Mary Paik Lee

This is a Korean name; the family name is Lee (née Paik).

Mary Paik Lee
Hangul	백광선
Hanja	白廣善
Revised Romanization	Baek Gwangseon
McCune–Reischauer	Paek Kwangsǒn

Mary Paik Lee (1900–1995) was a Korean American writer. She was born Paik Kuang-Sun in Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea. She left Korea with her family in 1905, arriving in Hawaii in May that year. In December 1906, after experiencing extreme discrimination in Hawaii, the family moved to California, where Lee would live the rest of her life. Despite her father's educated status in Korea, once in California, both her parents took on a variety of menial jobs, mainly involving physical labour.

Over the course of her life, Lee, her parents, and her husband would suffer many hardships. Her memoir, Quiet Odyssey, published in 1990, is noted for being one one of the few memoirs by an Asian American woman, and the only memoir by a Korean American woman that covers the majority of the twentieth century, providing an important cultural viewpoint on the last century, from the perspective of one of America's first Korean pioneers.

Autobiography

• Quiet Odyssey (paperback ed.), University of Washington Press, May 1990, ISBN ISBN 0295969695 

External links

• Short biography and photo
• Biography by the University of California with excerpts from her autobiography