A significant piece of U.S. aviation history was made 100 years ago on September 21, 1909, in the skies over my hometown, Oakland, CA, and the small city of Piedmont, which is completely surrounded by Oakland.

It’s a little known history in Oakland, Piedmont, California, and the United States, but in China, it’s a big deal.

That’s because the man who made the first self-propelled mechanized flight on the west coast of the United States was Feng Ru, aka Feng Yu and Fung Joe Guey, who was born in Guangdong Province, China, in 1883 and came to California when he was 12.

Courtesy of Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library

Largely unschooled, he taught himself the workings of various machines and was inspired by the Wright Brothers’ historic flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in late 1903.

He was 26 years old when he made the first Pacific coast flight, and he did it over the Oakland-Piedmont skies. He had moved to Oakland from San Francisco after that city’s disastrous earthquake and fire in 1906.

The September 23, 1909, issue of the San Francisco Call reported it this way:

CHINESE FLIES/IN AEROPLANE/OF HIS OWN BUILD

OAKLAND, Sept. 22 — For 20 minutes, Fung Joe Guey, a young Chinese inventor and aviator, circled through the air in the hills back of Piedmont yesterday afternoon in a biplane of his own manufacture, embodying his own ideas in aerospace construction.

Courtesy of Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library

The headline in the September 23, 1909, Oakland Tribune read, “CHINESE AVIATOR/FIRST TO FLY/ON COAST. Fung Joe Guey Local Machinist Makes Successful Flight in Bi-Plane.”

According to Steve Lavoie, the librarian in the Oakland History Room of the Oakland Public Library, Feng’s feat was dismissed in some aeronautics quarters of his day because of ethnicity.

The Aeronautics publication of November 1909 said, “It is claimed that this machine (Feng Ru’s biplane) has flown three-quarters of a mile in a circle on its first trial, but this is extremely doubtful for many obvious reasons.”

Lavoie has researched conflicting claims of the first west coast flight, and he said it was Feng’s flight over the Oakland-Piedmont skies that was indeed the first.

Photo by William Wong

The year 1909 was 27 years after the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the immigration of Chinese laborers. Most Chinese in America in those days lived highly segregated lives, were denied U.S. citizenship, and weren’t allowed to be part of the American mainstream.

To commemorate the centennial of Feng’s flight, aviation buffs, historians, Chinese temporarily living in America, and Chinese Americans will attend a ceremony scheduled for 1 p.m., Pacific Daylight time, on Saturday, September 19, 2009, at Laney College in Oakland.

Feng designed and built his biplane in workshops in and around Oakland’s Chinatown, which is where I was born decades later. One of his workshops, a relatively tiny space variously described as either 48 or 80 square feet, was at 359 East 9th Street, which today is part of the Laney College campus.

A bronze bust of Feng Ru will be unveiled during the ceremony and will find a permanent home on the Laney campus, whose president, Frank Chong, a Chinese American from New York’s Chinatown, was receptive to the idea of honoring the Chinese aviator.

Sculptor Long Xiang of the China National Academy of Fine Arts created the bust, financed by the QianJiang Evening News of Hangzhou, China, near Shanghai.

Photo by William Wong

On Thursday night (September 17), librarian Lavoie and Roger Glenn, organizer of a local committee to commemorate Feng, showed a photo of the bust and talked about Feng’s historic flight at the main branch of the Oakland Public Library.

Through the wonders of modern technology (Skype video and audio), they also connected with a Hangzhou middle school. This particular school is one of many in China that is honoring Feng’s pioneering role in Chinese aviation history.

Though at times fuzzy and inaudible, the Skype technology enabled those of us at the Oakland Public Library to hear teachers and students tell (in English!) of their study of Feng’s brief, but meaningful life as the “Father of Chinese Aviation.”

Two years after Feng’s Oakland-Piedmont flight, China underwent a stunning political revolution when Sun Yat-sen founded the Chinese Republic. Sun heard about Feng’s Oakland-Piedmont flight and recruited him to return home to start an aviation industry as China moved from its former imperial form of government to the republican form.

Feng returned to China in 1911 and began the Chinese aviation industry. Unfortunately, his amazing life was cut short when he died in an airplane accident in 1912. He was 29 years old.

Feng’s work spurred two Oakland-born Chinese Americans, Tom Gunn and Art Lym, to take up aviation, according to another speaker Thursday night, Patti Gully, a Canadian author of “Sisters of Heaven,” about three Chinese women aviators. At the request of Lym’s daughter, Renee Lym Robertson of San Francisco, Gully researched the lives of Feng and his two Chinese American disciples.

The story behind of the story of remembering Feng’s aviation accomplishment in Oakland and Piedmont is fascinating for its cross-cultural and international dimensions.

Photo by William Wong

Roger Glenn was the catalyst. A musician and pilot (he flies emergency services for the Civil Air Patrol), Glenn’s Oakland dentist is Dr. Wayne Fong. Dr. Fong, knowing Glenn’s love of aviation, told him about a Hall of Pioneers exhibit in Oakland’s Chinatown that featured, among others, Fung Joe Guey (or Feng Ru).

Fascinated, Glenn started digging into the Feng Ru story, finding Steve Lavoie’s research, among other things, on the Internet.

At a party, he met Qing Zhang, a Bay Area-based reporter for QianJiang Evening News of Hangzhou. Qing said she covered aerospace in China. Qing knew about Feng’s pioneering role in Chinese aviation, but knew nothing of his American accomplishment.

She wrote a story about Glenn’s campaign and she got her newspaper to financially support the creation of the bronze bust honoring Feng.

The China initiative to create a bust took Glenn by surprise. He had been working on getting an American artist to create a piece of art to commemorate Feng, but Qing’s efforts in China overtook his.

Another noteworthy aspect of the story behind the story is the fact that Glenn is not of Chinese descent. “I am proud as an African American to bring this (Feng’s Oakland-Piedmont flight) to the table. It crosses the border (of cultural relationships). We’re all human beings. We’re in charge of this planet. Creativity comes from all over this globe.”