Alice Wong received the Frank Fat Founders’ Award of the Chinese American
Alice Wong received the Frank Fat Founders’ Award of the Chinese American Council of Sacramento for her work on behalf of immigrant communities.
Alice Wong’s passion for social justice began as a child in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she had to become an advocate for her immigrant parents from China.
Wong’s dad worked as a cook at two different restaurants and also cleaned hotel rooms.
“He would come home and complain about his work schedule and treatment but he didn’t speak English,” Wong said, “so I called the hotel employees’ union on his behalf at 11.”
Wong became a civil rights lawyer to battle injustice and give voice to those immigrants who had none. The Chinese American Council of Sacramento has given her the Frank Fat Founders’ Award for more than a decade of community activism.
Wong, 45, focused on domestic violence issues for the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office from 1992 to 2006 and later in private practice.
In 1994, Wong said, she prosecuted a Hmong American accused of kidnapping, assaulting and threatening to kill his 17-year-old wife.
The victim, who escaped her abuser by running through a field in south Sacramento, knocked on a stranger’s door seeking help.
But the girl provided flat, unemotional testimony.
The jury found the husband guilty of misdemeanor assault, and Wong spread the word to Asian Pacific Islander community leaders, some of whom didn’t realize that spousal rape and abuse are crimes, she said.
Her family’s struggles, and the older Chinese women she saw toiling in sweatshops with no rights, “made me want to fight for fairness and equality,” she said.
Wong graduated San Francisco’s Lowell High School, the University of California, Berkeley, and Hastings College of Law. She joined a corporate firm in Los Angeles, but quit after she successfully defended a hotel against an employee it had wrongfully terminated.
After joining the Sacramento DA’s office, she got a $150,000 federal grant to create the District Attorney’s Citizens Academy – a 10-week class to build bridges between minority communities and law enforcement.
Wong was the first Asian American prosecutor assigned to the Homicide Unit, and in 2006 the bar association named her Sacramento County Attorney of the Year.
She went into private practice with her mentor, veteran civil rights lawyer Jerry Chong. They’ve worked to overcome the distrust many Asian immigrants have of law enforcement, and their fears in reporting domestic violence.
Wong said she and Chong represent law enforcement officers battling alleged gender and racial discrimination. They worked to ensure confirmation of the first Asian American woman, Lai Lai Bui, to the Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission.
Wong served as president of My Sister’s House, Sacramento’s first domestic violence shelter for Asian Pacific Islander women and children.
She’s president of CAPITAL Foundation, a nonprofit that offered the first anger management counseling program for the API community.
The Chinese American Council of Sacramento, founded by the late Frank Fat in 1986, also inducted pioneering Asian American attorney Karen Tomine – who died in 2010 – into its Hall of Fame.