At her home in Ithaca, Lee C. Lee, professor of human development and family studies in the College of Human Ecology and professor of Asian studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, talks about a photo she took of children in the streets of Suzhou, China, in 1982.
By Susan Lang
Were it not for a near-deadly case of meningitis at age 16 that destroyed her pho tographic memory and her ability to read, Lee C. Lee, an expert on Asian-American psychology and identity, might never have emigrated to America, founded the East Coast's first comprehensive Asian American Studies Program at Cornell or launched the Hong Kong America Center in Hong Kong, which promotes understanding be tween the two cultures.
Lee, professor of human development and family studies in the College of Human Ecol ogy and professor of Asian studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, was born in Suzhou, China, in the 1930s. At 16, she was teaching in an American school in Taipei, Taiwan, and attending a religious youth group when a severe case of meningitis damaged her brain and shattered her reading ability. The American minister of her youth group and his wife took her under their wing and painstakingly taught her to read again.
The couple urged Lee to go to college in America. With a lack of resources, she could go only where she was guaranteed a four-year scholarship. Mount Union College in Ohio, a school at which the minister had contacts, gave her such a guarantee.
Thus, in 1954, Lee became one of the few foreign students studying at the college. When she received a C grade in psychology, which tainted her straight-A average, Lee became determined to "show them" by winning the school prize in psychology. She went on to earn a master's degree in clinical psychology (1959) and Ph.D. in develop mental psychology (1968) from Ohio State University. She joined the Cornell faculty in 1968 and now teaches courses in experimental child psychology, personality and social development of children, Asian-American identity, cross-cultural issues in psychology, and she is developing a course on the psychology of the Chinese.
In 1981, with a research fellowship from the U.S. Academy of Sciences, Lee became the first American psychologist permitted to do research in the People's Republic of China after the Cultural Revolution. She studied the development of prosocial behavior in Chi nese children in Beijing and Shanghai. In 1986, Lee returned to China as a consultant for a Washington Post-Newsweek television documentary on China's day-care system. And in 1988, Lee collaborated with Chinese colleagues from Wuhan to work on a two -year, seven-site study on the socialization of Chinese children.
During this time, however, Lee became increasingly concerned about the lack of knowledge Asian Americans had about their history in America and other Americans had about Asian Americans. "Although Asian Americans have been in this country in significant numbers for at least a hundred years, their cultures and presence had been largely ignored in university settings," Lee says. "Yet, ethnic studies are an important vehicle for the infusion of new ideas and approaches into mainstream culture. Such programs are a step toward recognizing value in cultural diversity and toward pre serving the broad philosophical base crucial to excellence in higher education."
Thus, Lee developed courses on the Chinese in America, attitudes of U.S. media toward Asian Americans and the social history of Asians in the United States from the 19th century to the present. Her concerns about Asian-American issues led to the for mation of the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell in 1987, and Lee was its founding director.
Today, Cornell is the national headquarters of the Association for Asian American Studies and secretariat of the East of California network.
Lee has continued to build Asian American bridges; in 1992, she took a sabbatical leave from Cornell with a Distinguished Fulbright Professorship to serve as the found ing director of the Hong Kong America Center. An independent, non-profit organization open to any American scholar seeking office space and academic resources in Hong Kong, the center promotes the understanding of American society, culture and the arts for the Hong Kong community and the understanding of Hong Kong in America.
In just seven months, Lee found a home for the center at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, got it designed and built, formed a board of governors, launched its inaugural symposium, found corporate sponsors and members, and obtained a donation of a local area network (LAN) with more than 20 computers and a multimedia computer network.
"I am most proud of the fact that for the first time in Hong Kong, colleagues from different Hong Kong universities were working together to support the center, yet each have nothing to gain personally from doing so," says Lee, who notes that by the time Hong Kong is returned to China in 1997, the center hopes to have an endowment so that it may continue serving Chinese and American universities.
In addition, Lee is doing research on Chinese children in the Chinatown section of New York City and is editor of the forthcoming book Handbook of Asian American Psychology, due out in 1996 with profits going to the Asian American Psychological Association. Lee is also an avid photographer. She has had five solo shows at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, the Hartell Gallery here at Cornell, Stanford, in Elmira and New York City. One of her photos was featured on the front page of The New York Times Friday Metro Section.