GRIEGO: The jewels in the crown of a vault full of mysteries

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The envelope came to Ann McKee a year ago. It was bulkier than most crossing her desk. That alone made it unusual. Banks send her a couple of hundred envelopes a year, the contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes. Nine times out of 10, they hold what most people would call junk. The mind is hard thing to fathom and the heart more so. How else to explain a safe deposit box full of grocery store receipts?

Still, McKee tells people she has the best job in the state. Officially, she is the safe deposit box manager for the Unclaimed Property Division of the Office of the Colorado State Treasurer. A romantic would call her a guardian. Guardian of objects lost and forgotten, of lives in shorthand, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, letters, lists, coins, stamps, a Coney Island token and a broken pencil and a matchbook and some rocks.

She opened the envelope. Inside were silk pouches. Inside the pouches was jewelry. Jade. Gold. Pearls. Coral. Necklaces and rings and earrings. A small gold Buddha figure, studded with diamonds.

She and her colleague spread the jewelry out on a table in a back room near a vault in the treasurer's office. The bank reported the box abandoned in 2005, which told McKee that rent had not been paid for at least five years. It belonged to Nora Wang, address unknown.

What in the world could have happened, McKee wondered.

The guardian became a detective.

McKee recounts the story as I'm visiting the Unclaimed Property Division. It's the time of the year when the state publishes names added to the unclaimed money or property list. Eighty thousand new names were added to the list over the last year. Alas, I was not one of them.

McKee displayed the gold Buddha during a recent Great Colorado Payback press conference, hoping someone would come forward. No one did.

She shows me the jewelry. It is stunning. The box also held Wang's naturalization papers. She became a U.S. citizen in 1975. There's not much more information. Some old addresses. Was she in the jewelry business? Is she even still alive?

"We believe she's living," McKee tells me. "We've followed her back and forth in the country. She was married a couple of times. She might be in Taiwan. We think we might have a lead on a brother, an ex-husband, we don't know. I've been trying to find her for a year."

McKee is under no obligation to search for Wang. The state publishes the names, does some publicity, counts upon people to check the payback list. But in a state vault full of mysteries, Nora Wang is McKee's greatest.

And I cannot resist a mystery.

I have two advantages McKee does not: access to a super-duper online people-finder and to a super-duper reporter, Burt Hubbard, our database guru.

In 15 minutes, Burt hands me 37 pages of names associated with Nora Wang. Most of them don't have phone numbers. I troll the Internet and start making calls. Two hours later, I find an ex-brother-in-law in Memphis, Tenn. Ten minutes later, I reach his nephew, Alan Wang, Nora's son.

"I can't believe this," he says. "Do you know how long we've been looking for this box?"

"Do you know what's in it?" I ask.

"Jewels," he says. "They came from my grandmother and my aunt. Some date back to the Mongolian empire. We've been looking for this box for 10 years. We thought it was stolen. You have no idea what this means."

He says his mom will break down when she hears, that the jewelry was the archive of family memory and she always said the one thing she wanted was to see it again.

And so it turns out that Nora Wang lives in Taiwan as Nora Yang, her maiden name. She is in her mid-60s and she lived in the U.S. for 30 years. She was born in Shanghai to a family descended from Mongolian royalty. Her father inherited the jewelry and divided it among his four children. Nora was a girl then and left it with her family when she came to the U.S. Every time her mother visited her here, she would bring some of the jewelry and tell her daughter to take care of it.

She rarely wore the jewelry. After her mother died, she opened the box looking for the comfort of memories, of connection to generations past. She left Denver for Taiwan about 14 years ago, believing she had prepaid the box rent for five years. Some confusion arises at this point: Bank notices went to no-longer-current addresses; banks merged; the record of her box could not be found. She returned a few times, and the last time, in 2004, bank employees opened the vault and said, "Show us which one is yours."

Nora tells McKee and me all of this in a conference call with Alan. "They pointed at a whole wall of boxes and I couldn't remember. That's when I said, 'It's gone,' and I tried not to think about it anymore."

She will come to Colorado to retrieve the jewelry. Will you take it back to Taiwan, McKee asks. No, Nora says. "I'm getting old. I have two wonderful children and two beautiful grandsons and I will divide it among them. I am so thrilled. I will pass on my grandmother's legacy."

McKee tells her that her jewelry is in a state Capitol vault "and probably has the best security in the state." The detective is guardian again.

For more news about Great Colorado Payback, go to colorado.gov/treasury/gcp/

• May 15, 2008

  12:24 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  JDBELL writes:

  Cool. This is a very fine story. Thanks for helping ms.Yang and thanks for letting the rest of us share the story.
  JD

• May 15, 2008

  2:28 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  happymike44 writes:

  Wow what a great story,she has to have the best job in the whole world.I mean think of it you get to make people happy everyday of your life.Look at all the good she gets to do.She will get a lot of karma points for the good she does.

• May 15, 2008

  9 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Alive writes:

  I like the new Tina. Finally stories that don't focus on ethnicity. Keep it up.

• May 15, 2008

  12:28 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  ochis writes:

  Alive,
  Why can't you just leave a good story alone. Do you always have to put something negative in your comments whether they be direct or indirect? "Finally stories that don't focus on ethnicity" Unbelievable!!

• May 15, 2008

  2:09 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Fresh writes:

  Ochis,

  calling a spade a spade is not negative, Tina has brought this on herself by her past columns.

  all alive was saying is FINALLY this isnt one of them.

• May 15, 2008

  4:50 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  ochis writes:

  Fresh,
  Brought what onto herself? That she writes her column from a different perspective than how you think? What is wrong with focusing on "ethnicity" and learning about other cultures anyway? Thank goodness she is able to write about things that most of us don't even think about. She puts it out there and sparks conversation. I think she does a fantastic job at doing that and I hope she continues writing about people that have no voice whatsoever or minimal at best.

• May 15, 2008

  6:57 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Fresh writes:

  Because the way Tina has done it in the past displays her racist tendancies, and people are sick and Tired of that crap out of her. This was a breath of fresh air column from her usual race baiting feel sorry for the poor poor illegals whom have brought their plight onto themselves columns.

• May 16, 2008

  1:11 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  ochis writes:

  Fresh,
  Are you sure you're not the racist here? You should look in the mirror and what do you see? I'll tell you, a narrow minded, shallow orphan with no idea of who you are, with the word "Nazi" printed across your forehead.

• May 16, 2008

  11:03 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  redwhiteandBLUE writes:

  Best story ever, a real refreshing change. I loved it!

• May 16, 2008

  12:53 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Fresh writes:

  Ochis,

  there has never been a time where I have spewed anything racial at all. However, since you seem to be so smart and have great insight on me maybe you can you tell me who I am racist against ?

  Riddiculous and pathetic, but should be a good laugh!

• May 16, 2008

  10:50 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  redwhiteandBLUE writes:

  Yep, I agree with fresh , for once I liked her story.
  Those were some really strong words by Ochis towards Fresh.
  Racist ,Nazi, orphan ? Really Uncalled for. Shame !