Gold Mountain: Frank Fat 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, the restauranteur Frank Fat’s apron, wok, stovetop grate, restaurant menu and matchbooks.

Dong-Sai Fat was born in near Canton, China in 1904. He came to the US in 1919, adopting his American name, Frank Fat. He opened his namesake restaurant in 1939 in downtown Sacramento, near the State capital. Known for quality food and service, the restaurant soon became popular with state legislators and lobbyists. In March of 2013, Frank Fat’s received the James Beard Foundation America’s Classics Award— an honor bestowed upon locally owned and operated restaurants that are the fabric of their community.

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.