A Critical Mass: Hope @ St. Hope
- Flo Oy Wong

Rice Sacks for the People
- Barbara Hatchett

Angel Island History
- William Wong

Flo Oy Wong: Storyteller and Cultural Worker
- B. Stephen Carpenter, II

Flo Oy Wong: Honoring
- Jan Rindfleisch

Art AsiaPacific Review
- Collette Chattopadhyay

Baby Jack Rice Story
- Terri Cohn

Flo Oy Wong Saves Lives
- Joy Ritchie

Bill Whisp Essay
- Bill Whisp

A Chinese Griot
- Kim Curry-Evans

Telling Untold Stories
- Melanie Anne Herzog

Flo Oy Wong Saves Lives

Joy Ritchie
Professor of English and Women's Studies
University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Flo Oy Wong saves lives. For twenty five years she has reclaimed the erased and invisible stories of people whose histories and experiences would be lost were it not for her artistic representations. Her art gives voice to the silent lives of individuals: Gee Theo Quee, her mother, who entered the U.S.A. at Angel Island in 1933 as her father's "paper sister"; "Baby Jack," Ed Wong, her husband, who grew up in Georgia in the 1930's and 40's in a multiracial segregated community; Elsie Mayeda Honda, who was sent home from a school party at a local club because she was Japanese and who, in 1942, was sent with her family from their flower nursery in Richmond, California to a Japanese internment camp; and even the more well-known scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was imprisoned by the U.S. government for 278 days on charges of mishandling sensitive nuclear weapons data. These are just a few of the lives Flo Wong has reclaimed from invisibility and silence.

Flo Wong retrieves lives and places them before us using media that highlight the cultural perspective of her subjects and herself as artist. Rice sacks dyed in tea, peeling discarded suitcases, fading photographs, yellowed letters and postcards, all of these remind viewers that lives are collages of ephemera and that histories are always constructed of available materials. In made in usa: Angel Island Shhh these material objects are revitalized through embroidery, beading, stitching, photography and writing. In 1942: Luggage from Camp To Home Flo weaves the artifacts together with thematic threads that she has drawn from listening carefully to the stories of the Japanese Americans who were her co-creators in this project. In each series Flo Wong reaffirms the generative creative potential of memory and of collaboration between subject and artist in artistic production.

Although Flo Wong's art places before the viewer the experiences of numerous individuals, it also provides crucial lessons about United States history, law, and public policy. Gee Theo Quee's story in Flo Wong's made in usa: Angel Island Shhh series teaches viewers about the Chinese Exclusion Act and its consequences in the lives of thousands of individuals and their families who were kept out of the U.S., deported, or forced to devise elaborate schemes in order to reunite their families. The Baby Jack Rice series reveals the economic and social interaction of Chinese Americans, African Americans, and Euroamericans in the racially segregated South during the 1920's and 30's. In Georgia, Chinese American immigrants who had built the transcontinental railroad came to rebuild the Augusta canal system and later became essential contributors to the community. The story of Elsie Mayeda Honda and many other Japanese Americans whose lives are represented in the installation, 1942: Luggage from Home To Camp, brings into public view the consequences of U.S. government Executive Order 9066 and the resulting relocation of Japanese American to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and other internment camps.

With rice sacks embroidered in red and blue proclaiming the secrets of Chinese American immigrants hanging on the stark shadowed walls of the Ellis Island Immigration Center at Ellis Island, New York or with worn suitcases in a reconstructed barrack at the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, her artistry presents an insistent and haunting spirit about the importance of remembering, not just for the sake of remembering, not for the healing it can bring, but to provide a lens with which to view current laws and public policies and an admonition not to remain blind to the consequences for individual lives.