Administrator Florence Wong was a pioneer in delivery of culturally appropriate geriatric care

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Around 2009, Amy Go was chatting with one of the nurses at Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care when she learned that Yee Hong CEO Florence Wong’s own mother had recently been admitted as a resident.

It was the first Ms. Go had heard of it, despite the fact that she was then executive director at the Markham, Ont., site, working closely each day with Ms. Wong. Ms. Go was further surprised to learn that Ms. Wong’s mother had waited – like everybody else on the wait-list – for over 3½ years for the spot.

“Florence never, ever, ever intervened to take advantage of her position,” Ms. Go said. “Fairness and integrity. Those are the values that drove Florence.”

Such was Ms. Wong’s approach to life: Service for others, quiet conviction, and above all else, an innate sense of fairness. As CEO of one of Canada’s largest non-profit geriatric care centres – and one of the first to focus specifically on Chinese-Canadian seniors – Ms. Wong was a pioneer in the delivery of dignified, culturally appropriate care in nursing homes.

Under her decades of leadership, she oversaw the expansion of Yee Hong from a single site in Scarborough to a network of four long-term care centres, along with a suite of other support services aimed at Asian communities across the Greater Toronto Area.

“Hard work. Resilience. A positive attitude,” said her daughter Iris Yan. “She was always leading by example.” Ms. Wong died on Jan. 19 at the age of 74.

Chan Man Lai (Florence) was born Aug. 17, 1949, in Hong Kong, the second of six children. Her father, Chan Tak Shun, was a former member of the navy who worked as a cook on the campus of Hong Kong University. Her mother, Cheung Yuk Hing, was a homemaker.

“It was postwar Hong Kong, and difficult times for everybody,” said Ms. Yan. The family lived in a one-bedroom apartment on campus. It was too cramped for all of them, so Florence and a younger sister were sent to live with an aunt.

“She learned from a very young age that she needed to be responsible,” Ms. Yan said.

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She studied hard, and earned a spot at Ying Wah Girls School, a school founded by London missionaries where the motto was “Time is precious, treasure every minute.” From there, she earned a degree at HKU with a major in social work.

Her first job was managing an orphanage. There, she met a young volunteer named Wong Sou Son (Samuel). They married in 1974.

From there, she was hired at Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, a newly-minted agency tasked with tackling the widespread corruption among government and police officials at the time.

She spent over a decade at ICAC, eventually overseeing community relations for the agency. It was a job that demanded a deft touch in building relationships with often fearful, distrustful small business owners and community members.

“She had to win their trust to say, ‘It’s okay to come forward. There will be no reprisal,’” Ms. Go said.

By the mid-1980s, the couple had built a comfortable life in Hong Kong – Ms. Wong as a senior executive, and Sam running a successful import-export business. They’d had their first child together, a son they named Dennis, in 1975. Iris was born a few years later.

But the impending handover of Hong Kong to China loomed over them. They were nervous about the city’s future under Chinese rule – and their children’s futures. So they took the leap and decided to immigrate to Canada.

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Upon arrival in Toronto in 1987, Ms. Wong quickly learned that the experience she’d built up in Hong Kong – her sterling education, her time working as a senior executive – meant little in this new country. She’d have to start over.

She applied, and was hired, for a secretarial job at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB). Within months, she was promoted to the role of trainer. And within years, she was managing a new site for the organization. She was also appointed to a provincial advisory committee on seniors and people with disabilities.

Around this time, she met Joseph Wong, a young doctor who, along with dozens of volunteers, had begun work on building a nursing home devoted specifically to Chinese seniors. For years, the volunteers had been knocking on bureaucrats’ doors, explaining to them the reality of Chinese seniors living in nursing centres where they neither spoke the language nor understood the culture.

“I was told, ‘If they don’t know English, that’s too bad.’ That’s the kind of attitude that permeated throughout the health sector at the time,” Dr. Wong said.

Their work paid off because in 1994, the first Yee Hong Centre, in Scarborough, was built.

Ms. Wong applied for the role of executive director, interviewing with Dr. Wong and board member Gordon Cressy. “After she left, we both looked at each other and said, ‘It’s her,’” Dr. Wong said.

“She was a very small lady – barely five feet,” he said. “But as soon as she started to talk, you could tell that she was so solid. … She said what was needed, but otherwise listened intensely.”

As executive director and later CEO, Ms. Wong was always the first in the office in the morning, and last to leave at night. Under her leadership, Yee Hong built and developed 715 new long-term care spots, along with 308 units of seniors housing.

She was driven, above all else, by her own experience as a newcomer – her inherent sense of fairness, and belief that Chinese seniors deserved as much dignity and respect in this country as others.

Ms. Wong retired in 2012. She took up new hobbies: Studying Chinese calligraphy, and cooking. (Her black sesame soup, a classic Chinese dessert, was “better than the restaurants,” Dr. Wong said.) And she devoted herself to her grandchildren, even learning to play pickleball in order to spend time with them.

She was diagnosed late last year with lung cancer, and died a few short weeks later, at Peter K. Kwok Hospice in Scarborough – a Yee Hong care centre that she helped to build.

She leaves her husband, Mr. Wong; children, Dennis and Iris; and four grandchildren.

“Florence is an immigrant success story,” Ms. Go said. “In spite of the barriers, in spite of the challenges she faced, she not only survived, but she thrived.”

Shortly before her death, Ms. Wong had the following to say to her friends: “I have no fear, no regrets. No incomplete matters left to do.”

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