Demeaning negative images of the Chinese laundryman existed by the 1850s when their numbers rapidly increased. Mocking images made fun of his queue, clothing, and work setting and method as in ads for laundry soap.
Other ads with hostile images conveyed aggressive actions toward them as in an ad for a wringer that urged the solution to the Chinese question as "the Chinese must go!".
It took several decades before ads that included Chinese laundrymen became less negative. A mid-20th century ad promoting a home washing machine used a group of Chinese laundrymen surrounding this object in a mixture of awe and puzzlement as well as a feeling of a threat to their livelihood.
In the 1960s, a leading maker of men's business shirts, Van Heusen, made a bold move in their advertisements in national magazines such as LIFE using handsome Chinese male models dressed in American style attire, Van Heusen shirts, of course, to promote their easy to clean shirts made with new material such as dacron. Suzanne Shapiro, the company historian contacted me for reaction to Van Heusen shirt ads from the late 1960s featuring Chinese men neatly attired in Van Heusen shirts, which pointed out that times had changed. Whereas Chinese laundrymen once ironed Van Heusen shirts, now Van Heusen "presses his shirts," in the sense that new fabrics such as dacron did not require the labor of the Chinese laundryman.
The irony in the ads was more than a statement about Van Heusen's innovation displacing the need for the laundryman's services, but also a recognition that the Chinese laundry was a business in decline with technological changes, e.g., widespread home laundry equipment, aging laundrymen, and educated offspring able to enter white-collar and professional careers.
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