Today is Blog Action Day. I, along with over 12,000 bloggers, am supposed to blog about this year’s theme - poverty.  I live a pretty affluent lifestyle, pretty much having little to no exposure to poverty.  I really had no idea what I was going to blog about today, possibly talk about my work with YouthInkwell and what we’re doing to help people in Ethiopia.  But today, after a visit to USC, my mom decided to take me by her old houses in L.A. before she went to college and met my dad.  It was a really great coincidence that we did this today because I feel like it fits nicely into my poverty post.

My mother came from very humble beginnings.  She moved to San Francisco from Hong Kong at the age of four, and at seven her family moved to Los Angeles.  She, her two younger brothers, mom and dad crammed into a tiny little apartment on 42nd Street about a mile away from Exposition Park.  She attended public school her entire life while I can probably count the number of times I’ve stepped foot on a public school campus on my fingers.  At age 14, my grandparents had saved enough money to buy a little house in the “good part of town” at Van Ness Ave. and 41st Dr.  They spent $16,000 on that house.  My car is worth almost twice that.  I thought it would be nice to highlight some of my mom’s origins in Los Angeles and to show how she came from living in a working-class household in the middle of the city to a suburban house complete with hardwood floors.  My mother worked very hard.  She took buses to take classes that her school didn’t offer and excelled in all aspects of her work.  Today, we drove by her old homes in a 10-month old Lexus.  Her hard work paid off.  Congratulations, Mom.

My mom’s first home in Los Angeles: 957 42nd St.

The Wong’s first Los Angeles house: 2007 41st Dr.

Driving by Manual Arts High, my mom’s high school