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Carlton Jay Wong

Donate to the Carlton J. Wong Fund

I didn’t know Carlton, a San Francisco-born third-generation Chinese American, until he was living in my adopted town of Pittsburgh in the early 1990s.

By then, Carlton had also adopted Pittsburgh as his home, and we met in a way through a big Victorian home he had purchased. Later events would take us back to his hometown of San Francisco where we continued to live and plan for the future.

I still think of Carlton as full-of-life and taking on a renovation project, intently reading a magazine, going through a museum or drawing an adaptation of a favorite Victorian home with a pen and whatever piece of paper he could find.

It pained me later to see him unable to draw like he once had, instead producing scribbles so unlike his earlier efforts.

Life is not guaranteed, and the older I get the more I realize how much of life is actually beyond our control. Carlton and I both felt that loss of control when meeting the challenges ahead of us.

While reading through a research paper Carlton had written in 1982 titled “Three Southern Sung Night Landscapes” (Carlton had a double major in biology and art history) I drew some parallels with his and our experience. “According to the yin-yang aesthetic,” Carlton wrote, “there is a mutual dependence between the two opposing qualities; in order to show ‘what is darkness’ one must compare it to the light.” This, he wrote, would grant the painter artistic license to search for the meaning of the night.
When faced with challenges that can change life in a moment and then take it away, seeing the light and finding meaning in the night are equally difficult. Today we are left with a challenge not unlike that of the Sung painters. Ours is however one step greater. We are left not only to search for meaning in the night, but to create that wonderful light that darkness must stand against.

A donation to the Carlton J. Wong Fund provides can help others create some of the light that’s very much in need. In fact, the fund allows contributors to provide double support. Its unique design allows one contribution to help both peer leaders and severe need clients. The fund provides stipends for bilingual bicultural Peer Leaders to work providing emotional, practical and treatment adherence support to severe need clients. Peer Leaders are active clients themselves who provide training and supervision in order for them to offer much-needed services. Your donations are used twice and are a direct way to bring light to those in need.

Thanks so much for your help.

Eric Miller

The Carlton J. Wong Fund
Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center
Patrick Barnett, Keith Schroeder, Castro Photo
James Chuck
Kelton Finney
Robert Fong & Helen J. Fong
Victoria Harrington
Troy Kaji
Nicholas Kyriazi
Philip Lee, MD, FACC
Elizabeth Louie & Gary Louie
Eric Miller
Ruth Miller
Paley Yuen Pang
Ann Rule
Kathleen San
Thomas Stewart
Shelly Taylor
Robert Weaver
Maise Wong
Robert Wong
Samson Wong
Cary Young & Marie B. Young