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Did you know there was a thriving Chinatown in downtown Phoenix?<\/p>\n
A thriving Chinese community was pushed out of parts of what is now downtown Phoenix. Despite this a few businesses and buildings have survived.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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,\u201d Mark Schweikert, who\u2019s been a regular since 2008, said.<\/p>\n
Lyn Yee, Betsy\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A small chalkboard let customers know that Betsy had passed. One customer cried for five minutes when he learned the news, Lyn said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe just provided so much happiness and joy,\u201d Daryl Yee, her son, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Blue Fin was more than a restaurant<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u201cBecause she liked to talk to people, you know?\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 a physical reminder of Betsy\u2019s fight to keep her property intact.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the decades, luxury apartments and gleaming skyscrapers rose around the restaurant as Phoenix\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Her son noted that there was a symmetry to her spending the final decades of her life running a restaurant. Betsy\u2019s father, Dea Hong Toy, opened Toy\u2019s Shangri-La in 1950. At that time, it was one of the largest Chinese restaurants in Phoenix, and Betsy worked there as a teenager.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe started off in restaurants and she ended up in restaurants,\u201d Daryl said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Betsy Yee’s family were pioneers in Phoenix’s early Chinese history<\/p>\n
Born in 1934, Betsy was the tenth out of 11 children. She was born into a family of leaders in the early Chinese community<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s younger sister.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 checking produce to see if it wilted, fetching eggs from the chicken coop.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we were born, we lived behind the grocery store in the old Chinese way,\u201d Tung said. \u201cWe didn’t have air conditioning. We slept outside with a mosquito net over us.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe was entrepreneurial,\u201d Tung said. \u201cHe 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?\u201c<\/p>\n A woman ahead of her time<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHer 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,\u201d Daryl said. \u201cSo she would give people bubble gum and then talk them into voting for her.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimately, she lost the election. But that story was a harbinger of what was to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n Betsy Yee lived an adventurous life<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 in 1984, she signed her daughter LeAnn Yee up to hula dance at a Phoenix rally for Jesse Jackson\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was such a strong woman,\u201d LeAnn said.\u00a0\u201cMy mom had chutzpah.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Betsy taught at military bases in Okinawa and France. She received her master\u2019s in counseling from Columbia University in the late 1950s, a time when women were not admitted as undergraduates at the college, LeAnn said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy 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,\u201d Lyn said.\u00a0<\/p>\n How Blue Fin began<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0The property was in an area Chinese immigrants and other minorities had been steered away from, according to a 1930s Phoenix redlining<\/a> map.<\/p>\n