Woo Family’s Road to Success Long and Not Always Smooth

As World War II began in 1941, Beth Woo watched looters ravage her Hong Kong apartment unhindered by the occupying Japanese army.

“They . . . carried out everything they could. . . . We just had to let them,” she said, the words seeming to rush out emotionally 44 years later. “They were street people who would say, ‘Now it is our turn to enjoy.’ ”

After a few months under the occupying army, food in the city became scarce. Carrying her daughters, Pat, 3, and Janice, 11 months, Woo and her mother-in-law walked and bicycled eight days during a cold January to Hoy Ping, the family’s ancestral village.

Lived With Relatives

There the Woos shared a mud-floor home with relatives where Beth Woo worked in the fields, drew water from a well and cooked with straw in a brick oven.

Arrival of Japanese troops in the countryside created more hardships, she recalled.

“We would carry our children and a little piglet or a duck or a goose into the hills and hide until the army passed,” she said.

“There were times when they would come into the village and confiscate our food or haul off some men to be bearers or porters, and they never came back.

“One time I was carrying one of the babies on my back and they were so close we had to hide under a lot of wild gardenia plants. We kept still,” she giggled, perhaps with relief, “until they passed. We could see their feet.”

After the war, in 1946, Beth Woo rejoined her husband, Wilbur, in Los Angeles. He had left Hong Kong in 1940 to finish his education at UCLA. The Woos rebuilt their marriage after a six-year separation.

‘Rekindled Spark’

“It wasn’t easy,” Wilbur Woo, 69, said. “When you’re separated that far, you grow somewhat apart. . . . We said, look, we have . . . to make an attempt to stay together if only for the children. That, I think, rekindled the spark.”

“It took a lot of adjusting,” Beth Woo, also 69, said. “It seemed everything was so new.”

The Woos focused on curing the polio their daughter, Janice, contracted in China. The disease left one leg shorter than the other and required seven operations before she could walk without help.

After bringing two daughters to Los Angeles (they are Pat Wong, 46, of Del Mar and Janice Chin, 44, of Cerritos), the Woos had three children here: Michael, 33, newly elected to the Los Angeles City Council; Elaine, 31, a Los Angeles Times reporter, and Pamela, 29, who has Down’s syndrome and lives with her parents.

Doctors who diagnosed Pamela Woo’s condition recommended that she be institutionalized.

The Woos refused. “It was our desire to take the best care we could of her, and we thought that would be at home,” Beth Woo said.

Wilbur Woo’s father, David, and his mother, Gim Nuey Dea, also lived with the family until their deaths in recent years at ages 92 and 87.

Opened Produce Business

It was David and Wilbur Woo who started the family produce business in 1942, taking over a spot in the 9th Street Market from a Japanese man interned under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s relocation proclamation.

For 20 years Wilbur Woo rose at 2:30 a.m. each day to open the business. When Beth Woo arrived in the United States, she took over the bookkeeping. Grandfather David Woo continued to work there almost daily until his death.

In the 1960s, however, the roles changed. Tired of getting up so early, Wilbur Woo joined friends who got a charter for the first bank in Chinatown. He studied banking in his spare time and, a few years later, became a bank vice president.

Today he visits the produce business for a short time each day and keeps an office in the Cathay Bank, from which he officially retired in 1983.

Beth Woo still keeps the books at the produce operation, and during Michael Woo’s recent 13th Council District campaign against incumbent Peggy Stevenson, Mrs. Woo usually finished her work and raced to her son’s campaign headquarters.

‘Very Understated’

There the small woman with wisps of white in her black hair frequently emptied waste baskets, swept the floors and ordered lunch for volunteers. Many campaign workers did not know who she was.

“She’s a very understated individual,” said Ron Reed of Los Feliz, a volunteer in the campaign. “She does not attract a lot of attention to herself.”

Surrounded by Chinese art in the five-bedroom hilltop Monterey Park home her family has occupied for 25 years, Beth Woo said one afternoon recently that her inconspicuous campaign role was only natural for a mother.

“Everyone else was busy with the more essential parts,” she said, “They (the workers) sacrificed some comfort so we tried to make them feel comfortable.”

Wilbur Woo provided about half of the $437,000 raised by Michael Woo’s campaign and has been more publicized than his wife, but some say that Beth Woo’s help may have been equally crucial.

Consistent Support

“Michael’s mother was quietly making sure workers had food to eat, had a cold drink during the hot days, that everybody was comfortable and welcome in her quiet way,” said Lily Lee Chen, a former Monterey Park mayor and current councilwoman who worked at Woo’s headquarters.

“She provided probably the most consistent support (to the campaign) as well as stability.”

“She was quietly in the background taking care of what she had to do,” said Aram Yavner, 72, of Hollywood, another volunteer. “ . . . She cared about everybody. She tried to make sure everybody had something to eat, something to drink. I appreciated that. I think everybody appreciated that.”