MADE IN AMERICA

David Chu was an adolescent when his family left Shanghai and moved to Massachusetts. His father had been a top accountant with the Bank of America. But after the Communists came to power in 1949 and kicked out all foreigners and foreign businesses, the elder Chu realized he had no future in China. In the late 1950s, he took the advice of a brother already living in America and planned his flight.

The family settled in Cambridge (later Bedford) and Chu's father took an accounting job with the Beacon Valve Company of Waltham, while David attended Cambridge Latin School and washed dishes at a deli in Porter Square. He never graduated from high school, but-"I don't know how it happened"-applied nonetheless to Northeastern and entered the electrical engineering program in 1961. "I guess Northeastern made a special concession," he says.

In China, the Chus had been well-off. But after they escaped, "we all needed to work," he says, and Northeastern offered the ideal combination of education, work experience, and income. On co-op, Chu worked in purchasing for Andonian Associates, a manufacturer of liquid helium containers. "Ordering stainless steel, nuts, and bolts, calling all over," he recalls. "It was a lot of fun." Little else sticks in his mind from that time, except that he was studying in Hayden Hall when somebody came in and announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

The engineering degree came in 1966, followed by a master's in business in 1968. While at N.U. Chu met his future wife, Hing, who attended Mount Holyoke College-"at one of those Chinese-student gatherings in Boston," he says. They married in 1967.

Hing now holds a seat on the Hong Kong stock exchange, runs her own stock brokerage firm, and does volunteer work for the handicapped. Their son, Casey, a Tufts University graduate, works full time in his father's real-estate development firm (Wah Tak Fung Holdings) and operates a scuba-diving business. Their daughter, Kok-ann, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is attending law school in Hong Kong.

For a couple of years after business school, Chu worked as an engineer for General Electric in Lynn, on the electrical system of the steam turbine. There, he met Tung Chee-hwa, the son of a Hong Kong shipping tycoon, who was working on marine turbines. Tung is now the first chief executive of the Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong's designation after the handover) a job for which Chu was a contender, and-who knows?-might be again in the future.

From GE, Chu went into Far East sales for the medical division of the American Optical Company, and in 1974 joined the Bank of America in San Francisco. The following year he applied to Harvard Business School. Just for the hell of it, he says, to see if he could get in. Then, when he did, he decided to go.

More than anything else, the Harvard name is what drove him, he admits, and the anticipated challenge. Though it didn't amount to much of a challenge. Anything he really needed to know about business he'd already learned from Northeastern and from working. "In two years I didn't take a page of notes." What Harvard gave him-and he does not underestimate its value-was the validation that he was "as good as the best."

After Harvard, Bank of America sent him to Hong Kong as assistant to the regional manager of Asia. Then, around 1979, Jardine Matheson-a local conglomerate of property companies, banks, and trading outfits-recruited him to be the chairman's assistant, and, later, head of one of its property development divisions.

He jumped out onto his own around the mid-1980s, and made a fortune almost overnight. "A guy had started a business that wasn't doing so well, and he knew a banker who knew me and who put us in touch because the guy wanted an investor," Chu begins. "It was a tiny property development company, and I put in sixty percent, which was generous. But, right after that, the market went up and I made a lot of money doing nothing. He comes to me wanting to make things fifty percent each, because here I was with all this profit, and he was still in debt, and he wants to buy back ten percent. Because I had made so much money doing nothing, I gave him the ten percent, which was worth about $300,000 (U.S.) then. He was very grateful, he turned out to be somebody very, very smart, and the property grew 100 times-all by his doing. I didn't do one ounce of work. I spent all my time playing."

In the end, Chu's partner, a man named Richard Chan, amassed even more toys than Chu. "I mean, his underwear were Versace," Chu says. Chan took Wah Tak Fung Holdings public last year, and was about to settle down and get married when he suffered an allergic reaction to a painkiller, which constricted his blood vessels and put him in a coma. "He's like a vegetable now," Chu says with a resigned shrug.

Over the years, Chu, who travels frequently to a palatial home in Beijing and a farm in southern China, has forged relationships within the mainland political community, while remaining politically active in Hong Kong. In 1995, in the island's first popular elections, Chu won a seat on the Legislative Council (LegCo). The mainland Chinese government, infuriated that the British had timed democratic reforms to fall so near reunification, retaliated by disbanding the popularly elected LegCo and replacing it-until promised new elections can be held next spring-with a provisional legislature elected by a 400-member committee friendly to Beijing. Chu made the cut.

It has been widely and repeatedly reported that Chu "renounced" his American citizenship when he buried his American passport in a time capsule earlier this year.

What really happened, he says, is that somebody called into a radio show he was on and challenged him on his loyalty. "He's saying, 'You're so pro-China, so pro­Hong Kong, but you still have your American passport,' and he basically says, 'Put your money where your mouth is.' So I had an instinctive reaction. So I put an old passport in a time capsule as a symbol of my confidence in Hong Kong," he says with a shrug, noting that giving up one's passport (in this, case, an expired one) is not the same as relinquishing citizenship.

" 'Renounce' sounds so ugly," he says, and makes him sound anti-American, "which I'm not at all. What you're looking at is all American." In China, he was a kid in an isolated environment, where everyone's energies were concentrated on survival. His real learning experiences, he says, didn't even begin until he came here.

"In this respect, I'm pretty much Made in America."

­ Marguerite Del Giudice