Mary Paik Lee
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Mary Paik Lee (1900-1995) was a Korean-American writer, born Paik Kuang Sun in Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea. She left Korea with her family in 1905 and arrived in Hawaii in May 1905. In December 1906, after experiencing extreme discrimination in Hawaii, the family moved to California, where Paik Lee would live the rest of her life. Despite Paik Lee's 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, Paik Lee suffered many hardships, along with her family and her husband. 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.
[edit] Autobiography
Quiet Odyssey - University of Washington Press; paperback; May 1,1990; ISBN 0295969695
