Ernest Lee Interview – Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (2024)

Ernest Lee: “Actually way back my father in law was really involved in the Chinatown, the CCBA, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, since ’75. So he’s one of the helpers in the secretary area. And then he involved with different associations like the Chew Lun Association, the Hoy Ping Benevolent Association, and various organizations. So he wanted my wife, his daughter, to get involved with the association business. So I joined some of the banquets, you know. Normally just we go to spring banquet. It was a big deal at that time. And then the Lee On Dong people say, “hey, you’re a Lee. You should come to our associations.” “Oh, yeah yeah, we will come, I’ll come.” Back then, I was still working, we were all still working. So we was, “I had no time to do it.” But then after I retired in 2011 and then they finally dragged me into this, the Lee On Dong Association, so. And I slowly moved on up to the current position.”

Timestamp: [00:03:38]

Interviewer: Okay. Can you tell me here kind of, the positions that you’ve had with Lee On Dong and also the CCBA too. Yeah.

Ernest Lee: CCBA. Yeah, yeah. I first worked as a treasurer for several years. And then I moved on to the vice president. Got elected to the vice president for this association. And then later got elected to the president of this association. And at that time, the CCBA folks were looking for, uh…CCBA have an election every year, so they’re all competing for the president, vice president and the supervisory chair and the vice chair. The four positions. We call it the four officers. So, I was lucky enough at that time that I got invited to join Mei Lau at that time as the vice president candidate. And that was in 19…late 2019. And then we luckily got elected to be the president and vice president for the…for year 2020, then 21.

Interviewer: Okay. So you were, just to make sure I have the date straight, so 2019 is when you…with CCBA.

Ernest Lee: Right, right, right, right.

Interviewer: And then 2011, you were involved with the Lee On Dong Association. And then did you right away become the treasurer and then the vice?

Ernest Lee: Actually, I was involved with the helpers. Basically when you get into this association, you don’t know what’s going on, so you become, like, helping in those different activities. And then later it’s, “okay, you can do treasurer. Now why don’t you do treasurer?” So I was involved with several years as a treasurer.

Interviewer: What years were you vice president and president for the association?

Ernest Lee [00:07:15] For the association, let me work backwards. 2019 and 2018, I was the president. And then 2017 and ’16, I was the vice president. And then I was a treasurer from, I think, 20…2013 for until I became the vice president.

Interviewer: Okay.

Ernest Lee:2013 til 20…7…’16 I think.

Timestamp:[00:05:11]

Ernest Lee:Of course, this is one of our elder’s fathers in one of the pictures. You can see all the pictures of the past presidents. Yeah. The last two..no, no, the…from the bottom…the last two and three. Those are we call the elders. Which they, they got elected through the convention. And every three years we have convention for everybody showed up to select from different cities, pick up the, the convention. And then, at that time, they fight for elected to be the, the grand president. And, and if they finish the three years term of the grand president, they automatically graduate to an elder. An elder is very difficult to get. Yeah, yeah. Very difficult to get. You got to get all the votes from almost the whole association for you. And then you got to carry your duty for like, three years as the grand president.

Interviewer: Can you tell me that some of those duties as the elder and the grand president?

Ernest Lee:The grand president actually will make sure that, they… Every associations, they have challenges, they have conflicts. They gotta go in and sort of deal with it, which is sometimes is… Hectic. Like currently in the Sacramento area, they’ve got two factions fighting with each other. And they got to get the grand president to go in and sort of sort it out for them. Usually a lot of associations is dealing with who controls the money. Yeah. A lot of the money besides the rentals, they got incomes from, people come to association, play mahjong. Play mahjong. They, they they they put in like, like a rental fee. They put in, they. Like, they play, they play. Everybody gives five bucks or $2 or $12 or $4 whatever to the association. That is one of the income. So, our associations tend to keep it from outside people coming in here. And of course they, they call that gambling in there, which is illegal here. But usually they will get away from it by playing just chips. And they do the numbers, the money on the side, and they get away from that.

Timestamp: [00:21:55]

Ernest Lee:We’re not even coed. A lot of the associations, they switched to coed membership. In other words, women groups and the males can have meetings together. They can hold offices. And right now our association is still only males can hold office. Officers. And the women tend to segregate them into the women’s club, which have their own, they hold, they have their own.. You don’t call it president. It’s like the chief. The woman’s club’s chief. And they have their own treasurer. They have their own secretary. They’re pretty much autonomous, autonomous. A subgroup. They tend to help out during the picnics and the banquets.

Timestamp: [00:36:25]

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Ernest Lee:They celebrate March the eighth. There is a, I think it’s Women’s Festival or something like that. They have a major banquet. Not a banquet, like, like a party. They invite the males to go over there. So I think that is something we probably want to change. That, and just make it bilingual because I know the Wong family just started bilingual. The Chew Lun Association are already doing the coed. The Eng Family Association, they coed for, for like ten years already. And the Kong Chows, too, same. The Kong Chow Association. Coed. I think a lot of the associations already switched to coed. I know the Lees is one of the old, the one that’s still not doing that. The Soo Yuen Association actually, by name, is fraternal. It’s male only. In fact the females, they do not allow them even to listen to what they talk about. They got to be outside the building. Yeah, at least we allow them to listen. But they cannot participate. We allow the females to listen, but not to participate. That association do not allow them to listen.

Timestamp: [00:37:20]

Ernest Lee [00:10:37] Actually, this association is, besides the…Mainly we have three, three or four major activities every year. At the beginning is the New Year’s and Chinese New Year celebration and spring banquet. This is like a major event for all the associations in Chinatown. Every association, they will do a banquet, which invites everybody to join– so it’s a big deal–to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Actually, before that, they will start doing the family gatherings, kind of, in preparation for the Chinese New Year. And then we call it like a season of banquets. We usually eat from the New Year time until like mid-April. This is like almost every weekend will be busy with two or three spring banquets because we invite each other. Besides their own families, association people, you invite other groups, then other people show up, and then vice versa. We do it. You take that times 27 times. This is how much. This is how much you get into it.

Timestamp:[00:10:37]

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Ernest Lee:Yeah, I did mention that that’s the beginning of the year. And then around the May time will be the celebration of the Father’s Day, Mother’s Day. We usually will have one banquet to celebrate both for father and mother together. That’s usually late May, mid, mid-June. Early June. And then, we do have a good, summer picnic in July. Around July Fourth time, timeframe. Early, early July. And, it’s a big deal. We invite everybody from our own association, you know, to join. Families and all, friends and all. So it’s a big deal. Usually, usually over a hundred people showed up.

Interviewer: Wow.

Ernest Lee: It’s big one, yeah.

Interviewer: Yeah. And do you hold that in Chinatown, or where…?

Ernest Lee: We’ll pick, we usually pick outskirts, outskirts, uh, pick parks.

Interviewer: Okay.

Ernest Lee: I think we like to go to the… There is a park in Alhambra, north of Main Street. That is…

Interviewer:Yeah.

Ernest Lee:Yeah, we like that one. Yeah.

Interviewer: So you have a summer picnic…

Ernest Lee:Summer picnic, and then we also celebrate, then, the Mid-Autumn, the Moon, the Moon Festival. That’s one. And then the Thanksgiving. We’re gonna, we always have the turkey at the… So, this one will be in the association. Yeah. In the association. That, that is usually… We invite everybody to show up and that’s the time we start collecting the next year’s dues as a convenience. Come show up and eat, huh? By the way, you gotta pay, you gotta pay a due.

Timestamp:[00:14:01]

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Ernest Lee:Oh yeah, yeah. In the heydays I remember 20… when I first, first joined this association in 2011. We, we actually, the next door, which is the Empress Pavilion. We had 70 paid tables.

Interviewer: Oh, wow.

Ernest Lee:Yeah, 700 people. Because the Lee, the Lee Family Associations from various cities, from, from all over the United States come join us. So it’s a big, huge, huge, huge banquet.

Timestamp:[00:12:37]

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Ernest Lee:We, we also part of the, the Lee On Dong Family Association within the whole, entire United States.

Interviewer:Okay.

Ernest Lee:We do, we have like eleven, at least eleven different associations within the whole U.S. We separate that into two parts. The East and the West. We align with the, the West side, which is the headquarters in San Francisco.

Interviewer: Okay.

Ernest Lee:That is our main, main Family Association. And the other, the East side would be the New York, the New York Family Association. And then we…they will have their spring banquet. We always go to, go to there…

Timestamp:[00:18:06]

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Ernest Lee: I think the… This is back in 2000… I think 8. 2008 or 2009. I forgot. We actually held the national convention in Los Angeles. That was before I joined the association. I was told in the Lee On Dong, the Lee family Association’s, history, this was one of the best conventions they ever had. Blah blah, blah. Actually, up to nowadays. We just had one in Chicago and the people still talk about the L.A. convention. “That was the greatest one we ever had.” That was before I joined the association. I think there was a major, major activity back then, in Chinatown.

Timestamp: [00:53:26]

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Ernest Lee: It is like, historical. That is all like the hobbies, if you will, that the association offered to be to the membership and they come. Yeah. They come and play. We’ll always have people that give you tea, coffee and some, some associate actually will cook dinner for them. You can stay until at night and then eat dinner and then go home. Yeah. And you pay a nominal five bucks too. Cheap, you know, and they give you pretty good food.

Interviewer:Okay. That’s nice. Like, that’s a nice way to kind of use the space.

Ernest Lee:Yeah yeah. For the older folks and they got no place to go, this is a good hangout for people. Talk, talk and play and they’ve got food and it’s an easy way to to finish the whole day. Yeah.

Ernest Lee:Yeah. There is always like 1 or 2 at least. Hardcore people that play every day. They invite their friends. All you need is four people to play mahjong. And then the couple that you saw that just left, they are the “secretary” of this association. And he comes to open the association every day. Yeah I think we let him, let them, off two days a week.

Timestamp:[00:25:34]

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Ernest Lee: They just say ‘Okay they are good Lees. Good to us.’ On the surface it’s fine. I mean we, we talk, we play together, we eat together. But you know, a lot of the old folks are like, ‘don’t let them become president. They’ll change, they’ll change. They’ll change the…’ Of course the flags, it’s a major issue within the association too, right? A lot of the older associations, they’ll carry the Republic of China flag. Yeah, I think there’s at least over ten associations actually still carrying that flag. Republic of China flag. And our association, actually, back in the early 2000s, we actually had a faction of people that switched their allegiance to mainland China. In the past, we carried that flag. They would ask, ‘Why don’t we just lower it? We’ll make our association neutral.’ And so back then, they said, ‘We’ll lower our flags and just carry the Lee Family Association flag and we keep ourselves neutral.’ Which is, I think it’s okay. I mean we can go either way. We can freely go which way we want to.

Timestamp: [01:07:37]

Ernest Lee:But of course, the, one of the challenges, I saw that one of the question you’re going to mention is the, our challenges we face right now this is the, the older people go, pass, pass on and then no new people, no new blood to come and join. They just don’t like the activity at all.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Ernest Lee:And so there is a slack, if you will, in the membership. So we try to see how can we improve our activities, maybe, to get more new people coming in.

Timestamp:[00:13:17]

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Ernest Lee:What I’m seeing is the… Which actually it’s been, we knew about that for a long time, but we just don’t have a good solution. We have solutions, but the elders don’t like it, you know. They refuse to change kind of, conflict. We know that the younger folks say they’ve gotta switch to English, otherwise they don’t understand what we’re talking about. So some of the associations, they actually have, changed into English. Or they have meetings. They will have bilingual. The English and Chinese together. They at least try to. Even in the CCBA, we try to, we have English speaking members. They don’t understand anything we’re talking about, so at least our minutes we try to translate into English so they at least can understand afterwards what is being talked about. But during the meeting it’s still mainly just Chinese. Cantonese, specifically Cantonese, because a lot of the older folks, they they don’t understand English at all, and they refuse to, they refuse to let it go. Which is a major challenge to convince them. Like when I first I was the president and so I was telling the people “why don’t we, I establish a website for the association?” And a couple, those two elders, say, “I don’t understand anything about it, you know, don’t, don’t do it. You’re wasting your time and money.” So they refuse to even want to evolve. I know one of the elders, they, I think last year he still kept the old clamshell phone. And finally, this year I think he switched to a smartphone. Each of us is, like, “you’re way behind. You’re way behind the eight ball.” “I don’t want to do it, you know, I don’t even know how to get my messages.”

Interviewer:Oh no!

Ernest Lee:Actually, a lot of people, you call them until they answer because if you leave a message, they don’t how to retrieve it. So it is a major challenge, how do we get younger people to be involved. Number one, we got to change. We got to come up with some activities that they can, they can join us. They can participate.

Timestamp: [00:28:58]

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Ernest Lee:I’m trying to see if we actually… No, to tell you the truth. No, no, actually. A lot of people, it’s passed on by word of mouth. The younger folks that tend to join us, are like the old member’s son or grandson. They say actually when they, when they got old and realized that, “Hey my roots is in this association,” they actually came back and ask, “hey, what happened? Oh, I saw my grandparents’ picture here. I remember the days I went to the spring banquet.” So we do have quite a few people. But many people that came back and they are members. Yeah.

Interviewer:So it’s like they’re curious about.

Ernest Lee:They’re curious about their roots. They’re curious about their roots. And then I also know a lot of the members, their son’s granddaughter and the other’s granddaughter actually are good friends outside, but they just don’t join the association. They know each other real well and they’re good friends. They go to parties together, they go have vacations together, go on cruises together, but they just don’t… We don’t know until they, “Oh, yeah, I know them. Oh yeah, yeah, we know them… “

Interviewer: So why don’t you do it through the association?

Ernest Lee:Why don’t you guys come here and be part of our association? You guys, you guys talk. We don’t really know what you’re talking about. You go to the spring banquet and you guys talk talk talk talk right now, you know. “There’s no food.” And the food is the Golden Dragon food. “Nah, we don’t like it. We love Korean food.” So the food is… Also, even, like, I have two kids. Two sons. One is almost 40 years old, the other is 32. And I asked them to join the association. They said, “Okay what’s in it for me?” I invited them to join a couple of the spring banquets. It’s just, “Ahh too long, too boring. We don’t know what you guys are talking about. You sing songs that we don’t understand. And then everybody just talk talk talk and then we don’t know what’s going on. And we wait two hours before we have food to eat. And we don’t like the food.”

Interviewer: It’s not too bad.

Ernest Lee:I got good food! They just made your eight course meal! Just made your food! It’s good food. They say, “Oh no, I’d rather have Korean barbecue.” Yeah, it’s difficult. Those kids like Korean barbecue, Thai food. They love the sushi, Japanese food. “What about Chinese food?” “Aw nah, we don’t like it.”

Timestamp:[00:33:22]

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Interviewer: Has there been any conversations about trying to do that yet? To make it coed? Or is that not been brought up?

Ernest Lee:We mentioned it a couple of times, and of course the elders say, “No. Hell, no.”

Interviewer:Okay. It’s very traditional, yeah.

Ernest Lee:Very traditional. I think until they pass on or they… I think for the younger ones, us generation it’s no problem. No problem at all. Actually we want to have that because they do have some talented individuals that can be president of this association. Easily. They cannot be because they’re a female. That is one of the challenges that we are facing still, is how do we make it like… I know, I know, if we go to the court of law, we’re gonna get, we’ll probably get sued, you know. Somebody coming in says, “Hey, I want to be president,” and then say, “hell no.” “Oh, you barbecue. I got a lawyer.” Right now, of course, nobody challenges that.

Interviewer:Right. But it’s possible. Change. That and being bilingual.

Ernest Lee:It’s possible. Actually, they’re probably easier to change to bilingual, first. Easier to just get female involved, with our business. Yeah.

Timestamp:[00:38:43]

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Ernest Lee:Concerns with Chinatown is, I think a lot of people that remember the old days, the heydays, which is, a lot of… Of course, back then we did not have the different Chinese enclaves, if you will. Everything, you can only buy groceries in Chinatown. You only get Chinese food in Chinatown. There is no Chinese food outside of Chinatown. You got some chop suey houses but that’s not the authentic Chinese food. I remember when I first came in ’71, that was the way, until the 80s. Then slowly, you had small enclaves built up in Monterey Park, Alhambra, some in Cerritos, and then later migrated into the San Gabriel, Rosemead, and moved to the east side, Rowland Heights, that area. And some moved to Arcadia and some moved to Cerritos, and… They’re all over the place nowadays. They don’t have to come to Chinatown anymore, for food. Yeah. So the business is actually dwindling a lot from the heydays, I remember.

Ernest Lee:And there is a conflict. Some people try to preserve the old Chinatown. I know Eugene Moy is the one of the members trying to preserve some remnants of the Chinese heritage culture in Chinatown. But of course, the other side, the other extreme is the people who run the BID, which is saying, “Okay, we got to evolve into the newer upper class, upper middle class kind of environment.” So good for business, which is, of course, their job to make sure business happens. Safe place and got tourists, blah, blah, blah, blah, and of course we said, “no, no, no, we have to keep preserving Chinatown.” So there is a conflict between them. And CCBA is sort of like, “oh, we don’t know which way to go.” But a lot of the membership is still saying, “we want to preserve Chinatown. We don’t want them to… Only one building is all of the speaking-Chinese people.” And they lose that. They need a Chinatown.

Interviewer:Do you see that impacting– those kind of changes in Chinatown– impacting maybe the membership at all, or people being involved with this association? Or do you see it separate?

Ernest Lee: Really. Because a lot of the people are already not living in Chinatown anymore, the membership. They, like myself, moved to the Monterey Park area. But our roots still in Chinatown, so we treasure our roots here. And we want to make sure Chinatown stays Chinatown somewhat. It’s something like you gotta balance the new, the evolution, you know. If you don’t evolve, you’re going to be dead. And so Chinatown would be dead. Of course, but if you evolve, you lose that, your identity. What? Where’s the balance?

Timestamp:[00:55:53]

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Ernest Lee:They just say “Okay they are good Lees. Good to us.” On the surface it’s fine. I mean we, we talk, we play together, we eat together. But you know, a lot of the old folks are like, “don’t let them become president. They’ll change, they’ll change. They’ll change the…” Of course the flags, it’s a major issue within the association too, right? A lot of the older associations, they’ll carry the Republic of China flag. Yeah, I think there’s at least over ten associations actually still carrying that flag. Republic of China flag. And our association, actually, back in the early 2000s, we actually had a faction of people that switched their allegiance to mainland China. In the past, we carried that flag. They would ask, “Why don’t we just lower it? We’ll make our association neutral.” And so back then, they said, “We’ll lower our flags and just carry the Lee Family Association flag and we keep ourselves neutral.” Which is, I think it’s okay. I mean we can go either way. We can freely go which way we want to.

Timestamp:[01:07:37]

Ernest Lee:I definitely would like to see new membership to join us. There are some good news. A lot of the newer people that want to join, some is from mainland China. Because I think the newer immigrants, they did not like us. They were actually running away from the, uh, the commoners. They tend to actually, after, Chinese opened up, become more diplomatic relationship with U.S. Those are people who came after that and they were educated, brought up by the communist China regime. So they want to join our association. Lotta Lees, lotta Lees around. That is a major, major, last name. So a lot of the Lees want to join us. But then there are some pushbacks because we don’t want to change our thinking about the.. the political thinking, if you will. But on the surface, I think they’re nice. They donate. They give us good donations. They always join our banquets. And all that. But there’s some pushback from our own membership. They say, “We don’t want to get those people in, no no. Remember, one time I actually ran away from you guys. Now you guys want to join us?”.

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