Wongs Of Riverside
The Family of Voy and Fay Wong - Riverside, CA
We never knew our grandfather (Yeh Yeh) since he died long before we were born. We knew he lived in San Bernardino and ran a general store. My mom said he died of diabetes “hem nell” (sweet urine). Every year, around Easter time which coincided with the Chinese custom of Ching Ming, (haang tan), we would go with our dad to the Mt. View Cemetery in San Bernardino to put flowers on grandfather’s grave. Dad would open up his car trunk and there would be a lovely bouquet of flowers and 13 individual flowers, I remember red carnations. After placing most of the bouquet on grandfather’s grave (he gave a small portion to the adjacent grave) he would ask us kids to go find other Chinese headstones and place a single carnation on each grave. It was like a fun game for us to try to find all the headstones.
