Centenarian says key to joy is gratitude

Ethel Lung has some simple advice for you.

“Be thankful and live sensibly,” she said. “Never wish for this and that. Be thankful for everything you have in life, so you will be happy.”

That’s 107 years of wisdom for you, but add a year if you adhere to Chinese tradition, which considers people to be a year old at birth and Chinese New Year to be everyone’s birthday. So current Chinese New Year’s festivities mark her 108th birthday, the ninth cycle of the Year of the Monkey.

It’s a particularly momentous occasion because in the Chinese tradition, 108 represents the sum total of lunar, solar and other significant divisions of the Chinese calendar. “It symbolizes completeness or wholeness,” said Douglas Chong of the Chinatown Hawaii Chinese History Center, which has compiled oral histories from Lung and other seniors.

Lung, whose bright smile and twinkling eyes radiate an energy that makes you feel like it’s Christmas morning, says she has much to be thankful for.

“First, that we’re Chinese,” she said. “That we have good children, good families that have the right attitude.”

Even her humble origins have her filled with gratitude. She was born Ethel Yuk Lin Leong on Aug. 12, 1908, in Wailuku, the fourth of six children. Her father was a farmworker who married a young woman from China who had come to Hawaii as a child bride. The family was so poor that for Chinese New Year, rather than laying out the customary three cups of wine for their deceased ancestors, they would put out three cups of tea.

“I carried water, I chopped wood, I raised chickens and ducks,” she recalled. “I’m not sorry one bit because I learned how nature is. I got pokes and cuts on my feet, and I’m thankful because I didn’t get infections.”

She came to Oahu as a teenager with her mother with the help of her brother Jimmy Leong, a postal worker in Honolulu. He proved helpful in other ways, too, one day coming home with three brash pals who called themselves “The Three Musketeers.” They were all interested in dating his sister, but she “didn’t want to be an eager beaver,” she said. “I was too young, and I had lots of experience with people, working in different jobs.”

Over the years, those jobs included housecleaning at classic hotels like the Moana Surfrider and the Alexander Young Hotel and checking hats at a theater. Later on she worked at a drive-in diner, coming up with a salad that was so good it brought in customers in droves.

She eventually married one of those “Musketeers,” Wui Lung, who established a successful machine shop in Honolulu. They had four children and she became a happy homemaker.

“I sewed all their clothes,” she said. “I went to the Kaimuki Dry Goods store and bought remnants to make clothes for the children. I never bought one single clothes for my children.”

Her eldest daughter, Eileen Young, 85, remembers her mother’s cooking. “She used to make delicious desserts, like upside-down pineapple cake,” said Young, a retired teacher.

Lung remembers the radio announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor. “It said ‘Take cover, take cover!’ They keep repeating, so then I knew it was the real thing. The Japanese were bombing,” she said. But she was not afraid during the war years, preferring to stay in Hawaii while many fled. “I wasn’t scared at all,” she said.

She doesn’t live in the past. Though she attended school up to only the second grade, she keeps informed by reading the newspaper. Her cozy apartment at the Kahala Nui retirement community is decorated with family pictures and artifacts that she got on a trip to Hong Kong in the 1960s, along with a commendation to her husband from President George W. Bush. She is a lifelong Republican but she likes President Barack Obama.

“He’s from Hawaii and he’s a good man,” she said.

She enjoys a good laugh, especially some of the jokes that poke fun at Hawaii’s ethnic diversity.

But mostly, she is just thankful to have lived in Hawaii for all these years. “We have the best weather,” she said. “It’s comfortable. And people get along.”