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From “Chinee” to “Native Son”: Harry Low, Oakdale’s Chinese Laundrymen, and the Model Minority Myth

For Professor Ashanti Shih's HIST 227: Chinatowns

May 11, 2024

In 2000, California Governor Gray Davis tapped Harry Low as State Insurance Commissioner after the incumbent, Chuck Quackenbush, resigned under fire for corrupt settlements of under-compensation cases. The appointment was a culmination of Low’s immaculate forty-four-year-long career in public service, with Davis praising him as a “man of unquestioned integrity and absolute independence,” a prime candidate to rebuild the reputation of the embattled office.1 Over his career, Low served first as a deputy attorney general; then as a judge on the San Francisco Municipal and Superior Courts, and then the First District State Court of Appeals; and later as the commissioner of San Francisco’s Police and Human Rights Commissions. Low’s 1966 appointment to the Municipal Court made him Northern California’s first Chinese American judge.2 Although Low eventually settled down in San Francisco, he grew up some ninety miles inland in Oakdale, then a small agricultural town in San Joaquin Valley’s Stanislaus County, where he was born in 1931 at his family’s laundry.3 After graduating from Oakdale Union High School (OUHS) in 1948, he acquired an associate’s degree from the nearby Modesto Junior College in 1950 before attending the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he received his bachelor’s and law degrees.4

Low grew up during a time when popular perceptions of America’s Chinese were in great flux. Beginning in the 1940s, whites “successful[ly] transform[ed]… the Oriental from the exotic to the acceptable,” recasting Asians, especially the Chinese, who were long portrayed as an unassimilable “Yellow Peril,” as “model minorities.”5 Oakdale was a participant in this national reconstruction of Chinese identity. After Pearl Harbor, earlier depictions and treatment that emphasized Chinese men’s physical and linguistic differences to demonstrate their supposed unassimilability were replaced with praise and support for the American-born Low children’s contributions to the war effort and community. This shift in popular perceptions, replicated across the country, contributed to the rise of the “model minority” myth, which, when solidified in the 1960s, constructed a reordered racial hierarchy that juxtaposed America’s “good,” hard-working Chinese and Japanese against America’s “bad” minorities, especially African Americans, who were seen as failing or refusing to assimilate.6 Although Low’s career, which saw him ascend to the highest tiers of the legal profession, facially aligned with the emergent “model minority” narrative, in reality, Low’s ascendance came despite, not due to the absence of, racial discrimination. Understanding this reality, Low, a founding member of the Chinese American Democratic Club (CADC) in 1958, aided in defining a new mid-century Chinese American politics that pushed back on earlier consent to the problematic “model minority” myth and that, in its place, in Low’s own words, advanced the issues of “immigration reform, social equity, racial fairness, [and] civil rights” with a multi-racial, coalitional emphasis.7

Low’s father was the last in a long line of Chinese laundrymen in Oakdale, where, for over eighty years, Chinese-run laundries were an institution of the town’s railroad district. Oakdale’s Exclusion era (1882-1943) Chinese population peaked at 43 in 1900, consisting primarily of male laborers from Southeastern China who initially came to the county beginning in the 1850s to work in placer mining.8 In 1881, Jim Young, a successful Chinese merchant who also ran a local Chinese labor bureau, opened a laundry east of the town’s railroad tracks on the aptly named East Railroad Avenue (ERR).9 At the time, the laundry industry was dominated by Chinese men, who, as railroading and mining jobs dissipated and other industries refused to employ them, made up 77 percent of the state’s laundry workers in 1880.10 By 1908, there were two Chinese-run laundries in Oakdale, both on ERR. One was operated by Wah Lung, a partner of Young’s, and the other by Yip Hong, each of whom employed a boarder.11 Besides the four laundrymen, there were 21 other Chinese recorded in the town in 1910, 17 of whom were male, mainly working as domestic and hotel servants, agricultural laborers, and cooks.12

Within a decade, one of the laundries closed, and three-quarters of the town’s Chinese left or died; most of them, having arrived before the onset of Chinese Exclusion, were by then reaching their sixties and seventies. Only six remained, including Wah Lung and two boarders who operated the remaining laundry.13 This decline mirrored a similar decrease in the county-wide Chinese population, which nearly halved between 1910 and 1920.14 After Wah Lung retired, the ownership of the remaining laundry, which was eventually renamed Hop Lee Laundry, passed through the hands of a series of Chinese families: first, the Kongs, whose daughter March, born in Oakdale in 1922, went on to be a friend of Low’s and the first Chinese American woman to hold statewide constitutional office when she was elected Secretary of State in 1974;15 then, the Jues, whose only daughter Mabel was born in Oakdale in 1924;16 and finally, the Lows, who operated it from 1930 until they closed it in 1962.17 By 1940, the Lows, a family of six, were the only Chinese in Oakdale, which by then had around 2,500 residents.18

In the late nineteenth century, amid statewide anti-Chinese nativist sentiment, white Oakdaleites drew on physical markers of the town’s Chinese men’s difference to construct them as exotic outsiders. At an annual masquerade ball in 1888, W. Copeland went as Jim Young while F. Reeder, whose costume is listed simply as “Chinese,” won ninth place for the “best Chinese character.”19 Chinese laundrymen, whose statewide ubiquity made the occupation recognizably “Chinese,” received special attention at the balls. In 1893, the trio of R. H. Reeder, Lucy Pechart, and Mamie Lancaster won special mention for a group “Chinese Laundry” costume while Will Rodden is listed as dressingly simply as a “Chinaman.”20 Costumes associated with non-Anglo-Saxon nationalities, especially Chinese, Japanese, Black, and Southern and Eastern European ones, were popular choices for attendants of Oakdale’s masquerade balls, which seemingly functioned in part to allow white residents to reaffirm self-conceptions of their own whiteness and, hence, at that time, Americanness, by collectively inhabiting caricatures of their non-white, decidedly un-American, neighbors.21

Although no systematic expulsions of Chinese occurred in Stanislaus as happened in other Californian counties, there were still localized instances of anti-Chinese harassment and violence.22 Francis Marion Cottle, a cattle rancher and one of Oakdale’s first settlers, wrote in his diary that during the town’s early days

[a Chinese man’s] long que [or queue] was a rich source of amusement to his tormentors, who would often chase a timid Chinaman to grasp his flying pigtail and hold him or lead him about, sometimes not too gently while mocking… In many instances, during the years the Chinese did meet with violence… They were stoned, beaten and thrown into rivers and in a number of instances came to a violent end at the hands of ruffians.23

In the same breath, Cottle wrote of a supposed plan to import thousands of Chinese “coolies” to California, framing anti-Chinese violence within the “Yellow Peril” narrative popularized by Denis Kearney’s Workingman’s Party that fashioned Chinese immigration as a threat to white labor.24 A 1940 letter to the editor appearing in the Oakdale Leader, then the town’s lone newspaper, reminiscently recounts a queue-pulling incident targeting Jim Young during Oakdale’s “pioneer” days. The account, identifying Young by name as well as the “Mandarin button on his silk cap and long que,” recalled how “the Chinaman” allegedly shot at a fleeing Charlie Fugit after Fugit pulled on Young’s queue.25 Local incidences of anti-Chinese violence, along with the popularity of “Chinese” costumes at Oakdale’s masquerade balls, illustrate how white locals used perceived physical, and especially sartorial, differences in the construction of a racial difference: in their eyes, not only did Chinese men look different, but also, as a consequence, they were perpetual foreigners deserving of caricature and harassment.

Even as the twentieth century arrived and explicit anti-Chinese violence ebbed, caricatures that mocked and affirmed the difference of the town’s remaining Chinese men persisted. In August 1937, as the Second Sino-Japanese War raged a continent away, the Leader ran a front-page story entitled “Hop Lee Bettee Shirtee Chinee Lick Japanee.”26 The article reported on an interview with Harry’s father, Tong, who the Leader, as in this article, often referred to as “Hop Lee” after the name of the family’s laundry.27 In the interview, “Lee” expressed confidence that China would triumph in the “undeclared war between the two Oriental nations,” allegedly quipping that, “Russia boys, ’Melican boys, German boys–all help Chinese boys now. Pretty soon no more Japanee boys.”28 The exaggerated Chinese pidgin English used in the article’s title and “Lee’s” quotes, with its substitution of “l”s for “r”s and addition of “ee”s, originated in the 1850s and was commonly used as a “humorous… or often satirical” “stereotypical imitation of [the Chinese’s] limited English linguistic knowledge.”29 The Leader’s employment of satirical Chinese pidgin English signaled their participation in the perpetuation of anti-Chinese stereotypes. In mocking Tong, who by then had been in the United States for nineteen years, for his linguistic difficulties, they marked all Chinese as outsiders, incapable of conversing in “proper” English, whose concern for their home country was unworthy of serious consideration.30

Figure 1
Figure 1 Low, first row, fourth from left, along with the other members of the OUHS Student Council, posing for the 1948 yearbook. Courtesy of Barbara Torres at the Oakdale Museum and History Center.

In a striking reversal, with the United States’ entry into the Second World War alongside China in 1941, earlier local negative stereotypes were supplanted as the American-born Low children emerged as the face of Oakdale’s Chinese and contributions to the Allied war effort. In 1942, a pair of articles praising the Low children for their war bond sales appeared in the Leader.31 The first, published on September 24, reported on the three younger Low children, Harry, Jimmy, and Vera, who eschewed “lollipops, toys, theatre tickets and other childish delights” and, instead, through “selling magazines and newspapers and picking turkeys,” “soberly turn[ed] their earnings over to Uncle Sam to keep the men fighting,” together purchasing $400 in war bonds over six months. In contrast to the “Hop Lee” article, which, only five years prior, mockingly dismissed the conflict between “oriental” China and Japan as of minimal interest to Americans, the 1942 article opened by characterizing the Low children as Oakdale’s “manifestation” of America’s “intrepid Chinese allies” who were “exerting every means to bring about the defeat of the Japs and the rest of the Axis gang.”32 A second article, published a week later, featured a picture of the trio, who were reportedly reticent to pose for it until the school superintendent suggested to Harry that it might help boost bond sales.33 Upon Low’s graduation from OUHS, the superintendent, citing in part his childhood war bond sales, awarded Harry, a two-time class president, vice-president of the school’s honor society, as well as the only Chinese American student in his class, a gold embossed briefcase for being the student who had “done the most for the school.”34

Praise for the Low children’s civic contributions, while based in local reality, was buffeted by and typical of broader changing attitudes that laid the groundwork for the construction of a national “model minority” narrative. In the 1941 Life article “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Chinese men’s physical appearances, long subjects of caricature, as seen in Oakdale’s masquerade balls, were recast as a way to tell America’s new Asian allies from their Japanese enemies.35 America’s Chinese also did their part. In the wake of the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, which saw America clash with a newly Communist China (PRC), leaders in major cities’ Chinatowns, many of whom had ties to the Nationalist regime in Taiwan (ROC), channeled community-wide fears that the government would levy many of their tenuous immigration statuses or PRC-sympathetic political views as pretext for internment or deportation to align America’s Chinese, in the eyes of white America, with the United States and the nominally “free” ROC through public displays of support and the silencing of internal dissent.36

This alignment produced an environment where the “model minority” narrative flourished. In the 1960s, as, according to the U.S. News article “Success Story of One Minority in the US,” “it [was] being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent on uplifting Negroes and other minorities,” America’s Chinese, with their low rates of welfare utilization and childhood delinquency, were promoted as an up-by-your-bootstraps model for other minority groups that, according to historian Ellen D. Wu, in turn “reproduce[d] associations between household deviancy, lawlessness, welfare abuse, and African Americans.”37 Since then, scholars, including Wu, have contended that the law-abidingness and self-reliance of America’s Chinese that propped up the “model minority” myth stemmed not from an emulatable cultural superiority or an authentic triumph of American ethnic liberalism but instead from the aforementioned, now decade-long political compliance enforced by Chinatown elites that aligned America’s Chinese with anti-communist American values and the ROC.38 The federal government cashed in on the burgeoning narrative, employing Chinese Americans as cultural diplomats to showcase America’s supposed post-racial status abroad.39 As put by Wu, “By the twilight of the civil rights era, the success stories of Japanese and Chinese America had themselves become success stories.”40

However, if the successes of America’s Chinese were supposed to showcase the country’s racial progress, Low’s experience was no shining example. Low had a long-time interest in law, with Harry, then 11, telling the Leader in the second of the 1942 war bond articles that he aspired to be a lawyer.41 Besides his student government activities and participation in the 1947 California Boys State, where he was elected a mayor, Low was also exposed to the law at Bush & Ackley, a local law firm in Oakdale, where he worked as a janitor for four or five years. By the time he transferred to UC Berkeley on a Joe Shoong Foundation Scholarship, he reported being set on pursuing a career in law.42 However, in a 2007 interview, Low recalled the discriminatory state of the field upon his graduation from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law in 1955: “there were only 35 Asians throughout the state of California who were lawyers. [I] did very well in law school, but no private law firms would interview [me],” separately saying that “[m]any firms did not hire their first Asian until 1975 or later.”43 Perhaps a silver lining in Low’s inability to breach the world of private practice was that it shepherded him into public service on the recommendation of Sho Sato, a Boalt professor and the school’s first Japanese American faculty member. In 1956, he was recruited to serve as a deputy attorney general in the tax section, a position that Sato himself had once held, under State Attorney General Pat Brown.44 When Low moved to San Francisco to accept the position, he and his wife, Mayling, who he had met at Berkeley, faced yet more racial discrimination, finding themselves unable to rent an apartment in their desired neighborhood.45

By that time, the cracks in the San Francisco’s Chinatown elites’ grasp on the community’s politics were beginning to show. In late 1955, only months after Low graduated from Boalt, Everett Drumright, the US consul general in Hong Kong, published a report that accused America’s Chinese of coordinated immigration fraud and PRC collusion.46 In early 1956, the report spawned a Department of Justice investigation into the “immigration racket,” which in turn resulted in a blanket subpoena of the records of thirty-four San Franciscan Chinese family and district associations.47 The subpoenas, later described by critics as a “fishing expedition,” realized the worst fears of San Francisco’s Chinese, many of whom had manufactured familial connections to bypass the draconian restrictions on Chinese immigration during the Exclusion era. However, in the end, it was not Chinatown’s centrist elites or the ROC, but instead liberal Democratic politicians, in alliance with Chinese American activists, who secured public support for the Chinese and a district court ruling in March 1956 that dismissed the subpoenas as unconstitutionally vague.48

Chief among the members of the victorious alliance were Phil Burton and Lim P. Lee, former classmates at the city’s Lincoln High School. According to historian Charlotte Brooks, Burton was, with Lee’s encouragement, the “first white politician to publicly oppose [the subpoenas].” Through his connections, he persuaded other influential liberals to do the same statewide. Judge Oliver J. Carter, who ultimately ruled the subpoenas unconstitutional, was also an ally of Lee’s and a steadfast liberal who, fourteen years prior, was one of the lone prominent opponents of Japanese internment. In the aftermath of the ruling, in a break from Chinatown elites who saw Burton and other liberals as insufficiently supplicant to McCarthyism and the ROC, many second-generation Chinese Americans further aligned themselves with liberal Democrats, who had demonstrated their commitment to fighting racial discrimination. In the 1956 presidential elections, which saw the Republican Eisenhower sweep the state, San Francisco’s Chinese swung towards Stevenson, the Democrat. Burton, then seeking a seat in the state Assembly, defeated a twenty-four-year incumbent Republican by a slim margin, buoyed by victories in majority Chinese precincts in San Francisco.49

Under Brown, Low found himself amidst this new Chinese American politics. In 1958, Brown ran for governor against Senator William F. Knowland, a vigorous ROC ally known as the “Senator from Formosa.” At Burton’s urging, Low and Lee, among others, formed the CADC that September, formalizing Chinese Americans’ growing affinity for the Democratic Party and a politics that placed civil rights concerns, such as the immigration probe, over anti-communism, which remained the primary issue within ROC-aligned Chinese circles in the city. In his reelection bid, with the help of the CADC, Burton won Chinatown by a three-to-one margin, while Brown won a bare majority there, reversing a strong primary performance by Knowland on his way to a statewide victory that broke a four-term Republican gubernatorial chokehold. A budding protégé of Brown’s, Low campaigned widely for the Democratic ticket that year.50 The 1958 victories gave rise to state Fair Employment and Civil Rights acts in 1959 as well as a slew of Chinese American appointments, including Brown’s tapping of Low for the Worker's Compensation Appeals Board in March 1966, only nine months before another appointment, this time to the San Francisco Municipal Court on December 27, after Ronald Reagan unexpectedly upset Brown’s plans for a third term.51 Brown’s appointment, before which he jokingly asked the thirty-five-year-old Low, "How old are you?", teed up Low’s long career in the judiciary. In 1974, Low ran unopposed with the backing of former mayor Joe Alioto and won a vacant seat on the San Francisco Superior Court. In 1982, keeping it within the family, the outgoing Governor Jerry Brown, Pat’s son, appointed Low to the Court of Appeals in a newly-created First District, a position from which Low eventually retired in 1991, ending a twenty-five year-long judicial career. However, Low did not stay retired for long, working as a private arbitrator and accepting two city commissionerships before Governor Davis called him to head the State Insurance Commission in 2000.52

Low fought for his values from the bench and beyond. At the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, Low solicited funds on behalf of the NAACP, calling on Chinese and African Americans’ shared histories, saying, “We should not forget that not too many years ago, Chinese were the principal victims of discrimination and abuse in California. We should not neglect those responsible Negroes who are using reasonable methods to gain equal rights.”53 While presiding over a session of the Court of Historical Review and Appeals, a moot court that has decided questions such as the heritage of the American hot dog, in 1975, Low injected a hint of seriousness when he posthumously vindicated San Francisco police chief George W. Wittman, whom he determined had been falsely dismissed in 1905 as part of a plan to pin him to a speculated gambling scene in San Francisco’s Chinatown to deprive residents of their property.54 In his official capacity, writing for the State Court of Appeals, Low penned a concurring opinion in the 1988 case Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. v. Superior Court that took issue with the term “Chinese Wall,” which refers to a confidentiality barrier in a legal or financial context. The opinion, which hearkened back to state courts’ discriminatory history, such as in the 1854 California Supreme Court case People v. Hall, which held that Chinese could not testify against whites, referred to the term as a piece of “legal flotsam” and a “subtle form of linguistic discrimination” that unnecessarily associated the Chinese with “constraints on the freedom of open communication.” This oft-cited opinion contributed to the term’s continued decline.55 Low also carried his sense of justice to his last governmental position as State Insurance Commissioner, where he rebuilt the office’s staff and, among other initiatives, obtained $4.2 million from Dutch insurers for Californian Holocaust survivors and published a study on insurers of enslaved Africans and Chinese “coolies,” that, according to AsianWeek, sparked “debate about reparations for damages caused by slavery.”56 Low’s wide-ranging promotion of minority civil rights, especially vis-à-vis African Americans, provided a new perspective to the state’s judiciary and challenged the racial order that the “model minority” helped to construct, positioning Chinese and African Americans as partners instead of adversaries.

Low became a uniquely unifying figure in a racially and politically diverse San Francisco. According to John Burton, Phil’s brother who succeeded him in the state Assembly, Low was a “kingfish” of the city’s prestigious Calamari Club, where “[w]hen we [Burton] were growing up, the only way a citizen of Chinese ancestry would get in[...] would be washing dishes in the kitchen.”57 He also volunteered his time and talents to Chinese causes, serving as a legal advisor for the family association that served immigrants from his parents’ birth county and co-founding the Chinese American Bilingual School, the first of its kind, which opened in 1981. The school’s principal founder, Carol Ruth Silver, remarked that “[a]t the time, Judge Low was the most prominent Chinese-American figure in the city of San Francisco; not only was he beloved in the Chinese-American community, but he was beloved and respected in the San Francisco community at large.”58 Low’s widespread appeal was reflected in an ultimately unsuccessful bipartisan push by Chinese Americans for Low’s nomination to the state Supreme Court amid a wave of vacancies in 1986. The effort saw Democrats, led by Secretary of State March Fong Eu (née Kong), a fellow Oakdaleite, unite with the likes of Dennis Wong, the chairman of Asians for Deukmejian (the Republican governor who succeeded Jerry Brown), who heralded Low as a “moderate, [who] has been very active with all segments of the community, [who] has been a leader in the judicial organizations and as well is liked and well regarded by his contemporaries.”59

Low’s saga is a uniquely Chinese American one. In an illustrative transformation, Low, born the son of a “Chinee” laundryman, came to be adopted, alongside Fong Eu, by Oakdale as the town’s “most famous native son and daughter.”60 However, Low’s ascension to that status did not come without obstacles. At his induction to the inaugural Oakdale High School (née OUHS) Hall of Fame class in 1992 under the category of “contribution in a profession other than education,” Low remarked on his experience growing up on the “other side of the tracks” in Oakdale’s long-neglected east end.61 Due to their parents’ limited means, the Low children worked throughout their childhoods, with Harry able to count a half-dozen local Oakdale businesses as former employers by his graduation.62 Although Low benefitted from the changing attitudes towards America’s Chinese that culminated in the “model minority” myth, he still faced the harsh reality of growing up as a child of a working Chinese immigrant family, the only one of its kind in Oakdale.

Ironically, it was not in rural Oakdale, where, when Low was six, the local paper labeled his father a “Chinee,” but rather in San Francisco, a city with one of the country’s most sizable Chinese populations, where Low reported facing the most racial discrimination. There, beyond housing and employment discrimination, Low also faced more subtle slights, later jokingly recalling how Brown, as Attorney General, often confused him for Delbert Wong, a former employee of his who was also Chinese.63 In contrast, Low has nothing but good memories of Oakdale, where he was well-liked and was elected by his OUHS classmates as the class’ “biggest character.”64 Throughout his career, Low referenced his upbringing as a key to his success, saying that it instilled in him “a degree of confidence that helped him.” At the same time, Low also noted that he developed an appreciation for his Chinese heritage, coming to view it as a “distinct advantage” that gave him a unique perspective.65 Drawing on his unique background, Low became a trailblazer who broke “glass ceilings” across the Californian legal and political worlds. Joining with other Chinese Americans, he also effected a fundamental, lasting shift in San Francisco and state politics. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he helped to advance a novel politics that, in aligning with California’s ascendant liberal Democrats, placed minority civil rights front and center, rejecting earlier incarnations of Chinese politics that were steeped in anti-communist fears and that gave consent to the anti-African American “model minority” myth that continues to permeate American race relations.

Notes

  1. “The Downfall of California’s Insurance Commissioner,” Insurance Journal, July 10, 2000, https://www.insurancejournal.com/magazines/mag-coverstory/2000/07/10/21521.htm; Steve Breen, “Native son on tap to oversee state insurance,” Oakdale Leader, August 2, 2000, 1, Newspapers.com.

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  2. California Appellate Court Legacy Project, “Interviewee Biography: Justice Harry W. Low,” https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/Low_Harry_W_Biography.pdf; This essay uses the term “Chinese American” to refer to specifcially American-born people of Chinese descent, while the term “Chinese” is used to refer to any people of Chinese descent. The term “America’s Chinese” is also used when there is ambiguity about if the whether the people being referenced are in America or overseas. Low was also the first Chinese judge in Northern California.

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  3. K. Connie Kang, “Heritage: An Asian’s trip from laundry to judgeship,” San Francisco Examiner, January 4, 1978, 57, Newspapers.com.

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  4. California Appellate Court Legacy Project, “Interviewee Biography: Justice Harry W. Low.”

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  5. Robert G. Lee, “The Cold War Origins of the Model Minority Myth,” in Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader, ed. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 256-257, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bmzn3s.18.

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  6. Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 206-209; Lee, “Cold War Origins,” 256.

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  7. For background on the formation of the Chinese American Democratic Club, see Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 186-195; Harry Low, email to Charlotte Brooks, in Ibid., 195.

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  8. For background on the county’s Chinese population, see Ronald H. Limbaugh, “The Chinese of Knight's Ferry, 1850-1920: A Preliminary Study,” California History 72, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 107-113, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25177341; U.S. Census Bureau, Stanislaus County, California, population schedule, Oakdale, enumeration district 50, 1900 Census, NAID 2353585, Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790–2007, Record Group 29, The National Archives at Washington, DC., Washington, DC.

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  9. For background on Jim Young, see Local Happenings, Oakdale Leader, April 1, 1898, 8, Newspapers.com; Jim Young, “Chinese Laundry,” advertisement, Stanislaus Wheat-Grower, October 15, 1881, 3, Newspapers.com.

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  10. Limbaugh, “The Chinese of Knight’s Ferry, 1850-1920,” 112.

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  11. For mention of the two laundries, see “Fair Shake for the East Side,” Oakdale Graphic, October 29, 1908, 3, Newspapers.com; For background on Wah Lung, see “Oakdale Pioneer Goes Back to China Home,” Oakdale Leader, November 5, 1925, 5, Newspapers.com; For Wah Lung and Jim Young’s partnership, see Young, “Chinese Laundry,” advertisement; U.S. Census Bureau, 1910 Census, Stanislaus County, California, population schedule, Oakdale, enumeration district 157, sheet 13-B, NAID 2353585, Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790–2007, Record Group 29, The National Archives at Washington, DC., Washington, DC.

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  12. U.S. Census Bureau, 1910 Census, Stanislaus County, California, population schedule, Oakdale, enumeration district 157.

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  13. U.S. Census Bureau. 1920 Census, Stanislaus County, California, population schedule, Oakdale, enumeration district 180, NAID 2353589. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790–2007, Record Group 29. The National Archives at Washington, DC., Washington, DC.; “A Taste of the Orient: Oakdale’s history brushed by Chinese saga,” Oakdale Leader, October 27, 1993, 13, 18, Newspapers.com.

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  14. Limbaugh, “The Chinese of Knight’s Ferry, 1850-1920,” 112.

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  15. Benson Tong, “Eu, March Fong (née Kong) (1922– ),” in Making it in America: a sourcebook on eminent ethnic Americans, ed. Elliott Robert Barkan (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2001), 118-119.

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  16. “Mabel Chong,” Obituary, Ceres Courier, February 7, 2020, https://www.cerescourier.com/obituaries/mabel-chong; U.S. Census Bureau, 1930 Census, Stanislaus County, California, population schedule, Oakdale, enumeration district 50-30, sheet 3-B, NAID 598030, Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790–2007, Record Group 29, The National Archives at Washington, DC., Washington, DC.

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  17. For an account of Tong Low’s ownership, see Pati O’Connor, “Tong Low Closes Chinese Laundry,” Oakdale Leader, February 22, 1962, 1, 2, Newspapers.com.

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  18. The 1940 census lists zero Chinese in Oakdale, possibly because the enumerator did not realize Hop Lee doubled as a residence or the Lows were not present at the time. However, the Lows are widely attested to have lived in Oakdale at the time. U.S. Census Bureau, 1940 Census, Stanislaus County, California, population schedule, Oakdale, enumeration district 50-40, NAID 16660414, Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790–2007, Record Group 29, The National Archives at Washington, DC., Washington, DC.; Bay Area Census, “Population of Counties and Cities in California, 1850-2010,” accessed April 1, 2024, http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/historical/2010-1850_California_Cities.xlsx.

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  19. “The Masquerade Ball,” Oakdale Graphic, January 4, 1888, 8, Newspapers.com.

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  20. “The Masquerade Ball,” Oakdale Leader, January 6, 1893, 6, Newspapers.com.

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  21. Southern and Eastern Europeans were widely considered non-white during this period. For background on the shifting boundaries of “whiteness” during the period, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 91-135.

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  22. For background on early Chinese settlements in California, see Nancy Wey, “Chinese Americans in California,” in Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey for California, by California Department of Parks and Recreation (Sacramento: California Department of Parks and Recreation, 1988).

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  23. For a biography of Cottle, see Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections, Cottle Family Papers, 1852-1968: Collection No. Mss191 (Stockton: University of the Pacific, 2007), https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4g50075z/entire_text; Francis Marion Cottle, diary, in “A Taste of the Orient,” 18.

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  24. “A Taste of the Orient,” 18; Limbaugh, “The Chinese of Knight’s Ferry, 1850-1920,” 110.

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  25. C. F. B., “Gives Review of Pioneer Incidents,” Oakdale Leader, November 28, 1940, 7, Newspapers.com.

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  26. “Hop Lee Bettee Shirtee Chinee Lick Japanee,” Oakdale Leader, August 19, 1937, 1, Newspapers.com.

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  27. It is unclear if “Hop Lee” was an alias of Tong’s, who had also operated an identically named laundry on Pacific Street in San Francisco, or a name that the Leader erroneously inferred from the laundry. O’Connor, “Tong Low Closes Chinese Laundry,” 1; For other instances of the Leader referring to the laundry’s owner as “Hop Lee,” see “Building Permits Drop $34,780 Under March Level,” Oakdale Leader, May 4, 1950, 16, Newspapers.com; and “Heavy Kicks at Axis Delivered by Three Chinese Children,” Oakdale Leader, September 24, 1942, 1, Newspapers.com.

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  28. Tong Low, in “Hop Lee Bettee Shirtee Chinee Lick Japanee,” 1.

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  29. Wolfgang Mieder, “‘No Tickee, No Washee’: Subtleties of a Proverbial Slur,” Western Folklore 55, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 4-8, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1500147.

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  30. Tong Low, Petition for Naturalization, May 8, 1956, NAID 605504. Petitions For Naturalization, 8/6/1903 - 12/29/1911, Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685-2009, Record Group Number 21, The National Archives at San Francisco, San Bruno, CA, Ancestry.com.

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  31. “Heavy Kicks at Axis Delivered by Three Chinese Children,” 1; “Three Youngsters Who Are in the Fight, Too,” Oakdale Leader, October 1, 1942, 8, Newspapers.com.

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  32. “Heavy Kicks at Axis Delivered by Three Chinese Children,” 1.

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  33. “Three Youngsters Who Are in the Fight, Too,” 8.

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  34. Oakdale Union High School, The Oracle (Oakdale, CA: 1948), Oakdale Museum and History Center, in Barbara Torres, email to author, May 10, 2024; “176 Graduate In Open Air Service,” Oakdale Leader, June 17, 1948, 1, Newspapers.com; “Locals,” Oakdale Leader, April 17, 1947, 7, Newspapers.com; “Elections For Class Officials Held At H.S.,” Oakdale Leader, September 25, 1947, 12, Newspapers.com.

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  35. Lee, “Cold War Origins,” 257-260.

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  36. Wu, Color of Success, 114-122.

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  37. “Success Story of One Minority in the U.S.,” U.S. News and World Report, December 26, 1966, 73, in Lee, “Cold War Origins”; Lee, “Cold War Origins,” 258-261; Wu, Color of Success, 206-209.

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  38. Lee, “Cold War Origins,” 261-263, 266-269.

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  39. Wu, Color of Success, 126-138.

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  40. Ibid., 242.

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  41. “Three Youngsters Who Are in the Fight, Too,” 8.

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  42. “Harry Low Mayor At Boys' State,” Oakdale Leader, July 10, 1947, 13, Newspapers.com; Harry Low, interview by William Stein, May 24, 2007, transcript, California Appellate Court Legacy Project, California Judicial Center Library, San Francisco, CA, 1, https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/Harry_Low_6046.pdf; “Harry Low Receives Award,” Oakdale Leader, June 8, 1950, 10, Newspapers.com.

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  43. Harry Low, interview by Rick Quan, Youtube, September 9, 2013, video, 3:44, 0:05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqhDyXSBaT0; Harry Low, in Philip Carrizosa, “Profile- Justice Harry W. Low: First District Court of Appeals, California,” Los Angeles Daily Journal, March 8, 1983, 1, in David Quan, “Asian Americans and Law: Fighting the Myth of Success,” Journal of Legal Education 38, no. 4 (December 1988): 626, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42893057.

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  44. Low, interview by Stein, transcript, 2; UC Berkeley School of Law, “Sho Sato Biography,” Accessed May 10, 2024, https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/institute-for-legal-research/sho-sato-program-in-japanese-and-us-law/sho-sato-biography.

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  45. Kang, “Heritage,” 66.

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  46. Charlotte Brooks, “Numbed with Fear: Chinese Americans and McCarthyism,” American Experience, December 20, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mccarthy-numbed-with-fear-chinese-americans.

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  47. Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy, 157-159; Wu, Color of Success, 138-143.

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  48. Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy, 159-165, 191.

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  49. Ibid., 159-167.

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  50. Ibid., 186-194; Low, interview by Stein, transcript, 2-3.

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  51. Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy, 199-201; Low, interview by Stein, transcript, 3; California Appellate Court Legacy Project, “Interviewee Biography: Justice Harry W. Low.”

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  52. Low, interview by Stein, transcript, 4, 6, 11; California Appellate Court Legacy Project, “Interviewee Biography: Justice Harry W. Low.”

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  53. “Chinese Are Raising Funds For NAACP,” Berkeley Gazette, June 27, 1963, 11, Newspapers.com.

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  54. “Wieners’s Heritage Debated With Relish,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, July 31, 1981, 5, Newspapers.com; April White, “The Courtroom That Literally Relitigated History,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 26, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/courtroom-literally-relitigated-history-180973823.

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  55. Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. v. Superior Court, 200 Cal. App. 3d 273 (1998), 294-295; The term survives to this day, with Grant Maxwell Wong Kolling, a former city attorney for Palo Alto, California, sending one of his articles on the topic, which was inspired by and includes references to the Peat opinion, to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who used the term during her prosecution of former President Trump’s RICO case in Georgia in 2024. Grant Maxwell Wong Kolling, email to author, April 10, 2024.

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  56. Julie D. Soo, “San Franciscan of the Year,” AsianWeek, May 18, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070703031847/http://news.asianweek.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=82facc3925cf79459900fcc78dba31d7.

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  57. Han Li, “Memorial for pioneering SF Judge Harry Low inspires big turnout,” San Francisco Standard, April 27, 2022, https://sfstandard.com/2022/04/27/memorial-sf-judge-harry-low-asian-american-turnout.

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  58. Ibid.; Jeff Bissell, “A Tribute to One of CAIS’s Founders—Justice Harry Low,” Chinese American International School News, Dec 10, 2021, https://www.cais.org/a-tribute-to-one-of-caiss-founders-justice-harry-low; Chinese American International School. “Our History,” accessed May 11, 2024, https://www.cais.org/about/history; For background on the Fa Yuen community, see Him Mark Lai, “Chinese Regional Solidarity: Case Study of the Hua Xian (Fa Yuen) Community in California,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (1994): 19-60, https://himmarklai.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/01-Chinese-Regional-Solidarity.pdf; The author is a member of the school, now renamed Chinese American International School’s, class of 2017.

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  59. K. Connie Kang, “Asians want one of own on state Supreme Court,” San Francisco Examiner, December 8, 1986, 15, 21, Newspapers.com.

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  60. “A Taste of the Orient,” 13.

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  61. “Fair Shake for the East Side,” 3; “High school’s finest saluted,” Oakdale Leader, October 21, 1992, 54, 55, Newspapers.com; Harry Low, in Nancy Olsterholm, “Emotional tribute to OHS best,” Oakdale Leader, October 28, 1992, 3, Newspapers.com.

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  62. Jeanette Taylor, “Harry Low Recalls Boyhood In Oakdale,” Oakdale Leader, May 12, 1966, 11, Newspapers.com.

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  63. Low, interview by Stein, transcript, 2. Wong was then the first Chinese American judge in the continental United States after Brown appointed him to the Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1959.

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  64. Steve Breen, “New official to carry Oakdale values to Capitol,” Oakdale Leader, August 30, 2000, 8, Newspapers.com; OUHS, The Oracle (1948).

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  65. Breen, “New official,” 8; Kang, “Heritage,” 66.

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