Acceptance Remarks by Dr. James S. C. Chao receiving the Lifetime Legacy Award by Serica
May 22, 2025
Serica 2025 Trailblazer Conference & Gala Recap:
Hello, everyone. Thank you for this wonderful award to our family.
I want to commend Ms. Anla Cheng for her dedication and devotion to the Asian American community and for founding this organization.
On behalf of my family, I want to congratulate the other awardees for this recognition of their achievements.
As you all know, my late wife, Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, and I have six (6) daughters. I was an only child. I really like big families. My late wife, Ruth, was a wonderful mother. She grew up in a distinguished family in Anhui Province before the Chinese Civil War. Her family believed in educating their daughters. So, she was among the few women of her generation to receive an education, including being sent to Nanjing, then the national capital, to the prestigious Ming De High School, a girls boarding school, run by foreign missionaries. Throughout her life, Ruth believed that women and men should be equal in terms of accessing opportunities. We supported thousands of scholarships for women and men throughout her lifetime. In her eulogy, it was cited that she said: the most important adornments for a woman were virtue, intellect and achievement.
As this gala is about celebrating Asian American women achievers, my wife and I fostered a family of women achievers. But, we didn’t push them to achieve. We just encouraged them to explore their potentials. When we came to America as immigrants, Asian Americans overall comprised less than 1% of the whole U. S. population! We encouraged our daughters to go beyond our small immigrant community and explore the big world outside. My wife and I were newcomers – we didn’t understand or know much about America. So it was hard for us to advise our daughters about specific occupations or directions. But, we had great confidence that America would offer our daughters better opportunities even though we didn’t know what these opportunities would be.
At that time, we didn’t have many mentors or friends. There were very few women professionals at the time. So, I looked for women leaders for my daughters to meet: women bankers; women lawyers; women scientists, etc. So, my daughters can meet women who are pioneers. I took them with me when I visited ships, climbing up and down the hatches, going into the engine room. I took them on business trips with me in U.S. and internationally. They actually sat in on my business meetings. But, they didn’t just sit there and do nothing. They were given the responsibility of helping handle the logistics of these trips, book the airplane flights, run errands, pack and unpack at each stop, updating the schedule, etc. It was good training for them in real life practical skills. They also learned how to conduct themselves in real business meetings. When we had ship christening ceremonies, I gave them opportunities to make speeches representing the family at a very young age. When we had guests, our daughters acted as the valet, the greeter, the waitresses to staff the banquet dinners we used to host at our residence with business associates.
Most of all, we encouraged our daughters to expand their vista, their horizons and see the big world outside. We also always encouraged the daughters to follow Chinese thinking: to be a good person and contribute to Society. I believe Ruth and I have done that. Thank you for recognizing our life’s task of teaching our daughters to work for a goal bigger than themselves and contribute to Society.