Businesswoman, Cultural Leader Lilly Lee Dies at 70

“Cultivate perfection. . . . Never accept failure except as a growing experience. . . . Make it happen now,” advised the perfume-scented cards that the attractive, elegantly dressed millionaire distributed.

“The greatest deterrent to your success is yourself,” she told the 200 young women attending the first West Coast Chinese American Women’s Conference meeting at Cal State L.A. that day in 1982.

Lilly V. Lee, who was brought up in Chinatown and taught to defer to men, only to be divorced by her husband and left with two sons to support, never became her own deterrent.

“I failed a lot and was conned, cheated and manipulated,” she conceded, “and cried a lot and nearly went bankrupt a couple times.”

But by the time she addressed that conference, the 50-something Lee had a personal net worth of more than $1 million and was grossing more than $500,000 annually with her real estate companies Lilly Enterprises Inc. and Lilly Property Management Co.

She also had become a force in cultural and charitable organizations and business associations, not only in Chinatown, but also in the Greater Los Angeles area and around the Pacific Rim.

Lee died Saturday of natural causes in Los Angeles’ Good Samaritan Hospital, her son, Randal Lee, said Tuesday. She was 70.

Born into a family that emigrated from China to Los Angeles in the 1890s, Lee grew up walking from school along Chinatown’s dirt roads to the herb shop run first by her grandfather and then by her father.

Educated only in secretarial skills, she was a dutiful homemaker and mother, bringing up her two sons, for 16 years. With the thought of helping to pay family expenses, if necessary, after her husband’s anticipated early retirement, she obtained a real estate license.

But the life plan changed. Her husband divorced her, leaving her with the boys, a mortgage, a car loan and no alimony. So she went to work.

Boldly establishing herself in Beverly Hills, Lee at first sold houses, then graduated to apartment buildings. By the late 1970s she began syndicating large land deals involving downtown Los Angeles property sold to Hong Kong millionaires.

Lilly Lee gravitated to big-bucks Chinese investors for the same reason she agreed to head the board of governors of the Chinatown Public Safety Assn., which worked to establish a Chinatown police station, better housing and cultural and recreation facilities--because Chinese of all economic levels were family.

Years before American businessmen began making inroads in markets and manufacturing in China, Lee worked to foster improved business and charitable understanding between Americans and Asians. As part of that effort, she completed a “Pacific Rim Profiles and Technical Report” to provide information for business, government and human services organizations about the changing demographics of Asian Pacific communities. That database has been helpful in marketing, political activities and in providing social services.

Lee served on the executive board of the Greater Los Angeles World Trade Assn., as a director of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and as president of its Women’s Council.

And she was on the board of the American Red Cross and of United Way Inc., heading its Asian Pacific Research and Development Council. She encouraged two-way charity--both more grants to Asian assistance organizations and more solicitation of contributions from Asian businesses.

“The lesson to be learned is, there’s no such thing as the Asian community,” Lee told The Times in 1986 when she was helping develop cultural understanding and cooperation here. “There’s the Japanese community, the Korean community, the Chinese community . . . “

With her talent for organizing those various cultures, Lee developed a 40-member board of corporate and professional Filipino, Chinese, Japanese and Korean leaders to assist the Southern California Asian Pacific American Legal Center, whose council she headed.

Among many business directorships, she was serving on the board of Bank Plus Corp., parent of Fidelity Federal Bank.

Despite her own limited education, Lee was highly respected for graduating from hard-knocks schools of personal experience, and was named to jleading roles in top educational institutions.

She headed a research project, “California’s American Chinese,” for Claremont McKenna College’s Rose Institute of State and Local Government and was vice chairman of the institute’s board. She was on the boards of visitors for the UCLA School of Medicine and Southwestern University School of Law, a regent of Loyola Marymount University and on the board of the private Webb School. Lee was also the founder of Cal State L.A.’s Chinese American Women’s Scholarship Fund.

Her son said that among Lee’s myriad awards, his mother most treasured her honorary “doctor of philanthropy” degree from Golden Gate University.

The businesswoman is survived by her two sons, Randal and Craig Lee, both of whom joined her in her business, and three grandchildren.

The family has asked that memorial donations be made to the Lilly Lee Charitable Foundation at Lilly Enterprises Inc., 4727 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 612, Los Angeles, CA 90010.