Widow of Bus Crash Victim Receives Visa for Funeral

 Gilles Sabrie for The New York TimesLin Yaofang, the widow of Wang Jianhua, at home in China. Mr. Wang’s body has been in a New York funeral home since last month.

In the days after a bus traveling from a Connecticut casino crashed last month in the Bronx, the bodies of 14 victims were laid to rest. But the body of the 15th and final victim, Wang Jianhua, has lain in a funeral home in Chinatown while his widow, in China, has sought permission to come to the United States for his funeral.

On Wednesday, the widow, Lin Yaofang, said American consular officials had granted her a visitor’s visa. “There are so many emotions; I can’t describe them,” said Ms. Lin, reached by telephone at her home in Gui’an, a rural village in Fujian Province. “I am so relieved. I get to see his face one last time.”

Ms. Lin said she hoped to fly to New York next week. It would be her first trip out of China; the farthest she has ever traveled from home, she said, was to Guangzhou, in Guangdong Province, for the visa interview at the American Consulate.

The hard life of Mr. Wang, 40, was described last month in an article in The New York Times. He and Ms. Lin grew up poor in Fujian Province, and they met and married about 10 years ago.

They had two children, a boy and a girl, though Mr. Wang struggled to support his family working odd jobs and driving a taxi. In January 2008, he left China and, with the aid of smugglers, was brought to New York, where he found work as a restaurant deliveryman and lived in small, crowded apartments on the Lower East Side and in the Bowery.

Mr. Wang’s years in New York were marked by long days of toil, stress and deep longing for his family. He regularly wired money to China to support his wife, children and sick mother, and to pay off his smuggling debt. His friends said he had hoped to bring his family over to join him; he had petitioned for asylum on the basis of his opposition to China’s family-planning policies, a justification commonly used by Chinese asylum-seekers.

Ms. Lin said the past several weeks — from her husband’s death to the visa approval — had been dizzying and upsetting. On Wednesday, the visa interview, which took place two days earlier, was a blurry memory.

“My head felt huge and swollen the entire time,” she recalled. “Tears kept falling down my face. I just remember they asked quite a lot of questions. My mind was just very chaotic. I was so nervous.”

Grace Meng, a New York State assemblywoman, said her staff and the office of Representative Nydia M. Velázquez had helped to facilitate the process for Ms. Lin. “We just wanted to at least be able to give her that opportunity,” Ms. Meng said, adding that in her experience, consular officials had been “very understanding” in such situations.

In New York, Lin Changshui, a friend of Mr. Wang’s, said he and other friends planned to receive Ms. Lin and to care for her during her visit; they had found a place for her in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Ms. Lin said she had not yet given much thought to the funeral ceremony but hoped to cremate her husband’s body. “No matter what happens,” she said, “I will bring his ashes back, back to China.”

Kirk Semple reported from New York, and Xiyun Yang from Beijing. Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting from New York.

 

The Bay Citizen: City’s Art Is a Victim of Neglect, Damage and Loss

But management of the collection — which many local residents would be surprised to know even exists — is so slipshod that the city cannot say for sure how many pieces it owns. Some pieces have been damaged because of lack of maintenance or moth-ridden storage spaces; others have disappeared entirely.

The San Francisco Arts Commission, the city agency responsible for the collection, is especially poor at tracking its unusually large collection of around 2,500 portable works — paintings and other pieces that are supposed to decorate public spaces and buildings.

In one case, the city acquired 496 art objects for San Francisco General Hospital when it was renovated in 1972. By 2007, a floor-by-floor inspection turned up only 49 works — 10 percent of what was supposed to be there. Subsequently, more works have been discovered, but the city has yet to confirm the location of 141 pieces.

A big chunk of the city’s Modernist jewelry collection is also missing. A 2008 survey showed that of the 58 pieces in the collection, 19 were lost.

Since the Civic Arts Collection’s inception in 1932, a full survey of the city’s holdings has never been done. A complete inventory, encompassing sculptures and monuments and other stationary works in addition to the portable collection, is under way, but until its scheduled completion in late 2012, the city can only guess at the collection’s size.

Allison Cummings, senior registrar for the collection, began work on the inventory in 2009. She estimates the total number of works at 4,094 (including duplicates and large pieces comprising several smaller pieces).

Nearly one-quarter of the collection, an estimated 905 pieces, is in storage, while the rest is scattered around parks, hospitals, offices, courtrooms and other public city-owned spaces.

When asked about the number of pieces that could be damaged or missing, Luis Cancel, director of cultural affairs for the arts commission, said, “It is impossible for us to estimate or even comment on an inventory process that is presently ongoing.”

Upon request by The Bay Citizen, the city sent a partial list of its inventory, with 2,673 items of stationary and portable works. Many of the fields, like “dimension,” were unfilled, and question marks were sprinkled throughout. “The PDF files are the most complete record we can provide at this time,” said Kate Patterson, public relations manager for the arts commission.

The commission declined to provide locations for the items listed in the portable collection, citing security concerns.

Public and private arts institutions struggle with collection management, but throughout its history, San Francisco has allocated few resources to caring for its art

The job of collections manager (now called senior registrar) was not created until the 1980s; before that, no one person was in charge. The position was vacant from 2004 to 2007, when Ms. Cummings, a veteran of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other museums, was hired. She found that the city’s records “weren’t in as good a shape as they should have been.”

Now the Civic Art Collection’s care falls to three people: a full-time registrar, a part-time registrar and a project manager.

By contrast, Seattle, whose city art collection also contains thousands of portable works, has five full-time and four part-time employees in charge of public art. It also maintains an active database of its collection and does a complete inventory every four years, according to Ruri Yampolsky, director of the public art program for the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs in Seattle.

“We’re really careful to make sure we know where everything is,” Ms. Yampolsky said.

San Francisco’s large portable collection is mostly a remnant of the city’s art fairs from 1946 to 1986, which were held to support local artists. As a result of these offbeat fairs and other purchases, a catalog of the collection’s portable items reads like the packing list of an eccentric millionaire: world-class paintings by Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn are listed alongside jewelry, ceramic bowls and bolts of fabric. There’s even textile art — a wool skirt and a white leather jacket.

Now art is acquired through the Art Enrichment Ordinance. Enacted in 1969, it mandated that 2 percent of civic construction costs go toward acquiring public art. Because city finance laws do not allow bonds to finance maintenance, however, very little goes to the collection’s care.

awright@baycitizen.org;
rharmanci@baycitizen.org. Sydney Lupkin contributed reporting.