Tag: Roots

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My Father’s Family

Wong Hing Chong (aka Wong Yep Cheung), c. 1915; paternal grandfather of Leslie Wong (from a photo scanned by my sister, Alberta Mayo)
Wong Hing Chong (aka Wong Yep Cheung), c. 1915; paternal grandfather of Leslie Wong (from a photo scanned by my sister, Alberta Mayo)

My paternal grandfather, Wong Hing Chong (aka Wong Yep Cheung), was born in 1861 Baisha town (白沙镇), a township in Taishan city (台山市) in Guangdong province, China. He died in Phoenix, Arizona, ca 1930.

I’m lucky to know this because in 2008, my Uncle Bobby, (my father’s youngest brother, Robert B. Wong), spent considerable time doing family research at the National Archives in San Francisco. Uncle Bobby was researching his father’s (my paternal grandfather’s) paper trail of documentation for travel to China from the US. Wong Hing Chong had a general store and lived in Clifton, Arizona. It wasn’t a trivial thing, because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Geary Act of 1892.

My father, Honki L. Wong, was the oldest son of the eight children of Wong Hing Chong. My father had four brothers, John, Joe, Jimmy and Bobby and three sisters, Frances, and Rose.

Wong Hing Chong in his general store, Clifton, Arizona (from a photo scanned by my sister, Alberta Mayo)
Wong Hing Chong in his general store, Clifton, Arizona (from a photo scanned by my sister, Alberta Mayo)

This is part of the text of the summary that Uncle Bobby wrote for us:

“Evidently, our father (grandfather, great grandfather, etc.) immigrated to the United States in 1882, which was the year the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. According to Joseph Sanchez, Archives Technician who assisted me in the research, Dad probably arrived just before the Exclusion Act was implemented (passed in 1882 and initially enforced from 1882 thru 1884). Before the Act, foreigners, including Chinese, needed very little documentation to come to the US; they literally just walked off the boat. This must have been the situation with Dad. There is no information on which ship he came on, or other information prior to 1906 since many records were destroyed in an Angel Island fire in 1884. So Dad’s sojourn begins in 1906 when he applied for permission to go back to China for a visit.“

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Joel Siegel

Film critic Joel Siegel died today. He was significant in my life because he interviewed me in 1976. Years later, as a photographer for ABC, I ended up working with Joel when he did his ABC 20/20 interviews. I photographed him with such luminaries as Eddie Murphy and Andrew Lloyd Weber.

In the fall of 1975, I had been living in New York for only a few months. My mom called to tell me that she had obtained visas for us to go to China, as “Overseas Chinese“. She hadn’t been back to China since she left in the 40’s. President Ford and Henry Kissinger were going to China in December. So were my mom and I.

In 1976, Alex Haley had just published Roots: The Saga of an American Family and Smithsonian Magazine published my roots story in April. I got a call from Joel. He had read the piece and he wanted to do a “roots” story for WABC.

All I can remember was that I was living in a studio in 4th floor walk-up at 21 W. 76th St. The cameraman came huffing up the stairs into my apartment, looked around and said, “This is a great place, where’s the rest of it?” Joel looked at my photographs and asked me about my family. I made an audio recording of the interview when it aired – this was before VCRs – and Roger Grimsby did the intro. Years later when I was working with Joel, I never reminded him that he had once interviewed me.