“Edna Mae Fong” scroll for Gold Mountain, an installation by artist Flo Oy Wong displayed at “Whispers of the Past,” an art exhibition held from January 20 - March 24, 2007 at the Forty Acres Art Gallery in Sacramento, CA. The installation included a collaged scroll of family photos, a chest of drawers with Fong’s medical instruments and supplies, along with an essay, “Overcoming Obstacles” written by her daughter Rebecca Strickland.

Dr. Edna Mae Fong was the first Chinese female doctor in Sacramento.

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.