The Sonoma Sister Cities Association’s Sonoma-Penglai Committee is campaigning to fund a Chinese-style pavilion in Sonoma’s Depot Park to honor Chinese laborers.
Sonoma had a large Chinese population in the 1870s and ’80s. Hundreds of Chinese laborers were employed on local ranches and in vineyards. They also worked as launderers, fishermen, sailors and vegetable peddlers.
An important part of our local economy, they were nevertheless subjected to extreme, ugly discrimination from many white Americans, including Sonomans, during that period.
An old, hand-drawn, 1886 map of downtown Sonoma, in which various local businesses around the Plaza are named, identifies seven as Chinese. They were concentrated near what is now the corner of West Spain Street and First Street West.
All of them were long gone by the 1940s when I was growing up here.
The part of Sonoma’s Chinese heritage that I remember with great fondness is the period in which Freddie and Nancy Wing ran the kitchen at the Marioni family’s Swiss Hotel on Spain Street.
For most of my lifetime, Ted Dunlap ran the bar, Freddie and Nancy Wing the kitchen. Helen Marioni Dunlap was the real boss of the house and greeted everyone as they came in. Today Hank Marioni, Helen’s nephew, runs the family restaurant.
Freddie and Nancy were the chefs. Freddie was outgoing, friendly and very much up front and out in the dining room greeting his many friends every night.
Born in Wan Chong in the Canton region of China in 1908, his full name was Yee Wing Fon Tow. He came to California at the age of 16 with his father. He worked as a dishwasher, waiter and cook in the logging camps of Mendocino County.
He then got a job at the Albion Hotel, and while working and learning to be a chef, he went back to school and learned English. In six months’ time, at the age of 18, the hotel made him its head chef. He also changed his name to Fred Wing.
In 1937 he came to Sonoma as the chef of the Swiss Hotel. Except for distinguished service during World War II in Africa and then Italy, where he was awarded a bronze star, he remained at the Swiss for the rest of his career.
Nancy, born Man Sz Ng, in Canton, China in 1919, was the sixth youngest daughter of a wealthy tea merchant. In 1941, she earned a nursing degree in Canton then worked as a registered nurse in Hong Kong during World War II. She and Freddie met in Hong Kong in 1947 and after a whirlwind romance they married and she moved with him to Sonoma.
Freddie and Nancy were a great team. Nancy, was the shy, sweet, patient wife of the much more volatile and loquacious Freddie.
Thanks to Freddie and Nancy, the Swiss offered a Chinese menu along with its traditional Italian dishes.
When diners arrived and Helen seated them, Freddie would come out of the kitchen and say hello. Regulars like us could usually persuade him to sit down and join us for a before-dinner drink. During the summer, when the horse races were at the Sonoma County Fair, we could ask him for tips on betting. In fact the best and only good day I ever had at the county fair racetrack was when I followed Freddie’s tips on the horses.
Everybody in town seemed to know Freddie, although most of us also knew that Nancy was the real chef in the kitchen. And it seemed that just about everybody in town dined at least once a week at the Swiss.
Freddie was at the Swiss for 43 years until his retirement in 1982. He passed away in 1993. Nancy died in 2001.
It would be nice if a small acknowledgment to Freddie and Nancy Wing, distinguished citizens of our town’s 20th Century, could be added to the tribute to our Sonoma-Chinese citizens of the 19th Century.
