How the mystery of a Chinese-American soldier killed during World War II was solved, and his ashes finally brought home
- With the help of a DNA database, the US National Archives, a genealogist and an Instagram post, Ken Hom finally found out the truth about his uncle’s death
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Ken Hom wondered about his uncle, Wing On Hom, preserved in two black-and-white photographs at the family home.
In one, he looks handsome in his army uniform sitting on a stoop. In the other, he is standing, feet together, arms at his sides, in front of a painted scene of a lake with a canoe and wooden cabin.
Whenever Ken’s mother and grandmother lit incense to honour their ancestors and brought out uncle Wing’s picture, or when Ken and his two younger brothers would watch war films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967) or The Longest Day (1962), Ken would ask his parents and grandfather about his father’s older brother.
“Every once in a while we would ask, especially me, ‘Where’s uncle?’ The usual answer was, ‘He went to war and got killed’,” says Ken. “That pretty much shut down the conversation from there. I guess it was a pretty sore subject in the family.”
Ken could sense anger in their voices and felt that something bad had happened but that they didn’t want to talk about it.
“That pretty much was the extent of the conversation about uncle with our family,” he says. “But somehow deep inside of me, I always was just curious.”
