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It’s a Thursday in early December, at the weekly yoga/tai chi/fan dance/mahjong-and-lunch seniors program at the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Chinese Cultural Center, and Lee is busy serving meals.

Hospitable, outgoing, sports- and fun-loving, Lee works with the same positive spirit that she had during her time as a physical education teacher, coach, and faculty meeting cut-up at both ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ and Palo Verde high schools.

Retired from TUSD since 2003, Lee is now a positive force at the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Chinese Cultural Center.

Sporting a pink University of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ baseball cap, a pink and white striped UA shirt, and UA socks with sneakers, Lee ladles turkey soup into bowls, laughing, talking, cajoling. “Here, have some more! There’s plenty. Did you bring your take-home containers?â€�

When she finally sits down (bearing eggs rolls and two bowls of soup), she describes her volunteer roles at the center.

She supervises the seniors’ lunch. She’s on the history committee and initiated dozens of history and business posters and a bus tour of Chinese market locations — more than 80 Chinese-owned markets could be found in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, mostly in modest, often immigrant, neighborhoods, by the mid-twentieth century.

At one point, briefly distracted from the interview, she nods toward an Anglo lady at a mahjong table. “See that? She just got it,� Lee said. The mahjong tiles are all in Chinese. “She’s figured it out!

“I guess I’m still an educator at heart.�

At 70, Lee splits her time between looking after “herâ€� seniors at the Chinese cultural center, and teaching seven-to seventeen-year-old girls golf through the LPGA Girls Golf of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥.

“Golf is where college scholarships will be available,� she said. Boys aren’t playing golf much anymore, but colleges still have scholarship money girls can use. So she’s in the volunteer business of giving young girls golf skills.

This is not unlike her PE career. While many teachers would run from them, Patsy Lee chose to teach freshman. Freshmen were entertaining, she said. “Squirrelly. The squirrellier the better.�

She managed them by keeping PE fun, and by appealing to their interests. A nerdy kid more comfortable in a physics lab than on a field? “Let him compute the speed of a softball.� He can get his A. In fact, Lee said, the one skill necessary for a passing grade in her class? “Show up. Bring a friend.�

That “bring a friend� and make it fun strategy marked Lee as the stellar coach Star Sports Columnist Greg Hansen profiled on July 18, 2018 (“Self-Proclaimed ‘Jock’ Patsy Lee Broke Barriers as High School Coach.�).

Lee was the first ever female coach of a boys’ high school team in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥. She was hired in the 1980s to coach the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ High freshman boys’ basketball team. By the year 2000, she was Palo Verde High School’s assistant boys’ basketball coach when it went to the state championship game.

Over her 40-year career, she would go on to head coach Pima College softball, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ High girls’ track, and Palo Verde freshman boys’ volleyball; and —according to Hansen — “assistant coach so many places even she has difficulty putting them in order.â€�

When she was inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame in 2019, she concluded her remarks in a typically Lee-fashion, crediting the athletes for success, not herself: “You don’t take donkeys to the Kentucky Derby,� she quipped.

Setting down to lunch on an easy chair beneath the wall of TCCC donors, Lee becomes a little pensive. Her family’s was a 20th century immigration story.

Her father, Alan Lee, whose family immigrated to San Francisco around 1900, brought his GI Bill to the UA to study engineering. He returned to his southern Chinese village to marry Jean Liu, and they opened a corner market in Barrio Hollywood. Her mother’s “second language was Spanish,� Lee said. Jean and two Spanish-speaking neighbor-ladies learned English through daily episodes of “General Hospital.�

Tomboy-ish, the third of four children, Patsy said she was a smart-aleck, and more interested in sports than school. The TCCC poster of her family’s market (Alan’s) shows a family photo with her scowling at the camera: her father wanted a picture; Patsy wanted a bike ride. In her first math class at ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ High, “Mrs. Siemens said, ‘aren’t you David and Sylvia’s sister? (David would become a pharmacist; Sylvia an accountant.) What happened to you?’â€�

As children, they worked at the market. Their mother would put a stool at the counter, and “I’d sell beer,â€� Lee said. She attended Davis Elementary, John Spring Junior High — a year after it was integrated, and ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ High School, where she couldn’t play sports. “There were no team sports for girls then — only individual,â€� she said. “And I got cut from tennis.â€�

After school, she’d worked at the market; later they all worked at the family restaurant, the Four Seasons, located first at the corner of Campbell and Fort Lowell and then relocated to the corner of Speedway and Wilmot.

That family responsibility continued into adulthood. “People would say, why do you coach everything, Patsy?� she said. “You don’t know anything about track.’ It was to stay late to avoid a restaurant shift. It never worked. She’d end up cleaning the kitchen.

It was as an undergrad at the UA that Lee played team sports — volleyball, basketball, and softball — and the point of getting an education kicked in. Anatomy and physiology hooked her — “they made sense�; academics had application to athletics.

Lee pointed out her poster compiling the history of the Chinese community in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, settling in Hispanic neighborhoods, “highlighting the intertwining history of…the two immigrant populations.â€� It was only when researching the history that she realized how many Chinese actually immigrated to the US through Mexico because of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

The purpose of The TCCC center is to preserve Chinese culture and heritage, but also to share it with the non-Chinese community. It seems more important now, Lee notes, alluding to the current spate of Asian hate crimes. She hasn’t personally been targeted, but she worries for her seniors and the Chinese national students at the UA: “Bullies go for the vulnerable,� she said.

When she was race-baited as a kid, she’d jump into a fight…and land in the principal’s office. Now, she said, “I just fight with words.� But, admittedly, a fist to the eye was very satisfying.

Toward the end of the conversation, Bill and Mary Alice Ruelas Keller stopped by to say hi to Lee on their way out. “Patsy,â€� long-time ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥an Mary Alice observed, “is the heart and soul of the Center.â€�

Lee smiled and shrugged. “I like people to be happy.�