From Chinese Laundress to Mother of the Year

A story by Dr. Andrea Louie from 1920-1952

Andrea Louie in China with a museum display about Toy Len Goon

Toy Len Goon (阮陳彩蓮), a Chinese immigrant from Taishan County (台山縣), Guangdong Province (廣東省), was selected as U.S. Mother of the Year in 1952, in recognition of raising eight successful children while running a hand laundry after her husband, Dogan (阮祖根), a WWI veteran passed away. Dogan was able to enter the U.S. illegally via Canada around 1912, skirting the Chinese Exclusion Laws, in effect from 1882 to 1943, which barred Chinese non-citizens from entering the U.S., except for merchants and students. After being interviewed by a Chinese inspector in 1917, Dogan was brought in front of Commissioner Arthur Chapman for a hearing in which he was determined "Not Guilty" of being in the U.S. illegally, thus creating the basis for his application to apply to return to China as a U.S. resident to bring back his wife. Dogan and Toy Len entered the U.S. in 1921 and Toy Len quickly adapted to the daily tasks of doing laundry and housework and raising her children, the first of whom was born just months after her arrival. She had been pregnant during her arduous journey to the U.S. and while detained in immigration in South Boston.

Though Toy Len had brought some traditional Chinese outfits with her, including four mud silk, as well as cotton, and wool outfits, they remained in storage. Upon her arrival, Dogan had bought her a sewing machine and told her not to wear her Chinese clothing, but rather to make American-style clothing for herself. Toy Len wore her characteristic uniform—a house dress and apron—as she worked sixteen-hour days doing both house and laundry work, and caring for her eight children. Her workload increased when Dogan became ill and passed away in 1941, requiring her to pull Carroll, the oldest, out of high school to help run the laundry. All of the children helped out with laundry or housework, while also earning excellent grades at Deering High School. All went on for additional education, eventually achieving solid middle-class status.

Clara Soule, a retired school teacher who had engaged in "Americanization" work nominated Toy Len Goon for the Mother of the Year honor in 1952, at a moment in U.S. history when images of Chinese American women and families were shifting from negative to positive. In the context of the Cold War, the US felt pressure to demonstrate that its democratic principles gave it the right to be the leader of the free world. As the head of an upwardly mobile immigrant family, Toy Len Goon was a strategic choice, as her image could be deployed as part of a containment strategy in a cultural cold war as the U.S. tried to extend its influence in Asia. The family was portrayed as exemplary model minorities, facilitated by their in-between racial positioning, neither Black nor White.

However, the media coverage and public image created around her story contained multiple inaccuracies did not portray the roles Toy Len Goon took on as not only a housewife and mother, but also a businesswoman, wife, daughter, sister, and Goon clan member. Though she was portrayed as an assimilated American, representing motherhood and domesticity, the media deemphasized the numerous ties she maintained to the Chinese American community and to her family back in China, to whom she would write letters and send back money.

While she and her children never recall experiencing discrimination, their experiences, as well as those of Asian Americans more broadly, had been shaped by exclusionary immigration policies, and a history of social and economic marginalization and violence that created the conditions they had to work so hard to overcome.

Dr. Andrea Louie, Professor of Anthropology, Michigan State University and Toy Len Goon's granddaughter.

References:
Field, Jacqueline. 2014. Mud Silk and the Chinese Laundress: From the South China Silk Industry to Mud Silk Suits in Maine. Textile History, volume 45: 2.
Guen, Amy Chin. 2019. The Toy Len Goon Story. Draft
Hsu, Madeline. 2015. The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority. Princeton University Press.
Hsu, Madeline. 2016. Asian Americans and the Cold War. The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History. David Yoo and Eichiro Azuma, eds. Oxford University Press.
Klein, Christina. 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. University of California Press.
Wu, Ellen. 2015. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Politics and Society in Modern America), Princeton University Press. 
Wu, Ellen. 2008. "America’s Chinese": Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War. Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 77 No. 3, pp. 391-422.
Yeh, Chiou-Ling. 2012. "A Saga of Democracy": Toy Len Goon, American Mother of the Year, and the Cultural Cold War. Pacific Historical Review. 5081(3), pp. 432-461.