Chinese Laundromat Memories
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2017 edition of Folklore Magazine.
View a video of the people interviewed for this article:
Ever since I was young, my parents have made sure that I remember my roots in Saskatoon that reach back more than 100 years. As I was the only great-grandchild my great grandparents ever met, I wanted to learn more about how my great-grandfather came to Canada.
According to my relatives, my great-grandfather Yee Foo came to Canada in 1919 from the ancestral village where the Yee family originated. His uncle, Charlie Mak, sponsored him and his two brothers (one older and one younger) to come to Saskatoon.
Yee Foo, the author’s great-grandfather, ca. 1970s. Courtesy of author.
Great-grandfather, along with his brothers and their cousin, opened a laundromat called Wing Lee Lai. It was located on the corner of 19th street and Avenue D.
My relatives were part of the Chinese who immigrated to Saskatchewan between 1911 and 1921. According to Alison Marshall’s book Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada, the population of the province grew at this time from 492,432 to 757,510. By 1921, the Chinese population was double the number in Manitoba. Most of the settlers were mostly males between 11 and 20 years, the youngest were age seven or eight[1]. Meanwhile in 1911, China had the Wuchang Uprising. It was the catalyst to the Xinhai Revolution and ended the Qing Dynasty, which marked start of the Republic of China[2].
University of British Columbia history professor Henry Yu says most of the Chinese immigrants in the early days came from one of eight counties in Guangdong province, which sent 99% of the migrants from China to North America, the Caribbean and Australia as part of the “Gold Mountain” dream. The Chinese often referred to these countries as “Gold Mountain” which is not tied to one physical location, but represented the idea of a better life for their families. Toi San, where my great-grandfather was from, was one of these eight counties.
“So really it was a Cantonese-specific network that went around during the Gold Rush particular through the port of Hong Kong. It’s a very constrained network. Yet hundreds of thousands of people went out over hundreds of years,” Yu says.
Yu disagrees with people who say the Chinese left their country because of war. War didn’t result in people going overseas to mine for gold and open laundry stores. If they were escaping war, they would have just moved to a nearby country, he notes.
“They don’t say. ‘I want to cross the world to the other side of the planet and for the rest of my life, dig gold. And visit back every 10 years, get married, have a wife at home in the village, build a new house and then retire back to the village.’ That has nothing to do with war,” Yu says.
“In fact you don’t have this recurring system, over generation after generation, of young men going out working overseas. Getting married, leaving their wife and children at home. You don’t do that unless it’s a systematic network and pattern that you keep going generation after generation,” explains Yu.
Working in a laundromat was hard work for very little pay, say my relatives. But it must have been that Gold Mountain dream that kept my ancestors enduring through those tough conditions.
“I remember he (Yee Foo) told me that he charged 10 cents for one shirt. My grandfather was the one that go around the neighbourhood and collect laundry and came back to the Laundromat and work,” says Freda Louie, my aunt.
“They washed the laundry, dried, ironed and then delivered it. It was hard work. Dirty work too,” says my mother, Jennifer Yee Hwang.
My relatives describe the laundromat as dilapidated. My mother was not quite 14 when she, her sister and her mother arrived in Canada in 1964. She recalls visiting the laundromat.
Wing Lee Lai Laundry building, ca. 1960s. Courtesy of Saskatchewan Archives.
“It was an old, old wooden house. I think it was a story and a half,” says Yee Hwang. She observed that it was very basic with not much furniture. There were big wooden wash tubs for doing the laundry in the back of the building.
“It was nothing like what we have today, like machines. All of it was done by hand in those days. I don’t think they even had rubber gloves to protect their hands. They just used their bare hands,” she says.
My mother recalls that along the west side of the wall there was an ironing counter and a big furnace in the centre of the room where they heated their irons.
“It takes quite a bit of skill to iron pleats and all that but they managed,” she says.
“It’s quite a process when I think about it now. There’s no temperature control. They had to use common sense. It’s hard work. I don’t think they paid much,” she adds.
Chinese men had to be creative and brave to survive winters and loneliness in small towns without family. Winters were harsh, particularly the first one Yee Foo experienced.
Chinese Canadian men cut their queues (pigtails) between 1910 and 1911 and changed their appearance in other ways. After 1911, Chinese men wore Western clothing. Many Chinese men ran cafes, tailor shops and groceries along with laundromats. Yee Foo was no different. When he came to Canada, he still had his long braid, which was a way to show his loyalty to the Qing Dynasty. It was considered treason if Chinese men cut off their braids. My aunt Freda Louie remembers hearing about the story about how he lost his braid.
“He said one day he woke up and he couldn’t move because the long braid was frozen to the wooden bed. So his brother took a knife and just chopped the hair and that’s how he got short hair like the Caucasians, like the North Americans. That was funny for us. To him, it hurt him because that it was his identity,” says Louie.
My uncle, John Yee, came to Canada in 1958. When he first landed in Saskatoon in February, he visited the run-down laundromat. Later, he stayed there for a year.
“I slept upstairs in the laundromat where there were no rooms. It was all open. There were three beds,” says Yee, who was 11 years at the time.
Since the building wasn’t insulated, he remembers the heat came from turning up the furnace that had been used to dry the laundry. During the summer, he remembered the backyard which had a shed where they used to raise chickens in a coop. They also had a line to hang clothes and linen. My aunt and mother say that Wing Lee Lai was the last operational manual laundromat in Saskatoon. The laundromat closed in the 1960s or 1970s.
Shortly after the laundromat closed, the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon set up an exhibit called Boom Town, which was to represent businesses in the 1910. Yee Foo donated most of his equipment, like washboards, tubs, rollers, irons and other tools to the exhibit called “Wing Lee Laundry.”
Years later, this simple exhibit has much deeper meaning for me and I can say that one part of my family’s story is now part of public history.
Florence Hwang.
FLORENCE HWANG has a background in Canadian history, journalism, librarianship and documentary film. Currently, she is working as a media librarian in Regina.
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