Fay K Lee

Fay Lee passed away on April 21, 2023 at Kaiser Sunset Medical Center, a few weeks short of her ninety-seventh birthday. She was a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She is survived by her husband Ling, her two sons and two daughters, her four granddaughters, her great-granddaughter, her daughter-in-law, her son-in-law, and her two grandsons-in-law.

Fay was born in 1926 in a village in Toisan, a county of Guangdong, China. In 1945, she was introduced by a matchmaker to Ling who lived in a village that was about a half-day’s walk away, and they soon married that year. Three years later, in 1948, their village was taken over by the Chinese communists who had just won China’s civil war, and Fay’s father-in-law, being a landowner’s son, was sent to re-education camp.

By 1954, Fay and Ling had fled into British Hong Kong for safety and for more opportunities. Fay in 1955 gave birth to her older daughter. Three years later, in 1958, Fay united her family in Hong Kong by bringing over from China her and Ling’s young sons, a nine-year-old and six-year-old who had been in the care of their paternal grandmother. Fay then gave birth to her younger daughter in 1960.

Sponsored by Ling’s sister who lived in San Francisco, Fay immigrated to the United States with her family in 1963. With assistance from Fay’s uncle and her brother, Fay and the family settled in Los Angeles. Five years later in 1968, Fay and her family moved into their own house in El Sereno in Northeast Los Angeles, where her husband Ling still resides.

In her working years, Fay was a seamstress working mostly for minimum wage in off-downtown, industrial Los Angeles. She was out of the house by 6:30am and walked about thirty minutes to the bus stop on Valley Boulevard to catch the 7am bus to get to work on time.

Fay retired in the mid-1990s and was then able to continue to provide more elder care for her mother-in-law and to offer additional child care for her younger granddaughters. She did tai chi with the neighborhood senior retirees and tended her backyard vegetable garden and shared its bounty. Fay didn’t drive, but proudly and frequently used her senior discount public transit card to take her everywhere.

Fay’s longer travels were usually associated with important family functions and duties–paying respects to her dad at his Calgary gravesite, honoring elders and relatives in Canada and in Hong Kong, watching her youngest granddaughter graduate from the University of Oregon, and attending that granddaughter’s older sister’s wedding in Seattle a year later.

At around the age of 90, Fay was diagnosed with MCI–minor cognitive impairment–and learned to accept and deal with it. Other major health issues placed Fay in home hospice care in March 2020, the beginning days of the pandemic, but a year later, Fay against odds graduated out of hospice care.

She then continued to fight hard and held on for two more years of enjoying her family, her home, and her backyard garden. And Fay was able to see and hold her great-granddaughter who was born in 2022, with such joy and contentment.