Meet The Author: Gus Lee

Gus Lee, one-time attorney, now full-time writer, began his first book in 1989 as a private memoir. “My daughter asked me to write a family journal and it turned out to be China Boy,” he explained in an interview. Not only was the work Lee’s first novel, but it was also the first time he had ever attempted fiction writing. “I just wrote this book. For me, it was a miracle,” he recalled. Using a favorite analogy, Lee compared his literary success to baseball: “Say you always wanted to bat .300, but had never played a game before. You’re at the ballpark and they let you hit. Everything they pitch, you hit, and you didn’t even know you could hit before. That’s the way I feel about writing. I never had any literary training, did any workshops. China Boy just happened.”

The semi-autobiographical China Boy introduced audiences to Kai Ting, the American-born son of transplanted Chinese parents, who grows up in the predominantly African American Panhandle neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The book was widely heralded: the New York Times Book Review compared the novel to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum; Publishers Weekly referred to it as “the Chinese American experience as Dickens might have described it”; the Washington Post Book World praised it as “marvelous”; and Time magazine called it “delightful.” China Boy proved to be a six-month bestseller, a Literary Guild selection, a Random House AudioBook and one of the New York Times Best 100 for 1991.

Lee attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, did graduate study in East Asian History with Liu Kwangching and obtained a J.D. degree from the University of California, Davis School of Law (King Hall). While a graduate and law student at Davis, Lee served as an Assistant Dean of Students for the Educational Opportunity Program, project coordinator for Asian American Studies and ROTC Brigade Commander. He was an Army boxer, Army drill sergeant, paratrooper, Command Judge Advocate, U.S. Senate ethics investigator and legal adviser to the worldwide Connelly Investigation^[5]with tours in Asia. He became a multiple-event whistle blower, which involuntarily launched him into his work as an ethicist and character-based leadership consultant.

Lee worked as supervising deputy district attorney, acting deputy attorney general, FBI and law enforcement trainer, Deputy Director of the California District Attorneys Association. He was an adjunct leadership instructor at USC.