Every great artist has a story. Gloria Lee's story is similar to many children of the 1940s born to immigrant parents. Her mother was from Holland, Netherlands and her father was from Shanghai, China. They met at Cornell University in upstate New York where they fell in love. This union of two cultures was not celebrated and they struggled to find a minister to marry them. Eventually they were wed and went on to start a family. Gloria, the middle child was born in 1946. Soon after the Lee family moved to the west coast in hope to find a more liberal acceptance of interracial families.