Education in Activism

Chinatown advocate Suzanne Lee reflects on Boston’s troubled past, looks forward to finding solidarity

Most people know Suzanne Lee for two things: her career in the Boston Public Schools system, and her work building organizations in Chinatown. Today, she is the president emeritus of the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), board president of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, and a well-recognized and -loved leader in the community.

Here is her story. 

Beginnings in BPS

Though Lee is a Chinatown resident and activist, Chinatown is not where her journey began. 

Instead, she was born in China and grew up on Blue Hill Ave., what she described as the then-“heart of the black community.” This upbringing was deeply formative for her in many ways. Lee explained that only two other Chinese families resided in her neighborhood.

Having worked at garment shops in Chinatown during the summer in high school, Lee later began teaching English to garment workers on Saturdays in college, a precursor to her involvement in BPS, where she was first recruited as a bilingual teacher. Then came the Boston Busing Crisis.

(The following are excerpts from an interview conducted with Lee, edited for clarity):

Sampan: Talk a little bit about your background and how you came to put down your roots in Boston, as well as in activism….

Lee: I was a first year teacher when the Boston Busing crisis began. Through that, I saw firsthand how the Chinese were being treated in this country. 

During this time, Lee began translating letters of removal for affected schools for parents left in the dark, and created a support group for parents whose children had been relocated, writing letters to the school committee regarding translators at the new schools. Many Chinese parents were afraid that, without translators, they wouldn’t know if their children were safe at school in case of an emergency; for many, this fear led them to take their students out of public schooling, Lee said.

Lee said a representative from the Department of Justice told her that "they needed Chinese students back in school to be a buffer between Black and White students in case they fight." Chinese parents boycotted schools in 1975 for three days with 95% of Chinese students studying out of school, she said.

It was at that point, Lee said, she realized that to the city, “this is what we’re worth.”

That was what cemented her desire to start her journey of activism. “We cannot be somebody’s wedge, I am my own people.”

Suzanne Lee; Photo by Ben Lee

The Chinese Progressive Association

Lee’s activism quickly expanded beyond the school system to other places where she saw inequity and injustice. In 1977, she co-founded the Chinese Progressive Association, abbreviated CPA.

Sampan: Tell me about why you saw the need to found the CPA? What was the atmosphere like, and what was the CPA focused on?

Lee: In Chinatown, I met a lot of workers: garment workers, supermarket and store workers, restaurant workers; Chinatown is the hub of where people meet, a political center of our people. But what the workers and students saw is that we always get pushed out.

Lee referenced multiple infrastructure projects that occurred in Chinatown, from buildings getting torn down, like the immigrant housing that was demolished to make way for the Mass Turnpike, the Tufts Medical Center that bought buildings in Chinatown to further expansion, and the moving of the Red Light District to lower Washington. 

Facing all of these issues with expansion and encroachment, as well as a mounting number of Chinese immigrants arriving with no room to stay, rent prices driving out residents old and new, Lee described a moment of “forces coming together.”

CPA meetings started in Lee’s kitchen. It was, as she described it, a space both physical and social, where working people were the main force. 

Sampan: What challenges have you had through the CPA had with activism in the Boston Chinese community and Boston community at large? 

Lee: When the CPA began, we had three missions: Building and establishing a friendship between people in China and America, building a movement, and raising the living standards of Chinese people, especially through worker rights.

But in Boston’s then-political climate, these goals were difficult to achieve. Lee recalls that there were many conflicts, even within the Chinese community itself: helping workers advocate for their rights brought about worker-boss conflicts, standing with the workers led many activists such as Lee to be called “communists,” and posters that the CPA put up to educate and spread awareness were sometimes torn down by others in Boston unhappy with the way things were changing. “Everything we’ve done has always been uphill,” said Lee. 

She told a story about backlash and how older members of the community felt threatened by the way “new” people wanted to do things differently. “I remember someone talking to my father, saying ‘Can’t you control your daughter?’ “ Lee added. Indeed, Lee and her colleagues often found themselves facing backlash for their gender.

“There was always controversy,” Lee explained, recounting the time when some husbands would lock the doors as punishment to their wives going out to attend CPA meetings, and when her and her fellow organizers were called demeaning, sexist names for the work that they did.

“These women,” said Lee, “really took on a whole lot of fight.”

But all of this ‘trouble-making’ that Lee and her colleagues took on, all of the hardships they endured, allowed them to provide tools to their community — tools that today, even some of those who criticized her, utilize to make a better place for themselves in Boston.

Looking Forward

Sampan: Today, do you see any need for the role of groups like the CPA to change, whether in their objectives or in their avenues of activism?

Lee: The CPA’s missions: equality, justice, and democracy, never change. And we still have a long way to go. 

Lee explained the nuances of each of the CPA’s missions, which together form the CPA’s motto. Equality is how people look at the Chinese population, and how they receive things like wages. Justice referred to combating racism and worker oppression that still permeates the community in Chinatown, both with regards to work and daily life. And democracy, Lee stressed, was a commitment to ensuring that everyone in the community is heard. 

There are many avenues through which the CPA works to achieve these goals. Lee outlined the need to continue to educate people on what they can do in the system, which they’ve pursued by working with tenants and worker’s centers, educating people about their rights to organize and unionize.

“We must organize folks to vote,” Lee said, “or no one will listen.” 

She also has feelings about the current political climate. Lee lamented the civil rights protections that are being challenged, eroded, and taken away, adding that, “We have those rights because people will organize and fight for us. Now that they’re being taken away, it’s our turn to organize.”

As a message to the greater community, Lee emphasized that there is “No time to be demoralized, no time to be sad. Yes it is bad, but it was bad before.”

Her mindset comes from a place of grit, and resilience. No matter how pessimistic things may seem, we still, Lee insists, have more than we had before in terms of protections, in terms of awareness, and in terms of tools, especially in Boston.

To protect and move forward the futures of immigrants in the Boston area, especially Chinese immigrants, Lee has this to say: “We must arm ourselves, and know our own history. How can immigrants allow the rhetoric that new immigrants are bad people, when the Chinese used to be painted as bad people as well?”

Solidarity is key. 

For all the members of the Boston community, her advice runs along a similar vein of visibility and interconnectedness: to start being better neighbors, to get to know the people around you, and to put yourself out there and advocate for what you believe in. 

This is part of an ongoing series profiling people involved in activism and making change. Please feel free to suggest a person to profile by emailing asmith (at) sampan.org. Edits were made to this story shortly after it was posted online.