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.

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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.