Lela Lee created the Angry Little Asian Girl back in 1994. It started as a short video she made after viewing offensive cartoons at an animation festival. After she put the short video together in a video class at UC Berkeley, she was embarrassed by its' candor and scared of the social reproach she would face as a female expressing "impolite" thoughts. So she hid it in a drawer and there it stayed. Years later, while she was stuck behind the counter of her mom's dry cleaners, she pulled out the video and drew more episodes of the Angry Little Asian Girl to make it into a collection of 5 (un)animated episodes. It first screened at American Cinemateque, where audience members came up to her to tell her that the "Angry Little Asian Girl" said all the things they were bottling up inside. Critics from the LA Times and LA Weekly gave "Angry Little Asian Girl" glowing reviews. Lee had the idea to make t-shirts, so on a credit card, she made her first batch of shirts and sold them out of the trunk of her Toyota Corolla station wagon. Business was brisk, prompting her to trademark and launch www.angrylittleasiangirl.com in 1998 as an online store and also to self-publish comics drawn about topics that made her angry. She also selected an angry posting of the week chosen from entries readers wrote in to her website. With all her buzz, she was still getting rejections from mainstream publishers and she noticed women of all races knew what it felt like to suppress their anger, so she changed the name from "Angry Little Asian Girl" to "Angry Little Girls." "Angry Little Girls" served as an umbrella name for all her characters, much like "Peanuts" is the umbrella name for the star character, "Snoopy." The name change worked and Lee was finally published in April 2005. Two months later, without any marketing, her first book went into it's 4th printing. More books followed and Lee grew "Angry Little Girls®" into a popular line of merchandise and books sold in malls across America, and items with the "Angry Little Asian Girl®" were always the best-selling. In addition to cartooning, Lela works as an actress on television. films and commercials. Lela was series regular Jodi Chang on the SciFi show "Tremors." She recurred on "Scrubs" and "Growing Up Fisher." She made guest appearances on shows such as "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Charmed," and "Felicity." On November 13, 2016, Lela will guest star on the hit TV show "Shameless." This year 2016, Angry Little Asian Girl®" will celebrate 22 years. Lela is married and has 2 wonderful kids.
