Lonnie was my oldest and very best friend, but I would not be surprised to hear other people make the same claim. I am as happy to share her with others as she was to share herself. She was generous like that with her attention and her love. This remembrance is only one view of a remarkable human being, who was such a gift.
She was born Mary Lon Wu. Her father came to New York on a “paper uncle” visa, with no immediate family in the U.S., having bought the contract of “Jesse Chan” from the Chinatown house that held it. For a woman who came to hold so many people’s health in her hands, Lonnie was tiny and underweight when she was born. Her father enlisted in WWII to earn his citizenship, and since Lonnie’s young mother assumed that going off to war meant dying, she married another man before William Wu returned. Lonnie spent her early years in the Chinese immigrant community, where her father was a prominent restaurant owner and community leader. These early years gave Lonnie not only great culinary skills but also cosmopolitan tastes.
Not long after I met her in 1979, Lonnie asked me to proofread her résumé. We added a few things, and then, looking at her history, Lonnie sighed and said that she hadn’t done much with her life. I was speechless; her résumé was already three pages long, and she hadn’t yet finished acupuncture school. This wasn’t a case of false modesty; she simply had no idea how she compared to other people. This could be partly due to her discouraging experiences in public school. Her first language was Chinese, and her teachers assumed her silence signaled a developmental problem and seated her in special classes. But on more than one occasion, I heard older Chinese speakers comment that though her Chinese vocabulary was a child’s, it was unusually cultured.