Montville — Community members gathered Saturday afternoon to celebrate the life of John Y.K. Wong — a restaurateur and local cultural force.

John Wong, 93, who died in late June, lived in eastern Connecticut since 1947 and founded the Chinese and American Cultural Assistance Association as well as the Chinese American Business Association. The Montville businessman acted as a sort of mentor to many Chinese immigrants who moved to eastern Connecticut, helping them secure jobs and homes as well as health care and other services — long before the two casinos attracted Asians to the region by the thousands.

On Saturday, more than 60 family members and friends converged upon the Montville VFW at 91 Raymond Hill Road in Uncasville to remember John Wong. Pictures of him and those same family members and friends, among others, adorned poster boards adjacent to a podium. John Wong’s four children spoke to The Day about their father and eulogized him during the informal ceremony.

“He’d been in this county for 70 years,” son Nage Wong said Saturday. “He was almost like 'The Godfather.' All the Chinese people call him godfather. He’d help them find housing, whatever, they would go to him if they needed something.”

John Wong founded the cultural assistance association in 2007 to provide language assistance to new Asian residents and to help police and municipal governments with translation services.

“He was like the mayor of the Asian community,” John Wong’s daughter Namie Tedford said. “I honestly felt my father was invincible. I really didn’t think he’d ever die.”

“He had a quote,” Tedford’s brother Nage Wong interjected. “‘If I do good, everybody does good.’ He had a mission to open a big Asian American community center, to help the Asian American community, but my mother was sick, and he was there for her. He would not leave her side.”

John Wong's wife, Kally, predeceased him in 2017 at the age of 82.

Walter Wong used a different label for his father: “Ambassador.”

“He was like the ambassador of bridging the culture. You have to give credit to the major casinos that moved in here, they caused a surge of Asian cultures to come in here and what ended up happening was, they didn’t understand how things worked in Connecticut,” Walter Wong said. “My dad ended up being that bridge between the two. Everybody called my dad. They didn’t know who he was, but they’d call him, and they’d say, ‘Can you help me? I’ve got a trespassing citation,’ or something like that, because they didn’t understand how the laws worked. So my dad was always in the municipal courts trying to explain everything.”

Daughter Hallie Wong recalled when the casinos came to the region, John Wong lobbied for sidewalks along busy roads where workers walked to their jobs.

“We had a lot of people that worked at Mohegan Sun, and people were getting hit on their commutes to work. They were wearing all-black (work) uniforms. So these people came to my father and said, 'Can you help us?' Someone who was killed, their family couldn’t afford a funeral or even a casket. So he made that happen,” she said. “He got people to help them, gave them a funeral, gave them a casket. Then he said to himself, ‘I need to help more,’ and what he did was he went to the politicians and the townspeople and had them build sidewalks so workers could walk on sidewalks instead of walking on the road.”

In 2014, when the Norwich Rotary named John Wong as the recipient of its Lottie B. Scott diversity award, he said, "I've done quite a bit for the community, so maybe that's why they remember me."

At that same event, surrounded by political dignitaries, he lobbied state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, for improved home care access for Asian Americans.

In 2012, The Day reported on John Wong’s ardent efforts for a private bus company to resume shuttle service from Norwich to Foxwoods Resort Casino for the casino's employees. The casino had discontinued the service in 2012 after offering it for 20 years. 

Asians accounted for 2.1% of Norwich's population in 2001. Ten years later, in 2011, that number rose to 7.7%. At the time, John Wong said he wasn’t surprised by the census numbers. He noted that the manufacturing economy in New York's Chinatown crashed after Sept. 11, 2001, and here, the casinos were expanding, especially Mohegan Sun.

While in Norwich, Montville and surrounding towns, the Asian influx was the result of casino jobs, John Wong said, in Groton, jobs at Electric Boat and Pfizer Inc. attracted new Asian residents. He estimated that 90% of the Asians living in East Lyme came to work at Pfizer.

In September 2010, in the throes of the Great Recession, Mohegan Sun executed a round of layoffs. When John Wong heard the news, he went directly to the Mohegan Tribal office. He asked to meet with tribal officials to try to stop the layoffs.

None of the officials was available, but John Wong argued that the casino would be better off keeping the already trained employees through the tough times rather than having to hire and train new workers when the economy improved.

"I tried to put my two cents in," he said at the time. "I tried to get them to not lay off people but to cut benefits and hours to keep good trained employees."

John Wong worked with the two casinos over the years to help integrate the many Chinese employees into the region.

In September 2009, he presented a proposal to build a $200 million Chinese American University on the former Norwich Hospital grounds in both Norwich and Preston, a project he said would attract 5,000 high-level students to the region and bring $125 million in revenue per year. It ultimately did not pan out.

John Wong's proposal said the university would attract students from China, other Asian countries and the United States to study medicine, law, liberal arts, Asian languages and intercultural studies. 

That was John Wong the public figure, the local champion of the Chinese and Asian people in the area. He was born on Feb. 24, 1929, in Canton, China, and immigrated to the United States in 1944. He graduated from the Bulkeley School, which closed in 1951, in New London.

According to his obituary, after working for his family’s establishment, Wong’s Restaurant, John Wong opened his own restaurant in Uncasville in 1956, called China Lake. He brought in his father to manage the restaurant, and it stayed in business for more than 25 years.

John Wong bought and created other businesses as well, including Connecticut Air Freight, a logistics company. After China Lake closed in 1982, he opened a Chinese takeout place in Niantic and named it after “his friend and loyal chef, Sing,” John Wong’s obituary reads. Sing’s Kitchen became a popular place and later expanded. John Wong eventually retired and left the business to his son Nage Wong.

Walter Wong said it was difficult for his father to answer to his responsibilities to the community, be a family man and be a successful businessman all at once.

“It’s so hard for a businessman like my dad to balance everything out. He’s so in demand, and he created such a reputable restaurant back in the day, there were lines to get in, dignitaries left and right, so we kind of grew up inside the restaurant. ... It was hard for him to be there for us based on the demands of the restaurant,” Walter Wong said. “My dad was a very hardworking man who put provisions for his family first. His priority was to provide for his family ... with that, we did not see a lot of him ... My dad admitted many years ago that one of his greatest regrets was not spending more time with us and watching us grow up.”

Even in retirement, which his kids called his perpetual semi-retirement, John Wong’s “reputation grew amongst the Asian community.”

“People came to him for help or assistance to bridge the cultural gap in the communities that expanded throughout New London County. With the overwhelming requests for his help, he established the Chinese and American Cultural Assistance Association,” his obituary reads. “While serving this community well, he was making strides in narrowing this cultural gap. ... John's biggest dream was to build an Asian community with all of the amenities of an Asian town. Even though this dream did not come to fruition, John always gave his all to family, friends and communities.” 

s.spinella@theday.com