In the 1840s and 1850s America began to recruit Chinese laborers. Wah gung was the name of the migrating laborers. Chinese immigration was influenced by the first opium war, depressed agricultural output, and peasant rebellions.
At that time, war, famine, and a poor economy in southeastern China caused many Chinese men to come to America.
Most hoped to find great wealth and return to China. Between 1849 and 1853, about 24 thousand young Chinese men immigrated to California. The Chinese immigrants mined gold.
Chinese immigrants soon found that many Americans did not welcome them. In 1852, California placed a high monthly tax on all foreign miners. Chinese miners had no choice but to pay this tax if they wanted to mine for gold in California.
Chinese workers were also the targets of violent attacks in the mining camps. The legal system offered little protection. It often favored Americans over Chinese and other immigrants.
After the gold rush, many Chinese immigrants worked as farm laborers, in low-paying industrial jobs, and on railroad construction.
Some immigrants worked on the railroad. From 1863 and 1869, roughly 15 thousand Chinese workers helped build the transcontinental railroad.
They had to endure hazardous, unfair conditions and backbreaking labor. They were paid less than American workers and lived in tents, while white workers were given accommodation in train cars. The work was tiresome, as the railroad was built entirely by manual laborers who used to shovel twenty pounds of rock over four hundred times a day. They had to face dangerous work conditions – accidental explosions, snow and rock avalanches, which killed hundreds of workers, not to mention frigid weather.
Few other jobs were allowed for people from China. On May 6, 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed which prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States. This act, signed by President Chester A. Arthur, provided an absolute ten-year (which was extended) moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. For the first time, federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities.
Most of the Chinese men who came to the Midwest moved from the west coast to escape the violence.
The first Chinese immigrants arrived in Minnesota in the mid-1870s. Wang See Ling arrived in 1875, and was an entrepreneur who started restaurants, stores, import shops and hotels, in the Twin Cities and Stillwater, Iron Range, Duluth and ten smaller towns.
By the late 1800s, more than one hundred Chinese immigrant men had entered the state, with most settling in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Duluth.
In Stillwater, in the mid- to late-19th century, several Chinese laundrymen set up shops. The first one, belonging to Sam Lung, operated a shop in 1879. After a few years, The Stillwater Messenger exalted the owners of the laundry, stating, “They are honest, industrious gentlemanly fellows, who have made many friends among our citizens.” Stillwater was the home of a Chinese laundry for more than twenty years.
A man named Charley owned a Chinese laundry in downtown Shakopee in 1901.
Popular during the late 19th and early 20th century, these laundries were usually run by Chinese immigrants who hand washed and pressed clothes for their patrons.
One of the first laundromats in Shakopee was recognized on Sept. 20, 1901, in the Shakopee Tribune.
Discrimination abounded toward the Chinese, even in our own local papers, calling them chinks and Celestials.
A stereotype developed around the Chinese laundrymen and eventually their shops closed.
Though the newspaper called the man “Charley Sam,” it is likely that was probably not his name. “Charlie” was a derogatory term for a Chinese man. The people in Shakopee probably never learned the Mandarin or Cantonese name.
No more information was found about Charlie Sam and the laundry man in downtown Shakopee.