As a boarder at the Sacred Hearts Convent, Maria Victoria "Nena" Li Won would watch raptly as the older sisters worked needle and thread to fashion dainty miracles of embroidery that no machine could ever replicate.

Won, now 98, recalls her impatience in wanting to learn their craft. But the nuns said first things first.

"Before we could learn embroidery," Won says, chuckling, "we had to learn how to darn the pukas in our socks. They were very strict. They always told us, ‘You can’t just do it just any old way. You have to do it the right way.’"

That applied to everything from academics to sports. Indeed, the nuns’ loving admonition became a way of life, a standard that has served her well since.

Won is known to most as "Nena," a nod to her early years in Cuba. Her father was a Chinese vice consul here when he met Won’s mother. The couple married and moved to Cuba, Won’s father’s next assignment.

A couple of years later, the couple, now a family with Nena, her older brother and another baby on the way, returned to Hawaii.

When Won’s mother, Anna, died in childbirth, her father turned to his in-laws in Kaneohe for help, eventually marrying Anna’s younger sister, with whom he would have more children. At 6, Won was sent to the convent on Fort Street.

Before long the nuns were sending their new arrivals to Won to care for.

"They would come in crying, and I would take care of them," Won says. "They called me ‘Mother Nena’ but I was no bigger."

Won returned to the family home near Bingham Tract at age 12 and rode the streetcar to classes at Sacred Hearts Academy.

She also helped her brother with his Bingham Broncos football team. Among the boys playing on the lawn of Central Union Church was Paul Won.

Paul and Nena married a few years after high school and lived in Pawaa and then Kalihi before settling at Won’s grandparents’ Kaneohe homestead. Won has been there ever since.

"Coming back here felt to me like coming home."

Next Week: Won’s Five Generations of "Gold"