Patty You-Yen Lee ’69, The Alumna Behind “The Thinker”

By Connie Ma, Alumni and Community Outreach Officer

For more than fifty years, "The Thinker" has been a part of the Taipei American School. A grey statue of a humanoid figure with a book on its lap is deep in contemplation. Its head, arms, and book are worn smooth by decades of curious students. Parts of it are pockmarked and slightly crumbling. On a typical day in the lobby at dismissal and after school, students can be seen swarming around the statue, leaning against it while talking to friends or sitting at its base reading or on a laptop. Occasionally, a lower school student hangs from it like a monkey. Everyone who has walked through these doors remembers "The Thinker." So how did this statue come to be a part of TAS? The answer lies with Patty You-Yen Lee '69, a one-time sculptor and alumna, who may be one of our earliest "Tiger Babies."

An Early Tiger Baby

The Thinker on Senior Island (1969 US Yearbook)

Patty You-Yen Lee was born in Hong Kong. Her father moved the family to Taiwan for his job with Foshing Air Lines, a family business. "My uncle, who was married to my mother's sister, started the company. It was mostly domestic, and they only had one plane. They were basically an agent for international airlines like Northwestern, Air France, and SAS, who flew to East Asia," recalls Patty.

Though records are sparse, we may call Patty one of our first Tiger Babies. "I started at TAS in 1955 when I was six years old. As a child, I was sick very often, and my mother was very upset about it. In the 1950s, Taiwan was still quite primitive in many things. My mother did not like the education and hygiene in Taiwan, so she found TAS and put me in here, and I was stuck," Patty laughs.

TAS proved to be a better fit for her than the local schools. "I couldn't attend a Chinese school because

I knew no Mandarin. My father said, when you go out, you go to school, but when you come home, it's like a coat; you take it off. So at home, we spoke Shanghainese," Patty smiles. "I eventually learned Mandarin, but among my friends, I was the only one who spoke my father's dialect at home." Patty's older brothers attended local schools, but her cousin Gilda King '66 also attended TAS.

"We started at the campus on Chang'an East Road. It was just a bunch of wooden buildings. Back then, we lived on Zhongshan North Road, and a family lived behind the Ambassador Hotel. There was Amy An, and she had a brother, Abe An. He was a year ahead of me, but we would go to school in a pedicab. My mother and her mother chartered the pedicab with the same guy daily. He would take us up to school and drive us back, come rain or flood," Patty remembers.

She remembered that Asian and Caucasian kids did not mix during her time at TAS. "I met many friends at TAS, both Caucasians and Asians. I don't know what it is like now, but the Caucasians would stick to themselves, and the Chinese would stick to themselves. Generally, most Caucasians were from the military or the diplomatic corps. Although we were in the same classes and we were all friendly to each other, we never really played together or went out to the movies or anything. After school, they all returned to their homes and military encampment."

As for the Asians, many of them were also from the diplomatic corps, like from Thailand. "Attending TAS was more expensive than Taiwanese local education. And whether the tuition was paid in US dollars or NT, many locals or people from the mainland couldn't afford it. So you had to have something to be enrolled in TAS. I was the exception because I carried a British passport as I was born in Hong Kong."