The man who filled in the missing gap

Lee's father knew better. The photographer once told Wong that his father said in the 1960s that "Martin Luther King is going to benefit all people of color". Lee's pictures from the '70s formed a crucial part of the 2014 exhibition Serve the People: the Asian American Movement in New York, curated by Wong to explore a nationwide phenomenon with New York at its center and Corky Lee its most avid documentarian.

"What the Asian American Movement did was try to name what the Civil Rights Movement in the '50s and '60s would be for Asian Americans,"Wong said. "A new Asian American identity was shaped by reclaimed histories, revolutionary politics, feminist awareness, third worldism and community organizing."

Speaking of the last one, in 1971, Lee with a couple of friends organized a street health fair in Manhattan Chinatown to provide free screening and preventative medicine to locals. The Charles B. Wang Community Health Center of today, which largely caters to underserved Asian Americans, grew out of that earlier effort.

"Since we were doing things for free, we got the label as being communist inspired," Lee said when he talked about his photography and activism in 2013.

"Some very conservative people felt that the 'Cultural Revolution' (1966-76) was moving from China to Chinatown, but of course there's no such thing."

His brother John Lee remembers the fractious time when there was "continued apprehension" mainly caused by tension surrounding the China-US relationship. The political atmosphere meant "many had to falsely align themselves" with the Nationalists in Taiwan, who "had US backing yet were defeated by the Communists during the civil war (the War of Liberation 1946-49)," he said.

"A turning-point", said John Lee, was United Nations' recognition of the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China to the world body, 50 years ago this October, thus ending Nationalist representation of the country. Both brothers took part in demonstrations supporting the PRC held near UN headquarters in New York. (As a photojournalist, Corky Lee covered both sides.)

A week later, the father, suspecting his sons were involved, said something "very, very remarkable", to quote the younger brother. "You know, there was a great deal of danger that the supporters of the (Chinese) mainland undertook, but what is right needs to be expressed－that's what our father said. And he just left it at that," said John Lee, who later went to law school and became a lawyer on the US West Coast.

The photographer visited the mainland twice, once in 1971, when he toured the family's ancestral home in Toishan (Taishan), Guangdong province, and in 2014, when some of his photos were exhibited in a museum in Beijing.

Asked about their mother's reaction to Corky Lee's continued activism, John Lee said,"She was petrified, and was always just worried."

What she may never have known was how highly her eldest son regarded her. "She couldn't read well, but she could feed well" was a line from the song Corky Lee played during his mother's funeral in 2012. It was written by his young friend Taiyo Na, a New York writer, musician and second-generation Japanese American.

Corky Lee "reimagined what racism told us we were through images of who we actually are," Na wrote after his death.

Under Lee's eye, babies not only appear in cradles right beside their garment factory-worker mothers, but were also seen as proudly worn forward-facing by their fathers demanding equal rights for themselves and their next generation.