![]() ![]() ![]() Joe’s second advertisement ( The Local New, June 14, 1890). If Joe does what he promises in his advertisement he will not need to start an opium joint. The new washee has an English vocabulary of about six words, and his efforts to dictate his advertisement…was both amusing and painful, and during the process our “ad” man learned about 29,000 of the 7,000,000 words in the Chinese vocabulary after they learn a dozen English syllables. Four years later, Homestead’s newspaper introduced him as their new Chinese laundryman-at least the fourth since 1883-in an uncomfortable article reflecting the prevailing racism of the day (sic throughout this and all following newspaper quotes). In the earliest record I have for him, Greensburg, Pennsylvania called him “our laundryman” in late 1885 (Greensburg is 21 miles SSE of Homestead). and how he made his way east I cannot uncover. Joe was born in China around 1871 and likely immigrated to California as a teenager. The Atlanta spa shootings in March and subsequent attention to anti-Asian hate crimes got me thinking about a person long on the margins of my research who was caught within these constraints: Joe Wah, Homestead’s longest-serving Chinese laundryman. To research Chinese life in these same places is to see how the laws restricting Chinese immigration specifically undermined each of these factors, confining the Chinese who were already here-in many cases, who were brought here to build the transcontinental railroad-to inescapably bleak lives. To research Jewish life in small town America around the turn of the 20th century is to examine the prerequisites for building community in unlikely places-people, opportunity, and tolerance. ![]()
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