Did you know there was a thriving Chinatown in downtown Phoenix?
A thriving Chinese community was pushed out of parts of what is now downtown Phoenix. Despite this a few businesses and buildings have survived.
- A small chalkboard let customers know that Betsy had passed.
- Betsy is survived by her sister, Shirley Tung, and her five children Elizabeth Yee, LeAnn Yee, Daryl Yee, Lynette Yee and Lyris Patterson, and seven grandchildren.
- Betsy took over Blue Fin in 1991, when she was 57 years old.
Betsy Mae Quan Toy Yee, the charismatic owner of Blue Fin, a Japanese restaurant serving downtown Phoenix since 1981, died Oct. 18. She was 91.
“It seemed like Betsy knew everybody that walked in through that door. She treated them like family. I mean, I felt like I was one of her children,” Mark Schweikert, who’s been a regular since 2008, said.
Lyn Yee, Betsy’s daughter, started working at the restaurant in 2006 and has been running it herself since 2020, when Betsy took a step back. She plans to keep Blue Fin open.
A small chalkboard let customers know that Betsy had passed. One customer cried for five minutes when he learned the news, Lyn said.
“She just provided so much happiness and joy,” Daryl Yee, her son, said.
Betsy is survived by her sister, Shirley Tung, and her five children Elizabeth Yee, LeAnn Yee, Daryl Yee, Lynette Yee and Lyris Patterson, and seven grandchildren.
Blue Fin was more than a restaurant
Betsy took over Blue Fin in 1991, when she was 57 years old. When asked why she might have wanted to take on such a large project at that age, Daryl shrugged. “Because she liked to talk to people, you know?” he said.
Betsy presided over the restaurant for almost 30 years. She shepherded it through the construction of the light rail, organizing a customer petition to save it from demolition under eminent domain. To this day, the sidewalk in front of the small brick building juts out into Central Avenue — a physical reminder of Betsy’s fight to keep her property intact.
Over the decades, luxury apartments and gleaming skyscrapers rose around the restaurant as Phoenix’s downtown developed. But Betsy kept Blue Fin largely unchanged, serving the same menu of Japanese comfort food with the kindness and care that she became known for.
Her son noted that there was a symmetry to her spending the final decades of her life running a restaurant. Betsy’s father, Dea Hong Toy, opened Toy’s Shangri-La in 1950. At that time, it was one of the largest Chinese restaurants in Phoenix, and Betsy worked there as a teenager.
“She started off in restaurants and she ended up in restaurants,” Daryl said.
Betsy Yee’s family were pioneers in Phoenix’s early Chinese history
Born in 1934, Betsy was the tenth out of 11 children. She was born into a family of leaders in the early Chinese community.
Her father immigrated to the United States from China in 1909 when he was 16. He was drafted during World War I, and after his service, he brought his wife Lee Chee and daughter to the U.S.
After the war, he ran restaurants in Casa Grande and Phoenix before getting into the grocery business. The Chinese community came together to help him buy a horse and buggy, which he used to deliver produce, according to Shirley Tung, Betsy’s younger sister.
By traveling out to the tuberculosis sanitariums on the outskirts of the city, where no other merchants wanted to go, he was able to build a niche business and save up enough money to buy a plot of land on 16th Street and Camelback, Tung said.
Toy built a grocery store on the land and planted a pecan orchard. The family raised turkeys, lambs, geese and chicken. As soon as they were able to, Betsy and Tung, who were only two years apart, started helping out in the grocery store — checking produce to see if it wilted, fetching eggs from the chicken coop.
“When we were born, we lived behind the grocery store in the old Chinese way,” Tung said. “We didn’t have air conditioning. We slept outside with a mosquito net over us.”
At that time, Toy’s Grocery was located far from the city center. But as the area developed, helped out by the construction of Wrigley Mansion, the store grew successful. He invested his profits into more land, buying a 40 acre lot that he turned into a cantaloupe farm and a plot of land in what is now Paradise Valley, according to Tung.
“He was entrepreneurial,” Tung said. “He had a lot of foresight. He was able to imagine what Phoenix would be like. And he also had enough guts to do it, you know?“
A woman ahead of her time
Betsy took after her father and showed her entrepreneurial spirit at a young age. When she was in elementary school, in the midst of World War II, she ran for class president, Daryl said.
“Her strategy was, because the family owned a grocery store, she was able to get her hands on bubblegum, which was super rare during World War II because of the rationing,” Daryl said. “So she would give people bubble gum and then talk them into voting for her.”
Ultimately, she lost the election. But that story was a harbinger of what was to come.
Betsy Yee lived an adventurous life
When Betsy went to college, she had to choose between studying to be a teacher or a nurse, the two typical paths for women at the time, Daryl said. She chose teaching and graduated from Arizona State University in 1956.
But she craved adventure. The summer after she graduated, she traveled to Hawaii to learn more about Chinese culture there, according to an article in The Honolulu Advertiser. She worked at a bar selling drinks to sailors, Daryl said. She also picked up a lifelong love of hula dancing, which she passed on to her daughters — in 1984, she signed her daughter LeAnn Yee up to hula dance at a Phoenix rally for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign.
“She was such a strong woman,” LeAnn said. “My mom had chutzpah.”
She shared the story of a trip that Betsy made to Egypt when she was a young adult. Betsy ran out of money half way through her trip, so she resold all her souvenirs at higher prices outside of American hotels, rented a camel, dressed up in local garb and charged tourists to take pictures with it.
Betsy taught at military bases in Okinawa and France. She received her master’s in counseling from Columbia University in the late 1950s, a time when women were not admitted as undergraduates at the college, LeAnn said.
“My mom was an out-of-the-box thinker. I’m very like, the lines are here, I won’t go outside the lines. And she’s like, nah, the lines are kind of a guideline,” Lyn said.
How Blue Fin began
In 1961, Betsy married Howard Yee, who was also born into a Chinese family in Phoenix. In typical Betsy fashion, the wedding was in a grand cathedral in Paris. The couple moved to California, where they opened a pharmacy, before moving back to Phoenix in 1979.
Although she was working as a high school counselor, Betsy began investing in real estate. One of the buildings she bought was at 1401 N. Central Avenue, which she took special pride in owning because of the history of racist housing practices in Phoenix when she was growing up. The property was in an area Chinese immigrants and other minorities had been steered away from, according to a 1930s Phoenix redlining map.
“There was a period when this property wasn’t valuable,” Betsy told The Arizona Republic in 2022. “(But) we could never buy it. We as Asians were not allowed to live on Central Avenue.”
Several different businesses occupied the building before a Japanese chef opened Phoenix Blue Fin in 1981. A decade later, he needed to return to Japan, so Betsy took over the restaurant.
‘Like a mother would’
José Botello started working at Blue Fin in 1990, when he was 15. The original Japanese chef trained him, and he’s been the restaurant’s cook ever since. His mother was in Mexico, so he couldn’t see her often. Betsy helped fill that void.
“She’d call me to check in, like a mother would,” Botello said.
A police officer, Schweikert first started going to Blue Fin in 2008 because the area was part of his beat. Born in Japan, Schweikert was surprised to find home-style Japanese cooking at a restaurant in downtown Phoenix.
Betsy was always trying to get him to eat more. He’d refuse, telling her he was full, but she’d come to his table with more food. He used to watch Betsy scold Lyn for not doing things her way, and he’d chuckle because Betsy reminded him of his own mother. Betsy prayed for him at the restaurant and sent him cards.
“Seeing how she treated people inspired me to be better at my job, to be a better person,” Schweikert said.
Over and over again, friends, customers and staff emphasized how Betsy became like a mother to them.
One last gathering
Betsy had very refined taste, which was why she loved serving on the Phoenix Arts and Culture Commission, advising the city on how to include public art in their infrastructure projects. She loved expensive cars and refused to drive anything other than a Cadillac. She used to throw huge parties, renting out the Biltmore or the Phoenician to host hundreds of guests to celebrate birthdays and wedding anniversaries.
Before Betsy died, she had one final request.
“She wanted lots of flowers at her funeral,” Daryl said. “Even in death, she kind of wants a scene.”
“It was funny,” Lyn said. “She’s like, ‘I’m only going to die once. Just give me flowers.’”
Reach the reporter at reia.li@gannett.com. Follow @reia_reports on Instagram.