Ruby Chu

On December 9th, 1959, Ruby Lee was born in Lake Village, Arkansas, to King Ying Lee and Lee Kwok Toy, who also went by the names Ann and Arthur. At that time, Ruby’s two older siblings were living in China with their grandparents, but they would soon move to Arkansas as well. With six children and one set of grandparents, Ruby’s parents had a household of ten split between the house they bought and the one they built right next to it. 

All of the U.S.-born Lee children went through the Lake Village public school system, but Ruby and her little sister Sherry also attended a kindergarten operated by a local Miss Dunn. They were the first Chinese children to attend Miss Dunn’s kindergarten. Ruby was five and Sherry was three, and neither spoke any English before starting school– Ruby jokes, “The hardest thing that I remember was not being able to ask where the bathroom was because I didn’t know the word bathroom.” She also recalls being called names by some boys in the daycare, to which she responded by chasing them out of the playhouse with a toy tea kettle, yelling “Hot tea!” and threatening to pour it on them.

Ruby started at Lakeside Elementary in the first grade, and there she would remain until graduation, though at one point her parents asked her and her younger siblings if they would like to go into private school. This was around Ruby’s fifth-grade year when the public schools were integrating. She remembers her mother saying that they could attend one of the private schools “going up left and right,” but that they shouldn’t do so just to escape integration, especially because most of the clientele at their grocery store was Black. 

Though her mother objected to her desire to enter the medical field, Ruby attended dental school after going to college for pre-med. There were only 13 women in her class of 126 in dental school, and only 3 Chinese students. She does not recall any racial discrimination from her time there, but the older male instructors were very prejudiced against their female students.

Despite the sexism she initially faced, Ruby graduated dental school and has been practicing dentistry for 36 years. She has a joint practice in Lake Village with her husband Peter, an optometrist, with whom she has two sons she couldn’t be prouder of. One is an engineer in Fort Worth, Texas, while his brother followed in his mother’s footsteps and practices dentistry in Richmond. 

Story by Mack Stacy

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