"My father wanted us to go, but we all believed that the country needed us and that the Communists would be good for the people," recalls Po Woon Chow, now a key executive in the family's Vancouver operations. "We thought it would be a good system."
At first, events seemed to justify their optimism. As well-educated professionals, the Chungs and their spouses all found important niches within the Communist system. Po Woon and her husband, Kowling Chow, moved to Beijing, where she took a top union job while Chow served in the cultural-affairs office attached to Prime Minister Chou En-lai. Charlie won an appointment as a professor of chemistry in one of Canton's leading universities.
With the onset of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-60s, however, the fortunes of the Chung family took a turn for the worse. As highly educated professionals from a bourgeois family, they were now entitled not to privileges but to "reeducation" in the country. Chemist Charlie Chung, for instance, found himself feeding pigs on a farm far from his laboratory in Canton. Kowling, the scholarly son-in-law, supervised road construction crews.
As he sat in his Bangkok headquarters pondering the rumors and occasional dispatches he received from China, K. S. Chung trembled for his offspring. They had been disobedient in staying behind, but there seemed to be no justice in their new suffering. He considered it his duty to get them out at all costs.
President Nixon's 1972 visit to China provided the first opening in the Bamboo Curtain, and K.S. immediately set about to get his family through it. With the help of family connections in Hong Kong, he and two sons wrangled invitations to the Canton Trade Fair, at the time the only event open to Western businesspeople, and once in their native country, they began pressing the bureaucrats for exit visas for their relatives. It would take scores of letters and six years of visits by K.S. and his sons before the family finally received permission to emigrate.
Having reestablished contact with friends and officials in China, however, the Chungs were not content merely to wait for their visas. They also began exploring business opportunities. As early as 1973, Wing was arranging the first shipment of U.S. tobacco to China since the Korean War. And more recently, the family has invested more than $2 million in a series of joint ventures with the Chinese, from watch factories in the north to a taxi company in Canton to a fledgling tobacco-growing operation on an island in the Gulf of Tonkin.
As for the once-Communist Chungs, many have taken quite naturally to capitalism since they were allowed to leave their homeland. K.S.'s second son, Chung Lok Fai, a university-trained engineer, has used his Beijing contacts to open up North Korea as a new market for Thai tobacco. And Wong Yung Tung, a cousin who emigrated from Canton, has helped set up the family's various watch operations, including a joint venture with Shanghai's two largest watchmaking plants. Indeed, watches now rank second only to tobacco as a source of Chung Cheong Group revenues.
Similarly, it has been young Victor who has been instrumental in putting the family's China connections in the service of the computer business, first at Action and now at UDC. With such large customers as the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, which controls more than half of the retail banking trade in the world's most populous country, UDC is well positioned for China's transformation into an industrial economy.
"We've been building our reputation with the Chinese Administration of Computer Industries for years," boasts Victor, who predicts that UDC's China sales of $250,000 last year could reach as high as $5 million this year. "We may be a small family business with no limited resources and no [proprietary] product, but we have the right connections. That gives us an excellent chance."
For all their Chinese customers and partners, the Chungs provide a wealth of knowledge about the world outside China. In computers, that means UDC's access to the latest developments, such as Silicon Valley's Convergent Technologies. For products such as watches or garments, it is badly needed information about market trends and new fashions, from outposts in Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Los Angeles.
"The Chungs know the outside world far better than us," notes Pan Weigang, an official with Shanghai Silk Corp., a Chung supplier that produces millions of dollars' worth of silk each year without benefit of a design or marketing staff. "We don't know much. Our people can't travel very much. Maybe in 10 or 20 years we will have our own designers, but we will have to rely on the Chungs for a very long while."
As he rides through the city's crowded streets, K. S. Chung reflects on the most recent shifts in the direction of the Chinese economy. A new tax on "excess profits" of privately owned companies has already cut into the bottom line of the family's Canton taxi operations. But more important, it is a sign that orthodox Marxism is apparently on the rise again inside the Forbidden City, and that anticapitalist measures will soon follow.
"The whole trend is very unfortunate for us when things start closing again," Wing explained to me after returning from a visit to Shanghai. "People are more cautious now. It's going to be tough to make deals."
K. S. Chung has seen these sort of shifts before, and over the years, he has learned to survive them -- and sometimes prosper from the experience. Even at 82, he thinks in much longer terms than this quarter's results, this year's political trend, or even next year's economic outlook.
"After a lifetime abroad, I can say our future will be in China," says K.S. confidently, staring ahead at the traffic. "China is opening up, and there is no going back. It will, of course, take time. Not for me, maybe even not so much for my children, but for the grandchildren. But it will happen. And the family will be there."
