Johnny Lee

Interview Description

Oral History Interview with Johnny Lee

"Johnny Lee" was born circa 1961 in Hong Kong, China, the youngest of five siblings. He immigrated to New York City as a teenager, and finished high school at Seward Park High School in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan. The son of a working-class family, Lee sewed buttons in a Chinatown garment factory during high school, and washed dishes at a Chinatown restaurant as a young man. He attended City College for one year before leaving to pursue stable government work at an Off-Track Betting branch. At the time of the interview, Lee was in his forties and lived with his wife and three children in the three-family home that his parents purchased and converted into a five-family house.

In this interview, using a pseudonym, "Johnny Lee" recounts his life history. He recollects being raised in Hong Kong by his mother while his father worked in America. He remembers his time at Chinatown's Seward Park High School's bilingual program, classmates who dropped out to join Chinese gangs, after-school work as a button-sewer in garment factories, college work as a dishwasher at a Chinese restaurant, and the decision to leave City College to pursue full-time work at an Off-Track Betting location. Lee discusses the boom in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan's garment factories, the increase in competition, and resultant deflation in real wages and living standards. He talks about working-class income, real estate prices, his family's decision to purchase a home, and the rejuvenation of the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn and its Eighth Avenue small businesses. Interview in Cantonese conducted by Ka-Kam Chui.

Brooklyn Historical Society collaborated with the Chinatown History Museum (now the Museum of Chinese in America) in order to conduct a series of oral histories with residents of the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The Cantonese, Mandarin, and English language interviews focused on what was then a new presence of Chinese and Asian immigrants concentrated along Eighth Avenue. Among the topics that are explored in the interviews are tensions between different groups of Chinese immigrants, crime and safety in the neighborhood, Sunset Park's relationship to Manhattan's Chinatown, and how long-term residents of Sunset Park had adjusted to the area's "newcomers."

Citation

Lee, Johnny, Oral history interview conducted by Ka-Kam Chui, September 02, 1993, New Neighbors: Sunset Park's Chinese Community records, 1994.007.18; Brooklyn Historical Society.