"I'm in mourning...I just can't believe this is happening. Thank you for all of the memories."
Ching Lee’s third-generation owners, Jack Yee and his wife Evelyn, both 87, made the decision to close the shop due to Jack’s ailing health, as well as rising costs.
“It deeply saddens me that this era is ending,” Jacque Yee, the couple’s daughter who has managed the shop with her father for the past 30 years, told NBC News.
In 1876, when Jacque Yee’s great granduncle opened the doors of Ching Lee Laundry, he traveled by horse-drawn carriage to pick up laundry 20 miles away in San Francisco. By that time, the Gold Rush had brought tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to California, but the Yee family was among the very first to make their way south of San Francisco, to suburban San Mateo, which was then home to just 932 people.
Chinese immigrants dominated the laundry business during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Chinese were kicked out of fishing, farming, mining, you name it. They were being excluded from virtually everything else,” John Jung, author of “Chinese Laundries,” told NBC News. “Plus, out in the West, there were a lot of single men coming out and they weren’t going to do their own laundry."
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