Ming Nee Mah, the proprietor of Ming Mah’s Barber Shop in Walnut Grove, Calfornia.

In her essay,  On Voice and Memory: Flo Oy Wong, art historian Dr. Melanie Herzog writes “In Whispers of the Past, four installations Wong created in 2007, previously untold stories are revealed in visual form and accompanying text—like whispered, fragmentary memories buried and exposed over time. Wong sought to uncover the stories of key Chinese individuals in Sacramento and the Delta region of central California. Deeply honored to hear these stories, told to her by relatives of her subjects, Wong describes their reclamation as a process of “collaborative retrieval” in which these unspoken narratives poured forth “like a waterfall that has been sequestered in a teeny, tiny faucet.”

Photo from the archives of artist Flo Oy Wong.