an early life

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7 Miracles...hah. That's a stretch but that's how one of my 7 siblings described us ...and why not? We were dirt poor, the only Chinese family in our neighborhood growing up in South Central LA. To top it all off, mom and dad used to fight so much that the local paramedics knew our house.

After the last big fight, my brave mom finally got a divorce. This photo shows the Wongs on our first vacation after the split. A weekend at a Motel 6 in Oceanside, California. We stayed in two rooms with an adjoining door. We packed ourselves into a beat-up Ford Falcon, and it took forever to make the drive that any normal family would do in 3 hours. This memory shows us next to the public tennis courts (hence my love of racquet sports).

I have four awesome sisters: Karen, Jeanne, Deb and Teresa. My older brother looks like John Denver here :), my little brother Matt just caught a pitifully small fish. I'm the skinny little squirt in the back. Mom's not shown in this photo as she had to take the picture, but she was an extraordinary person even if she never went to college and never made more than $20,000 a year.

Clearly the cards were stacked against us that we would ever get out of the 'hood or the poverty. But adversity has a way of making you stronger and we've come a long way since that time.