The Chinese laundry between the two World Wars: recollections of Gwenllian Sou Kang Chan Lee†

This is a transcript of an oral statement by Sue Lee (Gwenllian Sou Kang Chan Lee). In 2012, I asked my mother to write down what she could recall of the functioning of her father’s Chinese laundries. I’d written elsewhere of my grandfather’s experiences and of the representation of Chinese laundrymen by dominant white society (Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness, Honololu: Hawai’i University Press), but what I asked her to do was to record as best she could remember, and while she could still remember, the day-to-day mechanics of the laundry business. Sue Lee died in March 2023 aged 98.