Bernie Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1943, but her story begins in South America. Her mother, Virginia Chia, was born and raised in Huacho, Peru, to a father named Carlos Chia, who had come from China to run a shipping business in South America, and a mother named Cristina Salinas who was half-Chinese and half-Basque and relished her role as a socialite more than that of a mother. Virginia’s parents split up while she was still a young girl, after Cristina discovered that Carlos had another wife and family back in China. Cristina kicked him out and had their marriage annulled.
Excerpted from When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League by Susan Blumberg-Kason. Copyright 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission from the University of Illinois Press.
Carlos decided to go back to Zhongshan in Guangdong Province, never to return to Peru. But even after the break from her husband, Cristina wasn’t keen on parenting. An uncle in Lima who believed in girls’ education happily took in young Virginia, making sure she attended school. Virginia also entered the Miss Chinatown pageants in Lima and went on to enjoy her teenage years, despite the abandonment by her parents.
Growing up, Virginia wanted to be a nun and entered a convent in the Philippines, only to be kicked out several times. Her sense of humor and her love of dancing and eating did not win her any favors from the strict nuns. Bernie’s daughter, Jacinta, remembers her grandmother Virginia dancing around the family living room in Chicago. “She would sing in Spanish and balance fruit on her head like the actor and dancer Carmen Miranda.”
Back in Peru, Virginia met her husband after he traveled to South America from China on business when he was a teenager, apprenticing to take over his father’s successful cotton farm. Virginia’s husband’s surname was Lo, and because he was spending so much time in Peru, he took the given name of Jorge José. The couple dated for five years before marrying in Peru at a time when many Chinese couples entered arranged marriages. Virginia and Jorge chose to follow their hearts.
They traveled to Hong Kong for their honeymoon in the 1930s, but the British colony was not yet the sprawling metropolis it is today. Virginia appreciated Hong Kong’s mixture of East and West because it reminded her of the Chinese communities of Peru. She preferred to wear Western dresses and not the Chinese cheongsam that women wore in China at that time, so she felt at home in Hong Kong because it was just as acceptable to wear Western fashion there as it was to wear Chinese styles. Virginia spoke Spanish as her mother tongue and English with a slight Spanish accent but didn’t speak any Chinese dialects.
Since Virginia was estranged from her mother and no longer had contact with her father, there was nothing keeping her in Peru. She was close to the uncle, aunt, and cousins who had raised her, but Jorge was now her family and she was happy to follow him to Hong Kong for his business.
The couple would not stay long in Hong Kong in the 1930s because Jorge felt his business opportunities were greater in southern China. So they left Hong Kong and moved just over the border to the Chinese city of Shiqi in the Zhongshan District. Jorge’s business soon thrived between southern China and Hong Kong, so he, Virginia, and their growing number of children ended up splitting their time between both cities.
Yet war on many fronts plagued China during the 1930s and 1940s. The Japanese military had started taking parts of northeast China at the same time the Nationalist government battled a civil war with the Communist opposition. Virginia and Jorge sent their five sons to a Chinese village, which was supposed to be safer than the cities in China since the Japanese usually bombed only the cities. They took their oldest daughter to Hong Kong, and their second daughter, Bernie, was born in Hong Kong in 1943 as war raged across the British colony and China. Food was scarce and it was difficult to find protein-rich ingredients, so Bernie subsisted mainly on cornstarch as an infant.
The family returned to Guangzhou after World War II ended, but their stable lives lasted only a few short years. World War II ended for the rest of the world in 1945, but China could not enjoy peace as its civil war between the Nationalists and Communists flared up again. At that point, Jorge was selling clothing in flea markets as well as operating a bakery and café, while Virginia made a living as a successful seamstress and sewing teacher. Jorge opened a hotel, which became his last business venture in China until news got around that the winning Communists had started to confiscate property. Many business owners, small and large, decided to flee China for the safety of British Hong Kong or the island of Taiwan. Bernie, her sister, and their youngest brother were sent to the Portuguese colony of Macau to live with an aunt while one brother was sent to Hong Kong with a family friend. Virginia soon joined three of her children in Macau—a forty-mile trip over the South China Sea—while Jorge stayed back in Guangzhou along with their two oldest sons to take care of business until Communist soldiers marched into the city.
Just a day before the Los were to leave Guangzhou, Jorge suffered an accident when a bicycle handle cut him near his throat. Medical attention was almost impossible to find, as the city was about to be taken by the Communists. Jorge decided it was time to give up his business in Guangzhou and took his two sons, miraculously finding passage for the three of them on the last ship to Hong Kong.