Wongs Of Riverside
The Family of Voy and Fay Wong - Riverside, CA
Fay Wong (Lee Fay Hing) was born in the Lee village of Wan Hong, Qau Hung Li, Toisan, Guangdong, China on September 5, 1917. She was the first born of Lee Nan Gan and Wong Tuei Seng. Fay’s father had immigrated to Canada and was able to send for his wife and child. Fay’s mother, a strong woman who was clever and practical held the societal belief that boys were more valuable than girls. She decided to take her nephew to Canada and left her 4 year old daughter Fay behind with her mother-in-law, (Lee) Ng Oi Hai, Fay’s paternal grandmother. Fay never forgave her mother for this abandonment.
Fay did have the opportunity to attend school as her parents sent money home to educate her. She attended up to the eighth grade when her mother decided to stop sending money home for her education. Fay remarked that her mother stopped educating her because she was a girl and that girls become “the other family’s person,” when they get married.
Widowed now with several Canadian born children to raise, Fay’s mother needed to get Fay married off as soon as she became of age at 17 years old. A matchmaker arranged her marriage to a Wong Gan Voy (Voy Wong) from the neighboring Wong village. Fay never spoke to or met her future husband prior to the wedding ceremony. The other girls told her he was short and had acne which was true when she got a sneak peek of him from a distance before the wedding. It was the custom for the bride to spend the night before the wedding at a community center (like a YWCA). Fay cried her eyes out that night. The next day she rode the wedding sedan chair from her village to his.
Fay’s grandmother told her she hoped to live long enough to see Fay married. She got her wish and died shortly after. Fay thought her grandmother had stomach cancer due to her bloated stomach. Her grandmother lay in the village home for several days despite the smell. A year after she was interred, her grandmother was then exhumed and the bones were wired together in an upright position, placed in an urn and then re-interred.
Fay married Voy Wong on February 27, 1934 and within a short time Voy left for Guangzhou (Canton) to study to be a chiropractor with another Gom Benn Villager, Dr. Siem. Voy was sickly, lacking energy for his studies and he was tired of his mother’s tight hold on the money from America so he decided to to seek his fortune by joining his father and brother in America. As was the custom, Voy left Fay to live with and take care of his mother, Lee See Yung.
Separated by the Japanese invasion of China and World War II, it would be 10 years before Fay would see her husband again and immigrate to America. These were difficult years for Fay because she was the second daughter-in-law and treated like a servant by her tyrannical mother-in-law and unsympathetic sister-in-law, Soo Hing. She would get up early in the morning and gather dried grass from the hills for fuel to start the fire in the brick stove. She fetched water from the well, cooked and cleaned. With her small allowance, Fay had to ask for spending money. She managed by being very frugal and a savvy businesswoman. She loaned money out with interest. With her growing capital, she bought small plots of land and then rented them out to sharecroppers. She also farmed the land herself and raised chickens and pigs.
The women did well enough to be considered landlords so that after the revolution, the communists tortured Soo Hing to get her to reveal where their hidden money was. See Yung told them it was buried in clay pots in the back yard. Both women and Soo Hing’s daughter, Mil were able to bribe an official to let them escape to Hong Kong and years later, all three immigrated to America.
