Lee, Gus 1946-

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LEE, Gus 1946-

PERSONAL: Full name Augustus Samuel Mein-Sun Lee; born August 8, 1946, in San Francisco, CA; son of Tsung-Chi Lee (an engineer) and Da-Tsien Tsu (a storyteller); married Diane Elliott (a nurse educator); children: Jessica (deceased), Jena, Eric. Education: Attended United States Military Academy, West Point; University of California, Davis, B.A., 1969, J.D., 1976. Religion: Protestant. Hobbies and other interests: "Family."

ADDRESSES: Home—Colorado Springs, CO. Agent— Jane Dystel, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, One Union Square W., Suite 904, New York, NY 10003.

CAREER: San Francisco Call-Bulletin and News-Call-Bulletin, San Francisco, CA, newsperson, 1955-60; Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), San Francisco, CA, assistant gym instructor, lifeguard, and locker room clerk, 1955-64; University of California, Davis, assistant dean of students of Educational Opportunity Program and project coordinator of Asian American Studies, 1969-75; State of California, Department of Industrial Relations, law clerk, 1975-77; United States Army, Judge Advocate General's Corps, command judge advocate/general counsel and defense counsel, 1977-80; Sacramento County District Attorney, acting supervising deputy district attorney, lead attorney of Misdemeanor Trial Team, and police trainer, 1980-84; associate of Charles A. Murray and Associates, 1984-85; California District Attorneys Association, deputy director and director of training, 1985-89; State Bar of California, senior executive for Legal Education and Competence and director of Legal Education, 1989-93; writer, 1991—. San Francisco Main Library Campaign, literary luminary, 1992—; member of board of directors, Boys and Girls Club; lecturer. Military service: United States Army, 1964-68; became drill sergeant and cadet corporal.

AWARDS, HONORS: Named Distinguished Military Graduate, University of California, Davis, 1974; Army Commendation Medal, 1980, for legal advising; Army Achievement Medal, 1983, for legal advising; Meritorious Service Medal and First Oak Leaf Cluster, 1978 and 1980, for criminal investigation and trial advocacy; Order of the Silk Purse, Sacramento County District Attorney, 1984, for trial advocacy; Outstanding Instructor Award, California District Attorneys Association, 1988; Meritorious Service Award, California District Attorneys Association, 1989; China Boy was named to the Top 100 list of the New York Times in 1991.

WRITINGS:

China Boy (novel), Dutton (New York, NY), 1991.

Honor and Duty (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1993.

Tiger's Tail (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1996.

No Physical Evidence (novel), Fawcett Columbine (New York, NY), 1998.

Chasing Hepburn: A Memoir of Shanghai, Hollywood, and a Chinese Family's Fight for Freedom, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2002.

ADAPTATIONS: Honor and Duty was recorded as an audio book by Random House.

SIDELIGHTS: Gus Lee's unusual life has provided him with material for his fiction, including the novels China Boy, Honor and Duty, and Tiger's Tail. Each of his books have presented a Chinese-American protagonist, struggling to reconcile his Chinese heritage with life as an American citizen. Lee's parents were wealthy Chinese aristocrats who fled their country for the United States in 1945. They underwent a dramatic change of fortune, settling in a poor area of San Francisco known as the Panhandle. The Panhandle was primarily a black neighborhood with many street gangs. Lee's life there was made particularly difficult after his mother died and his father remarried a stern woman of Pennsylvania Dutch background. Her severe discipline and the terror of violence on the streets led him to take up boxing at the local YMCA. With the help of a coach there and a tough, caring friend, Lee learned to defend himself. At the urging of his father, he entered West Point, but was dismissed after failing an engineering course. He subsequently earned two degrees at the University of California at Davis. Lee later became a criminal defense lawyer for the U.S. Army, and, after leaving the service in 1979, he worked as a deputy district attorney in the state of California.

Over the course of his legal career, Lee had never entertained the notion of becoming a writer. His first novel, China Boy, began as a journal about his long-dead mother. Lee's young daughter had begun asking many questions about her grandmother, and Lee responded by writing down his memories about her, as well as additional information gleaned from other relatives. When he wrote about her death, he cried about it for the first time in his life. He continued writing, and the memoir about his mother transformed into the semiautobiographical novel, China Boy, which featured Lee's fictional alter ego, Kai Ting.

Kai Ting, who is seven when the novel opens, is the first American-born member of his family—who like Lee's real-life family, had fled China's Communist revolution in the 1940s to settle in San Francisco's Panhandle. Ting is spoiled by an affectionate mother who, although dazzled by American technology, is determined to pass the traditions of Chinese culture on to her children. When Ting is six years old, his mother dies. Soon thereafter, his father brings home a new wife, an attractive Pennsylvania Dutch woman named Edna, who wants to erase every Chinese custom from the family's life. She also begins to lock Ting out of the house after school and on weekends, where he is helpless to defend himself from neighborhood bullies, who call him the humiliating name "China Boy." Eventually, Ting finds allies—a street-fighting pal named Toussaint LaRue, a Chinese philosopher who is an old family friend, and a trio of coaches at a Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) boxing program. Determined to make a place for himself in American life, Ting learns to defend himself and in the end he wins victories over both the local bully and his stepmother.

China Boy met with favorable reviews. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Bob Sipchen praised the book for providing "an engaging exploration of family dynamics and insight into a diversity of initiation rites" boys typically undergo in the process of becoming men. Chicago Tribune contributor Charles R. Larson commented, "Gus Lee's energetic first novel, China Boy, blends the West with Orientalism and in the process spins a compelling immigrant version of the American Dream." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Kiki Olsen called Lee's book "a fascinating, evocative portrait of the Chinese community in California in the 1950s." And in the Washington Post Book World, author Walter Dean Myers lauded, "It is, on many levels, a pure delight."

Kai Ting's story continues in Honor and Duty; like his creator, he moves on to West Point. The novel mirrors the physical and emotional challenges its author faced when he attended the elite academy. Although Kai Ting occasionally comes up against racist attitudes, for the most part he finds the Army to be a more level playing field than the larger world. Once he has mastered the challenges issued to all new recruits, he feels accepted, and surrounded by a spirit of camaraderie. A major subplot in Honor and Duty involves cheating among students, and Kai Ting's response to it. Reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review, Kathleen Norris noted that it "can be unwieldy," but added: "This story of the formation of a young man, as he struggles to honor his Chinese inheritance in an American context, is an important one." She pointed out that, like China Boy, Honor and Duty "reflects a fine comic sensibility." Both novels, she felt, are "honest in their account of the mean spirit that corrupts much human behavior," yet they "also reflect gratitude for the saving help that often comes from unlikely sources."

Lee replaces Kai Ting with another alter ego in Tiger's Tail. This story concerns Jackson Kan, a military lawyer struggling with conflicts between love and duty, and disturbing flashbacks to his term of service in Vietnam. The book shows much evidence of Lee's knowledge of the military world—-perhaps too much so, in the opinion of Scott Martelle, a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. He found that Lee's "deep knowledge of both military affairs and Chinese mysticism" weighed down the plot, but he praised Lee's descriptive powers and the "tender affection for ancient Eastern Ways, as well as a deep respect for the power of love," that infused the story. Booklist reviewer Emily Melton called it "an odd, quixotic book that requires flexible, tenacious readers," but added that Tiger's Tail is "compelling, charming (despite the violence), and captivating." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly described Tiger's Tail as "a wise and wrenching novel, beautifully told," commenting that the author's exploration of the contrasts between American, Korean, and Chinese ways is "bold and revelatory." Lee, concluded the writer, possesses a vision that is "daring, deep and unflaggingly moral."

No Physical Evidence, Lee's next book, calls on the author's experience in the district attorney's office. Joshua Jin, the story's main character, is bereft after the loss of his wife and daughter. All Joshua has to live for is solving a sordid rape case with a thirteen-year-old victim who does not want to provide evidence to the authorities. The case seems unwinnable, but Joshua cannot let go of it; he has made a connection between winning justice for the girl and redeeming his own lost soul. No Physical Evidence differs from the standard courtroom drama, according to Wes Lukowsky in Booklist; rather than simply providing entertainment, this book is "a challenging, intellectually stimulating odyssey of the soul that concludes on a sobering, real-world note."

Lee once told CA: "I came to writing like I entered my boyhood—lacking patent skills and without a hint of eventual destination. China Boy began as a journal to answer our seven-year-old daughter's question about her missing Bu-bu—grandmother. This was my mother, who had immigrated to America before my birth and died when I was five. Embarrassed by my stark ignorance of her and her life, I quizzed my tsiatsia—older sisters—as if preparing for trial: 'When did our mother get up in the morning? What'd she do first? What'd she wear, eat, say? Was she a morning person? Did she have a sense of humor? Who were her friends? How did she treat the servants in Shanghai?' This grilling, lacking, perhaps, only a bare light bulb suspended form the ceiling of a dank interrogation cell, went on for weeks.

"In order to coalesce my sisters' often differing accounts of our mother into a single story without narrative gaps, I inadvertently became a storyteller and a writer. When I reached our mother's death, I cried for her, for the first time. Without plan, I continued writing. It took the three months of the summer of 1989.

"I did not know that I would become a writer. I had never taken a creative writing course or participated in a writers workshop (which, to the discerning reader, may be obvious). And, as the years passed, novel reading became a quick victim to work and family, joining entities such as Sunday morning newspaper perusing, current cinema, sleeping in, dating my wife, and peace of mind in the rubble of child-raising and profession-serving.

"I recognize my opportunity to write as a blessing. It is a gift smaller than our children and less obvious than the generosity of friends, the love of family, and the magic of the nighttime sky, but it is a gift nonetheless. I have long been a rational, scientific man of little faith, seeking to control my world through effort, willpower, and strength, ever committed to the success of my professional cause and the growth of my career. But too many events, both wondrous and tragic, have occurred in my life and in the lives of my family to permit this attitude to persist.

"My writing appeared at a time that I was becoming increasingly aware of the importance of children, the crucial need for tolerant and attentive fathers, and the role of reverence and praise in a world too often driven by acquisition and selfishness. Even as I write these words, I am struck by their novelty to what I was, and the encouragement they represent to what I am seeking to be—a respectful father, a caring husband, a conscientious member of a larger society."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Notable Asian Americans, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 1994, John Mort, review of Honor and Duty, p. 787; October 15, 1994, review of China Boy, p. 415; February 1, 1996, Emily Melton, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 899; August, 1998, Wes Lukowsky, review of No Physical Evidence, p. 1923; January, 1999, review of No Physical Evidence (audio version), p. 10.

Book World, April 7, 1996, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 3.

Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1991, Charles R. Larson, review of China Boy, p. 3.

English Journal, January, 1996, review of China Boy, p. 88.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1996, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 165; August 1, 1998, review of No Physical Evidence, p. 1059.

Kliatt, November, 1992, Melinda D. Waugh, review of China Boy, p. 9.

Library Journal, April 1, 1991, review of China Boy; January, 1994, review of Honor and Duty, p. 162; March 15, 1996, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 96; August, 1998, Christine Perkins, review of No Physical Evidence, p. 132.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 16, 1991, Bob Sipchen, review of China Boy, pp. 2, 7; February 20, 1994, review of China Boy, p. 9; April 17, 1994, review of Honor and Duty, p. 6.

New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1991, p. 11; February 20, 1994, review of Honor and Duty, p. 8; February 5, 1995, review of Honor and Duty, p. 28; April 21, 1996, Scott Martelle, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, January 3, 1994, review of Honor and Duty, p. 70; January 23, 1995, review of Honor and Duty, p. 68; January 29, 1996, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 83; March 18, 1996, Judy Stone, interview with David Lee, p. 47; August 10, 1998, review of No Physical Evidence, p. 369; December 7, 1998, review of No Physical Evidence (audio version), p. 186.

Rapport, March, 1996, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 24.

Sewanee Review, summer, 1996, Gary Davenport, review of Tiger's Tail, pp. 461-467.

Time, June 3, 1991, Janice C. Simpson and Pico Iyer, "Fresh Voices above the Noisy Din," pp. 66-67; March 28, 1994, review of Honor and Duty, p. 66.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 13, 1994, review of Honor and Duty, p. 3; December 4, 1994, review of Honor and Duty, p. 1; February 19, 1995, review of Honor and Duty, p. 10; April 21, 1996, review of Tiger's Tail, p. 7.

Village Voice, October 1, 1991, review of China Boy, pp. 74-75.

Washington Post Book World, May 12, 1991, p. 7.