20 MINUTES OVER OAKLAND
It was a comment made to fill the kind of conversational vacuum unique to dentist offices, when both parties fall into a silence prompted by whining tools or the dry-mouthed difficulty of speaking through cotton pads. The fact popped into Wayne Fong’s head that 2008 afternoon as he cleaned Roger Glenn’s teeth, and to break the quiet, Fong said: “Hey, did you know the first man in flight on the West Coast came from here?”
Fong is an affable dentist with a love of trivia, and his office on the edge of Oakland’s Chinatown is adorned with the usual neutral-toned carpet and stack of waiting-room magazines. His family has lived in the neighborhood for three generations; his grandparents owned the barbershop that served as the center of Chinatown social life at the turn of the 20th century. More recently, he spent 25 years’ worth of Christmases as the local Santa before hanging up the white beard for good.
More than a century ago, Fong’s grandfather stood amid a rapt crowd watching the young man who had rented the workshop down the street soar above the Oakland hills in a homemade machine. Fong’s grandfather later told Fong’s father about the sight. Decades later, at the opening of a community center exhibit on local history, Fong and his father learned about a 26-year-old Chinese immigrant named Feng Joe Guey (Feng Ru in Mandarin) who flew a plane he’d designed and constructed himself at a time when few people in the world had successfully bucked the bonds of gravity.
Wait, Fong remembers his father telling him. I think I’ve heard of this guy.
It wasn’t the sort of thing that Fong would have brought up with every patient at his office, but he guessed that Glenn would be interested. The son of a legendary jazz performer who’d played with the likes of Duke Ellington and
