Boaz Dov Wong's: Biography, Age, Profession, Family, and Personal Life

The most uncomfortable thing about researching “Boaz Dov Wong” is what comes up first. Not the real story. Not the grief. A content farm on a medical software company’s server tells you Boaz Dov Wong is an “American business magnate, film producer, and philanthropist,” founder of something called the Boaz Group and Paragon Studios, named one of the “50 Most Influential Jews in the World” by the Jerusalem Post.

He was born May 28, 2000. He lived 90 minutes.

Let me just stay with that for a second before going further. A dead infant’s name — chosen deliberately, carefully, with meaning attached — got scraped off the internet and used to generate a fake billionaire biography. The machines found a name with enough search volume, built a person around it, and published it as fact. That’s not a minor error in someone’s biography. That’s something worse.

Quick Bio

Item	What’s verified	What’s murky or fabricated
Born	May 28, 2000, Memorial Day weekend, California	Solid across multiple primary sources
Birth circumstances	28 weeks premature, via surrogate named Shauna	Solid
Parents	BD Wong (actor) and Richie Jackson (talent agent)	Solid
Biological origin	BD Wong’s sperm; egg donated by Richie Jackson’s sister	Confirmed by Kirkus, The Advocate, librarything.it
Condition	Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) with twin Jackson Foo	Solid
Role in TTTS	Donor twin — his blood transferred to Jackson	Confirmed by The Advocate, librarything.it; one secondary source confuses donor/recipient
Weight at birth	2 lbs, 5 oz	Consistent across sources
Death	90 minutes after birth (some sources say “within hours”)	The Advocate says “shortly after birth”; Seattle Times says “quickly”; minor variance
Twin	Jackson Foo Wong — survived, spent 3 months in NICU, now openly gay, came out at 15	Solid
Memorial	Following Foo memoir by BD Wong, 2003, HarperEntertainment	Solid
Fabricated identity	“American business tycoon, philanthropist, film producer, Boaz Group founder, and one of the world’s 50 most influential Jews”	Entirely invented — surgimate.com medical software server

What Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome Actually Is

I’m going to explain this because most people don’t know it, and understanding it is the only way to understand what Boaz Dov’s 90 minutes on earth actually meant.

In identical twin pregnancies, the twins sometimes share vascular connections through the placenta. When those connections are unbalanced, blood flows from one twin to the other. The twin giving blood — the donor — becomes anemic, small, under-resourced. The twin receiving — the recipient — gets too much blood, too much volume, can develop heart failure. It’s a zero-sum biological situation. One body is sustained at the cost of the other.

Boaz was the donor. He was born first. He’d been giving his blood to his brother for months before either of them could survive outside the womb. When he arrived at 28 weeks, he was fatally anemic — his body had already given what it had. He died within 90 minutes.

BD Wong said it to The Advocate in 2003: “Jackson is here because of what Boaz did for him. I will always be grateful to Boaz for that gift.”

That’s not metaphor. That is the literal biology of what happened. Boaz’s blood sustained Jackson through the months when neither of them could survive independently. The gift was involuntary and complete.

The Emails That Became a Book

BD Wong did something unusual in those weeks and months following the birth. He kept emailing. He sent updates to friends, family, colleagues — real dispatches from a NICU in California about one dead infant and one fighting to survive, written by a Chinese-American actor who was supposed to be on a television set and instead was watching monitors and learning to read oxygen saturation numbers.

The emails became Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man, published by HarperEntertainment in 2003. Kirkus called it “unabashedly emotional, at times cloyingly cute.” Publishers Weekly noted it was “built around the engrossing e-mails Wong sent out chronicling the death of one tiny son and struggles of the other.” The Seattle Times review called it a “harrowing, ultimately upbeat tome.”

Here’s the thing about that book. It’s a document of grief and survival written in real time, not reconstructed afterward. Wong wasn’t processing the loss with distance. He was writing in the middle of it, hitting send, getting responses from Ian McKellen and theater colleagues and family members in San Francisco. The format preserved something that most grief memoirs don’t — the actual texture of not knowing how it ends while you’re living through it.

Boaz is in the book as an absence that shapes everything. Jackson’s survival makes no sense without Boaz’s death, and Wong knew that while he was writing.

The Name Itself

Let’s talk about the name for a minute, because it wasn’t random.

BD Wong is Chinese-American. Richie Jackson is Jewish. The egg that produced both boys came from Richie’s sister — meaning Jackson Foo carries both Chinese and Jewish biological heritage, as does, or would have, Boaz. The names they chose were deliberate. Boaz is a Hebrew name — a figure from the Book of Ruth, described as a man of great character and generosity. Dov means bear in Hebrew.

They wanted a child who would carry both their heritages. They chose a Hebrew name with weight behind it. The egg from Richie’s sister was, in part, about ensuring that a child who shared BD Wong’s sperm would also carry the Jewish line forward.

Think about the density of intention in that. Two Chinese-American and Jewish men exploring egg donation and surrogacy in a California agency during the early days of same-sex surrogacy as a feasible option at all — trying to build a family that contained both of them biologically and culturally. The name Boaz Dov is part of that construction, an assertion of what this child would carry in the world.

He carried it for 90 minutes.

What the Machines Did With It

In 2000, before social media, before the content-farm era, BD Wong’s emails about Boaz’s death went to a finite circle of people who loved him. In 2003, the memoir came out and the name Boaz Dov Wong entered the wider public record. For years it lived there appropriately — as the name of a child who died, mentioned in profiles of his father, stored in Wikipedia’s paragraph about BD Wong’s personal life.

Then, at some point after the search traffic around BD Wong increased — likely after his Mr. Robot and Law & Order: SVU periods expanded his profile — someone or something scraped the name “Boaz Dov Wong” from the biographical record, registered it as a high-volume search target, and generated a biography.

The result lives on a subdomain of surgimate.com, which is a medical scheduling software company. The page says Boaz Dov Wong is an “American business magnate, film producer, and philanthropist.” It says he founded “Paragon Studios” and “the Boaz Group, a private investment firm with investments in real estate, technology, and healthcare.” It says he has been named one of the “50 Most Influential Jews in the World” by the Jerusalem Post.

None of it exists. None of it can be verified because it was never real. The Boaz Group has no SEC filings, no incorporation records, no LinkedIn presence. Paragon Studios is not in any entertainment industry database. The Jerusalem Post honor does not appear in any search of that publication’s actual archives.

The machine needed a famous-sounding name and found one attached to a dead infant.

The Family That Persisted

Jackson Foo Wong survived. He spent three months in the NICU. His colon was blocked and his lungs were immature. He was flown by chartered plane to a more specialized hospital. He came home eventually, and BD Wong and Richie Jackson brought him up together until their relationship ended in 2004.

Since then, Jackson has been raised by three parents: BD Wong, Richie Jackson, and Richie’s husband, theater producer Jordan Roth. That’s an unusual family arrangement and, by all accounts, a functioning one. Jackson Foo came out as gay at fifteen. He appears occasionally in his father’s social media in ways that make clear a real and sustained relationship.

BD Wong married Richert John Frederickson Schnorr in Brooklyn in October 2018 — on October 7, which is a date that has since acquired a devastating other significance, though not one connected to this family.

Boaz Dov is not invisible in this family. BD Wong has spoken about him consistently and specifically. The book is still in print. The quote about gratitude — “I will always be grateful to Boaz for that gift” — appears in profiles across two decades.

My Verdict

The real story of Boaz Dov Wong is about 90 minutes of life that were complete in themselves — not because of anything Boaz chose, but because of what his body did involuntarily for his brother in the months before either of them could exist outside a womb. The meaning attributed to that afterward belongs to his fathers and to his surviving twin, who carries the biological inheritance of both.

The fabricated story is a content farm’s theft of that name, assigned to a fictional business mogul on a medical software company’s server, because the search traffic was there and nobody was guarding the name.

Let me be honest about something. I’ve written about fabricated net worths and invented careers for private people across a dozen articles, and all of it is irritating. This one is different. This is a name that was given to a specific child who died, that was chosen with intention to honor a heritage and a hope, and it got turned into a fake CEO with a fake private equity firm.

That’s not just inaccuracy. It’s a particular kind of carelessness that the content-farm ecosystem generates without consequence and without remorse.

FAQs

1. Who is Boaz Dov Wong?

Boaz Dov Wong was one of twin boys born to actor BD Wong and talent agent Richie Jackson via surrogate on May 28, 2000. He was born 11 weeks premature and died approximately 90 minutes after birth due to complications from twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome.

2. How did Boaz Dov Wong die?

He suffered from twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome — a condition in identical twin pregnancies where one twin (the donor) transfers blood to the other through shared placental vessels. Boaz was the donor twin and was born fatally anemic as a result. He died within 90 minutes of birth.

3. Is Boaz Dov Wong a business magnate?

No. This is entirely fabricated. A page on a medical software company’s server generates a biography calling him a “business magnate, film producer, and philanthropist” and founder of multiple companies. None of these entities exist in any verifiable record.

4. Who is BD Wong?

Bradley Darryl Wong, born October 24, 1960, in San Francisco. He’s a Tony Award-winning actor known for M. Butterfly, Law & Order: SVU (as Dr. George Huang), Mr. Robot, Jurassic Park, and many other roles. He is Boaz Dov’s father.

5. What happened to Boaz Dov’s twin?

Jackson Foo Wong survived after three months in the NICU with multiple medical complications. He came out as gay at age fifteen and is now raised by BD Wong, Richie Jackson, and Richie’s husband Jordan Roth.

6. What is Following Foo?

A memoir written by BD Wong in 2003, published by HarperEntertainment. It’s built primarily from emails Wong sent to family and friends during the weeks surrounding the birth, death of Boaz, and survival of Jackson. Kirkus and Publishers Weekly both reviewed it; it remains the primary document of this family’s experience.

7. Why are the boys named Boaz Dov and Jackson Foo?

BD Wong is Chinese-American; Richie Jackson is Jewish. The egg was donated by Richie’s sister, meaning both boys carried mixed Chinese-American and Jewish biological heritage. Boaz is a Hebrew name (a figure from the Book of Ruth), Dov means bear in Hebrew. The names reflect the deliberate bicultural identity the parents wanted for their children.

8. Did the loss of Boaz affect BD Wong’s relationship with Richie Jackson?

The relationship ended in 2004, four years after the twins’ birth. Secondary sources suggest the grief and the intense experience of the NICU period contributed to the strain. BD Wong has been careful in interviews not to over-attribute the breakup to the loss, but he has not denied its impact.

9. Who donated the egg for the surrogate pregnancy?

Richie Jackson’s sister donated the egg. BD Wong provided the sperm. The surrogate, named Shauna, carried the twins. This arrangement is documented in Following Foo and referenced in the Kirkus and Advocate reviews.

10. Is BD Wong still connected to the memory of Boaz?

Yes. He has consistently referenced Boaz in interviews about his family across more than twenty years. The quotation: “Because of what Boaz did for him, Jackson is here.” I will always be grateful to Boaz for that gift” — appears as recently as secondary biographical pieces in 2024 and 2025.

11. Why does “Boaz Dov Wong” generate so much fabricated content?

Because the name is attached to a famous parent, generating search traffic. Content-farm systems find the name, note the volume, and generate biographies. They don’t check whether the person named is alive or dead, adult or infant. The result is a fake CEO on a medical software company’s server, constructed from a name that belonged to a child who lived 90 minutes.

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