A CHRONICLE OF HARDSHIP
Despite its harsh content, author Edward Y.C. Lee's first book, The Laundryman's Boy, is a novel of hope and fulfilment
The Laundryman's Boy Edward Y.C. Lee Harper Avenue
Sir John A. Macdonald spoke these words in the House of Commons on May 4, 1885. Toronto writer Edward Y.C. Lee stumbled on them during research for his debut novel, The Laundryman's Boy.
It's an evocative account of a young Chinese immigrant's attempt to find a foothold in the racist climate that often characterized the Canada of more than a century ago.
“If you go to Hansard, the debates in the House of Commons, you'll find a whole section in which Macdonald talks about these things,” Lee says on the phone from his Toronto home. “They're real eye-openers — kind of ugly. When he talks about the kind of Aryan race that should be in Canada, it's quite disturbing.”
Well beyond his tenure, the attitudes of Canada's first prime minister were still playing a pivotal role in fostering a racist environment.
It's an environment that greets the novel's central figure — 13-yearold Hoi Wing Woo, a scholar's son whose dreams of following in his father's footsteps are shattered when he is uprooted from his home in China and sent to work in a Chinese laundry in Canada.
The Laundryman's Boy is a chronicle of hardship and vicious bigotry, but ultimately it is also a novel of hope and fulfilment as Hoi Wing refuses to abandon his dream of a meaningful education.
But to bring the reader to this point, Lee first had to set the stage, to convey the climate of the times and communicate the baleful legacy of Canada's early leaders.
“Macdonald didn't like the Chinese although he needed them to build the railway,” Lee says. “He imported about 15,000 Chinese to work on it — even schoolchildren. He didn't have any use for them once they completed the work — he wanted them go back to China basically.”
Lee grew up in Montreal in the 1960s and he remembers seeing Chinese laundries — still a familiar sight in Canadian cities back then — while wandering the streets.
One belonged to his uncle. “I remember standing there and seeing wrapped laundry on cubby holes on the walls.”
Those moments stayed with him as he grew older and became more interested in family history — for example the grandparents who came to Canada in the early years of the 20th century. “We never talked about these things growing up. We had a grandfather and grandmother living with us — it was a classic Chinese home — but they never spoke to us about the early hardships. It wasn't until after my grandfather died that I was old enough to have an interest and curiosity about these things.”
Lee, now 64, retired a few years ago from a legal practice that over the years had exercised his skills as an arbitrator.
“But I had always wanted to write. I just wasn't sure what to write about. When I grew up there was no Asian-Canadian literature. But I was thinking more and more of this idea of the laundry and came up with this idea of a young teenager working under these hard conditions — standing there with a paddle in his hand and stirring a vat of laundry. I started to write scenes about this boy and began building a whole novel around them. That's kind of how the whole idea came to me ... the symbolism of the laundry in Chinese Canadian history.”
Lee began working on the novel before retirement, but an early version failed to find a publisher. “It was quite dispiriting for me to have that happen.”
But then he was fortunate enough to meet an editor who made suggestions for improvement. So Lee found himself back at work during the pandemic, producing the major rewrite that would be snapped up for publication by HarperCollins.
The story is set in 1913 in St. Catharines, Ont., but essentially this city serves as a stand-in for the many communities where racial tensions might flare.
Lee stresses that although The Laundryman's Boy is a work of fiction, it is based on real-life events unearthed during his researches. For example, the frightening anti-laundry riot depicted so vividly in his novel drew on details of a notorious assault against a Chinese restaurant in Kingston.
“I also needed to convey the general oppression of the Chinese at the time,” he says. They were basically segregated, forced to live among themselves. There was a whole slough of legislative measures against them — for example, white women were prohibited from working in Chinese restaurants.”
So, in addition to telling a compelling human story, Lee is also delivering a work of social history. He notes that last year marked the hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923. “It pretty much closed the door to Chinese immigrants for decades. It was passed on July 1, 1923, and Chinese Canadians would long consider that date a day of humiliation.”
Much earlier had come the infamous head tax that was imposed on Chinese immigrants. “It had come about much earlier in the late 1800s. It started, I think, at about $50 and then was eventually raised to $500, which is what my grandfather paid to come to Canada. Look at that figure in context, and it represented what two houses would have cost back in that time. It was an enormous burden.”
It also meant that families would be separated. “My grandfather worked in Canada for decades, sending money back to his family in China.”
Such is also the plight of the two men who own the laundry where the young Hoi Wing works. Such, as well, is this young teenager's own fate. “Like my grandfather, he was sent over by his own father with the idea that he would work here and send his earnings home to support the rest of the family back in China.”
But for all the bleakness of Hoi Wing's situation, The Laundryman's Boy is also a winning story about the kindness of strangers. Two women, one of them who once worked as a missionary in China, welcome him into their home to learn English. A local academic, initially dubious about any Chinese youngster's intellectual capabilities, finds himself unable to be indifferent to Hoi Wing's determination to break down the barriers denying him a public school education. There is also the entry into the boy's life of Heather, a feisty young Irish scullery maid who shares his love of learning and books.
Lee enjoyed writing about Heather. “I hadn't been aware of how much prejudice the Irish faced in early Canada. It seemed a good way to have these two teenagers come together, both low on the social scale, each an outcast in their own way.”
Inevitably, however, the legacy of John A. hovers over the story. “I'm opposed to his statues,” Lee says quietly but firmly. “We have to recognize that he was one of the founders of Confederation, but I think there should be a better knowledge, a better education, of what he stood for.”
“We know that when the Chinaman comes here ... he is a stranger, a sojourner in a strange land ... he has no common interest with us ... he has no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations ... it is not desired that they should come, that we should have a mongrel race ...”
Sir John A. Macdonald