165
Chinese girls there. Very feminine and attractive, she had no end of male admirers, much to Mother's anxiety.
1
On February 6, 1932, young and inexperienced, Helen was married to Edmund Tin Wai Tong W, who was some years her senior and much more sophisticated. He had been educated at Lingnan University in Canton and at the University of Pennsylvania, and was working for the Chinese-American Bank, of which his father, Tong Phong, was president. This union was pleasing to both my Mother and to the Tong Phong's. A son, Edmund Yee Sing, was born on 28 September 1933. Following the failure of the bank when it encountered financial difficulties, Helen and Tin Wai were divorced on 18 January 1937. This was a disappointment to the parents on both sides, but the in-laws remained good friends. With the passage of time, Helen and Tin Wai are now on friendly terms.
Helen began her working career as a kindergarten teacher for a year and a substitute teacher at a junior high school for about half a year. For a year in 1937 to 1938, she went to San Francisco to attend a fashion designing school as well as a business school. She returned to Honolulu to work along these lines, first for others, then for herself in a dressmaking business, until the Second World War when she worked for the Office of Civilian Defense in a secretarial capacity. When the war ended, she accepted a civil service position as a statistician with the Territorial Bureau of Sight Conservation and later as a clerk-stenographer with the Territorial Board of Health. Due to the fact that she failed to receive child support, as ordered by the Court, from Edmund's father, Helen was forced to change jobs whenever a better paying one opened to her. Alone she eventually saw Edmund go through college with a degree in dentistry from the University of Illinois.
In 1946 on a vacation trip to Chicago to visit Dora, Helen met and married Tso-yu Futon on 14 March, 1947. He came from Wen Chou, Yung Chia Hsian, Chekiang Province MT and owned a Chinese art business, which ended when no merchandise could be imported from China. At the time of his death on 14 March, 1971, as a result of an automobile accident, he was a managing editor of a Chinese newspaper. After two more children, Lynnette Wen-chu X, born on 29 July, 1948, and Russell Wen-chau M born on 10 September, 1951,