Wilson Lee Flores - Family Profile

Family Profile

Wilson Lee Flores (Simplified Chinese: 李天荣; Traditional Chinese 李天榮) was born to a wealthy ethnic Chinese family in the Philippines, but lost his privileged life when his father died before he was seven. He spent his childhood in Tondo, Manila, where his late father, lumber businessman Lee Tek Hong 李德風, operated a sawmill before his death. His father had also lost a bitter legal battle for control of various family businesses before his death. His father used to manage the family's various sawmills such as Alaska Lumber Co., Uno Lumber Co., New Uno Lumber Co., General Sawmill, Lee Tay & Lee Chay, Inc. and others.

Wilson Lee Flores' entrepreneurial ancestors have a long history of political activism and social idealism which inspire his writings. His family surname Li (李） is pronounced as "Lee") in Mandarin and pronounced as "Dy" or "Dee" in Minnan (Southern Fujian) dialect. His forebears were among the overseas Chinese who supported Dr. Sun Yat Sen's 1911 uprising against the Qing Dynasty in China. His forebears and kins also actively resisted Japanese military hegemony in Asia during World War II.

His paternal great-great-grandfather Dy Han Kia was the third-generation overseas Chinese of his clan to sojourn from China's Fujian province to then Spanish-ruled Philippines, but it was Dy Han Kia who became a lumber merchant with five companies in 19th century Manila and he was a philanthropist.

His grandfather Lee Tay was a prominent sawmill businessman in Manila in the American colonial era with the firm Lee Tay & Lee Chay, which had the old Chinese trade name "Guan Hoc" 源福, which meant "wellspring of fortune" and which was the name given by the pioneer Dy Han Kia. In the early 20th century, Lee Tay sent his cousins to manage new affiliate lumber enterprises in Sta. Cruz and San Pablo City, Laguna province, and in Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija province.

His grandfather's two activist cousins Dy Hoc Siu 李福壽and Dy Hoc Khe became martyrs executed by Japanese soldiers in the Philippines during World War II. Dy Hoc Siu was a leader of the committee campaigning for boycott of Japanese trade in the Philippines under the nationwide league opposing Japanese militarism called “Khong Tiak Hue” (抗敵会） led by his cousin lumber tycoon Dee C. Chuan. Dy Hoc Siu was also the sawmill production manager of the grandfather and father of Wilson Lee Flores, and there is now a memorial to him and nine other martyrs built by the Chinese community inside the Manila Chinese Cemetery.

His grandfather's cousin and close friend was the activist tycoon Dee C. Chuan 李清泉, who became the Philippine "Lumber King" of the American era, founder of China Bank in 1920, 9-term president of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, president of a nationwide league opposing Japanese militarism, vice-chairman of the Southeast Asian Chinese coalition which supported China's war against Japan which had Singapore's "Rubber King" Tan Kah Kee as chairman. Dee was founder of two largest Chinese newspapers in the Philippines then, namely Chinese Commercial News (華僑商报） and Fookien Times （新閩日报）. Dee C. Chuan once led the Chinese minority in a legal battle (case known as Yu Cong Eng versus Trinidad) opposing a discriminatory law promulgated by Congress called the Bookkeping Act, which was won in a 1926 U.S. Supreme Court decision penned by Chief Justice William H. Taft. Taft had also served as the first civil governor of the colonial government of the Philippine Islands and also as former United States President.

A first cousin of Wilson Lee Flores' great-grandfather, lumber tycoon Dy Pac, was also imprisoned by Japanese military invaders for his resistance to their hegemony in Asia during World War II. A younger brother of Flores' great-grandfather, Dee Tian, was also an activist tycoon and Buddhist philanthropist.

Wilson Lee Flores' late mother, top educator Mary C. Young Siu-Tin 楊, was once the editors' choice among regional nominations by readers for "Asian of the Century" of Asiaweek magazine as an exemplar of Asia's unheralded heroic Asian women. She had served as outstanding principal and elementary school teacher in numerous schools throughout the Philippines, and also before 1949 in Fujian province, southeastern China. She used to also write poems published in major Chinese newspapers like Manila's Great China Press.