| Mary Paik Lee | |
|---|---|
| Hangul | 백광선 |
| Hanja | 白廣善[1] |
| Revised Romanization | Baek Gwangseon |
| McCune–Reischauer | Paek Kwangsǒn |
Mary Paik Lee (1900–1995) was a Korean American writer. She was born Paik Kuang-Sun in Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea. She left Korea with her family in 1905, arriving in Hawaii in May that year. In December 1906, after experiencing extreme discrimination in Hawaii, the family moved to California, where Lee would live the rest of her life. Despite her 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, Lee, her parents, and her husband would suffer many hardships. 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.