Chinatown

This guide to Boston's Chinatown traces it back to 1870, when a shoe factory owner shipped seventy-five young Chinese workers from California to break a strike in North Adams. It follows what happened once their contracts ended and factory doors and union halls stayed shut to them in Boston, pushing them toward the one trade left open. Many slept on the very ironing boards they worked at all day, a curtain strung across one room making a bedroom out of a shop.