The Stephen Huahn Memorial Scholarship is presented to the top college student. In 1997, Harold and Mary Wong donated $10,000 to establish the Stephen Huahn scholarship to honor the memory of their son. The following article is from the 1997 edition of the Voice of Gom Benn newsletter.
Stephen D. Huahn was an architect and planner. His was a satisfying life, as a beloved son, husband and father. And also as a China watcher, world traveler and skier. But he wanted more of himself. He wanted to paint. And in the final months of his life…he did.
As a child, everyone in Gom Benn Village could see he had a talent for painting. When he was only four years old, they asked him what he could draw. And he drew a pig. “It really looked like a pig,” his mother Mary remembers. “Everyone came to see it. He made everyone so happy.” That was his gift. They could see it.
Stephen D. Huahn was born in China in 1939. He was the only child of Harold and Mary Wong. His mother Mary was the village schoolteacher. His father Harold, also an artist and calligrapher, came to America. In the 1940s, he was a partner for a time in the Chungking restaurant in Riverside. After World War II, he operated a grocery store in the West Adams area of Los Angeles on Vermont Avenue near the Coliseum. And later, he and family moved to Palos Verdes and ran a coin-operated laundromat.
Stephen and his mother joined his father in Los Angeles in 1947. He initially found school in America difficult because he spoke little English. But his teachers soon discovered his artistic skills. He painted murals for school open houses. Stephen became a good student, too.
In 1959, he enrolled at the University of Southern California to study architecture. It was at USC that Stephen met his future wife, Loretta. Self-confident, even cocky, he told a friend when he first saw Loretta that she would be the “mother of my children.” He was right. They married in 1962.
The children, Trellis and Traci, came after they graduated from USC, and while Stephen was serving in the Navy’s civil engineering corps. After the Navy, the family settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stephen worked for the San Francisco Unified School District, becoming director of facility planning and construction. For nearly 20 years, he worked for the school district, until his retirement in 1992.
In addition to his family, Stephen had many loves: traveling, reading, classical music and cowboy movies. He was an avid China watcher, immensely proud of his homeland. He also loved skiing. The family skied U.S. slopes and mountains in Europe and Canada. He even went skiing after he learned he was dying from cancer.
Stephen fought to overcome his illness. While in the hospital, he had a revelation in which God offered to help him if he would paint and share the beauty he had seen. So he painted mostly colorful landscapes. Paintings of Africa, Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Yangtze River. He painted nearly two dozen paintings during the final months of his life.
Stephen worked hard all his life and he played hard. He loved his family. He was well respected by friends. In his final days, he said he knew he had been fortunate, although he wished he could have more time to do more, and to paint more. But he had no regrets. Stephen Huahn died in August 1996.
Note: Below are two watercolors painted while Stephen was a student at Foshay Junior High School in 1954. They are Los Angeles street scenes. One is the market run by the family. Also below are two of Stephen’s oil paintings from the final months of his life. One is a painting of a park in Alameda, Calif., that Stephen would frequent on his morning walks. The other is his reproduction of a painting of a town along the Three Gorges in China by the artist He Haixia, titled “Beautiful Mountains and Rivers.” His daughter, Traci, says her father had hoped to visit there, but never made it. Per his wishes, after he passed, the family made a trip there to scatter some of his ashes.
