"So the struggle was not only to have our stories told, but to make sure how they were told. Corky understood that. He told an insider's story."
His pictures show a Chinese girl sporting a pageboy haircut standing beside her mother in a garment factory and a jaded-looking Chinese restaurant chef taking a rare break on the sidewalk－things that "people always know are there but have never bothered to take a look", to quote Karlin Chan, a longtime activist in New York's Chinese community.
Meanwhile, Lee was always after Chan and his fellow "bullhorn types" for images that cut against the stereotype of political apathy among Chinese Americans, long viewed as the model minorities－diligent and docile.
"I've always revolted against that concept," Lee once said. Showing up at every political rally and march in New York Chinatown, Lee captured on film raised placards, fluttering banners and interlocked arms of the protesters including Chan, who once played truant with several classmates to march in a protest in the '70s. "I was only reminded of it when I came face to face with Corky's picture of us at an exhibition," he said.
It was also the photographer's own youth, a youth spent searching for a new identity for himself and his generations from behind the camera, one that is distinctly different from that of his immigrant parents. "ABC from NYC" was what he called himself, ABC standing for American-born Chinese.
"Corky belonged to the first generation of Chinese Americans for whom college was no longer an impossible dream," Chin said. "The resulting mobility allowed them to be the bridge between Chinatown and the new world, and to demand for their own people what the rest of the society had access to, better housing and job opportunities for example."
One major event that Corky Lee took part in and documented involved protests in May 1974 when a construction company refused to hire Asian workers for a 764-unit apartment building planned for Chinatown in Manhattan, even as it ostentatiously called the building Confucius Plaza. The company later relented, agreeing to recruit minority workers including Asians.
However, it was what happened almost exactly one year later that "convinced me to do photojournalism", Lee said.
On May 19, 1975, almost every shop and factory in Chinatown was closed, with signs outside reading "Closed to protest police brutality". On April 26 that year a Chinese American engineer, Peter Yew, 27, watched as police brutally beat a 15-year-old for traffic violation in Manhattan Chinatown. After he intervened, he too was savagely beaten on the spot. He was later taken back to the police station, stripped, beaten again and arrested for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.
Lee, who was nearby, took pictures of Yew. He also photographed the ensuing protests. His image of a protester, face streaked with blood, being escorted away by police appeared on page one of the New York Post, galvanizing anger.
Two decades later, in March 1995, a 16-year-old Chinese American said to have been "brandishing a pellet gun", was shot dead by a New York police officer. Lee's poignant image taken outside what appears to be the police station shows at one corner a photo of the "shy boy" on a placard and at another the bulking, slightly out-of-focus figure of a policeman.
The magazine AsianWeek once quoted Lee as saying, "I'd like to think that every time I take my camera out of my bag, it's like drawing a sword to combat indifference, injustice and discrimination."
These pictures speak eloquently to what is happening in the US today, said Ryan Wong, an art writer and curator in New York.
"The Black Lives Matter movement makes us really examine our relationship to the police. Asian Americans have a history with police brutality, as do black Americans."
