The unfinished laundry, folding our stories: oral histories of a Chinese American laundry family

The Chinese laundry was one of the first and earliest major occupations for Chinese immigrants. Many of the studies on the Chinese laundryman focus on a specific time periods or just one generation. There are limited studies on a multigenerational laundry family. The major questions of this thesis include what are the major generational shifts in a laundry family? How do issues of generational and transitional relationships, gender, and birth order affect a Chinese American laundry family in San Francisco? The key findings are that each generation had a different understanding and experience in the laundry. By putting into a larger context and closely examining the socio-historical shifts of the Chinese American community, the shifts and gains made by the family are analyzed and best represented by the evolution of the meaning of being a laundryman/business in the third, fourth, and fifth generations.