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The following article was submitted by Brian Wong, one of Chang Wing Wong’s grandsons.

My grandfather, Chang Wing Wong, immigrated from Gom Benn in 1923. He partnered with two other men from the Gom Benn area in 1927 to start the Ying Chong Lung grocery store, located at 9^th and San Pedro Streets, near the City Market produce distribution center. City Market, founded in 1909 by a consortium of immigrant farmers, including many Chinese Americans, was one of the oldest wholesale produce markets in the country. In the 1930s — this was still the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — Chang Wing Wong and his partners used their status as merchants to bring family members over from China. His oldest son, Ging Ching Wong, immigrated to the U.S. in 1932, and his wife Chung Shee and daughter came in 1933.  He had four more sons, (one who died in infancy) who were born in America. The surviving sons born in American were Kenneth Hai, Francis Hai (formerly secretary for the Gom Benn Scholarship Fund) and Calvin Hai.

Chang Wing Wong later started his own business, and in 1951, he opened the Kwong Hing Lung grocery store. Kwong Hing Lung was located on the corner of Adams and San Pedro Street in the East Adams area of Los Angeles, about a mile south of City Market. Diagonally across the intersection was the CFO (Chin Fong and Ong) Chinese-owned Shell gas station, and to the west, down the street was the Chinese Presbyterian Church. East Adams had become a location that attracted Chinese-Americans relocating from Old Chinatown and was a “bedroom community” for workers around the City Market. Kwong Hing Lung was a Chinese and American grocery store. The Store sold canned and preserved goods imported from China, standard American grocery items, fresh vegetables, and had a butcher counter for fresh meats. The store operated both as a retail and wholesale operation. The retail storefront served the local community, especially the Chinese in the East Adams area. The wholesale operation supplied Chinese restaurants with vegetables, meat, canned and dried goods.

Chang Wing and his family moved to a house that was less than a block away from the store down Adams Street. His wife Chung Shee and sons helped out at the Store. Chang Wing’s oldest son and my father, Ging Ching Wong, who was in college during World War II and had a degree in mechanical engineering, was in a graduate program at UCLA when Chang Wing Wong died in 1953.  Ging took over the operation of the store. Later, as his children got older, his wife, Marian, worked regularly at the store. The store operated through Ging’s death in 1988, with Marian operating the store until it was sold in 1991.

When my brothers and sisters and I were very young, I recall going to the store, having fun rolling the hand trucks down the aisles, and wandering around the warehouse area, climbing on crates and sacks of rice. I’m sure we were being a nuisance to the workers there. Later, when I was in high school, I spent some time working at the store, at first on the retail side. After getting my driver’s license, I drove trucks making deliveries of groceries to various Chinese restaurants in the L.A. area.  The store wholesaled to restaurants throughout the L.A. area, so I remember driving different routes making deliveries to Chinese restaurants in the Anaheim area, in the West Side along Wilshire Blvd, in the Hollywood area, and in the San Fernando Valley.

Supplying food to Chinese restaurants let us see the new waves of Chinese cuisine in the L.A. area as the old-style Cantonese food started to give way to Mandarin, Szechwan (Sichuan), and other Chinese cuisines.  My father, somewhere in his early years. learned to speak Mandarin Chinese, and was able to communicate with the new restaurant owners coming from Taiwan and China.  We saw new Chinese immigrants moving and settling in new Chinese population centers in Monterey Park and the East San Gabriel area of Southern California.  My family’s history and the Kwong Hing Lung grocery store was at the center of Chinese immigration into the East Adams area and beyond, and spanned the Chinese Exclusion Act era to the current time.