Chin Yang Lee

The eight Li brothers in Beijing, 1930. C.Y. Lee (left) was the youngest.

Chin Yang Lee (Li Jinyang) was born in 1915 into a scholarly family in Xiangtan, Hunan, China, the youngest of the eight Li brothers who all achieved national or international fame. His eldest brother, Li Jinxi, was the "father of the Chinese phonetic alphabet" and teacher of Mao Zedong. The second oldest, Li Jinhui, was a pioneering musician considered the "father of Chinese popular music".[1]

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from National Southwestern Associated University in 1942.[2] After working as a secretary for chiefdom of Mangshi at the China–Burma border, Lee emigrated to the United States in 1943, during the Second Sino-Japanese War.[2][3] After briefly attending Columbia University, Lee earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting from Yale University in 1947.[2][3] Lee was a journalist living in and working for two San Francisco Chinatown newspapers, Chinese World and Young China at the time, in the early 1950s, when he was writing Flower Drum Song, expanding it from a short story to a novel.[4][2]

By the 1950s, Lee was barely making a living writing short stories and working as a Chinese teacher, translator and journalist for San Francisco Chinatown newspapers.[5] He had hoped to break into playwriting, but instead wrote a novel about Chinatown, The Flower Drum Song (originally titled Grant Avenue). Lee initially had no success selling his novel, but his agent submitted it to the publishing house of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. The firm sent the manuscript to an elderly reader for evaluation. The reader was found dead in bed, the manuscript beside him with the words "Read this" scrawled on it. The publishing house did so, and bought Lee's novel, which became a bestseller in 1957.[6][7]

The novel, about generational conflict within an Asian American family over an arranged marriage in San Francisco's Chinatown, was adapted into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song, opening in 1958. The original production was the first Broadway show to feature Asian American players. The 1961 film jump-started the careers of the first generation of Asian American actors, including Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, and Jack Soo. Lee was interviewed on the 2006 DVD release of the movie.

On October 2, 2001, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles premiered David Henry Hwang's adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song to glowing reviews, in the first major theatrical production that had an all-Asian cast of actors and voices. Its initial run was extended, and after several months, the production moved to Broadway, where the reviews were less than stellar. Lee had worked with Hwang on the rewriting of the musical.[8]

Lee married Joyce Lackey, an American writer, in 1963. They had two children, Angela and Jay. Joyce died in 1997.[2] In his later life Lee lived in Alhambra, California.[4] On November 8, 2018, he died of kidney failure in Los Angeles, at the age of 102.[2][1]

• 10,000 Apologies (2006)

• The Chronology of American Literature (2004), edited by Daniel S. Burt. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

• Chin Yang Lee at IMDb