Sue Ting, the Morgantown artist and entrepreneur, died Tuesday.
Her friends wanted you to know.
Because like the Celadon No. 21 glaze she favored for her pottery creations, her life, they said, was polished to a high, multihued sheen of simply being there for others.
Relentlessly, Bryan Smith said, with a chuckle.
With a sprinkle of Bossiness added to the recipe, he said, with another chuckle.
“Sue was everyone’s mom,” he said.
“She fed us and took care of us. I never knew anyone quite like her.”
Smith was a WVU art major when he first made her acquaintance in the late 1990s.
That was in the circular environs of the Creative Arts Center, where he was working on his mastery of the potter’s wheel and she was just getting started.
Her life then was more like the outward spiraling of a universe, as opposed to a closed circle.
Citizen of the world
Ting was a proud Morgantown resident by way of Sichuan, China, and Grand Forks, N.D.
She was born in the province on Jan. 3, 1944, and spent her girlhood in Hong Kong before her family came to America when she was 15.
While studying at Penn State University (she was an education major planning on teaching math) she met her future husband, Francis Ting, who was also pursuing a career in academia.
The couple married and soon lit out for North Dakota, where Francis took a teaching post at a small school, which led to another offer at bigger school in West Virginia.
They quickly took to life at WVU and Morgantown, where tenure and two kids came along.
Ting expanded her universe in the University City, opening a restaurant, the Chinese Gourmet, which quickly became known for its lavish buffets for Chinese New Year.
Making art
The restaurant’s bottom floor housed a working laundromat for a time, which set her mind to spinning like a potter’s wheel.
Nothing to it, Smith remembered.
“She said, ‘Let’s make a kiln,’ so she made a kiln.”
That kiln and that space later baked into Zenclay, the pottery and ceramic art studio that’s still operating today.
Ting also made herself a fixture at WVU’s CAC, where she audited pottery class after pottery class and “adopted” student after student, as Smith said.
“She knew college students didn’t always eat right,” he said.
“She knew we didn’t always have money, so in she’d come, with these giant bowls of noodles and all kinds of leftovers.”
Jeff Ryan gave an appreciative laugh at the memory.
“Yep,” he said. “That’s Sue.”
The serious cook, he said, was also becoming a serious artist.
Her pottery and ceramic creations got more intricate and detailed over time, said Ryan, who followed her to Zenclay, where he still teaches classes.
And she become known regionally for her work.
“Celadon No. 21,” he said, of the aforementioned finishing glaze.
“Once she found that, she took off. She owned it.”
With her international background, she also “owned” most situations and environments in which she found herself, Ryan said.
“Yeah, thank God for that,” he said.
He is talking about that trip to central China in 1997.
Ryan, Smith and Ting were part of a delegation of WVU art students traveling to the provinces known for their pottery pieces, each distinctive to the region.
Ting was wowing the Mountaineers on her home turf when a 100-year flood hit, swamping whole villages.
Everyone’s art mom deftly worked through it all, with her fluency of local dialects and understanding of the regions where the high ground was located.
“Sue got us through all of that,” he said. “I don’t know what we would have done without her.”
He may have even remembered a “Country Roads” singalong with the locals – which we’ll get to.
What he won’t forget, he said, are the times he spent with her, simply being a friend.
Even after she closed the restaurant, Ting was still known for her Chinese New Year buffets. They were 15-course affairs, taking days of kitchen prep.
Which, was Ryan’s responsibility. Mainly, he just watched in awe.
“All this multitasking and all this ferocious energy,” he said. “And she’s talking the whole time. What I wouldn’t give to have one minute of that back.”
Take me home
Minutes were on Ting’s mind in 2019, when she made what would be her final trip to China to visit her 103-year-old uncle for Christmas.
She was accompanied by her son, Eric, the artistic director of a Shakespearean theater troupe in California; and her daughter Tracy, a pediatric rheumatologist in Cincinnati.
That’s how it was for a long time. The Ting trio. The untimely death of Francis left her a single, working mom.
Two years ago, the cancer began winning its battle, in wrenching increments.
A son watched his mom regarding her ancient uncle. She was still funny and spirited, he said.
And gloriously goofy.
And maybe, he said, she was still asking people for advice – then comically doing the exact opposite of what they just suggested.
But on this trip, she was wistful.
“I thought I was gonna live that long,” he remembered her saying.
“But I guess I’ve done enough things in life to make it seem like I have.”
He smiled, nodded and gave her a hug.
After that, there was more traveling to do.
Well, that, and “Country Roads,” as per Ting tradition.
That’s the thing, he said, laughing.
His mother loved John Denver’s far-out Appalachian ode to the moonshine, mountain mamas and winding, Whitman-like lanes of the place she came to call home.
When you traveled with Ting, her son said, you needed both a passport – and a lyrics sheet.
“You’ve gotta sing,” she’d say. “We’re West Virginians. What’s wrong with you?”
She was known to coax “Almost Heaven” singalongs on rickety rail cars in Morocco and on the airplane coming back from Iceland.
“Anywhere she went in the world,” Eric Ting said, “that song went with her.”
Once the emergence from the pandemic is complete, he said, people will be invited to Ting’s world of Morgantown – for the “pot-luck to end all pot-lucks,” at her house.
“There will be music,” he said, mock-assuming the art mom’s commanding tone. “There will be dancing. There will be laughter.”
And, he said, fond memories of a life made art.
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