Ngoot Lee, Artist, Cook and Charter Member of the Group of the Oblong Table aka Chinese Gourmet Club aka Gourmet Eating Club aka Chinese Gourmet Society

At Ancestry.com, there is a passenger list with Ngoot Lee, age eleven and born in “Toishan, China”. On September 29, 1939, he departed Hong Kong and arrived at Vancouver, British Columbia on October 19, 1939.

A train took Lee to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia where he departed by sea on October 27, 1939 and landed in Boston the next day. Waiting for him was his brother, Lin Lee who resided at 50 Beach Street in Chinatown.

Lee testified he was born on CR [Chinese Republic] 18-12-8 or January 7, 1930 at Goot Woo Village, Sun Ning District (Taishan), China. (Public records at Ancesrtry.com have his birth date as July 1, 1930.)

Chinese-American Calendar for the 102 Chinese Years 

Commencing January 24, 1849, and Ending February 5, 1951 

Below are selected pages from Lee’s Chinese Exclusion Act case file number 2500/12886 at the National Archives’ Boston branch in Waltham, Massachusetts. 

Testimony was also given by Lee’s brother Lin and cousin Yoke Fung Lee.

Lee has not been found in the 1940 United States Census which was enumerated in April. In Lee’s file was a two-page school attendance letter, dated July 11, 1940, by Boston’s Office of Supervisor of Attendance. The second page said Lee was somewhere in New York City.

Joseph Heller and Speed Vogel’s No Laughing Matter (2004) said 

One of the people Zero [Mostel] introduced me to there was Ngoot Lee, a fine painter who soon became a good friend. When he was about ten, Ngoot left Canton to visit an uncle, a wealthy Chinatown merchant. Ngoot liked New York and decided to stay, attending school, then working in restaurants and at odd jobs until he moved to Twenty-eighth Street some ten years later. 

In 1950 Lee graduated from the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan. Also in the class of 1950 were future comic book artists Ernie Colon and Jim Infantino. A year behind them were Tony Tallarico and Angelo Torres.

The Palette yearbook

A photograph of Lee appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, June 17, 1950. 

The 1950 census recorded Lee (line 16) in Chinatown at 34–38 Mott Street in apartment 8. Of interest is one of the neighbors, in apartment 7, Virginia Lee who worked in advertising. His future career would include advertising.

Several New York City telephone directories are available at Ancestry.com. Lee was not listed in 1953. Directories for 1954 to 1956 and 1958 were not available. Lee was listed in 1957, 1959 and 1960 at 51 West 28th Street. 

1957

1959

1960

The Detroit Times (Michigan), August 3, 1958, reported the new art gallery at Grinnell’s music store. Included in the exhibition was Lee’s watercolor of horses.

Arts, January 1960, said 

Ngoot Lee, Moura Chabor, William Harris: Chabor shows pastels, oils and gouaches of dancing peasants and children at play. Lee’s pastels and inks are of animals and natural scenes. Harris shows collages which are really cut-out and assembled pictures and which, because of the sharp contrast between figure and ground, have an effect like that of a drawing. (Dorona, Nov. 18–Dec. 16.)

Lee met Zero Mostel on West 28th Street where each had an art studio. Mostel taught some Yiddish to Lee.

Lee was mentioned in the syndicated column “The Lyons Den” that appeared in the Evening Star (Washington, DC), July 21, 1961. 

Zero Mostel, star of “Rhinoceros,” is an accomplished painter. He has a protege named Ngoot Lee who was born in Kung Tung. Mostel invited the youngster to his summer home in Provincetown but there wasn’t enough room. Ngoot Lee therefore was given a room in the spacious home of Lily Harmon the painter. On the first night she cooked chow mein for him. He sampled it and said: “Hmmmm just like Mother used to make.”

In the early 1960s Lee was a charter member of an eating club that included Mostel, Mel Brooks, Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel, George Mandel, Julius Green, Mario Puzo, Joseph Stein and Carl Reiner. The start of the club was told in Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 (2011). The club had various names: Group of the Oblong Table and Chinese Gourmet Club in Kenneth Tynan’s profile of Mel Brooks in The New Yorker, October 30, 1978, page 101 (also here); Gourmet Club in The New York Times Magazine, Part 2, November 3, 1985, “Eating with Their Mouth’s Open”, page 62; Gourmet Eating Club in Carl Reiner’s My Anecdotal Life: A Memoir (2003), page 176; and Chinese Gourmet Society in Mel Brooks’ All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2021), page 139. Brooks said Lee 

... was a brilliant calligrapher and furniture designer who worked for Bloomingdale’s. He would set up some of their furniture displays and do framed calligraphy on the walls.

Lee in a detail of Victor Juhasz’s illustration

for “Eating with Their Mouth’s Open”

Excerpt from “Eating with Their Mouth’s Open”:

[Speed] Vogel: Ngoot, is it true that the first time you invited Zero Mostel to your studio for a meal, he ate so much he could not get off the chair?

Lee: It’s true. He fell asleep with his head on the plate. And when he woke up, he started teaching me Yiddish. The first thing he taught me was “Siz shver tzu zein a Yid  (It’s hard to be a Jew).”

[Joseph] Heller: What would Ngoot be if he had not come to New York and went to Kansas instead? He’d be Van Johnson, right?

In the New York Daily News, June 5, 1962, Charles McHarry, in his syndicated column, “On the Town”, said

Zero Mostel’s long-time buddy, painter Ngoot Lee, and pretty Sutiluck Kongkatong, a Siamese, were married Sunday at Zero’s house in Manhattan.

For the Friendship Press, Lee illustrated the 1962 book, Sun Hee and the Street Boy. 

Two years later he illustrated The Boy Who Couldn’t Talk, another Friendship Press book. 

Lee was in a group exhibition at De Mena Gallery which advertised in The Village Voice, December 16, 1965. 

At some point Lee retired and lives in Chinatown.

Further Reading and Viewing

Memories of NYC Chinatown, photographs of Ngoot Lee

Seesaw: A Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks (1979)

Freehand: An Intimate Portrait of the New York Art Scene in Its Golden Years by a Remarkable Woman Who Lived, Loved, and Painted It (1981) 

Conversations with Joseph Heller (1993)

From Here to Absurdity: The Moral Battlefields of Joseph Heller (1995)

Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller (2011)

Anne Bancroft: The Life and Work (2017)

Bronx Banter, The Group of the Oblong Table (aka The Chinese Gourmet Club)

Ben Mitchell Art

Huff Post, Midnight at the Rickshaw Garage

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Lee Ti, Waiter and Artist

New York Herald, October 23, 1910

The Unsuspected Wits of Some Waiters

... Brawn, however, was not exactly what I was searching for. Was there no Waiter Artistic to be found among the greater deserts of the New York dining room?

Yes; he was discovered presently, an ivory, tint Oriental of the name of Lee Ti, consecrated for some few months to art—while his savings held—but recently the servitor of chop suey and other confections at the Mon Far Low, which is Loo Lin's and is in Chinatown.

Lee Ti is small and quick moving, and has shining Oriental eyes, bright as lizards. He will tell you (although you must be very diplomatic to tempt his confidence) that he has been here since he was a boy. He once was wealthy, but his material estate has fallen, though he bears his cross and his noodles more cheerfully than might most of us. 

He paints now (or in some spare moments of waiting) delicate, flat toned pictures. And when he speaks of them something beacons from his eyes. Then you know that he has a theory, and you learn that he has a mission,

“The weakness of the Western and the Eastern artist,” says he, with his specific but irreproducable [sic] dialect, “is that each refuses to consider the possibilities of beauty in the other’s art, and in so doing shuts his eyes to the possibility of a universal art—an art as broad as humanity—and therefore to a greater art than any which has gone before.

“Now, each of the arts has beauties of its own which the other fails to suggest. About the Western art is a vibrancy, a movement, a warmth perhaps lacking in that of China or Japan. But the Eastern art, on the other hand, has a broad simplicity, a delicacy, which even your greatest masters have not approached.

“In manual dexterity, too, the Eastern artist is far beyond his Western brother. The Westerner even affects to despise it, though when he christens it ‘technique’ he plods after it in a crude way of his own. But I prefer to call it ‘manual dexterity,’ and it is far more important to creative result than even the greatest of technicians conceive it to be.

“It represents the difference between subtlety and its opposite, between the responsive and the unmoving. Think of the magical touch of the Easterner, who, without pencil, does everything unerringly with one small brush. Then compare him and his mechanical results with the Western painter, aided by his dozens of brushes, all used for greater mechanical ease. 

His Art Chat.

The Waiter Artistic paused smilingly, after the bland ways of his race, and resumed:—

“I spoke about simplicity. In painting our race looks at nature more simply than does yours. We look in simple flats, you look in intricate ‘rounds.’ To merge, say, a sky with land you grade imperceptibly; we merge more effectively by arrangement. Up to the present your greatest artists have been those who have studied the art of looking simply at things, though even the greatest of them look far less simply than do the artists of our race.

“On the other hand, we can learn much in perspective from you, much intensity, much in warmth and much in characterization. I see these things—I who am Chinese and American too—and I am trying to incorporate the beauties of each art and unify it in

another. I shall have introduced a broader art, a greater art, a universal art, to the world.”

Lee Ti, too, drifted out, to be (who knows?) acclaimed in some hundreds of years as one of earth’s great originators, from the germ of whose idea the fruit of progress has come. ...

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(Next post on Wednesday: Ngoot Lee, Artist, Cook and Charter Member of the Group of the Oblong Table aka Chinese Gourmet Club aka Gourmet Eating Club aka Chinese Gourmet Society)