Last year in December, San Francisco and the Asian American community lost one of its most genuine and unlikely political leaders when Mayor Edwin Mah Lee succumbed to a heart attack at age 65. It is simple to say that we all have but one life to live, no one, absolutely no one, has two, and that in choosing how to live that life we define what we take away or give back to the world we occupy for such a brief space and time.
I did not know Ed Lee when he grew up in a housing project in Seattle, the fourth child in a Chinese immigrant family. Nor did I know him as a scholarship student at Bowdoin College in Maine. In fact, I first met Ed when we were classmates at Boalt Hall School of Law, when I dropped by an apartment house in Berkeley to pick up some materials from his roommates, also Asian American law students who I knew from my 1st year. The first thing I noticed upon our introduction was his broad, good-natured smile, as if he were simply amazed to meet you, as a remarkable son or daughter of the universe.
In 1978, the year we overlapped at Berkeley, he interned at the Asian Law Caucus and represented residents of the Ping Yuen public housing complex, who were angry over unsafe and unsanitary conditions, in the first tenant rent strike against the San Francisco Housing Authority. 
That same year I worked on “special admissions” to try and find those earnest and promising Asian American undergrads out there who had potential to give back to the community once professionally trained. As fellow members of the Asian American Law Students Association, I learned firsthand of Ed’s diligent work ethic, his intellect and most of all, his integrity. Or maybe the most of all was his sense of humor (attorneys can be a dour crowd) which kept our social events lively.
After law school, Ed worked at the Asian Law Caucus (where I had also interned prior to entering law school), founded by mutual friends Dale Minami, Don Tamaki and others, and eventually became Executive Director. Ed’s chosen path was directly into legal advocacy and community work, while my own veered here and there towards public administration and in time to a career as a civil servant with the San Francisco Dept. of Public Health.
For those of us who came of age in the 60’s and 70’s and who were committed towards social change and the elimination of racism, sexism and poverty, the question always arose: Do I work “inside” or “outside” of the system? I’m not sure if such a binary view is helpful, and if instead, reality includes a more nuanced spectrum of choices from which to choose, but Ed did seem to start out a little more “outside” with his tenant’s rights lawsuits, then move (a bit later than myself) to the “inside” in his civil service career as administrator with the SF Human Rights Commission, SF Dept. of Public Works, and City Administrator’s Office.
In this application of our skills and social commitments, I felt Ed was a fellow traveler; when we occasionally ran into each other at Board of Supervisors meetings, etc., we’d flash the “brotherhood” grin, earnest outsiders who had become hard-working insiders.
And then about six years ago when I retired from City service into my current life as a poet and writer still working on Asian Pacific American issues, Ed’s life took a different arc; he unexpectedly was recruited for and reluctantly accepted the nomination to be Mayor of San Francisco, a decidedly more political and ultimate insider position. Some of you may know that Ed Lee of the past few years, as Mayor, politician and community leader. That is fine and true, but the man I remember spanned a long career from law school to fellow civil servant and beyond.
The last time I spoke with Ed was in 2011 a week after I retired. I was invited to the ground-breaking ceremony for the AIDS Research Center renovation project for which I’d been project manager, and Ed made a brief speech as interim Mayor. When I mentioned to him afterwards that I’d just retired, Ed flashed that always amazing grin, pleasantly surprised and happy for me, and said he looked forward to retirement too. The next month he won his first mayoral election, then came the challenges and successes of the next phase of his life.
Ed didn’t get that chance to enjoy his golf game and his family as a City retiree, but what he did accomplish was to live the one life he wanted to live, that of taking the goodness and love from family and community and in turn, returning it multiplied a thousand-fold to those in need of his dedicated service, intelligence and compassion. That is all anyone is given; not just one earthly life, but a choice to live it well which becomes for each, “the one life.”
And to this I say: Good job, my friend.