Chinese-American Poy Gum Lee (also known as Li Jin Pei), the son of merchant Lee Yick Dep, is an architect whose nearly 50-year long career left his visible mark in China and New York’s Chinatown. Growing up in Chinatown’s Mott Street, Lee’s love of art from an early age led him to Dewitt Clinton High School where he became captain of the Art Team and later, he completed a three-year course in architectural construction and design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He continued his architecture studies at MIT over the summer of 1921 and in Columbia’s Beaux-Arts Institute’s night school in 1922 and 1923. As a young architect, he gained work experiences as draftsman, detailer and construction superintendent in the offices of well-known New York and Chicago firms: W.H. Rahmann & Sons; J.B. Snook & Sons; Edward D. Shank; Murphy, McGill & Hamlin; J.F. Jackson; and Ludlow & Peabody. In 1923, Lee and his family moved to China when the Young Men’s Christian Association’s China Building Bureau hired him as a staff architect on a three-year contract. Lee stayed in China and entered private practice in 1927, the same year the Chinese Society of Architects was founded in Shanghai – the first professional organization for architects in China. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the concentration of foreign wealth and influence in Shanghai allowed a hybrid of architectural styles to develop. European architects popularized art deco and International modernism while adapting local Chinese architectural elements and motifs and this can be seen in the Cosmopolitan Apartments Lee designed in 1933. Some of the important projects that Lee completed in China included the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou. He married Pansy Choye and had three daughters, Arlene, Katherine (Kitty) and Elizabeth (Pinky). Lee’s successful career in China was cut short by the Japanese occupation and then the Chinese Civil War. He returned to New York in 1945. Lee was employed as Senior Architect with the New York City Housing Authority from 1951-1962 and also worked for private clients from 1946-1968. His work was mainly confined to Chinatown where he received commissions for major civic architectural structures of which he blends stylistically Chinese details with modern technologies and materials. Among his highly visible commissions, Lee designed the Chinese American WWII Monument in Kimlau Square (1962), a modernist take on a traditional Chinese pailou, or ceremonial gate; the Lee Family Association (ca. 1950); and the Pagoda Theatre (1963, demolished).