military service, Lee returned to California to work
as an attorney and legal educator. Lee and his fam-
ily moved to Colorado when he decided to pursue
writing as a full-time career. Lee’s fourth novel, No
Physical Evidence (1998), is a legal thriller. His fifth
book, Chasing Hepburn: A Memoir of Shanghai,
Hollywood, and a Chinese Family’s Fight for Free-
dom (2003), is a memoir of his family.
A sequel to China Boy, Honor and Duty con-
tinues the story of the formation of a young Chi-
nese American, Kai Ting, at West Point. It has been
a long cherished dream of Kai’s father, a former
officer in the Nationalist army in China, to see
his son enrolled in West Point, a move that sig-
nals an “escape from diaspora and attainment of
America itself.” Being Chinese American, Kai finds
both familiarity and alienation at the predomi-
nantly white West Point in the 1960s. He relates
the traditional Chinese teachings of morality to
West Point’s codes of honor and duty, which he
follows in reaction to a cheating scandal at West
Point. With America’s escalating involvement in
Vietnam, the pain is doubled when he attends the
funeral of a beloved instructor from whose parents
he is steered away because of his Asian face. The
novel also relates the story of his fragmented fam-
ily, his continuous affinity with people he got to
know while in the Panhandle, and his relationship
with two girls. Kai embraces the terror of his life,
his stepmother, Edna, in a spirit of forgiveness on
her deathbed. The story ends with the reconcilia-
tion between Kai and his father, who notes hope-
fully, “We climbing up American ladder!”
The protagonist of Tiger’s Tail, Jackson Kan,
is a Chinese-American West Point graduate and
Vietnam veteran who works as an army lawyer
in San Francisco. In 1974 Kan is sent to Korea to
find a missing colleague who had been sent there
earlier to investigate the malfeasance of the base
commander, Colonel LeBlanc. During the inves-
tigation Kan discovers that LeBlanc, a nefarious
racist and anticommunist, has an imperialist vi-
sion of a white America. With the help of two
Korean shamans, Kan and his team manage to
depose LeBlanc.
Deputy District Attorney Josh Jin, in No Physi-
cal Evidence, is the only Chinese American among
the Sacramento district attorney’s staff. With his
daughter’s death and his wife’s departure, Jin is in
the crisis of his personal and professional life. He
is then forced to take a politically charged China-
town rape case of a 13-year-old girl. As a Chinese
American, Jin is under immense pressure from
Chinatown to win the conviction. Overcoming
various obstacles, the most insurmountable of
which is the lack of physical evidence, Jin eventu-
ally ensures that justice is served.
Some snippets of the family history in Lee’s
autobiographical novels, China Boy and Honor
and Duty, are expanded into a family saga of
four generations, spanning a century and a half
of Chinese history and two continents. Chasing
Hepburn: A Memoir of Shanghai, Hollywood, and
a Chinese Family’s Fight for Freedom opens with
an excruciating scene of Tzu Da-tsien’s foot-bind-
ing ceremony in 1909. Her rescue by her father
enables her strong feet to walk in her own path,
one that eventually leads to America. It also sig-
nifies China’s early 20th-century encounters with
clashes between tradition and modern ideas and
indicates a strong influence from the West. De-
spite the disapproval from both families, Da-tsien
rejects an arranged marriage and marries Lee’s
father, Zee Zee. Both Da-tsien and Zee share an
infatuation with Katharine Hepburn, an icon of
independence and glamour. Zee Zee becomes
a Nationalist army officer, fighting against the
Japanese occupation and the Communist party.
Da-tsien, resourceful and strong, preserves her
family and finally joins her husband in America,
where she gives birth to her long-desired son,
the author.
With a strong bond to his Chinese heritage,
Lee often refers to the Chinese language, culture,
and tradition. His forging of a Chinese-American
identity is not limited to a formula of “both/and”
or “either/or”; rather, his identity is made up of
multiple cultures of America. Moreover, with
America’s increasing involvements in Asia, Chi-
nese-American identity, as well as American iden-
tity, is perceived in constant reconfigurations in a
transnational context.Yan Ying164 Lee, Gus