Angela Chao: Upholding Chinese tradition Shipping executive ever grateful for family

Angela Chao is deputy chairman of Foremost Group, overseeing the company's finance, chartering and ship-management portfolios. She is the youngest of six children and the only one involved in the family's shipping business.

In a meeting room at the international shipping company's headquarters in midtown Manhattan, the soft-spoken Chao looked elegant and beamed when she entered the room.

"I am here not because my parents made me do it. Rather, it is because I love what I do here," she said of her career.

Chao learned about the shipping industry when she was a little girl. She recalled that during school holidays, she would accompany her father to his office for her first glimpses into the exciting world of shipping. It was where she learned how the industry is so vital to world trade, moving goods from those who produce them to those who need them.

"My parents believe that in order for the world to be more harmonious and peaceful - dialogue, exchange, trade, interaction - are all important facilitators. Shipping is a fundamental industry that fosters each of these facilitators to bring the world together," she said.

"This company is not just a commercial enterprise. It represents certain values and principles that my parents believe in and which my parents believe are good for the world," Chao said.

"I have the privilege to work for my father and to see him almost every day," she added. "He teaches me so much every day - not just about the business and the work, but also about how to be a good person, and how to always remember to try to give back."

Dr. James Si-Cheng Chao founded Foremost Group in 1964, after he left his native China to pursue a master's degree in management at St. John's University in New York. Over the years, the company has grown into an international shipping and trading company, managing a modern fleet of environmentally friendly dry bulk carriers and vessels.

"The company has grown nicely over time," Angela Chao said. "I was fortunate enough to join the company the first time after two years in corporate banking after graduating from college. I worked in the company for two years and struggled about leaving to obtain my MBA, but my parents encouraged me to do so as they are firm believers in the transformative power of education."

"I am thankful for my parents' encouragement, support and foresight. As they told me then, a good education is an essential tool in my tool box," she said.

Chao graduated magna cum laude in three years with a degree in economics from Harvard College in 1994. After a short break to start her professional career, she returned to school and got an MBA in 2001 from Harvard Business School.

She said that it's "most important" that "I have the benefit of my parents' philosophical thinking. They have the perspective that this company is not here just to make money. It is here to provide services to the world."

The shipping industry is still a male-dominated business. Chao is relatively young and female, and "I am of Asian descent in America," she said.

Chao rarely takes vacations, and even when she does, she is available 24/7. "If there's something happening, I have to respond," she said.

She believes in her parents' philosophy that you should be always stay busy and that you should give work to a busy person, because busy people are busy for a reason.

Chao was born and raised in the US. Her father once said that Angela, his youngest daughter, can speak the best Chinese in the family.

"My parents' philosophical thinking, which has Chinese roots and values, makes my sisters and me so much stronger," Angela Chao said.

She said her parents regularly asked her and her siblings to learn the Chinese language and cultural traditions.

"When we all sit down to the dinner table, nobody can touch her chopsticks until my father and mother do," she said. "That's the tradition. We value and treasure our Chinese culture and heritage. My parents' core values of humility and modesty and empathy for others, optimism, determination and perseverance are wonderful core values that lead to real happiness."

Chao said many people ask if she considers herself Chinese or American.

"I always feel completely comfortable being both Chinese and American. We always thought, and actually our parents always told us, we had the best of both worlds; we don't have to choose, just take the best of both of them and combine them together," she said.

"That is, to take the traditional Chinese values and our culture's emphasis on education, community and you as a member of a larger whole, and combine that with American individualism, optimism and a can-do attitude," Chao said. "The two of them together can really be unbeatable."

While her eldest sister Elaine Chao is the first American woman of Asian descent to be appointed to a US president's cabinet (she served as labor secretary under George W. Bush), Angela Chao said she has no interest in working in the government.

"I love what I do, and I also have responsibility here to my parents, sisters, as well as to all of my colleagues," she said. "I feel that I can also do a lot from here fostering and supporting US-China exchanges, education initiatives, etc. I have the ability and flexibility to do that here in a way that if I were in government, I would not be able to."

It is important to understand "what you are good at and in what and where you think you can contribute most", she said.

Chao has a passion for the arts and music and considered majoring in art history in college.

"My parents said 'That's fine, you can love art and music,' but as first-generation immigrants to this country, they understandably still wanted me to study something that could help me find gainful employment so that I would be able to support myself after graduation!

"So I concentrated in economics, but the arts are an important interest of mine that I have kept up and continue to be interested and active in," she said. "The arts and music help you think about things from different perspectives. One of the things I love about art and music is how it helps me think creatively and from different perspectives, which is invaluable to my work and our business."

Chao's interest in art and music also led her to the board of the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center's Global China Advisory Council. She works to support more cultural exchanges between the US and China and to have more Chinese performances come to the US and vice-versa.

"Cultural dialogues help people-to-people exchanges and promote better understanding and friendship," she said. "Once Americans and other non-Chinese understand or learn about the long history of China, they cannot help but to admit it is incredible!"

This month, Chao will go to China to visit a kindergarten in the Jiading District outside Shanghai for its 20th anniversary.

"The kindergarten is named after my grandfather, who was an education reformer and believed that for China to be strong, it needed to educate more of its rural population. He basically created and organized his own school in Jiading to offer free education for rural families."

She will also visit her mother's hometown of Laian county in Anhui province where two new kindergartens named after her mother, the late Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, will be opened.

In 1984, Dr Chao and his wife established the Mulan Foundation to provide scholarships to help students in the US and China access higher education and to promote US-China cultural exchanges.

In September, Angela Chao established a scholarship for undergraduates of Chinese heritage at Harvard College. The scholarship is in addition to the one her family created in 2012 at Harvard Business School, which sponsors four to six students of Chinese descent from anywhere in the world to attend Harvard Business School.

The establishment of the scholarship also was in conjunction with the first building to be named after anyone of Chinese descent on Harvard's campus - the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center. It also is the first building named after a woman on the Harvard Business School campus.

"It is important for people, especially young people, to understand both sides and build bridges, so that the relations between the two countries will always remain stable and on the right path that is essential for our world," she said.

lijing2009@chinadaily.com.cn