Luminary: William Poy Lee

Luminary: William Poy Lee

William Poy Lee was born and raised in 1950s San Francisco with one foot in the traditional Confucianist "village" of SF Chinatown and the other foot in the heady, bohemian arts, spirituality, and politics of Beatnik North Beach and its Italian American community.

His first book, a memoir, The Eighth Promise, grapples with issues of the relationship of how wisdom from agrarian-based, stable, & communal social structures can translate into the modern, individualist-based, fluid, and technological society; puts a human face on the immigration experience of his Mother, Poy Jen, who survived the Japanese invasion and the Chinese civil war before coming to America as a bride and then the author's own experience of assimilation; and all of this within a first person eyewitness narration of SF's counter-culture, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the first modern Asian American civil rights march, and the armed internecine struggles of 1970s Bay Area.

Over those decades, William Poy Lee recognized that it was his mother's ancient ways that sustained him as a compassionate and vital human being through all the turmoil, including the family tragedy of his brother being malprosecuted for a Chinatown related murder.

William Poy Lee graduated with a Bachelors of Architecture from UC Berkeley, a Juris Doctorate from UC Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, and has been a licensed California lawyer since 1979. He presently lives in Berkeley where he writes and lectures full-time. The author is increasing spending more of his time in China, where he is witnessing the lives and transfomations of China's post-Cultural Revolution generation.