Valley Parents Seek to Bring Quake Victim’s Body Home

The parents of a young Van Nuys woman killed in the Kobe earthquake, fearful that their daughter’s body would be cremated rather than be returned home, said Wednesday they received assurances from U.S. Ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale that he would help recover the body.

Voni Wong, 24, died when the house she lived in collapsed. Since receiving word of her death Tuesday, her family, who are devout Baptists, have agonized over whether they will be able to properly bury their daughter.

“We didn’t want her to be just a casualty,” said her father, Henry Wong, who has been haunted by visions of his daughter’s body lying in a gymnasium with thousands of other unclaimed victims of the Kobe quake. “We feel she deserves a Christian burial.”

Mondale telephoned the family Wednesday morning, expressed condolences and pledged to help personally locate and return the body, Henry Wong said.

A State Department spokeswoman in Washington confirmed that American officials were assisting the Wongs, but declined to say whether they have retrieved the body. About 3,000 have been killed in the devastating quake.

“We had a sweet angel,” her father said. “I thank God for her. We had her all these years. I had been looking forward to many pleasures--walking her down the aisle--but I guess that was not meant to be.”

Family and friends converged Wednesday at the Wong’s Van Nuys home as news of her death, the first known American casualty, was highlighted in local and national media reports. Telephone calls flooded the lines of the family’s church, Shepherd of the Hills in Porter Ranch. Mourners recalled Voni Wong’s adventurous spirit that propelled her to travel overseas.

She attended Grant High School and graduated with honors from UCLA in 1993, moving to Japan in January, 1994. She planned to support herself teaching English, though she neither spoke Japanese nor had a job lined up.

A friend helped her find work at a bilingual school. After that institution closed, Wong worked as a private English tutor while studying Japanese and Mandarin. Friends said she was a popular teacher.

In September, Wong wrote to a friend that after numerous moves in the Kobe area she had finally found the perfect living situation--an old house by the seaside owned by a warm, 80-year-old woman she called Obaa-san, or grandmother.

Wong wrote that this was to be her final move unless “I go insane . . . this house collapses or . . . I change my mind. All are possible.”

Indeed, one of those predictions came true while living at that house. Wong changed her mind and moved to another house in the same neighborhood, at 6-5 Tsuji-Cho, where she died.

One of Wong’s house mates, Laurie McCullough, in San Diego at the time of the quake, said her friend’s room was in the rear of the house and had a lowered ceiling. Wong slept on a raised, Western-style bed.

Wong’s four house mates, who slept on the floor in other rooms, escaped with minor injuries. Wong was crushed by the ceiling in her room, according to McCullough, who managed to make telephone contact with one of the housemates a day after the quake.

Henry Wong said his daughter had always dreamed of traveling to Asia, a “wanderlust” that was sparked during a family cross-country trip in an old Volkswagen when Voni was 6 years old. Her trip abroad was to be the English major’s much-needed break after working her way through college.

Her time in Japan was an unfolding venture of work, travel and self-discovery. In December, she made her first trip to China, eager to discover her family’s roots.

In a postcard to a friend dated Jan. 6, she wrote:

“I cried cruising into Shanghai harbor by boat because I couldn’t believe I was here. . . . It’s been rewarding getting in touch with my ‘cultural roots,’ for example, pushing through crowded streets, eating dog. . . .”

She returned from that journey Jan. 10--seven days before the quake would take her life. “She was so open to life,” said Suzanne Ross, a friend who lives in Los Feliz. “She wanted to explore the world. She was curious here and curious there.”

The Wongs received condolences from friends of their daughter from around the world, a testament, they said, to how she had enriched the lives of others.

“People we didn’t even know, they just called and said, ‘We’re praying for your family,’ ” said Voni’s brother, Jonathan.

Henry Wong said he has faith he will see his daughter again.

“We’ll have our reunion before you know it,” he said. “She’s probably a guardian angel up there, and there are those who enjoy her presence. Our loss is God’s gain.”