HOME AGAIN

Displaced by a horrible tragedy, two brothers find their way back to family by Steve Burgess

In the summer of 1980 in south central Los Angles eight years old  Daniel Fong was playing with some empty boxes on the floor of the Golden State Market, his parents store, when three man entered. One of them was carrying……

“ the guy asked for money,” Daniel recalls now. “ I think my mum was reaching for the money they kept under the counter. He shot her. My father ran ti her aid. He shot him, too.”

The police arrested John Wetly Hayes two days later. Hayes confessed to the murder of Leonard and Susan Fong, and to the murder of Ramond  Vasques, a man he had shot at a hamburger stand a few days before the Fong murders. He was given a death sentence for two of the murders, but n appeal, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the chance of parole.

After the murders, the question arose of who would look after Daniel and his brothers, Leonard, younger by four years. The two boys had been cared for by Ying-Ying, their paternal grandmother, and by Sui Tong Ng and “ Po-Po”, their maternal grandparents, who had arrived from Hong Kong the previous year.

chines tradition usually favors the father’s family, so when the boys were sent to life with Ying-Ying, they were unconcerned. “Ying-Ying was a part of my child-hood,” says Daniel.

What Daniel and Leonard didn’t realize, thought, was that they would not be staying with Ying-Ying. She had informed her daughter, Sue,and son -in-law, Tommy, that it would their responsibility to raise the orphans. “ it wasn’t a choice. It was duty”, Daniel says. “ And suddenly we were packed up and  rushed out. We showed up at the Toronto airport in the fall. It was a whole word that was new and miserable.”

Daniel and Leonard felt their new guardians were not happy with their burden. With three daughters and a young son  of their own, Tommy and Shu had to move  the family to a larger home in Mississauga to accommodate the boys. Within a couple of years, Ying-Ying passed away and Daniel and Leonard’s last link to the familiar was past gone. “ in our new home, we always felt like  we were  a hassle,” Leonard says. “ I remember being hit with a duster. It seemed as if we were punishedfor things their kids did. “ They’s say, you are stupid, you are teacher think you are stupid ”. if we were five minutes late for dinner, we did not eat.”

Unlike the couple’s own children, Daniel and Leonard were never given keys to the house. If Daniel got home after 10pm, the door would be locked. He would sleep at a friend’s house or spend the night skateboarding with other rootless kids. “ I was growing up on a skateboard, “ Daniel says.

Daniel and Leonard learned about loving families from friends. It was revelation. “ they had keys, their parents cooked and left food for them, “ Leonard says. ‘We matched it up with our own lives and knew something was not right.”

Finally, in1989, when Daniel was 17, after an argument with his uncle, he left the house with his skateboard and the clothes on his back , and he never returned.

For the next few month, Daniel stayed at a friend’s house. When he turned 18, he came into his share of his parents……. For the next five years, Daniel bounced between Ontario and the West Coast before finally ending up a student at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art Design. Leonard’s turn came when he was 16. After yet an other fight, he, too, moved in with a friend’s family. Two years later, Leonard joined Daniel in British Columbia and completed high school three. Within a few years, he decided to travel the world, and met Jenifer, who became his girlfriend, in Venica. He returned to Canada, where he studied photography for two years at Sheridan College, than moved to New York, too, and began working for the UN.

One day in September 2009, Leonard idly punched his name into Google. The information that popped up was not about himself but his father, Leonard Fong, Sr: a document from the Supreme Court of California regarding the appeal of John Westley Hayes, the man who had killed his parents. It was a name Leonard had never known, and the first time, he read the details of the crime. The document has contained another surprise: there had been a third shooting victim in the store that day. Her name was Yuk Chun Wong.

Leonard was stunned: Yuk Chun Wong was his maternal  grand mother-the woman the boy knew as Po-Po so many years ago. Hayes had shoot her in the hip when she moved to help her daughter.

“was she there?” Leonard asked his brother. Daniel had no memory of it.

Jennifer came up with a surprise birthday present for Leonard. Searching databases and Chinese cemetery  records in the Los Angeles area, she found a copy of the Fong’s death certificates. On them was the location of their East LA burial plots, sa well as the address of the old family house. In October 2009 Leonard decided  to travel west alone to visit their graves, “ just to get some inner peace”, he says. First, Leonard visited the two plots in the Chinese cemetery in East LA, then, with the address of the old family home in hand, he headed over to take a look.

The place looked just as he remembered it. But, he wondered, what about the old gazebo and koi pond he used to play besides a child? surely the current occupants would not mind if he had a look around. He stopped up on the porch and knocked on the door. A window opened. A women’s voice said something in Chinese ” I used to lived here,” replied Leonard in English, pointing to the ground. “ when I was four years old.”

There was a pause. “ Daniel?” the woman asked.

“ Daniel is my brother. I’m Leonard.” Inside the house, there was shouting and commotion. The door flew open. Two women stood there, crying. “ I’m your aunt,” one said. “ there is your Po-Po.”

They pulled Leonard inside and, in a rush, almost 30 years of history spilled out: after the shooting, by the time Po- Po come out of hospital, the estate of her daughter and son-in-law had been liquidated and her two grandsons had been whisked away to Toronto. Ying-Ying had left a Toronto address, but when the family moved to Mississauga with the boys, the maternal relatives in California were not informed of the address change. Hampered by the language barrier, Po-Po and her husband, Sui Tong Ng, had completely lost touch with Daniel and Leonard.

However, at the estate sale, Sui Tong Ng had purchased the family house. Although their children wanted him and Po-Po to move, they were adamant about staying in the house, hoping that someday their grandsons would find their way back there. The house was almost as it has been when Daniel and Leonard had lived there so many years ago. “the kitchen looked exactly the same,” Leonard says. “ the wallpaper, everything.”

Leonard pulled out his phone and made a call to Vancouver. “ Daniel, he said, you will never guess where I’m standing right now .”

Po-Po produced a photograph of two boys, aged five and one. Excited calls were made and people came in the front door, the side door. All of sudden, the room was full of relatives, some from around the country. More than coincidence, Leonard believes it was destiny that brought him to that place at the moment.

The entire family was gathered there to mourn, as Sui Tong Ng had been buried just the day before. So, in death, the boys grandfather, who had kept the faith for so many years, had finally reunited his family.