Lee began her career as a student teacher in inner-city Oakland schools with the Teacher Corps – a federally funded program started in the 1960s to increase employment in underserved public school districts. As a teacher, she sponsored the Bay Area Asian Students, a coalition of high school students engaged in social activism. As her awareness of the issues facing low-income communities grew, Lee began work as a community organizer. “There was so much activism then…” she says, “I became involved in the student and community movements” (2005).

In the 1970s, Lee was active in the Asian anti-war movement, and in 1972, helped found the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA). Lee reflects how in the days “before there were [many] non-profit social justice organizations. We were housed in the International Hotel and funded by members in the community, so it was as if I was part of a collective,” she says (2005). While organizing at the International Hotel with the CPA, Lee was involved in the I-Hotel eviction. 

Lee remembers that Chinatown had high rates of tuberculosis because of the poor air quality, long working hours, and lack of open-air spaces. At the time, she did not realize that much of her work would later become identified as environmental justice. The organization Lee worked for helped workers strike for better wages and conditions. When she went to organize them, she realized that “ninety-five percent of the workers were of color – hotel workers – African American, Filipino and Chinese. I decided [then and there] to make the transition to become a union organizer” (2005).

Many of the workers Lee spoke with had experienced the unionization drives of the 1930s, and they advised her, “If you want to be a good organizer, you have to be a worker. So, I became a room cleaner to really understand the work.” While working at a hotel, Lee was elected by her co-workers to a union position, then as a shop steward, and finally asked to join the union staff. I quit the job “after two years of cleaning rooms – and maybe I worked almost every job in the hotel; the last day I left my job in the hotel, I was a bartender.” Lee realized that even as a hotel worker, she had opportunities most of the people she was trying to unionize did not. She said, “I had that mobility [in the hotel] because I was American-born and was able to speak English. That’s not available to most immigrant hotel workers. I know that” (2005).

Lee worked as a union organizer with the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE) Union Local 2 for ten years, where she learned about the lives of immigrant and people of color workers, who she says “were being hired into more backbreaking jobs and the jobs that exposed [them] to really unsafe working conditions” than their white counterparts (2005). She also continued her volunteer work in the community.

In the late 1980s, while working as the staff director of the union, Lee was approached by the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, to join their staff and work with laborers in a variety of areas, including farms, hotels, airlines, refineries, and nail salons. “It was very hard to leave the union,” she says of that decision, “but I saw it as an opportunity to use the 20 years of experience” from the community and join the Labor Occupational Health Program (2005).

In 1990, Lee received a call from Dana Alston, a prominent environmental justice activist. Lee recalls, “She came to Berkeley, and we had a life-changing moment over a cup of tea! She explained to me that she had heard about the work I had been doing, and she wanted to put it into context for me—and that’s when she explained to me the concept of environmental racism” (2005).

Lee began working with others in the environmental movement and attended the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 in Washington, D.C. The Asians attending the summit caucused and pledged to bring messages from the meeting back to their communities, identify the environmental justice impacts in those communities, and organize community members.

The United Church of Christ had commissioned a report, Toxic Waste and Race, that focused on how minority and low-income communities are located close to toxic waste sites, “so we wanted to be able to understand it better,” Lee says (2005).

Lee was immediately drawn to the environmental justice framing. “The EJ framework can really raise the conscious(ness) of a community to really address root causes of environmental, sociological, and economic conditions, and because this framework brings in multi-issue perspectives and can bridge multi-racial, multi-ethnic communities. We felt there was real power that could be generated – political power – by bringing these perspectives as a framework and a mission” (2005).

In 1993, after a two-year dialogue and needs assessment information gathering, Lee helped to create the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). Lee’s role in APEN has been to provide programmatic guidance as a board member and Chair. In these roles, she is particularly interested in bringing attention to workers of color and unsafe conditions while building bridges with other environmental groups.

Lee stepped down as Chair of the Board of APEN in 2005 because of term limits. Lee participated in the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership in 2002. She collaborated with scores of other people attending the Summit to draft the “Principles on Working Together.” The summit and the principles produced from it were one of Lee’s career highlights.

The lowest points of her career have been “the passing of wonderful women in the environmental justice movement: Jean Sindab, Dana Alston, Nilak Butler, Jeanne Guanna from SNEEJ, Patsy Ruth Oliver from Texas. [It is] all very, very sad – the loss of these women who were so young. It was not

natural to lose them so young” (2005).

Another career highlight for Lee was the successful organization of Culinary Workers Union 226 in Las Vegas, where she worked with hotel workers for a year. “The end result of that effort…was that they won the power to make their work safer, and through their work as women and as room attendants, they showed real leadership” (2005). At the strike vote, Lee said thousands of people turned out, and the vote passed with almost unanimous consent. “It was the voice of these women that prior to 2000 had no positions in union or leadership or power on the work floor, and it was a highlight to be a part of it” (2005).

Thinking about the future of unions in this country, Lee says, “Out of struggle, there will be progress, so let’s hope there will be progress instead of the opposite. [Do] something constructive rather than destructive” (2005). Lee was inducted into the Hall of Resistance at the Ancient Africa, Enslavement and Civil War Museum in Selma, Alabama.