“I think I ate more than I sold.” That was Dr. James Yee Suen’s own accounting of his first job, at age five, standing watch over the candy at his parents’ grocery store in Dermott, Arkansas. He died November 4, 2026, in Little Rock, at 86, Legacy reported, closing a life that ran from a segregated Delta town to operating rooms in war-torn Ukraine.
Suen chaired the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences for 43 years and treated head and neck cancer patients for more than five decades. The story matters well beyond Arkansas: he trained more than a hundred residents and fellows, co-founded what is now the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, cared for President Bill Clinton, and in his 80s flew into Ukraine five times to operate on soldiers and children.
A Dermott childhood under the Chinese Exclusion Act
Suen was born October 9, 1940, in Dermott, in southeast Arkansas, one of nine children of Chinese immigrant grocers, Legacy reported. He arrived while federal law still barred Chinese immigration — the Chinese Exclusion Act had shut out Chinese immigrants for more than 60 years. His oldest siblings could not attend either the white or the Black schools in town, and the siblings who could enroll were the only students of color there.
His parents’ store was one of the few places in Dermott that served everyone, memoritree.com recounted, extending credit to sharecroppers and to Japanese people interned in nearby camps.
The car wreck that set his course
Medicine was not the original plan. In college, Suen stopped at a car wreck and helped pull people from the vehicle. Shaken, he told his sister Laura, a nurse, and she told him he ought to think about becoming a doctor. He protested that he was too dumb and too nervous. Her answer, preserved in the Legacy obituary: “I know you, and you could become one of those nervous and dumb doctors.”
He later described that exchange as the moment he discovered his purpose, reflecting a quote he cherished: “the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” His path led from the University of Texas at Austin to earning his medical degree from UAMS in 1966, completing an internship at San Francisco General Hospital, and serving two years as an Air Force captain throughout the Vietnam War.
Forty-three years at UAMS, famous patients included
Suen had hoped to follow his mentor, Arkansas heart-surgery pioneer Dr. Masauki Hara, into cardiac work. When Hara died of head and neck cancer, Suen switched to ENT out of love for his mentor, Legacy reported. Upon returning to UAMS, he became one of the initial two residents in the institution’s newly launched otolaryngology program, subsequently becoming the first otolaryngologist admitted to the head and neck fellowship at MD Anderson in Houston. At age 33, he came back to UAMS in 1974 and remained leading the division until May 1, 2017 — a span of 43 years that UAMS considers the longest tenure for any otolaryngology chair nationwide, memoritree.com noted.
With colleague Kent Westbrook he co-founded the Arkansas Cancer Research Center, now the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, directing it from 2002 to 2007. He wrote or edited six textbooks, served as president of the American Head and Neck Society, and treated patients whose names read like a ledger of American public life: President Bill Clinton, whom he traveled with on the 1992 campaign and visited in the White House; Roy Scheider of Jaws; Charley Pride; and Walmart co-founder Sam Walton. He was also a close friend of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
Five missions to Ukraine, and the “Medical Oscar”
In his 80s, Suen became consumed by Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. From 2023 through 2025, he undertook five surgical trips to the country alongside the Dallas-based LEAP Global Missions and the Christian Medical Association of Ukraine, treating pediatric patients with congenital deformities and military personnel suffering severe facial injuries, memoritree.com reported. During March 2023 at a Lviv hospital, the 82-year-old Little Rock surgeon removed a blood-vessel mass the size of a fist from an infant’s neck while preserving the surrounding nerves.
In early 2025 he brought Kyiv maxillofacial surgeon Yuri Chepurnyi to Little Rock for about a month of training in free-flap reconstruction — the microsurgery that rebuilds a face — because Suen knew of only one surgeon in Kyiv who could perform it. Ukrainian physician Rudi Myhovych later wrote of one of Suen’s operations: “That day changed how many of our doctors see what’s possible.”
After the Lviv trip, Dr. James Yee Suen said, “Since the war started, I have been watching and trying to understand. I was seeing the horrors of the war, and I always felt I wanted to do something to help Ukraine.”
In 2026 he received the Order of Saint Panteleimon, which his family described as Ukraine’s highest public recognition for service in medicine — often called the “Medical Oscar of Ukraine,” Legacy reported.
Suen’s final lecture honors life
Before two cancer diagnoses took his health, Suen had been scheduled to give a “Last Lecture” at UAMS. He prepared it, and Dr. Gresham Richter, the current chair of otolaryngology, presented it on his behalf. As it became clear he would not survive, the event became his celebration of life on October 29, 2026, surrounded by 400 family members, friends, doctors, and patients, Legacy reported.
Survivors include his wife Karen; his children Brent, Tiffany, Brad, and Brennan; his grandchildren Sophia, Vivian, Ethan, and Violet; and his sisters Mary and Judy, as listed in the memorials published by Legacy and echovita.com. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations go to the UAMS Department of Otolaryngology with “in honor of Dr. James Suen” in the gift comments.
He would still be going to Ukraine today if he could, his family said — which may be the truest measure of a man who spent five decades healing people other doctors had given up on.
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