RE: Finding Terry Ong, Chinaman
This is my story.
We are in a desperate search for a gentleman named Terry Ong who is referenced in 1941 in Boston, Massachusetts as a 25-year-old Chinaman. He lived and worked at 69 Berkeley Street, a laundromat it says. His daughter, Anna Mae, born in February 1942, now would very much like to find him. Terry Ong is certainly not his Chinese name, though we have no way of knowing what that was. Since he is listed in the child’s social services record as 25-years-old in 1941 that would make him around 88 now. We are hoping that he is alive, but hold out no real hope. Finding out what happened to him, if he went on to marry, stay in the United States, or return to China, we would really like to know.
We have searched the records of the social services department of Boston that gladly gave Anna Mae her file over a medical condition 15 years ago. She never searched for him then because her adopted parents were still living. The last one died on Christmas Eve in PA. She was Pearl S. Buck’s seamstress.
Terry Ong’s whereabouts are unknown. We have been completely unable to find the mother. They never married according to the record.
We have tried about everything we can think of to see where Terry Ong might have gone. For three years after the February 1941 birth, he paid $4 per week as his responsibility for the child. The child was given up within a year of birth to the Massachusetts social services department, though Terry Ong continued to pay through his probation agreement with the Boston Municipal Court for the entire three years (it was illegal then to father out of wedlock). His file is not archived in the Boston, Massachusetts’s archives and thus will require about 20 people to search a set of boxes that we have located. This will hopefully give us his real Chinese name and allow us to contact him or his family through a Benevolent Association.
Anna Mae, his daughter, was placed with a family in Amherst, Massachusetts where she lived happily until she was 11 years old. At that time, she was somehow, and potentially mysteriously, scooped up by Mrs. Walsh (alias Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel prize-winning author) and sent to a family in Lansdale, PA near her new project and foundation, Welcome House, that helped Amer-Asian children find homes. We have no idea how Mrs. Walsh would have known about this child in Amherst, Massachusetts and suspect that she was searching for a poster child for her good works.
Nonetheless, the Welcome House Foundation has been wholly uncooperative towards Anna Mae gaining access to the files they have. They refuse to give any information out to Anna Mae. It saddens us as a family that Pearl S. Buck did not foresee this issue for the works she did. The record mysteriously indicates that Pearl Buck had an interview with Anna Mae’s mother before Anna Mae was born. She is out of the picture until the child is 11 years old. We will always wonder why Pearl Buck, who helped American-fathered Asian children from abroad, picked a child born and raised in America, of a Chinese father, and an American woman. We are pursuing this angle in case there are other children that were taken from their mothers unnecessarily because of a need that the Welcome House Foundation might have had at that time, however well-intentioned. The program was barely in existence, and an interstate adoption was an unbelievable hassle. However, there probably were not many Chinese children available to start her cause in the local area of Bucks County at the time. Anna Mae had another adopted sister that I believe was also not from oversees and was Chinese-American.
The courts of Boston cannot find the file on Terry Ong though they do know it exists because it is listed in the Boston Municipal Court dockets at their location in Boston. We are continuing that search and have flown to Boston and spent the only few hours we had at the archives off-site attempting to cull through multiple boxes.
Anna Mae went on to become a registered nurse. She is clearly Chinese. She went on to marry, have three wonderful children, and I’m sure soon will become a grandmother. She has one son in his 30s, and two daughters. This daughter of a “Chinamanâ€, as they described him in the social services records that I have, has no idea that one of his granddaughters is a corporate attorney, that his daughter became a registered nurse and a successful seamstress, and that her Godmother was Pearl S. Buck.
Please help us. If you know anything about the Chinese naming system, anything about Ong, know of a Terry Ong that would be or is about 88, think your family could be or might know something, please contact me. I am the niece of Anna Mae. I live in Los Angeles and I have agreed to help Anna Mae find out what happened to her father, Terry Ong.