Sprayers from a Chinese American laundry shop, about 1900 Finding themselves barred from most industrial jobs and deprived of U.S. citizenship in the late nineteenth century, many Chinese immigrants started their own businesses as a means of survival. Smithsonian curators purchased these brass water sprayers, used in a Chinese laundry shop in Washington, D.C., to help tell stories of immigrant labor in the 1976 exhibition A Nation of Nations. See also: Work History

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