Wayne Ng
Wayne C. Ng was born in Lynwood and grew up at the Eng Association. He served as president in 2016-17. He is also in the leadership of the National Eng Convention and the World Eng Convention, as well as with the Next Generation Group. Wayne is an attorney.Susan Dickson and Susie Ling interview Wayne Ng June 17, 2023. Wayne speaks about his relationship with the Ng Association and touches upon various themes important to their experience.
Origins of Ng Family Association
“My name is Wayne Ng. I was born in Lynwood, California. In the United States, of course. Background… I’m an attorney by trade and practice immigration law. I’ve been doing that for over 20-something years now. My affiliation with the Ng Family Association started when I was very young, probably in the late seventies. I just remember going to parties, we used to go to like Halloween parties. All I remember was going upstairs and then I discovered later on that it was actually a rented room on Chung King Road. So that property, I guess, was owned by the CCBA or one of the CCBA people, and they rented that to us. I believe that started in around 1977. So in terms of the Ng family here in Los Angeles, I believe that they informally got together, you know, pretty early on, probably like in the sixties and seventies, but officially they didn’t start anything–like trying to start a group–until about ’74. The reason why it’s around that time was in ’72, I believe that the international convention in New York was being held and one of the representatives came out to Los Angeles with some other L.A. area people they knew to solicit funds, you know, to get money for the convention, even though we didn’t have an association here yet. That’s kind of how they started. Then the people in L.A. said they expressed to national this interest in forming a group here in L.A. because they knew there were Ngs in the area, even though there was no formal affiliation or group yet, but they were interested in forming a group. Now, I guess in terms of the history, I don’t know how long the Ng Family Association in the United States was. I understand it was probably early 1900s starting Seattle, spread to New York and San Francisco. So that’s kind of how it spread out. But L.A. is a very new and recent in terms of the overall history of the Ng family, so that’s like the seventies.”
Timestamp: [00:00:43]
Legend of the Ng Family Patriarch
“Actually, the Ngs are, I mean, in terms of history, if you’re talking about legend. Legend is we all… Our family association, even though in English we call ourselves the Ng Family Benevolent Association… Of course, that’s very benign, right? That doesn’t sound like very evil or anything like that. Like the Tongs, you know, that’s like gangs and stuff. But, our Chinese name is the Eng Suey Sun Association. That’s the Cantonese transliteration of Eng Suey Sun. If you look at this, if this is Eng Suey Sun, now you notice Sun, this is the mountain symbol. It’s actually a mountain. This is Suey. We all kind of trace our heritage to this one famous ancestor, right? His name is Eng Suey or Wu Zixu. Apparently, the legend is, you know, he had served under many kings during either the fifth or sixth century B.C. in China. He ended up being under the service of the Wu king. Not our Ngs, but the other Wu. He had served as a general and advisor for this other family, this Wu Kingdom. But for whatever reason, he fell out of favor with one of the successor kings. Then he had warned about some kind of action, and then the king, in his anger, ordered him to kill himself. The legend is, before he did so, he said, “Do one thing. Gouge my eyes out when I’m dead. Hang them on the gates of your thing, so I could watch the other army come in and conquer your kingdom” because he had warned of this impending doom if you didn’t listen. Sure enough, you know, a decade later, they were conquered by this other family, so the legend kind of came true. Apparently, Wu Zixu or Eng Suey Sun, it’s kind of a folk hero for like loyalty in China. A matter of fact, there are other parts of China that have like temples or shrines that celebrate this person, even though they’re not related to the, you know, to the Ng family. They revere him for his loyalty and service and stuff like that. But apparently, when he killed himself, the king had ordered his body to be just discarded into the river, the ocean. The villagers, I guess the people that live in the area, they did respect him for his council, so they erected this shrine. All this Ng family throughout the world, actually, we followed this name, this Eng Suey Sun, after the shrine. Honestly, there is actually no shrine anymore where supposedly he was buried, but there are other shrines in China. I’ve never visited it. I’ve never been there, but I understand that there are other parts of China that have this thing.”
Timestamp: [00:18:54]
Goals and Feelings Towards Members of Ng Family Association
“That’s kind of interesting because, you know, listening to my father who was interviewed–I don’t know how long ago for a similar type of thing. That is actually done by our local… Actually, our youth in the Ng Family Association. I will share that with you later. He had the same things, you know, like the association was really just like camaraderie, you know, for like people. I guess, I don’t know if it’s… I mean, I can only speak from my perspective as a Chinese-American. I don’t know what this affinity is, but we’re attached to our name, and it’s kind of neat that we hang out with people with the same name. Like, I do know that other American families, they do, you know, Smiths get together, Jeffersons. You know, stuff like that. They get together. We have a particular thing because we have no real familial relationship with them. We’re not the same family. Maybe some people are related somehow, but for the most part, we’re not related. They’re from different time periods, different parts of… Maybe even different villages, not necessarily the same villages and stuff. So you’re not related by blood, not directly anyways, or distantly, maybe. But you still feel this immediate affiliation with them, which is kind of neat. Like if I meet a new Ng, it’s like, “Oh, you’re an Ng!” You know, it’s not like you’re like family. It’s just, it’s very strange that way. You feel this kind of… Some level of trust with your family. Like, you wouldn’t hesitate to ask, like your family association people to do things that you would ask like your own family to do. Like, “Oh, I need to get a ride,” you know, “You need pick me up.” “I need help with my house,” or “Here are the keys to my house, can you go fix this?” You know, just give it to strangers, like just go into your house and do stuff. Somehow you just trust these people. Going forward is the difficult thing. I think looking at all organizations, just in general, is sustainability. You know, what is the future? How do you get new membership? That’s always been the challenge. Still is the challenge, was the challenge. My brother and I are very involved, whereas other children of other Ng family people are not so, and they have no interest. Many of them even speak much better Chinese than we do, you know, because at home they spoke Chinese, whereas we didn’t. We mostly spoke English at home. Going forward, it’s really to maintain these traditions, the history, and also to take care of the legacy that’s left by not only my own grandfather, who, through a lot of his efforts, was to raise the money for this. You don’t want it just to disappear, right? Then you’re also concerned about who would get it if it were to disappear, right? Those are real kind of real-world concerns that we have.”
Timestamp: [00:32:02]
Future of Ng Family Foundation Depends on The Youth
“Well, some of it is just the day-to-day stuff. We make sure that the business is getting taken care of. Just so the building survives, you know? You know, rent is collected, deposited, insurance is paid, the building is taken care of in terms of upkeep and stuff like that. The building, you know, it’s ’91 we built it. It’s an old building now, you know. The roof leaks just like everybody else’s roof leaks because it doesn’t rain in L.A. until when it does and everyone discovers they have leaks, right? Then, you know, just run, you know, things run down after a time, so just keeping those things. I think my brother and I are focused on that. I think for future membership, we’re just going to have to depend on our next–the other young people, the ones that are having their own children and stuff like that. I don’t have any children myself, but we do have many other younger members who are also children of other older members, who they themselves have children now, so hopefully they will bring them into the force.”
Timestamp: [00:36:32]
Involvement of Women in the Association
“It could be quite a bit more, like double that, easily. It’ll be a lot more families now. It’s a lot fewer families that come. Surprisingly enough, a lot of our most loyal members who come every month are our [00:39:07]Gu Po, [0.0s] the women that are born Ngs that, even though they married somebody else, they still come back because they are still welcome to our association, which is kind of unique to L.A. LA’s Ngs were a little bit more progressive that way. One, we had female leadership. We’ve had a president who’s a woman. New York, they don’t even allow–not New York–San Francisco, which is our national headquarters. They don’t even allow their women in their regular meetings. That’s still how backwards they are. I don’t know how to go about changing that. We kept… You know, San Francisco is just San Francisco.”
Timestamp: [00:38:50]
Chinatown Organizations Working Together
“Well, see, like many people in Chinatown, you wear multiple hats within the community. Like one of our prominent members is Peter Ng. He was a past president. He’s also one of our national elders of the Ng Family Association, which means he had held my title as a national president before he became an elder. He’s the executive director of the Chinatown Service Center, which is a very important organization within L.A. Chinatown. He, obviously, through his organization, he’s promoting their interests as well as the community interests, as well as elder, you know, issues and stuff like that in the community. I guess by extension, that’s how we also push the Ng agenda too, you know, just like because you know, what’s good for Chinatown is generally good for all our members, generally speaking. We’re also involved with CCBA, obviously. We support leadership with current projects that they’re trying to support right now as well. We also have one of our members is actually the current… I don’t know what the… I guess in English would be like a chair of the cemetery committee because as you’re aware, CCBA has the Chinese cemetery out in East L.A. It’s in a weird place, right in between the freeway. The Chinese cemetery, it’s the CCBA that manages that, so he’s responsible for kind of managing that, which is a very prominent position, partly because they do manage a lot of those… I mean they have trust funds that are quite large, which is also good because he happens to be a CPA too, because there’s, you know, in Chinatown there’s always rumors of mishandling, misappropriation, you know, those kind of things, you know, it’s kind of historical, you know, just with Chinese people, you know, when anyone’s watching money, you always have to have many people overseeing it, which is funny, like because, you know, I was a past president of Chinese American Citizens Alliance too. We were talking, looking at the traditional roles that like CACA had. They actually had three auditors. Can you believe that? You have three auditors because two is not good enough. You need three of them. You don’t trust one, you don’t trust two, you need three.”
Timestamp: [00:54:25]