Wash, Dry, Fold, Repeat
How immigrants from China came to run NYC’s laundromats
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I first met Sister Lin at her 24-hour laundromat, in Brooklyn, on an evening in early March. She looked tired. And she had every reason to be. It was already 9 p.m. but ahead of her was a long night of washing, drying, and folding the dirty laundry that customers had dropped off earlier that day. And she was worried about the trip she would be taking the following week, when she would return to her hometown of Putian, in China, to attend the wedding ceremony of a distant relative. Accompanying her on the trip would be her grandson, the youngest of three, whom she calls “Little Meatball.” She found herself overwhelmed by the stress of planning for the trip, looking after her laundromat each night, and making arrangements for the business in her absence. And the trip she was soon to set out on would take her eight thousand miles to the town she had seldom visited since 1989, the year she illegally came to the United States.
Prior to leaving China, Sister Lin was making a decent living running a small grocery store at the local market. But while the country’s socialist regime had slowly started to embrace the market economy, private businesses were still at risk of being considered unlawful. Life in the United States was painted as much more financially rewarding by comparison. Lin thought that maybe she should leave and spend a year or two in America to make some money.
In 1989, Sister Lin left behind her husband and six-year-old son and flew first to Bolivia and then to Puerto Rico, where her passport was recognized as a fake. The US immigration detention system held her for a month before bailed out by the smuggler. The smuggler eventually put her on a flight to New York City. His fee was $30,000, the standard price at the time. To pay him back, Sister Lin had to find a job right away.
Like the majority of Chinese immigrants in New York City in the 1990s, she started as a seamstress in one of the hundreds of thriving factories in the Garment District. These Chinese-run factories were effectively sweatshops, but they were also the best-paying employers she could find without a legal identity or proficiency in English. “At that time, the [Chinese] restaurants only paid $600 to $700 a month and still you couldn’t even get in because of the competition,” Lin told me in Mandarin. “In a garment factory you could earn $2,000 or $3,000 in the high season and at least more than $1,000 in the low season. Everyone chose the garment factory.”
The sewing life was rough. Lin frequently worked overtime, saving up every cent to pay her smuggler and to send back home. With China’s market becoming increasingly open, she often thought of going back. But the average monthly wage in China was still around 100 yuan, or about $20 (around $38 in today’s dollars). Her family back home was expecting her, the unimaginably rich “American,” to keep sending them money. She decided to stay longer than originally planned and kept next to nothing for herself.
She did indulge on one expense: immigration lawyers. Soon after arriving in the US, Sister Lin started applying for political asylum, the most common way for Chinese immigrants to obtain legal status in the country. She hired lawyer after lawyer, hoping to find some new approach to argue her case. Again and again, however, her petition was denied. Meanwhile, without a legal status, she couldn’t travel home to visit her family, fearing that if she did she would not be able to re-enter the United States.
Then, in 1999, Sister Lin’s years as a seamstress came to an end. New York’s once-flourishing garment industry could no longer compete with its counterpart in China, where labor was even cheaper. With her wage cut by almost two-thirds, Sister Lin quit her job and, with her meager savings, bought a nail salon on Long Island. In 2004, she sold the salon because she recognized a better opportunity: the 24/7 laundromat in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant where she has worked ever since.
By the time I met Sister Lin on that busy night in the laundromat, she was an American citizen. She had been granted a green card at last in 2007 and passed the citizenship exam a few years later. She had also been able to apply for a visa for her son to join her in New York. The first-grader she had left behind was now a young adult with a college degree. Neither of them could hold back tears the moment they met at the airport.
“Sister Lin” is the name she gave when she introduced herself to me. In Chinese, the name doesn’t carry any religious meaning; it’s a form of intimate address. Sister Lin is what her staff call her, and it is also the name on her WeChat profile (the popular Chinese social media app). When earlier that day I had stopped in to scope out the laundromat, Ou, a Chinese employee, explained that on first meeting Sister Lin, she could sense how nice she was. As with Ou, I also liked her instantly. A petite lady aged 65, Sister Lin fits the image of the typical Chinese granny. She is soft-spoken, amiable, and enjoys taking care of her grandchildren.
In China, most women Sister Lin’s age are retired, dedicating their days to household chores or to square dancing. As Little Meatball ran throughout the laundromat waving his toy truck, Sister Lin put on a dust mask and the white apron she always wears when working and dragged around a big trash bin as she cleaned the lint filters in the dryers one by one. Now it’s the ever-rising rents and water bills that keep her up at night. “Someone told me I am destined to be poor in this life,” Lin said. She seems to believe in this life sentence.
I left the laundromat at 11 p.m. that night. Shortly after getting on the train, I received a WeChat message from Sister Lin. “Very nice to meet you,” she wrote in Chinese, with two emojis of welcoming hands. I clicked on her avatar. She looked much younger on my phone. She was wearing makeup and her hair fell in the loose curls common among middle-aged Chinese women, like my mother.
Throughout the early history of the United States, laundry was a task reserved for women, whether wives or hired laundresses. But in the mid-19th century, when the first significant wave of Chinese immigrants, largely made up of men, came to California, they found themselves excluded from the jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural industries. Hand laundry work, considered “feminine” and inferior, remained open to them.
The number of Chinese immigrants working as laundrymen grew steadily. By 1880, they owned two-thirds of the 320 hand laundries in San Francisco. Eventually they moved eastward to more industrialized urban areas like Chicago and New York, where dense urban populations generated huge demand for laundry services. The 1900 census details that nearly one in four Chinese immigrants in the American general labor market worked in a laundry operation. It was one of the few ways for socially excluded immigrants with no capital and limited language skills to survive.
Even though Chinese men had taken up the one occupation that American men were unwilling to do, they faced ever-rising anti-Chinese hostility. The racist attitude was blatantly exhibited in the national and state laws, which culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the only federal law in American history to have denied citizenship and the right of border entry specifically to one ethnicity. (It would be in effect until 1943.) At the same time, most laundrymen who were already residing in America effectively lived as sojourners without ever assimilating.
As Paul Siu recounts in The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, all kinds of social restrictions prevented them from even trying. Chinese men were not allowed to bring over their wives or family members under the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act. They were prohibited by laws to marry white people in fourteen states, including California. They were not able to learn English because the laundering work took up 90 hours a week. “They retreat to Chinatown, where Americans are the foreigners,” wrote Siu, because everywhere else the Chinese laundrymen were seen only as a thing — a laundry service — and never as a person.
These immigrant men largely dominated the laundry industry until machine-powered steam laundries took to the stage in the 1920s. Facing strong competition, some Chinese immigrants went where their labor was more in demand: restaurants. On December 25th, 1921, the New York Tribune published a cartoon titled “Exit Washee. Enter Chop Suey,” with a caption explaining that the laundries were changing their signs to “restaurant.” Other laundry owners struggled on, extending their work hours and lowering their prices, or transforming themselves into drop-off sites for the prevailing steam-laundry factories. In the 1930s, there were still an estimated 3,000 Chinese hand laundries in New York.
In To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York, historian Yu Renqiu recounts one of the laundry owners’ last fights against the steam factories and the country’s widespread racism. It was also the most influential one. In March 1933, the New York City Council proposed an ordinance, supported by the capital-heavy, white-owned steam laundries, to require self-employed laundry owners to hold US citizenship. It also proposed a $25 annual license fee, as well as a $1,000 security bond payable to the city. For small Chinese laundries, the ordinance would have been a disaster. A coalition called the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance organized to oppose it. During the council’s public hearing, the coalition argued persuasively that the ordinance was discriminatory. They won the hard battle. The ordinance was passed but in a largely modified form, with “Orientals” exempted from the citizenship requirement and all fees drastically reduced.
Meanwhile, laundry technology continued to evolve. By the mid-1930s, the rapid spread of home electrification in both urban and rural America had enabled domestic washing machines to replace steam factories. In 1934, the first self-service laundromat, called “Washateria,” opened in Fort Worth, Texas, although the concept was only popularized after technological advances in the late 1950s birthed completely automatic, coin-operated washers, according to Brian Wallace, president of the national Coin Laundry Association. These early laundromats were usually small and unattended and had more of a utilitarian feel than the warm and family-friendly ones we think of today.
Counter-intuitively, going to a laundromat was never only about saving on costs. Doing laundry with a washing machine at home is actually cheaper — if you can afford to buy one in the first place. While laundromats are the only option for urban dwellers without in-home or in-building washers, even those with access to home machines might still take their laundry to the laundromat. The possibility of using several machines simultaneously to finish the whole family’s laundry at once is an attractive one.
As Wallace explained to me, this accounts for why the 1980s roughly mark the laundromat’s second high-speed growing after the ’50s. The invention of larger-capacity front-load washers and stackable dryers, which continue to be the norm in laundromats today, added further convenience. And as customer demand for greater flexibility and shorter wash and dry times expanded, 24/7 laundromats and full-service pick-up/drop-off services also started to take hold.
“I would say that the peak level of ‘wash, dry, fold’ — or you could call it full-service laundry — is happening as we speak,” Wallace told me. A 2018 national survey conducted by Coin Laundry Association revealed that 57 percent of laundromats in the United States provided full-service options. Since many customers are willing to pay more to rid themselves of the burden of laundry, this industry more recently built on automation is again moving in a labor-intensive direction. Some owners also add on-site services like clothes alterations or dry cleaning to further maximize the profit.
As time passed and hand laundries neared extinction, Americans started using the words “laundry” and “laundromat” interchangeably. Today laundromats are still a business favored by immigrants because they require minimal language skills to operate. According to a 2012 report by Fiscal Policy Institute, dry cleaning and laundry businesses had the second-highest concentration of immigrant ownership of all of the 119 industries they analyzed using American Community Survey data. Around the turn of the century, laundromats were predominantly owned by Korean immigrants, the majority of whom arrived in the 1970s and ’80s, and made up America’s third largest immigrant group then. But in New York, laundromat ownership was about to change. Korean owners were turning away from laundromats toward more lucrative businesses, like dry cleaning. And the laundromats they put up for sale were spotted as an opportunity by some familiar faces: newly arrived Chinese immigrants.
There are no statistics on how many New York City laundromats are owned by Chinese-born immigrants today, but data provided by the Department of Consumer Affairs reveals they are overrepresented. In March 2019, according to the department, there were 3,864 licensed retail laundries in the city, the majority of them laundromats. Of the long list of names made public, many only make sense when read as Mandarin phonetic spellings. Others contain buzzwords like lucky, golden, and happy that suggest Chinese ownership, words also often used by Chinese take-out restaurants. But it’s not possible to calculate how many there are by names alone. One Chinese laundromat proprietor I spoke with estimated the number of Chinese-owned laundromats in New York City to be around 500. The majority of owners arrived in the US after 1980, according to the proprietor, who has extensive relations within the Chinese community. As they settled down and purchased laundromats in different corners of the city, they were also navigating their new American lives.
When in 2004 Sister Lin began to consider the possibility of owning a laundromat, she saw it as a business with everlasting demand. Lin had observed that customers would often be required to reserve washing machines in advance or line up in the store to wait their turn. Also, she was aware she was approaching retirement age. Compared with the nail salon, where she was forced to get up and work as soon as a client came in, operating a laundromat would grant her more flexibility. It would also be less physically taxing than sitting and staring at nail beds for many consecutive hours on end.
After a few months of consideration, Sister Lin became the third owner of the laundromat she still runs in Bedford Stuyvesant. At the time, it was considered relatively big, with 52 washers and 50 dryers. It cost her about $500,000, most of which she borrowed from the bank and a private loan. The laundromat had first opened four years earlier. The previous owner, who was also Chinese, left her the big purple sign that still hangs there today, exhibiting its former name and amenities: “fully air conditioning, drop off, self service, cable TV.”
The business did well, and Sister Lin paid off her loans after the first seven years. Today she has three employees, all first-generation Chinese immigrants, working in shifts. Lin tells me her laundromat was the first in the neighborhood to be Chinese-owned and the first to provide drop-off service — a model emulated by competing laundromats over the next few years. She declined to tell me about her costs and profits, worried that her “business secret” might be copied by her competitors.
To maintain an edge over her rivals, she keeps the laundromat open 24/7: customers love laundromats that permit them to come late at night. Unfortunately so do thieves, robbers, and other people looking to start problems. When Sister Lin first moved to Bed-Stuy, once one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in New York, her laundromat would be frequently robbed and vandalized. She says the situation has improved in the past five years, as the residents become familiar with her and the neighborhood undergoes rapid gentrification. But thefts and robberies still take place. Just a few months ago, the cash was stolen from the registry while she worked at the other end of the laundromat. Now she keeps the registry locked behind a deadbolt, which is safer if less convenient than the simple doorknob lock she relied on previously.
A more frequent problem is how to deal with the homeless people who find her laundromat a good place to stay. Lin says they will steal clothes from unattended dryers and sell drugs if she doesn’t ask them to leave as soon as she spots them. The spotting part is easy — Sister Lin can identify those who aren’t her regular clients. The hard part is persuading them to go. They might resist, curse, or, as has happened to some of her employees, even start a fight.
Fifteen years of operating the laundromat have trained Sister Lin to master this skill. She’s not afraid to curse back, in English, the language she still hasn’t grasped. “Of course, I feel frightened about starting a fight with them,” Lin told me, “but I have no other choice. I have no other choice but to protect myself.” She calls the police if they refuse to leave.
Some customers have taken note of this tiny lady’s fierce side. “She’s, like, feisty, you know?” said Tiffany Pierce, a 42-year-old African American woman, as she finished folding her laundry. “I like her. She doesn’t let nobody sit in here that doesn’t belong here. So, I like that. She takes good care of her laundromat.” Pierce has lived a block from Lin’s laundromat her whole life, but has only been a regular customer since 2017, when a fire destroyed the nearby Chinese-owned laundromat she was previously loyal to. It had been smaller and more compact, and she had established a sense of intimacy with the family that owned it, a relationship that she hasn’t built with Sister Lin.
In Bed-Stuy, close community ties are part of the traditionally black neighborhood’s culture, and communication between business owners and customers is highly valued. Sister Lin’s laundromat has been there long enough for her to see kids who once tagged along with their parents on the weekend grow into young adults and then come to the laundromat by themselves. However, it’s been hard for Sister Lin to build strong emotional connections when she can’t engage in conversation deeper than common greetings.
When Sister Lin came to the United States, she barely spoke any English. At first she attended free community English classes but soon found herself too busy. So, she’s learned what she needs to know at work — quarters, detergent, and softener were among the first words she could use proficiently. For the most part her job requires that she listen more than speak. Except when the customers are not satisfied with the service. Unable to argue effectively in English, she tends to accept fault and refund the customer. But on the few occasions when the situation has escalated, people have called the police on her or sued the laundromat in small claims court. She never hires a lawyer in these situations because she understands that economically it’s wiser just to pay what the customer is asking for.
Meanwhile the neighborhood around continues to change rapidly. Between 2000 and 2015, Bed-Stuy’s population of white residents increased from 2.5 percent to 27.3 percent, making it the largest white influx into a New York City neighborhood during the same period. And newcomers are significantly more educated and better-off. Unlike many of the long-term residents who are still coping with this new status quo, Sister Lin is enjoying the shift she has seen in her customers. The affluent newcomers are less sensitive to price and more likely to choose the more expensive — and more profitable — drop-off service.
The changing neighborhood has also led to some unexpected experiences. Jake Orlin, a young white film producer who moved to Bed-Stuy last summer, uses the laundromat often. A few weeks ago, assisting a friend to direct an indie-electronic music video, he decided the laundromat would make a good location and secured Sister Lin’s permission. Starting at 9 p.m. on a Friday night in April, Orlin used tape to divide the laundromat into two sections. On one side, a handful of customers folded clean laundry. On the other side, two cameras followed a light-skinned dancer acting as a laundromat worker. A homeless man managed to nap on one of the waiting seats while Sister Lin watched the filming with interest. But he was finally found. “No here. Have to go.” She stared at the man for a few seconds until he walked out into the night.
But while the neighborhood has been diversifying, Chinese faces remain hard to spot here in Bed-Stuy. Fifteen years after she first moved to the community, Sister Lin still does not feel like she belongs. She doesn’t charge the neighboring store employees when they come to the laundromat, but she goes to Chinatown in Manhattan or Sunset Park in Brooklyn or Flushing in Queens to shop for her own groceries. She donates to the local church and to other community fundraising events when asked, but she only participates actively in organizations made up of Chinese immigrants. The location of her laundromat might put her deep in an English-speaking neighborhood, but she’s still the sojourner bouncing between two communities, just like any new immigrant from China, regardless of when they came here.
Starting in July 2017, many Chinese laundromat owners received an unexpected letter in English from the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA). For years, laundromat owners had been required to update their operational licenses biennially, a simple process in which they updated basic information and submitted any required fees. The letter informed them that this process was about to change. Going forward all laundromat owners in New York City would need to provide a physical copy of a certificate of occupancy or a letter of no objection. Otherwise, the city would force them to close down their laundromats.
The new requirement was an outcome of the City Laundry Equity and Accountability (CLEAN) Act, which passed in July 2016 to improve the regulation of laundries. In August 2017, the DCA organized several open houses to spread the word. Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and Bengali interpreters were said to have been present, according to an attorney who has been representing laundromats for nearly four decades. But most Chinese laundromat owners either didn’t know about the open houses or didn’t care. They only realized the renewal procedures had changed when their applications were later denied.
For some of them, the newly-required certification was difficult or even impossible to get, as when a building was too old to have been issued a certificate of occupancy or the landlord had many existing violations. Some worried the policy change meant a sudden end to their careers. Owning a laundromat means investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to start and earning it back quarter by quarter. You can’t move a laundromat elsewhere if you don’t get a license. All those washers and dryers are carefully mounted in their place and won’t easily fit a new location.
For the first time in the short history of Chinese laundromats, individual owners came together and conveyed their concerns to city officials. Over 100 laundromats signed a petition and in early November 2017 presented it to Councilman Peter Koo, who represents the Flushing neighborhood largely inhabited by Chinese and Korean immigrants. The laundromat owners also held a press conference and confronted city officials at local events. In mid-November, the petitioners were told by Koo that a six-month grace period could be granted to help them acquire the relevant papers; they were not satisfied and kept pressing.
On the evening of November 21, two days before Thanksgiving, Mayor Bill de Blasio came to a Flushing town hall meeting. When he was publicly asked by the petition leader, Li Shengli, about the new laundry license, he replied that the city had heard their concerns and had decided to reconsider. The following day, the mayor’s office published a written announcement officially nullifying the requirement. “This is the biggest and best Thanksgiving gift for the laundry business from New York City mayor today,” Li Shengli wrote on his WeChat timeline. The laundromat owners were able to renew their licenses as they had been previously.
With the renewal procedures resolved, the incident has since born another child: the Chinese-American Laundry Association, which came into being in early 2018. In many ways, the newly founded association strikes me as similar to the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of the 1930s. Both started in New York. Both were coalitions of small laundering businesses. And both originated from discontent that emerged in response to a city regulation about laundry licenses. But there are many discrepancies too. The 2016 regulations were far from being motivated by racism. And while CHLA was in its time the only voice standing up for the Chinese community, now there are hundreds of Chinese-American organizations to help the laundromat owners voice their difficulties.
On an afternoon in late March, I met Huang Jianxin, the second — and current — president of the new association, in his Brooklyn laundromat, located between Fort Greene Park and the Walt Whitman public housing project. At 42, he looks younger than his age, and keeps his hair short with a little bit of a Mohawk. Huang was also one of the petition organizers.
“We Chinese work in the store all day and don’t care much about other things,” Huang explained to me, in Mandarin. “There seems to be a cultural reason for why we don’t pay much attention to the newly passed city regulations and laws. There were three hearings for the certificate of occupancy requirement, but we didn’t know about any of them.”
The licensing crisis was a wake-up call. Now the association has 145 individual members, most of whom own one laundromat, although some own more. The owners chat in a WeChat group where they relay recent fines, discuss regulations, and share their daily experiences. The association maintains a close relationship with city officials and frequently meets with them to express their concerns. Since its formation, it has successfully argued for changing or postponing three more rules that members found unreasonable.
Huang bought his laundromat 12 years ago. At the time, the wave of Brooklyn gentrification induced by those priced out of Manhattan hadn’t yet hit this neighborhood. Today, it is just a couple of blocks away from Brooklyn’ bustling downtown.
Unbeknownst to many outsiders, there’s a subtle but stubborn racist mentality among new Chinese immigrants. For this story, I talked to the owners of seven Chinese laundromats, most of them in central Brooklyn. Many of these owners associate African American residents with high crime rates and poverty. For a long time, Huang also believed this stereotype. He used to dislike his customers, many of them from the nearby housing projects, for haggling over every quarter and accusing him of “stealing their money.” But now his attitude has changed. Because the public housing residents have been more stable customers, he’s gotten to know everyone in the community and built trust. Once they became friends, he found their straightforwardness quite likable and easier to work with. “After all, to put it bluntly, we both belong to the underclass,” said Huang.
Among the owners I met, Huang is the most conscious of this stereotype, which he recognizes as a result of having come from a homogeneous society. “Especially in New York City, this big melting-pot, you can meet all kinds of people every day,” he told me. “You can’t communicate with them as if you are still in China.” It’s another America 101 class that every new Chinese immigrant has to take. The racial tensions, the democratic political system, the community culture — these are all hard questions Huang and others never had to think of back in China. But they are making progresses.
While we were talking, a customer walked into Huang’s laundromat and greeted him. I heard the customer telling his friend, “This laundromat is the best.” After he left, I asked Huang if they were close. “We just see each other around a lot,” he said. I told him what I had just overheard. “Westerners are all like that,” Huang laughed. “If you are kind to them, they will be kind to you too.”
When Sister Lin bought her laundromat, it came with all the necessary paperwork, including the certificate of occupancy. This protected her from the turmoil around licenses, which she never really paid much attention to. And, before I told her about it, she hadn’t heard much about the association either. Over the years, she’s grown accustomed to finding out about regulations that impact her only when she is caught violating them by a city inspector. Because the city never inspects a whole block at once, Lin opts to try her luck and hope she won’t be inspected and fined. Her simple and self-comforting philosophy is: nobody can be perfect, so it’s not worth trying. “Even Trump dodges taxes,” said Sister Lin, “so everyone must have done something wrong.”
After 15 years, there is a lot in her laundromat that looks old or worn out. Several vending machines and an arcade machine seem to have been discarded. A tiny television set, which appear to be from the 1990s, plays the international channel of China’s state broadcaster every day, mainly to entertain her and her employees. Small “out of order” notes are taped to the six dryers closest to the door, although I later learned that it’s a trick to save some machines for the employees’ use. Only two of them are truly broken.
Lin tells me that most of the machines in her laundromat haven’t been replaced since it opened, and a lot of her time at work is spent troubleshooting various malfunctions. The most common fix: forceful knocks on the top of the control panel. “She has the magic touch,” said one customer, who was clearly not prepared for such a simple solution to her problem. But there have also been times when Sister Lin has had to climb on top of the tallest washer, open the cover, and, using a screwdriver, delve into the mysterious world inside it.
She has a talent for fixing the machines, Sister Lin tells me. Back in China she once was a driving school instructor and worked with cars a lot. The ability to fix a broken machine is probably the most important skill for small- and medium-sized laundromat operators, who can’t afford to call in a mechanic every time something goes wrong. Sister Lin has decided not to upgrade her washers and dryers to the latest models, which take prepaid cards instead of coins, because she fears she won’t know how to fix them if something goes wrong.
For Lin, it’s all about controlling the cost. The price of water, which soared during Bloomberg’s second and third term as mayor, has increased 250 percent since 2004. Gas bills, employee salaries, and property taxes are all rising quickly. Her 20-year lease with the landlord, passed down from the previous owner, has a moderate 5 percent rent increase every two years. The monthly rent is currently about $8,500, but the lease will need to be renewed this November. In Bed-Stuy, where rents have sky-rocketed in the past decade, the future doesn’t look so good. Meanwhile, customers can be very sensitive to any price increases, even if it’s just a quarter.
Sister Lin is candid about the fact that she regrets entering the laundromat business 15 years ago. Most of her assets are fixed in her machines, which are immovable and hard to sell. The industry is also not as profitable as it once was. Fewer and fewer new immigrants are purchasing laundromats today, part of a bigger trend. In 2017, the Atlantic reported that the number of laundromats in the US has decreased by about 20 percent since 2005, and even more so in metropolitan areas. The business has been challenged both by an increasing number of newly built apartment buildings with washers and dryers on site and by on-demand laundry apps. Sister Lin has tried investing in a few other businesses, some of them in the United States, some back home. Most have failed and yielded no return, she says.
She doesn’t consider herself “successful,” she told me. Some of her old friends back home had ridden the Chinese economic boom and become billionaire real-estate moguls. Could Sister Lin have been one of them if she hadn’t chosen to immigrate and start over? Her family was also profoundly impacted. In 2003, 14 years after Lin first came to the United States, her husband joined her in New York. But he returned home ten years later, having found himself unable to enjoy his new life. He knew nothing about America, he told Lin, while she knew everything. They later divorced.
Her son, who arrived four years later, chose to stay. Now she also has three grandchildren. When they are around, Sister Lin isn’t the feisty laundromat owner guarding her territory or the adventurous immigrant entrepreneur. She’s only the happy granny who likes to spoil her grandkids.
The first night I met Sister Lin, I noticed something different from everything else in that laundromat, something I couldn’t ignore. Hanging on a wall were two photographs that captured Sister Lin and her then-husband at a 2004 fundraiser in Flushing — in one, they were standing with John Liu, a Chinese-American councilman in New York, and in the other, with Hillary Clinton, then a New York senator. The photos had been taken at the same event as the image she would later come to use as her WeChat avatar. Detached from American politics, she saw them as precious mementos of a time she had gotten to meet celebrities in person.
They had been taken the same year she bought her laundromat, one year after she reunited with her husband. She would have been 48. Sister Lin dressed in a white suit and black pants, looking like a successful business woman and elegantly smiling at the camera. Her face beamed. She looked so pretty and confident that it took me a moment to recognize her as the same elderly woman who had just shared with me her struggles and life stories. When I asked her about the photos, Sister Lin recalled that afterward Clinton had asked her to dance. “She took my hands and wanted to dance with me, but I didn’t know how to dance then,” Lin said. “It was after this experience that I told myself, I had to learn a bit of dancing.”
