Wallace Ng was carrying a watering can Saturday morning, the first day of Pawtuxet Memorial Park “Avenue of Flags.” A Memorial Day tradition, the avenue features more than 300 large veterans’ flags evenly spaced along roads that weave through the cemetery.

Unlike others visiting the park, Ng was not looking for the name of an ancestor or friend among the fluttering red and white stripes with a blue swatch bright with stars. He was weeding around the grave stone of Danny Lin, his brother in-law.  Across the way Pam Amaral was looking over a colorful floral display of a headstone.  She was on a hunt to find the flag bearing his grandfather’s name.  The names of veterans buried at the park are printed on the inner seam of flags.

Ng looked up from his weeding, squinting in the bright sun.

Was his father or a member of his family a veteran, is that why he was here on Memorial Day weekend?

He left the watering can and came over to the car. Ng revealed he visits this section of the cemetery almost every day to make certain things are in place and to be close to his wife, Sharon, who died a couple of years ago.

How many more of the family have found their final resting place in the park?

Ng paused before answering. He was counting as he named in-laws and others in the extended family.  With a sweep of his hand across graves on both sides of the road, he came up with 12. His father, “Jack” Thun Sing Ng served in the Army during World War II. Ng didn’t have the particulars of where Jack served or whether he experienced combat. But he had the details of his brother-in-law who performed three tours with the Marines in Vietnam.  The brother-in-law made it through the war, only to die years later from the affects of Agent Orange used to defoliate the jungle.

Ng told of the death of Danny Lin and three others in 1978 that captured local headlines for days. Lin was the manager of Lee’s Cathy Terrace, a popular Warwick  Chinese restaurant on Post Road across from the airport.  On June 17 soon after opening for dinner, a cook, Gan Fong Chin,  at the restaurant pulled out  his hunting rife and killed the co-owner of the restaurant, a bartender, cashier and Lin.  A customer at the scene collapsed and later died of a heart attack.

What prompted the massacre?

Ng said they never knew, but it was thought the cook believed they were poisoning his soup.

Ng who is retired from RIPTA, served in the Marine Corps at the tail end of the Vietnam War. After training , however, the unit was never deployed and Ng spent most of ten years as a Marine in Camp Lejeune.

Others visiting the Avenue of Flags Saturday drove slowly through the display. Pam Amaral found the flag with her grandfather’s name. She knows Irving Ellison was a World War II Army veteran and she was too young to remember him when he died. Yet she was there to pay tribute to all the veterans buried in Pawtuxet Memorial Park.

And Ng was also there to keep company with family.