Mary Loy Yee

Mary Loy Yee began her life in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the oldest of four children, all four of which attended a Catholic school despite the fact that her parents were “more Buddhist than anything else.” After school, Mary would help her family’s laundry business. Her father passed away when she was 8 years old, and a few years later her mother remarried to her stepfather, Wong Gar Kay. In 1944, when Mary was 14, they moved to Helena, Arkansas where Wong Gar Kay owned a grocery store. Mary explained that when they first arrived in Helena, her family was unable to purchase a house despite having the funds to do so. Eventually, a white friend of the family had to purchase a home in his name and then transfer it to her stepfather. She didn’t understand it as a child, but looking back she realized, “the Chinese couldn’t buy any property at the time.”

In Helena, Mary attended Central High School where she became one of the first Chinese to graduate from this newly-combined school district. Unlike other high school students of her age, she did not participate in extracurricular activities. Instead she came and worked in the store “stacking groceries and selling to the customers.” She and her family mostly kept to themselves, though she recalls they often travelled to Chinese community events around Arkansas and Mississippi. In fact, she describes meeting her husband, Yim Hong Yee, at a Chinese dance in Cleveland, Mississippi.

Yim took over a liquor store in North Little Rock in 1955. By the following year Yim and Mary were married and running the store, which operated for 43 years. The couple raised both of their children and continued attending Catholic church. Mary notes that their store made enough money for them to send their kids to college and allowed them to sponsor a local basketball and baseball team. Later in life, when she turned 80, Mary started taking taekwondo and tai chi classes.

Chinese culture was important to Mary’s family growing up. Mary has vivid recollections of her mother tending a “beautiful garden” full of bok choy, bitter melon, and winter melon, which she cooked alongside special ingredients ordered from San Francisco. During Chinese New Year, her family would have have roast and the children would receive red envelopes. She also spoke Chinese while at home, but lost the language once she started going to school. She later states that she picked up the ability to recognize some Chinese characters, including her mother’s surname, throughout the years. She takes pride in her Chinese heritage and the life she and her family built for themselves in the Arkansas Mississippi River Delta.

Story by Alyssa Brown, Isaura Funes, Hannah Smithson, and Marcus Norris

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