A Chinese Mayor, So Why Is an Airport Named for Him

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

On February 14 I went to San Francisco International Airport to see someone off on a flight home to China, and I looked up and saw the name on the wall of the International Terminal Departures Hall, Mayor Edwin M. Lee International Terminal Departures Hall. I stood there for a few seconds, stunned.

Edwin Lee. Ed Lee. A Chinese name, carved at the top of an American international airport.

Do you know that feeling? You are in a completely unfamiliar environment, and suddenly you see the name of a man who looks like you, carved in the highest place. It is hard to describe, and the shock of it is real. I wrote one sentence on the spot. The international terminal at San Francisco International Airport is named for Edwin Lee, a Chinese man, it feels close to home, and he has truly earned it, I hope more Chinese people become this remarkable.

Later I looked him up properly. Ed Lee, the child of immigrants from Taishan, Guangdong, born in Seattle in 1952. His father worked as a cook, his mother as a seamstress and waitress, and six children grew up in public housing. A man from an ordinary Chinese immigrant family like that worked his way up from civil rights lawyer to San Francisco city administrator, and in 2011 he became the first elected Chinese American mayor in the city’s history. He won reelection, and he served until he died in office in 2017. To remember him, San Francisco put his name on the International Terminal Departures Hall, dedicated on November 13, 2019, and the hall now holds a bas relief portrait of him. That is what I saw on this trip.

Think about it. Tens of millions of travellers pass through that hall every year, people from every country on earth, and the name they look up at belongs to a Chinese man. A restaurant sign does not hang in a place like this. A Chinatown archway does not hang in a place like this. This is an international airport terminal.

Why do I think this is worth saying out loud? Because many of us Chinese students, myself included, develop a quiet feeling after enough years in America, a feeling that the ceiling for Chinese people in this society is fixed. We can be good engineers, good doctors, we can get into big tech companies and earn high salaries, but in public life, in politics, in the seats where the rules actually get written, it seems like our turn never comes.

Ed Lee’s existence breaks that assumption in half. He never took the tech titan or finance giant road. He took a road most Chinese families would never even consider, public service. He started by taking legal cases for immigrants, and step by step he built trust inside the system and gathered influence, until he stood at the highest administrative office of a world class city.

There is one more detail. His name went on the International Terminal, the face the city shows to the whole world. That choice says something on its own. This city decided that a Chinese name deserves to be the face San Francisco presents to the world.

Where did this hit me? It forced me to rethink a question. What exactly is our generation of Chinese students chasing?

The path of almost every classmate around me is perfectly clear. Study hard, find a good job, get legal status, buy a house, settle down. Nothing is wrong with that path, but look at where it ends. It ends with your own life going well. The road Ed Lee walked ends somewhere different. It ends with his name carved into a city’s infrastructure, with tens of millions of people seeing a Chinese name every year, with the next generation of Chinese American kids walking through that hall and thinking, so we can go this far.

I thought about the difference between those two roads for a long time. One optimizes your own life. The other moves the boundary of what a whole group believes is possible.

I am not saying everyone should go into politics, that is not realistic. I am saying we need a new definition of what remarkable means. In many Chinese families, remarkable means high income, high position, high degrees. On a bigger map, remarkable means your existence changed what other people believe is possible.

Ed Lee did that. With his entire career he proved one thing. Chinese people are not only participants in this society. Chinese people can be among the people who shape it.

So next time you fly through San Francisco and pass that International Terminal, take one more look at that name. Then ask yourself a question. In my lifetime, can I do one thing that gives the people coming after me one more option, because I existed?

It does not have to be naming an airport. At the very least, in whatever field you end up in, you can leave behind one piece of evidence that Chinese people can reach this place.