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Douglas Lee thought he knew just about everything about the family business.

Since the late 1930s, the Lee family has sold insurance at 31 Pell Street in New York City's Chinatown. Their entrepreneurial roots in the Chinese-American community stretch back to 1888, when the Lees opened a grocery store at the same location.

One hundred twenty-five years later, the family's longstanding history in Chinatown is on display in a new exhibit at New York's Museum of Chinese in America.

When Lee and his sister Sandra started gathering artifacts for the exhibit, they pored over old business records stored in the family's safe. That's when Lee, a film and TV executive who has worked at HBO and 20th Century Fox, discovered his career in the entertainment industry is not such a divergence from the family business after all.

An old ledger book is one of the few remnants of the New York Chinese Film Exchange, a business venture founded by Lee's grandfather Harold in the late 1920s — and long forgotten by his descendants. The company distributed Chinese-language films to theaters serving immigrant moviegoers.

"Everybody's mind is a little bit blown," Lee says of his family's reaction to the recent discovery. "It's part of my family history that nobody really knew about or talked about until I did this research."

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Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and others from the GOP have spoken with NPR in recent years about why they believe the federal debt is the nation's "No. 1" problem.

The next state to legalize same-sex marriage may be Hawaii, where the state's Legislature will begin a special session on the issue Monday. The governor called the session so that lawmakers could consider the Marriage Equality Bill, which would allow same-sex couples to wed.

NPR's Nathan Rott reports for our Newscast unit:

"The gay marriage debate is nothing new to Hawaii. In 1990, gay couples who applied for a marriage license there helped start the national debate that resulted in the Defense of Marriage Act, the law that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.

"Proponents for same-sex marriage, including Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie, are trying to ride national momentum, pushing for legislation that would make Hawaii the 15th state to legalize gay marriage. They argue that the bill extends the state's Aloha spirit of equality and would spur tourism.

"Opponents of the bill have organized protests, saying that Hawaiian voters should decide the issue, not the state's lawmakers."

George Polk may have been born to make history. He was descended from the American president who led the conquest of Texas and much of the southwest. But for George, Texas was too small, says his brother, William Polk.

In the 1930s, "Texas was a little backwater at the time and very few people even knew where other countries were — what the names were, what the languages were that were spoken," William recalled. "And he had a tremendous sense of curiosity."

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