EP 564: Henry King Fong On His Historical Quest To Get to Know His Father

When Henry King Fong was born in Sacramento, his immigrant father was already 58 and his straight-from-the-village mother was 48. Henry was the youngest of five and was only two years old when his father died. Their family was quite poor, but his mother made every penny count. Henry eventually graduated from UC Berkeley with an engineering degree, and went to work designing rockets. Even after he got married and became the father of their two sons, a part of him still had a deep yearning to know who his father was. Which is why he began to search high and low for the essential missing pieces of his dad's life-puzzle. As a result, Henry became the Fong family's historian.

My late father was Uncle Henry's oldest brother, so I grew up spending a good amount of time with my uncle and his family. But it really wasn't till I began to spend more time back in Sacramento that we really got to know each other as adults. Uncle Henry turned 96 this past July, so I was determined to make a recording of what he's come to know about my grandfather whom I never knew.