“Life is like a cup of tea,” it reads. “It’s all how you make it.”

After years of working six or seven days a week in her one-woman Orchard on View sandwich shop, 71-year-old Mei Lee is finally putting her feet up.

Jack Knox in the Victoria Times Colonist, Oct 29, 2026

As an antidote to the huffing and puffing of the election campaign, meet Mei Lee.

Or, perhaps, meet her again.

We first ran across her in 2009, a tiny woman eking out a living in a tiny little soup-and-sandwich shop carved out of the side of the Bay Centre.

Back then, her Orchard on View Marketplace was barely hanging on, one of a handful of downtown businesses victimized by a spate of late-night drunken window-smashing. A $500 insurance deductible is enough to tip you over the edge when you’re only netting 30 cents, 50 cents, on a sale.

Mei vowed to keep going, though, because she had no choice. Navigating life without a map — her words — she was all alone save for the son she raised on her own. Sink or swim.

Today, you’ll be happy to learn, Mei is still afloat. You might be even happier to learn that after this Friday, having spent the past 22 years working six, seven days a week in that one-woman shop, the 71-year-old will retire.

Why is this a story? Because Mei Lee, her feet sore from all those years standing behind the display case, her aching bones reminding her of all those hours spent hunched over the counter making sandwiches, is a lesson in gratitude.

Nothing has come easily to her. She didn’t finish elementary school in Singapore, and had little English when she landed in Calgary, where an uncle lived, in 1977. She was 21.

She washed dishes in a Calgary hotel, married a man from Hong Kong, and gave birth to a boy, Ray, in 1981. By the time Ray was 1½, the husband was gone, and mother and son were all on their own.

A Newfoundlander convinced her that St. John’s would be a fine place to raise Ray, so she moved there for six years, baking pizzas for a living — though as Newfoundlanders migrated to a brighter future in the West, she decided that path would be best for Ray, too. They headed to Victoria in 1991.

Alerted by a friend in Newfoundland, a nun from the Sisters of St. Ann met them at the Victoria bus depot and took them to the Douglas Hotel, where they lived for three weeks until low-cost housing opened up.

Mei washed dishes at the Esquimalt dockyard for six months, then got hired by Oldfield Orchard on the Saanich Peninsula. She spent 12 years picking berries and apples there, moving to the farm’s roadside market as her English improved.

Bit by bit, she scraped together enough money to open Orchard on View in 2004.

She would rise at 5 a.m., head to the bakery, arrive at the shop by 7, stay until 6 p.m., and then go grocery shopping.

On Sundays, she would sleep in a bit, get up in time to go to church, then do a supply run before heading back to View Street to get ready for the week.

By 2018, when we checked in on her, she was serving cake to customers to celebrate the shop’s survival. “I want to say a big thank you to Canada that I have this opportunity.”

She said she was grateful to the Newfoundland neighbours who shovelled her walk when it snowed. She was grateful to Oldfield Orchard. She was grateful that Ray, now in New York, had worked hard in school, earned a business degree and become a good man who gave back to his community.

But then came the pandemic. “During the COVID time, 2020, all the little shops shut down — so difficult,” she said the other day.

She said she couldn’t have survived without the help of Bay Centre manager Darlene Holstein and her team, or of all her regulars from the neighbouring law firms and accounting offices.

“The community supported me.” Customers who were working at home would come downtown just to buy a bowl of soup.

Mei, in turn, became known for taking her leftover sandwiches to the Salvation Army or Our Place.

All that [is now] over. A nice young couple in their 20s will take over the Orchard on View space, selling frozen Greek yogurt.

Mei said she has catching up to do. “If God allows me to live to 90, I have 19 years left.”

She plans to spend the next 10 reconnecting with friends and family, including spending more time with her mother in Singapore.

She feels bad about not devoting more time to those relationships in the past, but “I had no choice — I had to put food on the table.”

As she talks, customers drop in for one last lunch and a hug. They tell her she’ll be missed. She tells them how grateful she is.

Affixed to the wall behind her is a fabric hanging. “Life is like a cup of tea,” it reads. “It’s all how you make it.”

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