Lily Wong Remembers Hard Times
Lily Wong’s interest in residential real estate investment in Southern California dates back a couple of decades when she and her husband borrowed $50,000 to buy a Glendale apartment building in partnership with other investors.
The partnership later went broke, and the Wongs were confronted with a bank loan that eventually took 10 years to pay back. “It was then that I wanted to learn how money is made and how it is lost,” she said in an interview.
Judging from the trappings of success that now surround her, she took her studies seriously.
Wong has built a burgeoning development and investment business that began with the purchase of a six-unit apartment building in Monterey Park in 1971. As testimony to her financial success, a Rolls-Royce sits rarely used at her multimillion-dollar San Marino home.
Wong is clearly among the creme de la creme of Asian-born entrepreneurs living in Southern California. Although she has had no formal business education, she has harnessed an abiding faith in hard work with the good fortune of rising property values to become one of the most successful Chinese businesswomen in Los Angeles.
Like most arrivals from East Asia, she prefers to work in the comfort and security of anonymity, far from the business pages of local newspapers.
Yet Wong has quietly become a major investor in the Los Angeles real estate market. By her own estimate, she owns and operates 50 apartment buildings within a two-hour drive of her home. Her business formula is simple: Buy a building, wait for it to appreciate, then borrow against the increased value to buy another building.
Wong’s early years were marked by turmoil and extensive travel that took her to cities far from her native Shanghai. She was born to a well-to-do family that was separated for years by the Communist takeover of the Chinese mainland in 1949. Wong did not rejoin her parents, who had fled to Hong Kong, until 1958.
She settled in Monterey Park 21 years ago with her husband, now a psychiatrist on Wilshire Boulevard, after hopscotching across North America for years.
After getting married in Vancouver, Canada, she lived for awhile in Columbus, Ohio, and Portland, Ore., where her husband had found work. To supplement his $350-a-month salary in Columbus, she taught Chinese cooking to the wives of faculty members at Ohio State University.
The home in San Marino, perched on more than an acre, cost the Wongs $1.4 million six years ago. The back yard is a beautifully landscaped mix of trees and sloping rock gardens flanked by a tennis court and hexagon-shaped swimming pool.
In one sense, Wong, now 50, remains very traditional and distinctly Chinese. She loves to cook Sunday dinner for her husband and four children and remains more comfortable speaking Chinese.
Yet she is a U.S. citizen known for a frank and direct business style that is very American. Her investment clients are mostly Anglos, though they include a large mix of Chinese from all over the Far East.
When it comes to her own money, Wong does not emphasize what she has but, rather, how she got it, recalling the early days when she personally collected rents and cleaned apartments when tenants moved out. “People ask me how I got all this,” she mused on the terrace overlooking the serenity of her back yard. “I tell them: ‘You didn’t see the hard part.’ ”
