No tickee, no shirtee

I can't recall overt racism from my childhood readings of Lucky Luke's almost 90 comic book adventures. Memory is like that.

Mr. Luke, the Belgian-made American cowpoke, first showed up in 1946 as a one-shot. "Lucky Luke started as an affectionate take-off on movie Westerns of the period," says my git-on-little-doggie-eared copy of "The World Encyclopedia of Comics." "Lucky himself was the traditional pure-of-heart cowboy always ready to bring justice to the Wild West before riding off into the sunset." With steadfast horsie companion Jolly Jumper, of course.

The lure of fame, fortune, and perhaps hommage, led in 2004 to a new adventure en francais (created by fans of the work of the late Morris and Goscinny), that's set in Quebec: His Nibs in "La Belle Province." In it, an obsequious Chinese laundryman named Pou-Tinh rescues a properly pleased Luke's filthy clothes. Nyuck nyuck: that guy sure washes clothes well, but darned if he doesn't tawk funny. Every 'R' is pronounced like an 'L.'

At least it's sort of historically accurate to place a Chinese laundry in the Quebec of the not-quite-clearly-labeled time period inhabited by Lucky Luke. The laundry business "became institutionalized as a pattern of work and life for the [early] Chinese in Canada," according to author Ban Seng Hoe's "Enduring Hardship: The Chinese Laundry in Canada."

Chinese men came to Canada during the Gold Rush, and later when hearing of job opportunities to build the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Cariboo Wagon Road. All this to say that most settled in British Columbia.

They were escaping a steady collection of wars (both invasions and civil), natural calamities, extreme poverty and famine. In 1881, writes Ban Seng Hoe, there were 4,383 Chinese in Canada; seven lived in Quebec. Ten years later, the number of Chinese in Canada had doubled; 36 lived in Quebec. "In Montreal in 1900, over 80 percent of the Chinese were said to rely on the 'starch and iron business.'"

EVIL MONGOLS
They were despised, and hired only for the most menial, backbreaking jobs -- mining, fish canning, ditch digging. To start one's own business must have seemed like a step up. They had little money, a language barrier, and few skills. Laundry work made sense -- though it involved a mind-and-body-numbing 12 to 18 hours of labour a day, scrubbing, washing, ironing, drying, for pennies a shirt. They died young, often illiterate and still unable to speak English or French because taking time to learn would have left a huge gap in earnings -- the endless washing left no time for anything but sleep.

The Chinese pulled in business because their service was much cheaper than that offered by white-owned businesses. Many "real" Canadians despised the immigrants, supposedly for taking Canadian cash, but not investing every penny into the local economy. Instead, the working men sent as much money as they could to wives and children back home. (Until 1947, the Chinese head tax and other specialized Canadian legislation made it almost impossible for the men to bring over wives and children. Life was darned lonely for most.)

Writes Ban Seng Hoe: "Constant agitation from politicians and trade and labour unions -- as well as harassment from such organizations as the Anti-Chinese Society (formed in Victoria in 1873), the Anti-Chinese League (formed in Vancouver in 1887) and the Asiatic Exclusion League (Vancouver, 1907) -- coupled with high unemployment and hardship, led large numbers of Chinese to quit British Columbia for other regions. Chinese laundries began to dot the landscape in various cities and towns from the Rockies to the Atlantic provinces, and became an essential means of livelihood for Chinese workers."

The anti-Chinese laundry panic spread across the country, too. White workers feared for their jobs because "white labour, having regard to the cost of living, cannot compete with the Chinese," announced one royal commission. The white Nelson, B.C. Laundry Workers' Union in 1902 proclaimed: "In the laundry work in Nelson alone there were at the lowest estimate 200 Chinamen employed at a wage varying from 75 cents to $1.50 per day, their hours of labour extending over the whole 24 hours, with barely time to eat and sleep. On some wash-houses a double gang is worked, the off men sleeping in the same apartment as those working, and often sleeping on clothes to be washed; and their habits are such that we feel sure that in many cases a health officer would condemn the same as injurious to public health.... We extend our most hearty approval and support to any legislation that will effectually remove this evil of Mongolian labour."

IT'S ALL IN THE GENES
A Quebec Le Soleil newspaper reporter called Chinese laundrymen unsanitary and tubercular in 1910. "The reporter went on to state that many people had noticed that their laundry would become yellow when laundered by the Chinese, and that this was no doubt due to the Chinese penchant for smoking opium." The paper also exhorted readers to support "our" industries and "our" merchants.

In Montreal, the Chinese laundry licencing fee was $50 a year, "equivalent to the charge levied on a first-class restaurant, and which represented four months' income for a Chinese laundryman." Nonetheless, writes Ban Seng Hoe, Montreal was Canada's Chinese laundry capital in the early 1900s. "During the first half of the 20th century... Chinese laundrymen became so ubiquitous that suggestions were made that the Chinese were genetically programmed to be laundry workers."