Sing Kee - Laundries, Violence, and Vandalism
Many Chinese immigrants in Colorado earned their living as laundry workers. For Chinese men in remote mining areas such as Fairplay, this was due to both a scarcity of women and the mindset of white men who saw laundry work as being beneath them. This left the market wide open.[1] Although laundering was a fortuitous opportunity for Chinese immigrants, it was also extremely laborious. In order to compete, Chinese laundry workers offered reduced prices and worked long hours in confined, humid, and isolating conditions.[2] In Denver there were grumblings that Chinese laundry workers were taking jobs away,[3] but in Fairplay the population seems to have been small enough that white settlers were more concerned with competition for mining jobs, rather than laundry jobs.
The Fairplay Flume provides the briefest glimpse into the life of Sing Kee, a laundryman in Fairplay. In March of 1888, "boys" in town consistently made “raids” on Sing Kee’s cabin with their faces masked by handkerchiefs. The ages of the boys are not given, neither are the nature of the raids, except that they happened at night. The boys viewed the raids as practical jokes, but Sing Kee feared for his life and ended up moving from his cabin to a space at the rear of the “Bergh Home.”[4] In August of 1892, an advertisement appears in the Flume for a new laundryman named Yee Wah Lee. Lee markets their services as “the best and cheapest laundry in town” and gives their location as “Sing Kee’s former stand.”[5] While Sing Kee may have just moved stands, it is possible that he left Fairplay because of the terrorizing of the young men.
Unfortunately, Sing Kee's experience was not atypical of Chinese residents in Fairplay. The Flume mentions a number of similar incidents, such as the "hazing process" which the boys of Fairplay used to terrorize their Chinese neighbors for sport. Some of these included breaking windows and stealing chickens, methods which the Flume writer describes as an "American…good joke."[6]
Similar acts of violence are recorded throughout 1883-1885,[7] with the most severe being a "prank" by Charles Valiton and his friends who snuck down to the river where some Chinese placer miners were at work. One of the main parts of hydraulic equipment was a large water cannon that shot water under high pressure and was capable of "blast[ing] away large amounts of earth."[8] The boys took advantage of a temporary pause in the water output and adjusted the nozzle of the "cannon" to point towards the workers. The boys watched in glee as the miners were knocked down under the onslaught of the water pressure, some falling into a "deep pit" (Bjorkland). The boys then fled, pursued by rightfully angry miners. Many of the workers sustained serious injuries from the “practical joke.”[9]
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[1] Huping Ling and Allan W Austin, “The Chinese American Experience: History and Culture,” in Asian American History and Culture an Encyclopedia (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2010), 198.
[2] Ling and Austin, 198-199.
[3] William Wei, Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2016), 75.
[4] Fairplay Flume (Fairplay, CO), Mar. 29, 1888, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/.
[5] “Yee Wah Lee, New Chinese Laundry,” Fairplay Flume (Fairplay, CO), Aug. 25, 1892, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.
[6] Fairplay Flume (Fairplay, CO), Dec. 20, 1883, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.
[7] Fairplay Flume (Fairplay, CO), Dec. 3, 1885, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.
[8] "What is Placer Gold Mining?" National Park Service, accessed August 9, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/yuch/learn/historyculture/placer-mining.htm.
[9] Linda Bjorklund, A Brief History of Fairplay (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013), 71-72.