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NEWS |
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| ELECTORNIC EDITION |
| 2007-11-09 |
| ·WEST ·EAST |
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GLOBAL CHINESE PRESS |
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Lee is the most common surname in the Lower Mainland
Chad Skelton 2007-11-09 16:02 Vancouver Sun | When former city councillor Don Lee came to Canada from China in 1949 at the age of 13, there weren't that many Lees in Vancouver.
City directories from the time show there were only a few hundred in the entire city - and many of them were from England, where the name (meaning "meadow") is also common.
When Lee received his science degree from the University of B.C. in 1960, he was one of just three students named Lee in a graduating class of 445.
When he began applying for teaching positions in Ontario, he said, employers would often look at his resume and assume he was white - then look disappointed when a Chinese man showed up for the interview.
He got so frustrated at being turned down for jobs because of his ethnicity that he changed his cover letter so the first sentence read: "I am a Chinese-Canadian".
Lee finally got a job as a math teacher, then moved back to Vancouver a few years later.
Over more than 25 years at Templeton Secondary in east Vancouver, he noticed the number of Lees in his class steadily grow as waves of immigrants from Hong Kong, and then mainland China, transformed the city.
By the time he ran for a seat on city council in 1996, Lee had become the second-most common surname in Greater Vancouver, after Wong.
And during his two terms on council, he was one of two Lees on the 10-member council (the other was Daniel Lee).
Today, according to statistics compiled by The Vancouver Sun, Lee is the single most common surname in the Lower Mainland - shared by more than 5,800 households in the 604 and 778 area codes.
And while Don Lee may have once been mistaken for English or Irish, the shoe is now very much on the other foot.
Mario Lee, a social planner at the City of Vancouver, is an immigrant from Chile who got his last name from his great-grandfather, who was Irish.
He said he regularly gets mail delivered to him at city hall that is written entirely in Chinese - and at election time gets hassled by Chinese-speaking campaigners targeting the ethnic vote.
But perhaps the biggest case of mistaken identity came several years ago, when Lee was asked to speak at a conference in Ottawa on multiculturalism in big cities.
When he walked in the room to speak, he recalls, he could almost feel the disappointment.
"I found out upon arrival that they were expecting a Chinese individual," he said.
"Instead, they ended up with a Latin American."
Smith may be the stereotypical everyman - and remains the most common surname in Canada as a whole.
But here in the Lower Mainland it comes in a distant fourth - after Lee, Wong and Chan.
Indeed, if you add in those with the surname Li - which is the same name as Lee, just in Mandarin instead of Cantonese - there are now more than twice as many Lees in the Lower Mainland as Smiths.
Lee is also the most popular surname in B.C. as a whole, followed by Wong, Smith and Chan.
Most Lees in Greater Vancouver are, of course, from China, where Lee is one of the most common surnames. But an increasing number are also from Korea, where Lee is one of the top three most common names.
Meanwhile Smith's fall from the top spot in Greater Vancouver is still recent.
As recently as 1991, according to telephone directories, Smith was still the most common surname in the region. But it has been slowly losing ground ever since.
The change can be partly traced, of course, to the changing ethnic makeup of our city.
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