William Poy Lee, Born and raised in historic 1950s San Francisco in a halcyon era where our entire neighborhood of multi-racial rogues, roustabouts, family, retail store owners watched over and protected the sacredness of childhood. This was the International District, a community now long gone. My remembrances of this era are told from a child’s perspective in a child’s fragmentary perceptions in my literary collection, PORTSMOUTH SQUARE STORIES.
Suddenly, in my teens, the 1960s happened and I came of age in the epicenter of seismic social change: LSD laced hippie counter-revolution, passionate anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and of course the idealistic Civil Rights movement, all of which I threw myself into 100%. Then, suddenly in the 1970s, the contradictions of my Chinatown community heightened to the point where it exploded in a violent struggle where other 30 people were shot and killed. This urban war culminated in the Golden Dragon Restaurant Massacre of Labor Day Weekend 1997.
At it’s start in 1972-3, one of the victims was my brother, a rebel with a dissident youth group, who along along with other leaders in his group, were framed and tossed into state prison. I joined in attempting to reverse these legal injustices and although we failed, yet I discovered a strength of compassion that kept me and my brother human through the desperate 1970s. This energy emanated through my mother with her mysterious Guan Yin lineage and the collective ways of our 1,000 year old peasant clan village, descendants of the Tang Dynasty, ancient China’s most developed Dynasty. In a duet of voices in alternating chapters between my mother and me, our heritage, Toisan wisdom, and family saga are told in THE EIGHTH PROMISE: An American Son Pays Tribute to his Toisanese Mother.
Fulfilling an immigrant family’s American Dream, I earned a scholarship and graduated from UC Berkeley in 1974. Because of the legal injustices to my brother and his group, I then entered and graduated from UC Hastings School of Law in 1978. From there, utilizing my multi-cultural skills and street smarts, Bank of America employed me as an international banker and lawyer, eventually to smooth business expansion overseas and as a work-out specialist.
From 2007 to 2019, I primarily lived and taught universities students in China: Lhasa, Beijing, Shanghai, and Dali, Yunnan. While teaching at Beijing Central University for National Ethnicities in Beijing, many Tibetan students befriended me. Through them, I got to understand a generation of millennial Tibetans born and raised in the PRC.
One of them arranged for me to teach English in Lhasa, Tibet in the summer of 2010. Through these growing friendships and subsequent visits to Lhasa and other Tibetan areas, I realized that both the Free Tibet movement and the PRC perpetrate false, polarizing narratives of the factual situation on the ground in modern Tibet.
This inspired me to write a novel: THE TRISONG CAFE OF LHASA: Born in the PRC, the Millennial Tibetan Moderns. THE TRISONG CAFE takes no sides, but introduces millennial Tibetans as people, real people, like you and I, in all our complexity.
In 2019, listening to my intuition, I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area on the heels of President Trump’s Tariff wars and declaration of a new Cold War against China as the America’s main strategic competitor and also just in front of the Corona-virus pandemic.
Peace Out & La Luta Continua – William Poy Lee
Great summary of the situation between the US and China. Also check out his bio on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/William-Poy-Lee/e/B001JP23NC?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_38&sr=1-38
Johnson Choi Biz 