Fan Jiao

Andrew (Zhèngchāng) Cherng (程正昌) is one of Forbes’ Twenty-Five Notable Chinese-Americans [1] and a member of the Committee of 100 [2]. He was born in Yangzhou, China, grew up in Taiwan and Japan. In 1966, at age of 18, Andrew Cherng came to the United States to study mathematics at Baker University in Kansas. There, he met his future wife, Peggy, also an international student. In 1973 Andrew Cherng and his father, a Chinese chef, opened the Panda Inn, a sit-down Chinese restaurant in Pasadena, California. Ten years later, Andrew Cherng opened the first Panda Express, a fast-food Chinese restaurant, which has expanded more than 2,200 locations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and other countries, employing nearly 40,000 people while remaining family-owned and operated. As co-chair and co-CEO of the Panda Restaurant Group, Cherng has amassed a net worth valued at $3.5 billion according to Forbes. Since 1999, Panda Cares, the restaurant group’s philanthropic arm, has donated more than $140 million to provide healthcare services to uninsured children, improve college readiness in schools, deliver immediate relief to victims of the California wildfires, and more.

Since the 1960s, Chinese immigrants have arrived in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley; many more have come from the mainland since the eighties. In the last four decades, many of them have become high tech entrepreneurs and engineers who contributed a great deal to Silicon Valley and the US economy. The purpose of this article is to introduce 54 of these leaders to the audience.

As the fifth richest American in 1984, with 40 patents and 23 honorary degrees, Dr. An Wang was a computer industry magnate, inventor, and philanthropist who founded Wang Labs, which successfully competed with large companies such as IBM in the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1940s, after passing the competitive China Overseas Graduate Examination, he was accepted by Harvard University as a Ph.D. student and became a leading figure in the electronics industry in the world. His breakthrough in manufacturing core memory equipment was one of the greatest technological innovations of the last century. His Fortune 500 company Wang Labs, became a market leader in desktop calculators, word processors, and IBM-compatible mainframe computers. Most of his philanthropy was dedicated to strengthening understanding between Chinese and Western cultures and improving the arts, schools, and health care in Boston and surrounding communities in Massachusetts.