Raybin Q. Wong

The Raybin Q. Wong Foundation was founded by Mr. Raybin Q. Wong on February 1, 1999 as a New York State registered charitable tax exempt organization. Mr. Wong was born in China and was a US citizen who had lived in America for over half a century. The mission of his Foundation is to help poor and disadvantaged Chinese children, both in mainland China and the US, to gain an education. Many of these children have never attended school. Others cannot afford to continue.

Who was Raybin Wong? He was born on December 22, 1915 in Yue Jiao, a rural village located in He Shan County of south China. He grew up in a home where there was tremendous respect for education and was raised in the two different cultures of America and China. At a preschool age he moved to the United States with his parents and spent his boyhood in America, where he received his earliest education. Initially this was at a primary school in Philadelphia. Then Mr. Wong returned to China with his family. During the eight years that Japan made war on China he became an ardent advocate of Chinese national liberation and participated in the resistance movement of the local guerrilla forces. Then in the 1940’s he taught middle school in his hometown. He became an English teacher at the Premier Sun Yat Sen Memorial High School, which was run by Premier Sun’s son. He had a deep love for teaching, especially in the village of his birth, and he continued to cherish these memories until his old age.

Mr. Wong returned to the United States in 1949, and at age 34 continued his education at New York City University (CUNY). As a college student he struggled with full time studies and part time work until he finally received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering when he was almost 40. He also undertook the tough training and testing required to qualify as a licensed New York State Professional Engineer. During the following 20 years Mr. Wong worked as an electrical engineer for the City of New York.

Meanwhile, in his spare time Mr. Wong worked as a volunteer at a church school, where he taught English to new immigrants and helped them to survive in America. He thought it was his responsibility to care about less fortunate people and to contribute to society. Even then, he never forgot his hometown. Recalling those days, he said, ”Sometimes I sat alone on a bench in Central Park, looking toward China across the distance, fondly remembering my country of birth with tears in my eyes”

Mr. Wong was a habitually thrifty person who lived frugally and saved his money for future enterprises. Then, after retiring from his City government job he made a bold decision to invest his savings in real estate. Thus, after a lifetime of hard work he began a new career as the owner, managing engineer and property manager of several commercial buildings with his own, ‘Raybin Q. Wong Company’. In his new career he was able to manage frugally, move quickly and to amass wealth.

Raybin Wong’s most recent successes did not obscure his concern for humanity and he frequently donated to charitable projects in China. It’s hard to enumerate how many times he made donations to give help after disastrous events. In addition to his friends and relatives, many poor Chinese people benefited from his generosity while he continued his own simple lifestyle. Throughout his life he was a diligent student, a hard worker and a smart businessman with great empathy for poor children.

Then Mr. Wong suffered two strokes, the second in the late 1980’s. Thereafter he continued to manage his own life and his business, but he had some physical limitations. On a daily basis he was forced to confront the realities of aging, but he never lost confidence. He continued to exercise every day to recover from the after effects of the strokes. He continued his work with persistence and maintained a work schedule of almost seven days per week. Mr. Wong’s advice for successful living might be summed up in two of his maxims: “Study industriously; it will never be too late”, and, “Work hard and you will never be overwhelmed”. But in the last years of his life his strength grew even fainter because of his impairments from strokes, liver disease and frequent influenza. However he was stoical in the face of his increasing illness and he never gave up, even after he became bedridden.

During his later years he became more and more preoccupied with his idea of creating an education foundation for poor children in the rural areas of China. His dream was finally realized during the last year of his life when he assigned 90% of his assets to his own, newly created, ‘Raybin Q. Wong Foundation’, that was devoted to education. Thus, at the end of his life he was full of hope that the poorest of the poor Chinese children would be more educated and have improved opportunities for a better life.

Unfortunately, Raybin Wong saw little of what he had created so late in his life. He died, at age 84, on February 5, 2000 in a hospital in Queens, New York City. Despite his death his legacy lives on with us, most especially in the actual functioning of his education project. He was a man with great vision. His spirit is still ablaze today, encouraging us all to carry out his programs.