Betty Ann Wong has passed. Our Glen Park neighbor, she lived for decades in a humble but iconic house at the foot of O’Shaughnessy, at its intersection with Elk, above a dragon-emblazed garage door. Through a long career as a musician and composer, Betty personified humanity’s devotion to its music, in its many colors and rhythmic subtleties, for the bond it affords the world’s peace-loving people in their varied hues and accents. Betty’s siblings were a formidable bunch–she and her surviving twin Shirley were closely associated in music all their lives, from early classical music lessons to studies, degrees and faculty positions at Mills College, UC San Diego and San Francisco State, joining the faculty of the San Francisco Community Music Center in 1972, and co-founding the Flowing Stream Ensemble in 1973 and the Phoenix Spring Ensemble in 1977 to dive into Chinese and pan-Asian musical traditions. Their brother Zeppelin, said to have been personal secretary to Langston Hughes in Harlem for a time, was appointed to the Federal Attorneys office and recruited by Ted Kennedy in 1960 for consideration as vice presidential candidate on the JFK ticket. Older brother Victor studied political science and journalism at UC Berkeley and theology at the University of Chicago under Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber, before joining The Second City comedy troupe in Chicago and then returning to San Francisco where he studied under Mark Rothko at the SF Art Institute, became a journalist in the 1970s and made his mark as an actor in the 1980s and ’90s. The family’s first born, 15 years Betty and Shirley’s senior, was Sarah Anne Lum, born in 1923, a devotee of Chinese couture, courted by Hollywood in the 1940s as a potential successor to film star Anna Mae Wong, an Arts Ambassador towards Peace through the Arts and a performer internationally for 40 years with the Poetic Dance Theater Company, with acclaimed performances at World Congresses of Poetry and Cultures. Such was the family and cultural environment that produced Betty and that Shirley carries on.

Each year on the first Sunday in March at Bird & Beckett, for more years than we can pin down, Betty Wong called in talents from the Community Music Center to celebrate the breadth of music that held her ear and kept her creative juices flowing. Marking the Chinese New Year each year, she brought a cavalcade of musicians – students, faculty and friends — to play music from a variety of cultures and traditions around the globe, capping the afternoon as always with a trio of jazz players that were her long-time colleagues and dear friends. This year we’ll do it again, with Shirley embodying the family traditions and Betty present in all of her magnificent spirit.

Mark your calendar now for March 1st, 2026 at 1pm, when we’ll present CMC students, faculty and friends in a three-hour program dedicated to Betty’s memory and in celebration of the Year of the Horse.