The world has converged on the Eastside in the past 20 years, and as usual, preening Seattle hipsters are the last to know. Many (and I confess I’ve been one) still picture Bellevue and its neighbors as bland, homogenous strip mall and cul-de-sac nowheresville — “a yuppie, upscale, white-bread suburb,” as the marketing director of Cellophane Square called Bellevue in 1994, after his company deigned to open a store there in 1985. In 2011, a Seattle songwriter named Igor Keller updated the stereotype in an album entitled “Greater Seattle”: “Yuck, Bellevue! It’s such a soulless place! Yuck, Bellevue! They’re enemies of the whole human race!”
The cul-de-sacs and strip malls are still there, along with much more opulent malls and enough outsized SUVs to make a Subaru-driving Seattleite feel like a Tonka truck at a big-wheel rally. But the people living, shopping and riding in them hardly match the stereotype. It turns out that many people from Shanghai, Chennai, Moscow, Mogadishu and most points in between want the same things that drew upwardly mobile native-born Americans out from the teeming cities to the greener suburbs in past decades: bigger, newer houses; spacious yards; safety or the perception of it; and, above all, good schools for their kids.
In the white-flight years of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, those amenities were reserved for those with names like Bailey and Roberts, or at most, Bernstein and Rossi. Today, the allure endures, but with a very different complexion.
Conrad Lee was an early adopter of the immigrant suburban ethos. He came to the States from Hong Kong in 1958 – one soul in the mid-century “forgotten wave” of Chinese immigrants – moved to Seattle in 1962 and became an engineer at Boeing. In 1967 he crossed the lake to Bellevue and never left. In 1994, he was elected to Bellevue’s city council. Today, he is its mayor.
