Raymond Lee’s immigrant success story who used his capital — monetary and social — to help reshape Chicago’s Chinatown.
Mr. Lee died Aug. 31. He was 90.
“We’re losing a lion of our community,” said Ald. Nicole Lee (11th). “But he left us a good blueprint for the kind of people we want to be.”
Mr. Lee includes the creation of Ping Tom Park, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago and a thriving business run by his son.
They are accomplishments that would have seemed unreachable when Mr. Lee arrived in Chicago when he was 15 to join his father at their extended family’s food business in Chinatown, which supplied restaurants and regular shoppers across the city.
After arriving in Chicago in 1950, he was placed in second grade at Haines Elementary School, where he towered over classmates as he began learning English. He then made leaps to the fourth and seventh grades before going to Harrison High School.
After school, he worked at the family store at 238 W. 23rd St., bunking upstairs with his father. The heat was turned off in the evening, and choosing whether to get up to use the bathroom in the middle of a winter night could feel like an existential decision.
His duties at Quong Yick, the name of his family’s business, making tofu and delivering it to nearby restaurants in buckets of water that occasionally, and annoyingly, splashed on his clothes in freezing weather, and working the cash register.
While interacting with customers, Mr. Lee glimpsed the lives of doctors, lawyers and engineers who had houses, yards and paid vacations. It was a world he wanted to be a part of. Education, he knew, was the key.
He studied accounting at the University of Illinois and worked in industry before starting his own business in 1970, a grocery store in Chinatown called Golden Country Oriental Foods. His father was an investor. A few years later, he started his own wholesale operation.
In 1988, Mr. Lee’s friend and community leader Ping Tom suggested that Mr. Lee join the Chicago Park District board because Mayor Eugene Sawyer was looking for an Asian person to fill a spot. The neighborhood had needed a park since Hardin Square Park was demolished years earlier during the construction of the Stevenson Expressway.
Mr. Lee was hesitant because he had a business to run but agreed and joined the park board, where he secured funding to help get the park off the ground. It fully opened in 2005 and was named Ping Tom Memorial Park after his friend, who died in 1995.
After several months on the park board, Mayor Richard M. Daley tapped Mr. Lee for the Chicago Board of Education, where he helped secure money for a renovation of his alma mater, Haines Elementary School.
Mr. Lee also headed the nonprofit Chinese American Development Corporation to expand Chinatown onto an old railroad property. He oversaw the development of housing and retail space on the land that’s now known as Chinatown Square. It began in the 1980s. He was brought into that project by his friend Ping Tom, who, one his deathbed, made Mr. Lee promise to see the project through to completion. In the early 2000s, after nearly 20 years, the project was completed.
In 2004, when members of the community were looking for a home for a new Chinese American Museum of Chicago, they were eyeing a building that once housed the food operation Mr. Lee’s father helped run. The business closed in 1999. The new owner of the building offered it at cost for use of the museum. Mr. Lee offered $660,000 to buy the building under the condition that the museum open an exhibition within 12 months of the purchase.
The deadline was met. At its 2005 opening, Mr. Lee said: “I hope our children and grandchildren, as they grow up to be Americans, will learn about their cultural heritage. The Chinese-American Museum of Chicago will offer them a place to learn about the suffering and the accomplishments of their parents and grandparents.”
Mr. Lee was born Sept. 7, 1934, in China to Chung Yuen Lee and Ling Fong Lee. His mother came to the United States a year after Mr. Lee did.
He and his future wife Jean met in 1961 at a social gathering in Chinatown and got married months later. She died two years ago. Mr. Lee carried the same picture of her in his wallet for more than six decades.
“My dad helped other Chinese who came here,” said his son Sidney Lee, who heads Golden Country Oriental Food, a wholesale operation now located in Pilsen. “He offered jobs, helped them navigate life, get a business license or a building permit or whatever.”
Mr. Lee is survived by his son Sidney, daughters Bernice Lee, Serena Liew and Medora Lee and eight grandchildren. Services have been held.