Inside the Oy Quong Laundry

It was not easy being a young Chinese girl growing up in California during the 1920s and 30s. Kathleen not only had to survive the prevailing hostility of the times, she also had to endure being a "worthless female" working in her fmaily's laundry and her mother's suspicion of anything not Chinese. Because Kathleen wanted her family to enjoy the benefits of American life, she chose to violate certain expectations of filial obedience. This brought on her mother's wrath, but her father's gentle understanding. Her search for worth, the struggle for acceptance, the awkwardness of growing into womanhood, and her gracious acceptance of those ugly aspects of life which can transform us into people of dignity, character, and grace are captured here Inside the Oy Quong Laundry. From the Introduction by Carolyn Wing Greenlee: For years my mother had been telling me little vignettes of her childhood -- the sweltering Merced summers made hotter by eight-pound irons and endless baskets of other peoples' laundry, the gorgeous iridescent rooster gallantly defending his harem, the slobbering ghostly visitations in the night. For these stories, I have a fierce love. I carried them all my life. But would she let me commit them to print? At first she was dismayed. "Sounds like a bitter old woman," she said. "Can't you make it more smooth? The writing is terrible." But later she acquiesced, saying "I tried to rewrite some and it came out stuffed shirt." This book is not stuffed shirt. My cousin Susan said Primary Documents speak for themselves in a way that's more powerful than if we had analyzed and synthesized them. As I worked on this book, I kept that in mind. There is no editorializing on my part. I edited only the repetitions and some of the grammar--trying, at the same time, to preserve my mother's inflections and energy. I hope you will sense in it her spirit, her heart, her own unique beauty. Most of all, I hope you will hear her voice and, in the process, perhaps you will hear, more clearly, your own.