Mabelle Jan was born on November 12, 1916 in San Francisco, the oldest of 12 children. Her father owned a grocery store and worked long hours. She helped her father arrange produce for display when she was young. During this time, her mother sewed for Levi Strauss & Co.
In the 1930’s, Mabelle’s family moved to Oakland. Her father took over a grocery store from a Japanese family who had left for internment camp. When her parents got into an automobile accident, Mabelle left high school to care for her siblings. Her parents recuperated at the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco and the children would take the ferry across the bay to visit them. “On Saturdays, I took my younger brothers to the theatre on Stockton Street. We’d bring food and sit in the front row. It cost 10 cents to watch cartoons and movies,” she recalls. Eventually, Mabelle was able to return to school and graduated from Oakland Technical High School.
She met her husband, David Jan, at a YWCA dance in Sacramento. When his father passed away, David had to quit high school to help run the family business, Wing Lee, a wholesale meat market. They dated for several years. David would always take the train from Sacramento to Oakland to see her. They got married in 1942. Mabelle said, “He set the date. We had a formal wedding at the Chinese United Methodist Church in San Francisco.” They never had any children of their own, but they raised her niece from the time she was 21 months old. Many years later, David left the family business to start a real estate career. They were very proud that in the 1950’s, he went to night school and obtained his GED certificate.
Mabelle and David had been married almost 70 years when he passed away. They traveled around the world. One special memory was flying on the Concorde in the late 1980’s to New York. “It was very noisy but fast.” She learned how to play mah jong and played regularly with her good friend, Mae Chan, another centenarian. How does it feel to be 102? She smiles and says, “I’ve had a good, peaceful life.”
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