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Cate School's Chinatown

By: Alison Wang '25

Did you know that Cate School had a Chinatown? As early as the 1910s, 8 or 9 Chinese men worked as the earliest kitchen and laundry staff at Cate. 1880 Cate Mesa Road was a dorm for Chinese men from the late 1920s until after World War II broke out. This building, even after the Chinese workers had left, was referred to as “Chinatown” at Cate for decades.


1947 Chinatown in Snow


The Chinese workers were present in the beginning stages of Cate School, founded in 1910. They were integral to the school's physical founding and were crucial characters in Cate’s early campus culture. The Chinese staff served as waiters at formal dinners before Juniors did, and they were remembered by students and faculty alike. In memory of Chong, who was a laundryman at Cate for twelve years, Curtis Cate wrote in School Days in California about how Chong would collect the weekly laundry from Long House and yell at the students, “Laundeley bag, laundeley bag!” As he yelled at the boys to “Hully up!” the students would reply with, “Gong-fat-choi, Chong.” After over a decade of work at Cate, Chong’s job as the head laundry worker was replaced by a younger couple as he proved to be less efficient with the new laundry system and machine. In the El Batidor article that year commemorating Chong after he left the school, the boys applauded him for his “remarkable, Chinese personality.” 

While Curtis Cate and the students expressed their appreciation for Chong, this evidence of their “love” for him and the name “Chinatown” for their dormitory, reveals how the Chinese workers at Cate were met with racist tokenization that inhibited them from being viewed as equal members of this residential educational community. Although, unlike many other Chinese immigrants, Cate’s historical Chinese workers were able to remain in the U.S. after the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act and were acknowledged for their presence on campus. Nonetheless, the Chinese workers’ jobs at Cate mirrored the other poorly paid Chinese immigrants after the transcontinental railroad was completed: laundry and cooking. The Chinese workers at Cate underwent racial stereotyping similar to their contemporaries in the rest of the state, which prevented their access to education for themselves and future generations. Despite living in an educational community, the Chinese workers at Cate were constricted to labor. Like many in California, they often faced barriers to education, mirroring the 1884 case of Mary Tape, who sued for her daughter’s right to attend a public school in San Francisco. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors segregated Chinese students from white students due to their belief that Chinese people were unassimilable to American society, a racist belief in which Chinese exclusion was entrenched. Coming from a culture that views scholars as the leaders of society, segregation and stereotyping isolated Chinese workers and their descendants from both American education and their cultural roots. This alienating belief of Chinese immigrants enabled the racist tokenization, treatment, and language the Chinese workers faced at Cate School. 

The archival materials included in this article barely scratch the surface of the history of these Chinese men at Cate: how they ended up at Cate, why they left, their lives before and after their time at Cate, how their departure from Cate was followed tightly by Cate’s first Chinese student in 1944 affected how the community viewed its first Chinese students, remain mysteries waiting to be uncovered. This article aims to shed light on an important aspect of Cate's history that is not widely known.





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