Mediaboss Marketing

Loved and Lost is a project about memorializing those lost to COVID-19 in NJ. NorthJersey.com

This story is part of Loved and Lost, a statewide media collaboration working to celebrate the life of every New Jersey resident who died of COVID-19. To learn moreandsubmit a loved one's name to be profiled, visit lovedandlostnj.com.

Nancy Blair of Lyndhurst was committed to her family foremost.

In her 20s, she left college and her accounting studies behind in Taiwan to move to New York and pave a way for her parents and her two younger brothers to one dayjoin her.

In her 30s and as a married woman living in New Jersey, she raised her three children with her husband, John Blair, and helped her parents buy a house near her home in Harrison.

And in recent years, as a grandmother, she often invited her children, spouses, and grandchildrenfor Chinese and Italian meals followed by hours-long conversations.

Nancy Blair of Lyndhurst died of complications of COVID-19 on April 22, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy from Blair family)

She always wanted the family together, especially holiday events," John Blair said. "She would do all the cooking.

Nancy died on April 22, 2020 at Hackensack University Medical Center. She was 75.

Nancywas born Jian-Hua Wang in China and was the oldest of three children.When she was a child, her family relocated to Taiwan, fleeing communism. When Nancy was in her early twenties, she moved to New York to work as a nanny, a job she didnt enjoy because she got so fewdays off,her husband said.

Eventually, she found work as a bookkeeper and accountant at Chinese restaurants in Queens, which would allow her to save money and bring her parents and brothers to the United States.

She was a very happy and kind person, with a good frame of mind, her husband said. She was always very considerate of her family.

Nancy had two children, Marsha and John Khan, during her first marriage. She met John Blair one day when he dropped envelopes at her house in Queens that he had printed for her then-husband. A friendship ensuedthat would continue for years.

After her divorce, Nancy moved in with her mother and would confide her struggles to John during their almost daily phone conversations.

The conditions werent so good with her mother, and I felt she should get out of there, and then we started to make some plans to get married, John Blair recalled.

The couple moved to Harrison, where they bought a house close to the train station so John could easily get to his printing job in Manhattan. Nancy, meanwhile, worked as an accountant at local businesses, includinga dress shopand a lumber yard. At the lumber yard, she met a builder constructing houses in Harrison and asked him to save one for her parents, who were still living in Queens.

She moved her parents into there,'' John Blairrecalled. "It was a three-family, so the other two floors they rented out.

Nancy liked to give financial advice, her husband said, andshared tips with anyone who would listen.

She was a giving person in every respect, John said.

Nancy and John, who also became parents to a son, David, eventually moved to Lyndhurst. In 2007, to celebrate their retirement, the couple toured several countries in Europe as part of a cruise.

Nancy Blair, of Lyndhurst, and her family. Blair died of COVID-19 complications on April 22, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy photo from Blair family)

Nancy, who had successfully battled stomach cancer 20 years earlier, fell sick last March, days after she and her younger brother, Jenn Wang, buried their mother, Ruoh Yeh Yong Wang, who died March 18, 2020. The siblings had visited their mother at her nursing home in Hackensack for weeks before her death.

Nancy'sbrother, who lived in Texas, returned home and soon feltsick as well. He died March 28 of COVID, 10 days after his mother.

The day her brother died,Nancy was diagnosed with pneumonia. John said Nancy was taken to Hackensack University Medical Center a few days later by ambulance and later tested positive for COVID-19. She never returned home.

Her purse still hangs on a chair in the kitchen where sheleft it, he said.

I never moved it from there," he said, "just with the idea that she would come back.

MonsyAlvaradois theimmigration reporter for NorthJersey.com. To get unlimited access to the latest news about one of the hottest issues in our state and country,please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email:alvarado@northjersey.com

Twitter:@monsyalvarado

Read or Share this story: https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2021/03/22/covid-nj-nancy-blair-left-taiwan-paved-way-family-come-us/4749955001/

Here is the original post:
Loved and Lost: Nancy Blair fled communist China, paved way for family to start over in US - NorthJersey.com