Researching history
A Titanic survivor lived and died in Chicago’s Chinatown — and inspired one of the 1997 movie’s iconic scenes
Anearly unknown Titanic survivor lived in Chicago, died in Chinatown and possibly inspired one of the 1997 film’s most iconic scenes, according to a new documentary, executive produced by filmmaker James Cameron.
Of eight Chinese passengers on board the ill-fated ship, six survived, and “The Six” focuses on their stories, said lead researcher Steven Schwankert, who co-created the film with director Arthur Jones.
Schwankert, who has been based in China for 25 years, said he lost sleep at night over their untold stories.
While other Titanic survivors became minor celebrities wherever they went, the six “just arrived in New York after being saved from Titanic, and then all of a sudden, they’re gone,” he said.
Schwankert and Jones began their work with a visit to Tom Fong.
Fong happens to own one of the oldest Chinese American restaurants in the country: the Cozy Inn in Janesville, Wisconsin.
“He told us, ‘I’m the son of a Titanic survivor,’ ” Schwankert said. “The skeptic in me said, ‘No way. Unless you’re like 95.’ When we got there, he told us that his father had gotten married very late in life and started a family very late in life. At least that part of it was believable.”
Even Fong, 61, was skeptical at first. “My father never told us he was on the Titanic,” he said. The family patriarch never spoke of the ship to his wife either. Mother and son remain close, living just 10 houses apart.
Wing Sun Fong was an 18-year-old third-class passenger when the Titanic sank in 1912. He died at 91 in 1986. His grave at Mount Auburn cemetery in west suburban Stickney is marked with a modest metal plate. Chinese characters show only his name and ancestral village in Taishan.
Nearly 20 years after his father’s death, Tom Fong took a visiting cousin to a local tourist attraction, where he first learned about his father’s survival story.
“My father sponsored my cousin’s family from Hong Kong,” Fong said. That cousin’s family would go on to open Quon Yick Bakery, long closed in Chicago’s Chinatown. On a visit to Wisconsin, the cousins went to the House on the Rock in Spring Green. The attraction has long housed a Titanic display among myriad memorabilia.
“My cousin just mentioned that my father was on the Titanic,” Fong said.
Later that evening, his son began looking for passenger lists online and found their last name, but spelled slightly different. Further research revealed a story about Titanic survivor Fang Lang, found floating on debris. The floating debris detail matched a story a family friend had told Fong as a child about his father surviving a shipwreck.
“I had always just assumed it was in China,” he said.
“The Six” shows a scene cut from the 1997 movie “The Titanic” of Fang Lang desperately balancing on a board floating on the freezing water. Cameron says in the documentary the historical account may have inspired the fictional ending with his characters Jack and Rose.
The new film shows the methodical and meticulous research around the world that proved and disproved the Chinese survivors’ stories. Schwankert was able to share details unknown to Fong, whose parents divorced when he was only 5.
The documentary is as much a son’s quest to learn more about his own family history.
“We got what I would call the Rosetta Stone of his father’s documents, basically his application for naturalization,” Schwankert said. “He had to get all these letters from different employers saying, ‘Yes, he worked for me, and he’s an upstanding citizen.’ The funny thing is, he’s submitting all of these documents with these fake names, but he’s submitting them under his own name.”
The film doesn’t show what the research team discovered about how the survivor known as Fang Lang got from the Titanic to Chicago.
“He worked on fruit boats down in the Caribbean,” his son said. “When World War I started, he somehow managed to make it back to Europe. They did find that he worked for some ship that was registered to Denmark. And somehow he lived in France, in Le Havre.”
Fong remembers seeing a photo of his father as a young man standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, luggage in tow.
“He worked on a ship that went to New York that was docked there for weeks. Just prior to that ship leaving, he disembarked, and he made his way to Chicago from there,” Fong said.
His father arrived in Chicago in the 1920s. He tried to become a merchant, and at one point opened a laundry. He would eventually move to Milwaukee, where he worked as a server at the Lotus restaurant on Third Street, which has since been torn down.
After the divorce, he moved back to Chicago, where his younger brother opened the bakery. He lived at 202 W. Cermak Road, in a family association bachelors’ quarters on the third floor, above the old Three Happiness restaurant. The building was later demolished to make way for the new Chinatown branch of the Chicago Public Library.
“He used to roam back and forth on Wentworth all the time, because he had so many relatives there,” Fong said about his father. “Do you remember Haylemon restaurant? They were relations too. It was right as you walked into the main strip of Chinatown, right under the gate. That’s where we’d have family reunions.”
The elder Fong was also very politically active, Schwankert said.
“He was very active in the community,” he said. “So if somebody of note was coming to town, he got a photo with him.”
Some of those photos can be seen in the film. They may eventually be seen at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, said former president and board member Soo Lon Moy. She appears in the documentary, explaining immigration laws.
Moy said the film could end up showing at the museum as well. Meanwhile, you can find a list of upcoming screenings — several of which will be virtual in November — online at thesixdocumentary.com.