A woman who immigrated to the United States from China and helped her husband start a successful restaurant in Hickory has died.
Hickory resident Becky Der died Monday morning. She was 106.
Becky lived a simple, faithful life, said Der’s granddaughter, Suzanne Ngo, 53.
She said her grandmother never drank, smoked or learned to drive. Becky was a homemaker, Ngo said.
“(My grandmother) was deeply religious,” Ngo said. “She converted to Christianity when she moved here. That was pretty much her life.”
Grandson Ronnie Yee, 59, described Becky as a giving person, and said she was active in First United Methodist Church until she got older.
Ngo said Becky was constantly in prayer at home and would often sing hymns.
“God and her family were everything to my grandmother,” Ngo said.
Gaining citizenship was no simple task for Becky, either, according to a Hickory Daily Record article from 1971. The article was published when Der became a naturalized citizen.
Becky and her husband Fang Der opened a laundromat when they first settled in Hickory, Yee said. The building was located where Hickory City Hall is now, he said. He added that the couple also opened Fang’s Chinese and American Restaurant in Hickory, then a second location when the couple moved to Asheville in the mid-70s.
When the Ders retired, Yee said his grandparents returned to Hickory. Fang passed away from cancer in the early 1980s, he said.
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