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Remembering Our Merry Prankster

Victor Keung Wong at home in the late 90s.

By Lia Chang

Victor Keung Wong was a fine artist, a visionary photojournalist, a consummate stage actor and a successful Hollywood character actor. Charismatic, contemplative, funny, insightful and profoundly spiritual, he was a trailblazer for Asian Pacific Islander American broadcast journalists — an APIA Leonard Zelig who traveled the currents of post-war American life: the Beat Generation, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War Era and the Asian American movement.

Wong was enigmatic and fearless onstage in the early 80s, the seminal period of the APIA cultural scene in San Francisco and New York. His life was as colorful as the characters he portrayed. An ancient Chinese mystic, a Ronan-like character who embodies the samurai guard spirit, a wacky Zen monk and a completely westernized Chinese American physics professor are just a sampling of the characters he played in theater or film during the 1980s and 90s.

But for all the history that Wong had experienced and witnessed first hand, the last — and perhaps saddest — national event he faced was the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, thousands of miles away from ground zero. On Sept. 12, the morning after the Twin Towers collapsed, Wong died in his sleep at his home near Locke, in the Sacramento Delta in California. He was 74.

A second generation Chinese American, Victor Wong was born in San Francisco on July 31, 1927. He was the eldest son of the late Sare King Wong, a Chinese calligrapher, journalist, poet and advisor to Chiang Kai-Shek, Taiwan’s president at the time. His mother Alice taught at a Chinese language school. When Wong was 3, his family moved to Locke to open a school in nearby Courtland for the children of Chinese farmers and laborers. The Wongs returned to San Francisco three years later. He spent his childhood in the bachelor society of Chinatown. In his late teens, under the influence of his mother, who had been educated in China by Southern Baptist missionaries, he studied the Bible and wanted to become a minister. Stricken by tuberculosis in his youth, he spent a few years in a sanatorium. Isolated from his family and from his Chinatown community during his stay at the hospital, he grew introverted.

Constantly on a spiritual journey, Wong was the radical black sheep of the family. His father was the unofficial mayor of Chinatown who hoped that his eldest son would follow in his footsteps. But Victor had the soul of an artist.

Wong attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in political science and journalism. He began his acting career in San Francisco’s community theater, where he attended a workshop conducted by the drama teacher Viola Spolin. She thought Victor was brilliant and recommended him to her son Paul Sills, founder of Chicago’s Second City Comedy Troupe, where Wong worked with Sills, Barbara Harris and Alan Arkin.

While in Chicago with Second City, he continued his studies at the Graduate School of Theology on a fellowship at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of religious scholars Paul Tillich, Rheinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber.

A contemporary of the Beat poets, Wong was one of Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters” and chummed around with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He went on the road with Jack Kerouac and was the inspiration for the “Arthur Ma” character in Kerouac’s Big Sur. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore was the setting for Wong’s first exhibit in the 1950s while still a student under Mark Rothko at San Francisco Art Institute. Wong earned his master’s in art in 1962.

According to his sister Shirley Wong-Frentzel, a professional musician, “Victor converted the basement of our house into an art studio with no windows. Living like a hermit, he painted abstracts with monster faces in oils by bulb light to the rhythm of jazz and blues. His images were dark and sinister and his major influences were Oskar Kokoshka and German Expressionism.”

From 1968 to 1974, Wong worked on the daily Newsroom program on San Francisco’s public television station, KQED, as one of television’s first Chinese American broadcast photojournalists. Seeing Victor’s presence on the air encouraged Emmy award-winning TV news reporter-producer Christopher Chow, the first APIA on a major network commercial station in Northern California (KPIX San Francisco, 1970), to pursue a career as a broadcast journalist.

Chow related, “The other Asian Americans on the air or working in TV at the time included Mario Machado (KHJ Los Angeles, 1967), Sam Chu Lin (Kool Phoenix, 1968), Ken Kashiwahara (KHVH Hawaii, 1969), Barbara Tanabe (KOMO Seattle, 1970), Suzanne Joe (KGO San Francisco, 1970), Connie Chung (WTTG Washington DC, 1971) and Willie Kee, who broke the barrier in 1970 at Oakland’s KTVU-TV as a cameraman, producer and writer.”

In 1999, the Chinese Historical Society of America honored Wong. At the gala benefit honoring Chinese American broadcast pioneers, Chow noted, “Victor Wong created the photojournalistic essay genre — now popular on public television — in 1968 when he went to work for the seminal news and analysis program, Newsroom, on KQED-TV, Channel 9.

“The creator of that show, Mel Wax, uses the word ‘superb’ when talking about Victor Wong: ‘Victor Wong is a superb photographer who married pictures and music with his own on-air narration to create a special form of story that has inspired imitations and variations to this day on public television.’ Victor was the first to go out and cover assignments with his still camera and bring back photo essays, introducing them on camera in the studio, at the desk, narrating them, offering his closing comments and answering questions from the reporters. The photo essayists on today’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS owe Victor Wong the respect of the inventor. After Newsroom, he went on to work on experimental television programs like San Francisco Mix and a few others out of WNET.”

Wong documented the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Zodiac Killer and the Symbionese Liberation Army when Patty Hearst was with them.

After a bout with Bell’s palsy in the late ’70s, Wong left the journalism world and returned to the stage. He appeared in Genny Lim’s Paper Angels and Philip Kan Gotanda’s Dream of Kitamura at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco.

“I met Victor when the AATC produced Paper Angels,” said actor Dennis Dun. “Audiences were blown away by the intensity of his stage presence, his focus and his clarity. A power resonated from within him. It was exciting to be onstage with him. If you weren’t real on stage, he could blow you off the stage. In addition, doing Paper Angels was a way of reexamining his upbringing in Chinatown, and reconnecting to being Chinese American. We became really close. I even named my daughter Lia Victoria after him.”

In the early ’80s, Wong moved to New York City, where he appeared in the David Henry Hwang plays Family Devotions and Sound and Beauty, at the Public Theater. He also did a stint on the TV daytime drama Search for Tomorrow. Other stage credits include the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Hamlet, and the Broadway production of Plenty.

“Victor played leading roles in the theater, it was a great medium for him,” said Flower Drum Song playwright David Henry Hwang. “His natural talent and commitment to the moment made him a very truthful actor. I directed him in Dream of Kitamura in 1983 in San Francisco at AATC. Whenever there was a role for an older man in my shows, Victor was my choice. There was something very electric about his work.”

For Wong, acting was like a drug. In 1991, he was quoted as saying, “If I can’t act, I go crazy. I need it every day.”

In 1984, his film career got its jumpstart when, at age 57, he was cast in the made-for-TV movie Nightsongs after the director saw Wong on stage.

“I felt that Victor was my alter ego for a few years,” revealed director Wayne Wang, who gave Wong his breakthrough role as Uncle Tam in Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart that same year. Wang utilized the prolific actor in his independent features, including the comedy Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), where he played a New York gambling club owner who goes after his cuckold son’s rival with a meat ax; Life is Cheap…But Toilet Paper is Expensive (1990) as Old Chong and in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1993).

“We did four films together,” reminisced Wang. “Victor was very experimental and had this innocent child-like quality that is a part of me. I felt very close to him. When I read that Victor died and the last images he saw [were of] the coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center … I had the strongest feeling, the sense of the world not being the same.

“The evil part surfacing brought to mind another fateful date — on July 18, 1984, we were filming Dim Sum. It was late in the afternoon, and we couldn’t find Victor anywhere. We found him sobbing like a child. He had just heard about the Hamburger Massacre shooting in San Ysidro on the radio. Forty-one-year-old James Huberty had walked into a McDonald’s restaurant with three loaded weapons and started slaughtering people whose ages ranged from 4 months to 74 years. Twenty-one people died and 19 were wounded, giving the United States the biggest massacre in modern history at that time. It was one of the first situations where a crazy guy went postal. Victor was so emotionally affected. I had never seen him like that.

“Knowing that he died the day after the aftermath of the terrorist attacks brought to mind that he must have experienced some of the same intense sadness prior to his death.”

Wong’s rich legacy and life were showcased in the 1997 Sundance award winning documentary My America…or Honk if You Love Buddha (“On the Road,” AsianWeek, July 18 - 24, 1997), as he accompanied filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña on the road and served as her on-camera seer and narrator of the APIA experience in the United States. Wong was refreshingly candid about sharing his life and beliefs, his own interracial marriages and his multi-faceted career.

Wong gave up acting after two strokes and in 1999, he returned to his first love in art and painting, creating abstractions featuring humorous colorful characters with fantastic titles using a computer generated paint program. His paintings were featured in a one-man show at B. Sakata Garo gallery in Sacramento, California. In 2001 he was slated for a role in Kung Phooey to be shot in San Francisco. His brother Zeppelin took over the role.

Wong is survived by his wife Dawn Rose, his children Emily Wong of San Rafael, Calif., Anton Wong of New York City, Heather Wong-Xoquic of Davis, Calif., Duncan Wong of New York City, sister’s Sarah Anne Lum, Shirley Wong-Frentzel, Betty Anne Wong and brother Zeppelin Wong, all of San Francisco, and grandchildren Philip, Isa, Ian, Ciriaco and Tyler. His son, Lyon Wong, died in 1986.

Victor Wong will be celebrated on October 21st, when a public memorial service led by Sojun Roshi from the Berkeley Zen Center will be held at the First Unitarian Church at 1187 Franklin St (near Geary) at 2 p.m. in San Francisco. nt>

To find out more about My America... Honk if You Love Buddha, go to www.pbs.org/myamerica/

Reach Lia Chang at lia@liachanggallery.net