Paul Yee obtained a Bachelor's and master's degree in Canadian History from the University of British Columbia.
He has stated that his career as a writer is "a fluke" as it was Lorimer that approached Yee, wanting a knowledgeable person to create a book set in Vancouver's Chinatown neighborhood.
One of his books for children, Ghost Train, was adapted as a play by Betty Quan and performed by the Young Peoples Theatre in Toronto in 2001.
[12] In 2011, he created a poem to accompany the Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra's performance of an original composition by Jin Zhang.
[14] Three recently published monographs have featured chapters on Yee's publications; these include: Dr. John Z. Ming Chen's The Influence of Daoism on Asian-Canadian Writers (Mellen, 2008), prefaced by Dr. Yuhua Ji; Dr. John Z. Ming Chen's and Dr. Wei Li's A Study of Canadian Social Realist Literature: Neo-Marxist, Confucian, and Daoist Approaches (Inner Mongolia University Press, 2011); and Dr. John Z. Ming Chen's and Dr. Yuhua Ji's Canadian-Daoist Poetics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Springer, 2015).