While it marvellously pre-serves the voices of the laundry workers themselves and unflinchingly describes theracism that was integral to their lives, it does not exhaust the subject. There is noextended discussion of the diasporic family relations at work within the laundries.We learn little of families’ lives in China. Nor does Hoe discuss the political life ofthe workers. While he does mention Chinese associations, he does not discuss theirimportance for mutual aid and support or their links to Chinese political movements.This contrasts with Renqiu Yu’s brilliant study, To Save China, To Save Ourselves:The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress, 1992), a work that Hoe cites in the bibliography but does not draw upon in hisnarrative. I do not know whether the absence of this theme reflects the findings ofHoe’s interviews (a thinly dispersed population may not have had the same opportu-nities as those in the larger centres) or whether it reflects a view that such a discus-sion would not be appropriate for the museum’s intended audience. Neither does Hoediscuss the religious life of the laundry workers. The number and proportion of Chi-nese who were Christian increased the further the Chinese population got from Brit-ish Columbia. This may be an artefact of the need to have some ties to the localpopulation in order to survive. Certainly having local co-religionists would havebeen helpful in finding the customers that made a laundry viable in the first place.These, however, are quibbles that a larger scholarly history could address. Moreimportantly, Chinese laundry workers were isolated from the people around them,cut off by barriers of language, of racism, and of economic necessity; EnduringHardship ensures that they are not cut off from our historical memory.Timothy J. StanleyUniversity of Ottawa

Hoe, Ban Seng — Enduring Hardship: The Chinese Laundry in Canada

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Hoe, Ban Seng — Enduring Hardship: The Chinese Laundry in Canada

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)