Daniel Rubin: In death a news blurb, but in life 'a quiet giant'

You may not have seen the news about a 25-year-old woman who died last Sunday after jumping from the second floor of her burning house in Olney.

We didn't identify her. TV got her name wrong. We just wrote that her fiance had tossed their 3-month-old daughter to neighbors, and that the father and baby had been hurt but were expected to survive.

So this is what you missed - a young woman bursting with talent, passion and quiet rebellion.

Her name was Somalie Hong.

Arlene Bell, executive director of the Caring People Alliance, had spotted Hong when she was an intern from Bok Vocational School. Bell was so impressed with the skills of the teenager, whose family had survived the Killing Fields of Cambodia, that she hired her full time as assistant to a particularly thorny development director.

"If anyone could do work with him, Somalie could," Bell said. "Uncomplaining. Hardworking. Lovely disposition."

We were standing at Hong's cubicle, nicknamed the West Wing both for its geography and the high-level decisions made there. "Somalie was the glue," Bell said, softly. "She did everything."

A red light blinked on the young woman's phone. No one has had the heart to listen to the message or hit erase.

One of Hong's supervisors, Joselynne Jones, poked her head in:

"I called her a quiet giant," Jones said. "She was very small, but very big in what she did. You know how you hear on the news when someone dies that they always helped everyone, and it isn't always true?

"If you broke your glasses, Somalie would fix them. If you lost an earring - one day I came in with one missing, and she said, 'Give me your necklace.' The next day, she came in with two new earrings made out of my necklace. Whatever was broke, she would fix."

Another friend at work, Maria Miranda, had been to a memorial vigil the night before, standing among the teddy bears, soot and broken glass outside the rowhouse where Hong had been staying with her fiance, Chucky Leang, 21, and their baby, Lana.

"Her family gave us incense, and I was trying to stick my candle on the pavement. It took me five minutes. I said to my sister if Somalie had been here, she'd tell us to step back and she'd make a beautiful display, but she'd tell us very nicely and it would not make us feel bad."

Hong was to have returned to work Friday after a three-month maternity leave. She was planning an August wedding. She was preparing to begin community college with her younger sister in the spring.

Finally, she was settling down.

"She tried to break all the rules," said her older sister, Phorllie Tsen, 26. Somalie had been accepted into academically prestigious Central High School but wanted to go to a vocational program instead. She won a full scholarship to the Moore College of Art, but turned it down. Too structured, she told her sister.

"All her painting, sculpting and sewing she learned on her own," Tsen said. "As soon as you put her in a class and said, 'You have to do it,' it was not fun anymore. As soon as you tried to pay her for something, there was no more passion."

For a quiet woman, Hong could sure belt out the tunes, which surprised coworkers at office parties. She dragged Tsen to an American Idol tryout at the Franklin Mills mall six winters ago. Her song - a Mariah Carey number, her sister thinks - didn't make the cut.

As a teenager, Bell said, Hong struggled to maintain some independence from her parents, Peter and Debbie Yang, who came to this country in 1980.

Tsen counts making 22 moves as a child, from Columbus, Ohio, where she was born, to California, where her parents picked apples and oranges, to Washington state, where they picked strawberries.

"If they could get 25 cents more, they'd move," she recalled. They settled in Philadelphia in 1996, and the father has worked for most of that time at Terminix. The mother did hair.

After having the baby, Hong split her time between her parents' place in the Northeast and her fiance's rowhouse.

Someone had left something on the stove Saturday night, and at dawn Sunday the young family woke up to a house ablaze.

Hong's fiance grabbed Lana, tossing her to neighbors who had been awakened by screams and the pop of electrical wires. Hong jumped to the landing, but Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers said that was jumping into a ball of fire, and she never had a chance.

Investigators found no smoke detectors in the house. Ayers said the department needed to raise awareness in the immigrant community of the importance of alarms.

"We will actually come and put one in their homes," he said. That's available to any Philadelphian, he said. Just call 215-686-1176.

And if that saves one person, the death of Somalie Hong will be something other than a terrible waste.

Contributions may be sent to the Somalie Hong Memorial Trust Fund in care of Beneficial Savings Bank, 1600 Chestnut St., Philadelphia 19103.

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