Edward Y.C. Lee
The Laundryman's Boy
Fall 1913, St. Catharines, Ontario. Thirteen-year-old Hoi Wing Woo, the son of a scholar, is forced to give up his dreams of an education when he is sent to work in a Chinese laundry in Canada.
​
Hoi Wing is immediately thrust into relentless, mind-numbing toil, washing clothes by hand for sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Isolated and friendless, he falls into despair.
​
When he meets Heather, an Irish scullery maid who shares his love of books, Hoi Wing’s life immediately brightens. Together, they escape the drudgery of their work by reading novels in a secret hideout. As their friendship grows, they defy the restrictions of their indentured servitude and embark on a plan to better their lives.
​
But Hoi Wing’s dreams will not go unchallenged. Jonathan Braddock, a wealthy and influential entrepreneur who heads the Asiatic Exclusion League, has decided to run for mayor. If Braddock is elected, Hoi Wing will be sent back to China.
​
The Laundryman’s Boy is a moving coming-of-age story that bravely examines notions of race, duty and friendship in early Canada.
How I Wrote
The Laundryman's Boy
The early Chinese pioneers to Canada had a saying: A Chinese man could journey across the whole country on two legs: one of which was the laundry, and the other a restaurant. I wanted to write a story about these early Chinese immigrants who, like my grandfather, paid the Chinese head tax and came to Canada at a time when they faced only racism, hatred, and hostility. These men came to this land and toiled, often for lonely decades, to send money home to support their wives, children, and families. We owe so much to their courage, hard work, and dedication. I wrote The Laundryman’s Boy so their stories would not be forgotten.
​
When I began writing The Laundryman’s Boy, I had a vision of a skinny, teenaged kid, standing before a barrel of boiled sheets, churning the laundry with a splintered paddle. I saw him toiling sixteen hours a day, six days a week under the unrelenting eyes of a slavedriver of an employer. I tried to imagine what this boy might think of his new life in Canada, a frozen country ten thousand miles away from his village back in southern China. How would he view this harsh, inhospitable land where the townspeople hated him and he didn’t speak the language or know the culture? What would he feel as he stood before mountains of stinking wash or as he plied the five pound irons across acres of sheets? What future could he hope to envision for himself? I gave him a great desire for education, fueled by his father’s notorious failure back home, and then I let the elements of the story come together. I wrote one scene and then another, always putting my character in peril and making life more and more difficult for him. The scenes grew into chapters until they became The Laundryman’s Boy.