For over a century, Milwaukee trusted us with its dirty laundry.
By the 1940s, Milwaukee was home to 78 Chinese hand laundries. Each was owned and operated by a family – fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, hired help. The hours, marathon. The work, intense. Each family found a place in the industrialized engine of Milwaukee, firing on all cylinders.
My mother was born in 1945 in Los Angeles, one of nine. Our family business was the Mandarin Laundry, serving clients like restaurants and hotels. As children, my mother, aunts and uncles were woven into the labor force, with resulting opportunity yielding harvest throughout our family tree.
Like my grandfather, the Mandarin Laundry was just a memory by the time I was born in 1984. Times had changed. Washers and dryers had become fact-of-life home appliances. My mother, father and their five children moved to Milwaukee the following year, 1985.
I’ve always felt a longing, having never met my gong gong or experienced the family business. As a Chinese-Irish kid growing up next to Lake Michigan, our American origin story felt like a myth that I barely knew. What I did gather ignited my imagination, but the anecdotes I’d collected from my mother felt like pieces to a puzzle – so few that they left me guessing at the image they form.
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The longing was similar to be part of a Chinese community in Milwaukee. To belong to something. Family trips to see my family in LA felt large and boisterous and American. In Milwaukee, our Chinese community felt small and well-behaved and suburban – a different vision of America – by comparison.
I wasn’t exactly wrong, but now I can see our local community in ways I couldn’t then.
Growing up, I was part of the local chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans. We gathered for the new year and shared culture at venues like Holiday Folk Fair and Asian Moon Festival. What I did not see was that this community was an orchard of Chinese Milwaukee family trees, many rooting from seeds planted by these laundries. The doctors and professors and professionals I knew were the children and grandchildren of Milwaukee’s Chinese pioneers. They followed a patently immigrant path – show up, work hard, reap opportunity, invest in education, repeat.
Milwaukee’s Chinese laundry era began in 1874 when Wing Wau Laundry opened its doors, and at least 30 Chinese laundries serving the burgeoning industrial city by 1888. The number of laundries crested at 78 in the 1940s and by 1984, only two remained. For over 100 years, these businesses were a necessary part of Milwaukee’s landscape, keeping long hours, serving their neighbors.
On Brady Street, Moy LG Laundry operated in the building where Rochambo Coffee & Tea House is today. Downtown, Lin G. Chow Hand Laundry was on Wells Street, and Thomas Toy Laundry was nearby on Vliet Street. A block from A.O. Smith was Hopkins Street Hand Laundry and Washington Heights had Wisconsin Hand Laundry, established by Harvey Leong. Ald. Vel Phillips, Mayor Frank Ziedler and musician Al Jarreau were all patrons of Fred Moy Laundry on Third Street, today known as Dr. Martin Luther King Drive.
Each business took in never-ending piles of laundry, day after day. The hands of the namesake family sorted, washed, pressed, folded and packaged, from morning’s early hours and into the night. Parents put their lives into the work, children grew up soaking it in, and customers picked up their clean clothing, shirts wrapped in craft paper and tied with thick string.
“No one needs to have a family origin story here for the history of Milwaukee to be theirs.”
Earlier this fall, OCA-Wisconsin, Wisconsin Historical Society and YWCA of Southeast Wisconsin enshrined the history of Milwaukee’s Chinese Laundry Era with a historical marker at the YWCA (1915 N. King Dr.), near where Fred Moy’s Laundry once stood. It was a joyous occasion, with Chinese elders and a lion dance on King Drive. My family have been friends with Fred Moy’s descendants since I was small, but I knew only whispers of this history until 2025. The emergence of these stories brings me pride and joy, especially knitted into the landscape of Milwaukee’s Bronzeville.
For third through fifth grade, I went to Golda Meir Elementary School, just a few blocks from the newly installed marker. Throughout my time there, walking field trips were common, and in Mr. Horowitz’s fourth-grade class, I remember walking from our school to Grant’s Soul Food Restaurant and America’s Black Holocaust Museum on North Avenue. We did not know what an honor it was to have Dr. James Cameron as our griot. We were also blessed with a classroom teacher who took our history and city seriously.
Learning these stories changed me. And whether on this field trip or another that year, I know my fourth grade class walked by the site of Fred Moy’s on King Drive. I wish I could go back as a time traveling docent, to share what I’ve learned with young me and my class. The history was still quiet then. Now, it doesn’t have to be.
No one needs to have a family origin story here for the history of Milwaukee to be theirs. So, it is profoundly sweet to find the history of Chinese families on sidewalks I know like friends. Not all laundry needs to be aired out in the public commons, but if anyone deserves a moment in the sun, it is the hardworking families of these laundries.
Xie xie and thank you, Milwaukee.
