REUNIONS 2005

Hon. Denny Chin was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States with his family in 1956. He grew up in New York City, where his father was a cook in Chinese restaurants and his mother was a seamstress in Chinatown garment factories. He attended public schools in New York, including Stuyvesant High School.

At Princeton, Judge Chin majored in psychology and wrote his senior thesis on "The Old Ones of Chinatown: A Study of the Elderly Chinese." He served as managing editor of The Daily Princetonian and was also active in the Asian-American Students Association. He graduated magna cum laude in 1975. At Princeton, he also met his future wife -- Kathy Hirata Chin '75. She is a partner at the New York City law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Their son is at Princeton now, a member of the Class of 2006.

After Princeton, Judge Chin attended Fordham Law School, where he was managing editor of the Law Review. He was one of several students who started Fordham Law School's first Asian-American Law Students Association. He graduated in 1978 and then clerked for the Honorable Henry F. Werker, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. He was associated with the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell from 1980 to 1982. He was then appointed an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he served under John S. Martin, Jr. and Rudolph W. Giuliani. In 1986, he left the government to start his own law firm, Campbell, Patrick & Chin, with two colleagues from the U.S. Attorney's Office. In 1990, his firm disbanded and he joined Vladeck, Waldman, Elias & Engelhard, P.C., where he specialized in labor and employment law representing employees and unions.

In September 1994, Judge Chin was sworn in as a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. He is the first (and still the only) Asian American appointed a United States District Judge outside California and Hawaii.

As a federal trial judge, Judge Chin hears both civil and criminal matters. He has presided over a wide array of high-profile cases, including cases involving: New York's Megan's Law, the sex offender registration and community notification statute; New York City's denial of a parade permit to the Million Youth March; habeas corpus petitions filed by two men who had served 13 years in prison for murder before they were exonerated after a priest revealed that another individual had confessed to the murder; perjury charges against a highly-decorated New York City police officer; felony-murder charges in connection with the death of a New York City police officer; Fox News's effort to enjoin Al Franken from using the phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his book; and Listerine's advertising campaign suggesting that the mouthwash was as effective as floss in fighting plaque and gingivitis.

Judge Chin has taught legal writing as an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School since 1986. While in private practice, he provided extensive pro bono representation to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. He served as President of the Asian American Bar Association of New York from January 1992 to January 1994. He has served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations, including Hartley House, Care for the Homeless, the Clinton Housing Association, the Prospect Park Environmental Center, and the Fordham Law School Alumni Association.

Judge Chin has completed four New York City marathons, in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003.
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There is a Chinese adage, “Wealth does not pass beyond three generations”. William Fung wanted to prove this wrong. He is the third generation of the Fung family, who founded trading company Li & Fung nearly one hundred years ago. Together with his brother Victor, they are guardian of the family business for the next generation.

William was class of ’70 at Princeton, graduating with an Engineering degree. He went on the Harvard Business School after Princeton where he earned his MBA. In 1973, he and his brother received a call from his mother pleading them to go back to Hong Kong to help his father in the family business, who has been working too hard.

Upon his return to Hong Kong, William instantly applied his western style management skill sets to the family business. One of the first things he did was to take the company public, in order to separate ownership and management. This provided a way to reward the other family members through transparency and a regular dividend instead of jobs in the company, thus enabling them to bring on board professional management

In 1989, together with Victor, William launched a management buyout of Li & Fung, a first in the Hong Kong stock market. Through this, they consolidated their shareholding of the family business and restructured the company for further growth.

William had only one job since he finished school in the US, and he remains proud of it. Under his helm, Li & Fung is today a multinational trading group consisting of export, retail and distribution business. Its flagship export trading business, Li & Fung Limited, is a blue-chip stock on the Hong Kong Exchange, and is the leading company of its kind with annual turnover of US$ 6 billion, managing the merchandise supply chain for many retailers and brands world wide.

In the public service arena, he has held key positions in major trade and business associations. He is the past Chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, the Hong Kong Exporters’ Association and the Hong Kong Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC). Currently, William Fung is a member of the Trade Development Council. He is also appointed by the Government of the Hong Kong SAR to serve as a member of the Economic and Employment Council.

William remains active in the academic circle. In 1999, he was conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Currently, he is also a Council Member of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Court Member of the University of Science and Technology.

Apart from being the Group Managing Director of Li & Fung, he also sits on the board of several companies including Convenience Retail Asia Limited, IDS Group Limited, HSBC Holdings PLC, CLP Holdings Limited, chinadotcom corporation and VTech Holdings Limited.
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M-H. Carolyn Nguyen came to the United States in 1975 with her family when South Vietnam fell under communist rule. Determined to let go of the past and re-establish their lives in the United States, her parents took whatever job they could to earn a living and build a stable home for their children. So despite the fact that they were both part of the top echelon in Vietnam, they started life again in their 40’s at the bottom. Through their hard work and dedication, they instilled in their children an irreplaceable work ethic as well as a lifelong humility to help others, to excel in life, and to strive for all that is possible in a free society.

Carolyn did not speak any English when she arrived in the US. In class, she would copy down everything from the board and then her father would explain it all to her in the evening. Math naturally became the easiest subject as no knowledge of English was required. This and, as with all immigrants, the need to find a profession that would ensure a stable income, prompted her to select electrical engineering and computer science (it was a single department then) as her major when she enrolled at Princeton. However, her first love was the arts, and Princeton enabled her to pursue both. Carolyn took the minimum requirements for engineering, and spent the rest of her time building up a life long passion for art, photography, and philosophy.

“Princeton was unique in its encouragement for every student to be well versed in the humanities as well as the sciences. This meant that I was able to pursue my interest and develop my ability to think critically in both disciplines. These abilities have helped me tremendously later on in my professional career as I find myself able to approach problems from different perspectives and often came up with more creative solutions than other colleagues.”

Today, in addition to her BSE from Princeton, Carolyn holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a Master’s degree from Cornell University, all in Electrical Engineering. She also completed the Executive Advanced Development Program at the London Business School. Carolyn has authored papers on electronic commerce, high speed digital subscribers loop, and high speed data networking protocols. She is the holder of several patents in data communications and converged communications.

Currently, Dr. Nguyen is the Director of Mobility Strategy at Avaya, a global leader of enterprise IP telephony systems, applications, and services. She is responsible for driving the vision and creating the strategic framework for Avaya’s enterprise mobility strategy globally. This also includes forming strategic alliances, and business and market development for mobility, especially for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).

Carolyn joined the EMEA region in June 2004 from the Avaya CTO (Chief Technology Office) organization, where she was part of the team that created the new strategic direction for Avaya after its spin off from Lucent Technologies in 2000. She created Avaya’s current technology strategy in converged communications. She was also the Acting Director of Strategy and Business Development for Avaya’s Communications Appliances Division at its founding, helping to shape the vision and strategic framework for its portfolio evolution.

In 1999, Dr. Nguyen became a Brookings Congressional Fellow, where she served as a technical advisor to Senator Bill Frist ’74 for the US Senate Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee. While there, she developed technology policies and authored legislation on electronic commerce and technology commercialisation. Several of the legislations which Carolyn drafted have since been ratified and have become laws.

Her previous work experience includes AT&T Bell Labs, where Dr. Nguyen was responsible for several key initiatives and development of key technologies in distributed applications and data networking protocols. These include the development of electronic commerce platform software, distributed multimedia conferencing protocols, data networking protocol design and implementation, and high speed broadband access standards.

Carolyn travels extensively both for work and for pleasure. She enjoys sharing good food and good wine with her family and in the company of her circle of good friends from around the world.
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Greg currently serves as Vice President, DNA Products, for Affymetrix, a public Silicon Valley biotechnology company. At Affymetrix, Greg leads the DNA analysis business, where he is responsible for building products to study the human genome and the importance of genetic differences between people. Genes play a major role in a person’s risk of getting any specific disease and in determining whether people will respond well or poorly to any particular drug or treatment. Through understanding how genetics affects both disease and drug response, Greg and his colleagues at Affymetrix seek to enable scientists around the world to better understand disease and doctors around the world to improve quality of life. Greg’s professional passion is the application of advanced technology and individual genomic information to improve health care.

Since 2001, Greg’s business area has grown from startup to a core growth driver for the company with multiple market-leading product lines. Greg’s responsibilities include strategy, portfolio management, product development, and marketing. Greg first joined Affymetrix in 1997 and has served in various marketing and business development roles of increasing scope, with responsibilities over time including strategic partnerships and acquisitions, outlicensing, and European sales. Greg has also worked in management consulting (with a focus on health care) for McKinsey & Co. and in life sciences venture capital for Bay City Capital, both in San Francisco.

Greg has published in journals ranging from the leading scientific journal Science (research which he helped conduct while an undergraduate at Princeton) to MSNBC / Newsweek.com (a five-part series about his experiences job-searching near the end of business school before deciding to rejoin Affymetrix).

Greg received an A.B. in molecular biology, summa cum laude, from Princeton in 1995, where he was also awarded the Khoury Prize for academic excellence in molecular biology, and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2001. Greg was a United States Presidential Scholar.

While at Princeton, Greg ran track, played club volleyball, and served as business manager for W.P.R.B. radio

“The wonderfully broad education I got at Princeton has been absolutely essential for me. I had no idea when I entered Princeton what I wanted to do with my life, and frankly, I didn’t really leave with a much clearer idea. But looking back, the pieces actually fit together into the foundation I needed. I very happily majored in “undecided” for two years and took whatever I thought was interesting. I picked molecular biology planning to go to medical school. My general education got me into consulting, and my interest in biology took me back into biotech. I’ve found my career now, but the journey to get here took a whole variety of skills and experiences, most of which I started or built at Princeton.”

Next month, Greg will be marrying his favorite person, Mauria (whose major flaw is not attending Princeton), in Sonoma County, CA. He is a lifelong Bay Area resident (with the exception of his years at Princeton) and lives in San Francisco, CA.
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Mary Yee was born in Rutland, Vermont and grew up in Boston Chinatown. Her grandfather, who was a laundryman, and great grandfather, who lost all his belongings in the Great Chicago fire, followed the sojourner tradition typical of the earliest Chinese immigrants. It wasn’t until after WWII that her father made the locus of the family the U.S. by bringing her mother to America. Restricted to ethnically tracked occupations, her father worked as a restaurant waiter and her mother worked as a garment worker. As with many Chinatown families in the 1950’s and 1960’s, immigration laws caused her siblings and grandparents to be separated from the rest of the nuclear family, not only by distance but by culture and language.

Ms. Yee graduated from Girls’ Latin School in Boston and attended Bryn Mawr College. She came to Princeton for her junior year to participate in the Critical Languages Program, a National Defense Department initiative to increase the number of scholars with proficiency in the crucial languages of the Cold War era. Ms. Yee elected to stay her senior year and graduate in East Asian Studies. She, along with three other Asian women, constituted half of the female graduates in 1970, the first class to graduate women. In protest against the secret bombings of Cambodia and the Vietnam War, she did not attend Commencement.

Subsequent to Princeton, Ms. Yee studied city planning at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 1970’s and early 1980’s, she was actively engaged in Philadelphia Chinatown’s struggle for survival against urban renewal and interstate highway construction. As a founding member of Yellow Seeds, a community advocacy organization, and a Board Member of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, she was involved in numerous initiatives to preserve the community and to develop affordable housing and community facilities. In the 1980’s, Ms. Yee was a founding member of Asian Americans United, a grass-roots organizing and advocacy organization, which focuses on youth leadership, anti-Asian violence, and educational issues. Most recently, in 2001, she was drafted to be the Chair of the Technical Review Committee in the struggle to keep a downtown baseball stadium from destroying the physical fabric and economic base of Philadelphia Chinatown.

Since Princeton, Ms. Yee has pursued several professional interests. As an urban planner, she worked at Venturi Scott Brown (then known as Venturi and Rauch). Between stints working in urban planning, she worked in the garment industry organizing a rank and file caucus within the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). In the 1980’s and early 1990’s she taught fashion design and curated the Historic Costume Collection at Drexel University in Philadelphia, at the same time fabricating custom design work for interior designers. Her latest career has been in education.

Presently, Ms. Yee is the Director of the Office of Language Access Services and Community Outreach at the School District of Philadelphia. For the last ten years she has worked in various capacities in the School District to address the issues of equal access for students and families whose primary language is other than English. Since 1987 she has worked to remediate a civil rights class action lawsuit (Y.S. v. School District of Philadelphia, 1985) filed against the District on behalf of Asian students who were limited English proficient and also students with disabilities. She has worked in various capacities in ESOL and bilingual program administration and in compliance and monitoring. Her current mission is to ensure that language is not a barrier to educational access and that school-community relationships are supportive of educational achievement.
Along the way, Ms. Yee has earned a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Science in Fashion Design from Drexel University, and a Master of Arts in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) also from the University of Pennsylvania. Before retiring, she hopes to earn a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics. Ms. Yee’s board affiliations have ranged from the Third World Coalition of the American Friends Service Committee and the Education Law Center to the Philadelphia Folklore Project.

Ms. Yee’s experiences at Princeton were an important part of her coming to terms with her Asian American identity and of developing a continuing commitment to work for social change. Princeton provided the opportunity to learn about her heritage language and culture and to travel in East Asia. During her senior year, she belonged to a group of Asian American students who circulated petitions and bought a full-page ad in the Daily Princetonian protesting the Vietnam War. This reflected the growing Asian American political consciousness developing across campuses and communities. Ms. Yee and other Asian American students were drawn together by opposition to the Vietnam War and recognition that the same racism affected the quality of life in the communities of color in the U.S.

Of her time at Princeton, Ms. Yee reflects,

“That I appreciated the academic rigor and intellectual life at Princeton goes without saying. However, I was here at a time in my life when it was important for me to be centered in who I was, to understand my cultural heritage, to value my experience growing up in Chinatown, and to see the need for profound social change. My experiences at Princeton helped me find a particular path. For me, ‘Princeton in the nation’s service’ has meant advocacy for those who have been historically marginalized in American society.”

Qui came alone to America at the age of thirteen in 1975 as a refugee after the fall of South Vietnam. Separated from his family in the midst of the mass exodus, Qui was placed with distant relatives who adopted him and raised him until 1981, when he was reunited with his father, a former government official who managed to escape his own reeducation camp ordeal. Not knowing a single word of English, Qui sat still in class and was tutored after school by Catholic nuns at the local convent through their common knowledge of the French language. The oldest son of six, he quickly assimilated, and thrived within the American culture and its dynamic society of freedom and democracy. With Qui leading by example and setting the standard, his younger siblings successively escaped Vietnam by boat, risking their own lives in search of personal freedom and liberty, and applied themselves with great intensity to also benefit from their own high quality education at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley. Qui did not see his mother again until the age of thirty.

“… My brothers, my sisters, and I are so grateful for the opportunities to challenge ourselves not only to survive and persevere, but to also thrive and succeed under challenging conditions, to earn an opportunity to contribute and share in the tremendous social-economic evolution of this great country. My Princeton education affects everything that I do in life today. It radically accelerates and elevates my own personal growth and development… My multidimensional Princeton experience transforms, molded, and expanded my capacities for observing, reasoning, creating, sharing, and doing, with unparalleled freedom, clarity, and passion.”

Qui comes back to his 21st Reunion at Princeton with over 20 years of experience in finance and portfolio management, specializing in the pioneering aspects of financial engineering, portfolio architecture, investment management strategy. Qui spent his entire professional career working in various capacities in the investment management industry: as a commercial hedger, portfolio manager (risk, return, as well as cost management), private investor, financial advisor, small business entrepreneur, institutional investment fiduciary, community volunteer/activist, and industry advocate.

“Princeton has given me the nurturing environment to develop intellectually and socially. My education sustained me with great standards and ideals. Princeton supplies my propensity for volunteerism and service. Princeton stimulates my independent thinking, and then empowers my abilities to embrace others’ innovative ideas, to develop fresh solutions, to challenge conventional wisdom and false beliefs, and to create successful paradigm shifts. Princeton inspires me in my continuing quest for excellence at the leading edge of progress. My lifelong friends, my mentors, my benefactors, my competitors, and my supporters from Princeton contributed to how I could achieve so much so quickly early in my life. Looking back, I could not have been a victim, but rather a beneficiary of extraordinary circumstances. How does one reciprocate such a monumental endowment in one’s life?”

Qui is a graduate of the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) program. He received his B.S.E. in Civil Engineering in 1984. During his sophomore year, Qui was elected to serve as class of ‘84 Secretary-Treasurer, and became a member of the Ivy Club. Summer internships with Procter & Gamble led to his senior thesis: Quantitative Methods for Test Marketing New Consumer Products. After receiving invaluable training and work experience at Procter & Gamble, Thomson McKinnon Securities, and Legg Mason, Qui established his own investment management company in 1995. Qui spent his lifelong career devoted to discovering new ideas and technologies that secure a better tomorrow for humanity. In 1995, Qui conceived and devised “Multidimensional Alpha Integration,” a contrarian approach for “absolute return” investing, while conventional wisdom favors exuberance toward “momentum investing” within a “relative return” paradigm. His work in designing “synthetic portfolios” and introducing the use of “optionality” as a strategic vehicle for institutional investors is gaining considerable attention, along with his well known initiatives in establishing a worldwide “think tank” and industry collaborative network called the Global Investment Management Consortium.

Qui served as elected Chairman of the Asian-American Coalition of Houston from 1998 to 2000, after having been elected to serve 3 consecutive terms as Vice President of the Vietnamese-American Community Association from 1988 to 1994. From 1998 to 2001, Qui took a sabbatical from managing private wealth to serve as the Mayor’s appointed representative and trustee, on the Board of the Houston Police Officers’ Pension System (HPOPS), a $2 Billion public pension fund with a diversified investment portfolio. In 2001, Qui was elected to serve as Chairman of the National Association of Investment Fiduciaries (NAIF), a private not-for-profit association formed by concerned fiduciaries to advocate volunteerism and activism through investor education and the establishment of best practices standards in institutional investment management.

In addition to various corporate and foundation boards outside of Princeton, Qui also serves on the advisory board of the CAIA association, the members of which hold the Chartered Alternative Investment Management Analyst (CAIA) professional designation. Qui regularly appears as a speaker, moderator, and panelist at major institutional investment conferences held in the U.S, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Qui is married to Keiko Nishimura of Tokyo, Japan, and they have one daughter, Angelina, who hopes to be good and lucky enough to qualify for admission as a proud member of the class of 2018.
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